Life is Full of Surprises

A hunting spider that refuses meat but goes after veggies? Yep, says a report in the BBC:

"The spiders live on the plants - but way out on the tips of the old leaves, where the ants don't spend a lot of time, because there isn't any food on those leaves."

But when they get hungry, the spiders head to the newer leaves, and get ready to run the ant gauntlet.

Professor Curry said: "And they wait for an opening - they watch the ants move around, and they watch to see that there are not any ants in the local area that they are going after.

"And then they zip in and grab one of these Beltian bodies and then clip it off, hold it in their mouths and run away.

"And then they retreat to one of the undefended parts of the plant to eat it."

Like other species of jumping spider, Bagheera kiplingi has keen eyesight, is especially fast and agile and is thought to have good cognitive skills, which allows it to "hunt" down this plant food.

I find it humourous that this "news" was already covered by Wikipedia citing scientific reports going back to 2008. So I guess BBC needs to tone done their claim of "here is the latest news".