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When you think of animals that hunt in groups, you probably come to the lion, or the hyena. But now spiders seem to do it too.
If you’re afraid of spiders, you should skip this one. Because while you will find a spider in the average web, there are species of spiders that live in social groups. This only applies to a few of the 50,000 known species. And these groups will also hunt together. The researchers took a closer look at how exactly they do this in a South American species.
They did a test with a fake prey in an existing web whose threads they also vibrated. In this species, the web is in the form of a net. Just before the picture. They don’t stick very well. And, oh yes, they can measure several cubic meters. Huge nets, in other words, containing thousands of spiders.
Let’s go back to the experiment: When the prey is supposed to fall into the web, all the spiders started moving. Then they stopped again. Spiders seem to be very good at monitoring the vibrations of prey, but also those of all other spiders. This allows them to hunt extremely efficiently and capture prey hundreds of times their size.
Luckily, social spiders that live in groups are often small. So the chances of you ever being chased by a group of terrifying giant spiders are slim.
Read more: How do spiders hunt “in unison”?
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