AN AUSTRALIAN spider has a unique way of catching flies for dinner: it laces its web with rotting plant material. This makes it the first arachnid known to use scented bait.
Some spiders, including Nephila edulis, hoard both new and old prey scraps for days in silk cocoons in the web. These were thought to be simple food caches. But Mark Elgar and his team at the University of Melbourne found that Nephila also hoards plant material, which the spiders do not eat.
Tests on plant debris from 17 spider鈥檚 webs showed that potential prey such as the sheep blowfly were attracted to the scent (Naturwissenschaften vol 91, p 245).
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