AN AFRICAN jumping spider uses its agility not just to hunt, but also to steal food from the mouths of ants.
Menemerus spiders have eyes pointing forwards, sideways and upwards, allowing them to 鈥渟ee like a primate and hunt like a lion鈥�, says from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. With his colleague Robert Jackson, Pollard filmed 98 spider-ant tussles at Lake Victoria in Kenya. In each case, they saw that when an ant grabbed a lake fly, a spider lurking nearby snatched it out of its jaws (Journal of Arachnology, ).
The spiders may be using the ants to sift out fresh prey. The corpses of lake flies can be trapped by strands of spider silk, where they dance in the wind 鈥渓ike macabre puppets鈥� says Pollard. But as spiders can鈥檛 digest the dried-out corpses, using webs to catch them may just waste energy.
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from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln wonders if the behaviour is instinctive or learned. 鈥淚 want to know if exposure to another individual foraging in this way increases the likelihood of attempting it on one鈥檚 own.鈥�