The Australian ant-slayer spider’s acrobatics let it feast on insects twice its size.
“This acrobatic behavior is just fascinating. I’ve personally never seen this kind of hunting,” says Paula Cushing, an evolutionary biologist and curator of invertebrate zoology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, who was not involved in the study.
The dots were tiny spiders moving among ants. Suddenly, one of the spiders jumped. “I thought it was trying to escape an ant,” Aceves-Aparicio recalls. “But then I saw the ant floating and I thought, woah, there’s something going on here.” Most ant-hunting spiders use webs or sneak up on their prey from behind to minimize risk. But despite being smaller than their prey, Aceves-Aparicio’s spiders were facing banded sugar ants
Ant-slayer spiders capture their prey by jumping over ants and tagging them with a thread of silk — a leap that lasts all of a few milliseconds. The spiders then dart around ants to trap them in more silk and sweep them off their feet.
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