The world's only vegetarian spider

Freak!

Bagheera kiplingi the vegetarian spider

However, though the article doesn't say so, this little fellow comes from my favourite group of spiders, ie the jumping spiders, which provide one of my favourite animals - the completely bizarre and very carnivorous genus Portia (which are hunters of other spiders):

Anyhoo, I digress.

SCIENTISTS have discovered the world’s first known vegetarian spider.

Bagheera kiplingi, a South American species, lives almost exclusively on leaf buds and is thought to be the only spider of about 40,000 species to have rejected a carnivorous diet.

Instead it has developed a laidback lifestyle based on nutritious wild acacia plants — and has no need to spin a web to catch its prey.

The females have even dispensed with the time-honoured spider custom of eating their sexual partners immediately after mating.

Thanks to http://twitter.com/Phuket_Gay_Boy and http://twitter.com/weirdimals for the hat tip.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous