Spider babies may be more like our infants than we thought. Mother spiders can produce nutritious milk-like fluids to feed their offspring.
Juvenile spiders eat all kinds of food: in some spider species they feed on small insects, and in others they catch pollen. Previous research has also found some spiders simply don’t eat anything until they grow large enough to hunt.
But Toxeus magnus, a type of jumping spider native to Southeast Asia, must be doing something else. Its young grow shockingly fast – they reach almost half adult size in the first 20 days of their life – but neither the youngsters nor the mother leaves the nests to gather food.
“We couldn’t figure out how they just keep growing without food until one night, I saw a baby spider clinging onto its mom’s belly,” Zhanqi Chen at Chinese Academy of Science says. “I had this radical idea that maybe spider moms feed their babies with something they produced.”
So Chen and his colleagues put mother spiders under the microscope and gently squeezed their abdomens. A few droplets of a creamy white fluid came out, something that looked very similar to human or other mammalian milk. Analysis found the milk-like liquid contains fat – and about four times as much protein as cow’s milk.
Written By: Yvaine Ye.
This article was originally published on New Scientist