Orion and I saw the coolest thing tonight

[sholio]

I mean, we might be wrong about what we were looking at. But ... I think I saw a spider mimicking another insect to attract insects to its web, in very much the same way that some octopi and cuttlefish can make themselves look like other kinds of sea life by shaping their bodies in certain ways.

We were down at a little seasonal pond on our dog walking trail near dusk, and I saw the weirdest bug and could not figure out what it was (though mainly the problem was just not being able to get close enough). But what really threw me was that it looked like a water strider of some kind, but its reflection was way down in the water, a few inches below the actual insect on the surface of the water. Like it was hovering above the water somehow. I just couldn't figure out how on earth it was doing that.

And then Orion goes "It's a spider!"

It was a spider on a web, perfectly motionless, with most of its legs bunched up and two or three of its legs stretched all the way out to the side in a very unspiderlike way, producing exactly the profile above the water of a water-strider-shaped body (minus the actual spread-out legs that a real water strider would have; I just thought they were so fine as to be invisible from my angle). It was good enough to fool me!

It turned out Orion was standing on one of its web lines, and when he stepped off (carefully) the spider pulled in its legs and reverted to a perfectly normal (HUGE) spider and scurried to a stick to avoid falling in the water.

Have you ever heard of anything like that?? I mean, it's possible that we had just tweaked the web and it froze in whatever weird position it was in, but it looked so exactly water-strider-like in its reflection, and its legs were stretched out in such a weird way that it's hard for me to believe it was a total coincidence.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I have no idea, but this is incredibly cool!

[madripoor_rose]

That is interesting! My first thought was that it had to be accidental/frozen in that position, because the spider wouldn't want to imitate something eaten by fish or frogs, but rereading and seeing that's a seasonal pond/big puddle....

[naye]

That sounds AWESOME. Nature is so cool!

[sovay]

It was a spider on a web, perfectly motionless, with most of its legs bunched up and two or three of its legs stretched all the way out to the side in a very unspiderlike way, producing exactly the profile above the water of a water-strider-shaped body

Oh, I hope it was making itself its own decoy. That would be so cool.

[leesa_perrie]

I don't know, but it's perfectly possible. Nature is much more weird and wonderful than people realise, after all!! And more sneaky too!!

The only examples I have are bird ones. We often get a blackbird (usually male) sitting in our tree doing his 'oh noes, bad things are here' alarm call, then after a short while, dropping down onto the lawn to eat the sultanas in peace. I'd heard about them giving false alarms like this, but it's always funny to watch it happening!!

And if a heron can watch people feeding bread to the ducks and notice that the fish eat the bread too, and so learn to pinch disgarded pieces of bread and dip them in the water to attract fish, well, anything is possible, surely?!

[hamsterwoman]

I've not seen that/heard of this kind of behavior but that sounds so cool! I hope that's what was happening!

[rachelmanija]

That is so cool! Quick, someone tell Adrian Tchaikovsky.

[copperfyre]

That’s so cool!! And sounds very plausible, spiders are tricksy that way. I recently ran across one that had flattened itself on a sedge stalk just below the flowers, so it was just an entirely linear spider flush with the stalk, presumably to grab at whatever came in to pollinate.

[abyssinia]

That definitely sounds like something a spider could do - though I wonder what the goal was? Lure a prey that eat water striders that the spider eats? Look like a water strider so it catch an unsuspecting insect?

(My grandfather wrote a book years and years ago called Animals and Plants that Trap all about, well, exactly this kind of thing - I remember reading it obsessively as a kid when we visited. Nature doing this kind of thing is so cool!)

[timespirt]

Maybe it was a type of water strider. I looked it up and there are over 350 in that pool of spider. Sounds cool.

[sealie]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggressive_mimicry is a def. behavioural response to improve predation success.

[aelfgyfu_mead]

Wild!

[lokifan]

That's so cool!