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Photo: Jurgen Otto
This is a kind of jumping spider, and it’s only about 5mm in size. The males have a colorful pattern on flaps that extend from their abdomen during breeding/mating. In addition to this, they raise their back pair of legs and dance from side to side to win over their plain brown females.
Only found in Australia, they were classified as species Maratus volans because people originally thought the flap was for gliding after jumping. Wiki
There are some 40,000 known species of spiders, but every single one of them is thought to be carnivorous … except this one. The Bagheera Kiplingi jumping spider of Central and South America is the first spider found to have an almost exclusively vegetarian diet. These spiders live and feast on the protein packed tips of the acacia tree leaves.
But to reach this leafy fare, the spider has to evade the attention of ants, which live in the hollow spines of the tree.
“But when they get hungry, the spiders head to the newer leaves, and get ready to run the ant gauntlet. 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. “
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