These spiders hunt other spiders
There are some spiders that even other spiders should be afraid of. Pelican spiders, socalled because of a long neck and long jawlike appendages, make a living by hunting and killing other spiders.
Humans should not worry. Most Pelican spiders are the size of a grain of rice. They were first discovered in 1854 as fossils in 50-million-year-old amber. Only later did scientists realize they were still living in Madagascar, South Africa and Australia.
Those three regions were next to one another before 175 million years ago, when the supercontinent known as Pangaea broke up. The spiders were probably around before the breakup.
Hannah M. Wood of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, with Nikolaj Scharff of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, recently published a report on the spiders in the journal Zookeys. The researchers identified 18 new species in Madagascar from field expeditions. Below is a conversation with Wood that has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Tell me about Pelican spiders.
A: They’re a really dominant predator, but on a very small scale. You can go out and observe them at night catching other spiders, and they’re quite abundant. Q: How do they hunt?
A: All spiders, when they walk lay a drag line. It’s a line of silk that allows a spider to return to where it came from. I think that they’re capitalizing on that.
I think what they’re doing is walking around searching for drag lines, and then they follow those drag lines and that leads them to other spiders.
Q: What do they do with those long appendages that look like jaws, the chelicerae?
A: They have fangs at the tip. The spiders swing the chelicerae out, impale the prey with the fang at the tip, and then they just hang upside down with the chelicerae held out, with the prey struggling while venom’s being injected into it. And they leave the prey way out there until it dies.
It’s kind of like when your little brother is trying to hit you and you put your hand on his forehead and he can’t reach you.
Q: Why is it important to look for new species in the field or even in museum collections?
A: This is basic research, where you’re just going out and discovering what’s out there, and then later is when you can make discoveries about venoms that can fight cancer or other