麻豆社

This may look like a bird dropping but that鈥檚 just a disguise against anything that may want to eat it. In fact, it's a spider with a very unusual hunting technique. The bolas spider remains motionless throughout the day, but when evening comes, she prepares for action. She abandons her bird dropping disguise and starts to move, slowly making her way down to the underside of a leaf. She hangs from a horizontal thread while she produces another single, strong line, pulling it from her spinnerets with her back legs. At the end of the line is a sticky globule: her bolas. It's all she needs to capture her prey. She climbs back up to her leaf and takes up her position on the horizontal thread, with her weighted filament dangling from one of her front legs. A moth comes close and she whirls the bolas like the ancient weapon, but misses. But this is not the end for her. She has other ways of enticing the moth back. She can produce a pheremone, a chemical perfume that the moth finds irresistable. What's more, she can change it to suit the particular species of moth that happens to be around. The moth comes back and this time the spider catches her prey.