by Greg Mayer
We’ve had occasion previously to note some dastardly beings that eat lizards, and express dismay at their foul deeds. And now, thanks to Matthew, we have another opportunity to engage in a two minutes hate towards a transgressor.
That’s a wasp spider (Argiope bruennichi), a recent invader of Great Britain from the Continent. The picture was tweeted by Phil @goldenorfephoto. Phil is based in Cheshire, which is up where the NE corner of Wales touches England. So if he took the photo locally, then the spider is expanding its range rapidly (or, as Matthew put it to me when pointing this out, “pdq”), as can be seen from the map below, where it’s still quite a ways from Cheshire.
The tragic victim is a common lizard, Lacerta vivipara, one of the two three species of lizard native to Britain (the others being the much rarer sand lizard, Lacerta agilis, and the legless slow worm, Anguis fragilis; lizard count updated thanks to comment below by reader Dave). You can see some less traumatic photos of them here.
The picture reminded me very much of the large American orb weaving spider Nephila clavipes, which I have encountered in the West Indies and Central America, and which also eats lizards. The Nephila I’ve seen in the tropics are more yellow, rather than the orangey Florida ones pictured at the link above. Nephila and Argiope are both orb weavers (I didn’t realize they had big ones in England), and are sometimes placed in the same family.
h/t Matthew ~
Hey! Baihu eats lizards, and he’s not at all dastardly!
b&
A colleague of mine collects photos of spiders eating vertebrates. I’ve seen some pictures of large nephilid spiders of SE Asia eating birds that haplessly fly into their webs. Nephila are pretty strongly supported as being in the Nephilidae (previously in Tetragnathidae) and Argiope are araneids (Araneidae). Whether or not the orb-web evolved once or multiple times is still debated, although there were two papers this year suggesting the latter. Here’s an Anolis being eaten by a black widow in the Dominican Republic: https://flic.kr/p/5Fg4DD
Look for some Dolomedes spp., fishing spiders that pretty frequently feast on small fish or frogs. 😀
There’s a very recent paper about spiders eating toads, and a less recent paper about spiders eating bats.
Opportunistic hunter gonna opportunistic hunt!
I once witnessed a black widow spider (widespread here) attempting to eat a young lizard here in Southern California. The widow had ensnared the lizard in a low-hanging web and was cautiously approaching its thrashing victim.
I took the chance to have my 3 year old observe the scene (he agreed that the spider was dastardly) before finding a stick to rescue the lizard…
That’s not a spoider, THIS is a spoider. Here in Oz, the counterpart of your BW (Latrodectus mactans) is the Redback (L. hasseltii). They catch and eat lizards pretty frequently, have been known to also kill deadly Brownsnakes (Pseudonaja), and one time I was too late to rescue a python from one. A frickin’ PYTHON!
(Indeed, it was a juvenile of one of the smallest species of python Antaresia stimsoni, but it really happened)
Why does it seem particularly macabre when it’s an invert preying on a vertebrate? And I don’t mean parasites or the like, but something that actually seizes & eats prey.
(Guess I should limit that to terrestrial organisms…there’s nothing surprising about, say, a cephalopod nomming fish…)
(And that’s basically a rhetorical question–I can think of some answers myself. :
😉 )
Minor correction – we actually have three native lizards, not two. The “slow-worm” (Anguis fragilis) is also a lizard, although it has no legs and is therefore not as obviously lizard-y as the other two.
The northernmost black dots on the map are not far short of Cheshire, and if juvenile Argiope bruennichi show the “ballooning” behaviour of many other spiders they would cover that distance easily, so it’s maybe not too surprising if they are now established there. With a warming climate, our insect and arachnid fauna is set to acquire a lot more additions in years to come.
As far as I know, most orb weaver spiderlings do balloon, so I agree with you. Does anyone know how “native” the lizards are–that is, how long ago they established themselves on the island?
Along with the few snakes and amphibians that we have, they must have got here once the country had warmed up sufficiently after the last ice age (about 10,000 BC, off the top of my head), but before the land connection with the continent was broken (maybe about 6000 BC – I’m not sure about current dating of this).
Off the top of my head … there was a major burst of deglaciation around 9-11 thousand BP, which I’d have thought was a prime candidate for when the British started getting all insular.
Thanks to both of you.
Thanks–my mistake; there was no intention to impugn the ‘lizardy-ness’ of slow worms! The post has been updated with a correction.
GCM
One man’s dastard is another woman’s epicure.
Spiders gotta eat too!
Impressed. Lived in Africa many years, never seen a spider eat a lizard. 🙁
I’ve seen them eat frogs, in Costa Rica.
Couldn’t put a like! OMG.
🙂
Try going out at night with a headlamp. 🙂
I thought that spiders did their thing by injecting flesh-dissolving enzymes into the carapace of their victims, then later drinking up the resulting insect-soup.
If that’s the case (if), then do spiders get appreciable nutrition out of such a large and hazardous-to-win meal?
Maybe over a long period of time. But I suspect they leave a lot of calories uneaten when they tackle a relatively large vertebrate.
Brings to mind the dastardly praying mantis and the hummingbird.
Just breed really big praying mantises to eat those spiders then if those get too prolific, grow bigger lizards to eat the mantises and then if there are too many big lizards who cares? Big lizards are awesome!
Or big spider wasps.
When I was a boy my friends and I would stage gladiatorial contests between praying mantises and other things we could catch, mostly insects. Luckily for my conscience the typical result was . . . nothing. But there were one or two epic battles.
I used to put ants from one ant hill in the ant hill of a different any colony and watch the ensuing battle. I was punished by the ants running up my legs & biting me.
I have a hard time thinking of spiders as dastardly, but this is an invading species.
There are two types of invasive species: those which were translocated by humans first, and those which extend their natural range on their own account. As far as I know the expansion of the wasp spider over most of Europe belongs in the latter category and is a purely natural phenomenon. No need to disregard these critters.
Yep that was sort of my thought too; I don’t want to support it as an invasive species, but outside of that consideration, I have no problem with a spider eating a lizard. I like spiders. And lizards…I also wouldn’t have a problem with the reverse situation.
So, to tie this into evolution, orb weavers belong to one of three major branches of spider evolution, the araneomorphs. Araneomorphs are the only spiders who produce major ampullate silk, the very strong silk you see spiders hanging on. It’s also the silk that allows spiders to balloon (although there have been documented cases of a few species of one of the other two branches, the mygalomorphs, ballooning as well). The other two branches (mesotheles and mygalomorphs)comprise fewer than 4,000 known species. There are about 40,000 species of araneomorphs. Araneomorph spiderlings disperse far and wide by ballooning–the Channel wouldn’t be an uncrossable passage by any means if the conditions were right. In contrast, spiderlings in the other two branches tend not to wander far (since they’re traveling on foot) from their birthplaces. So there is a much higher probability that araneomorph spiderlings will find themselves geographically isolated from others of their species. And that opens up the (slim) possibility that their descendents will eventually evolve into a population that can be defined as a new species. The possibility is slim, but given how much time is involved (spiders have been around for hundreds of millions of years) and how many spiderlings there are in each generation of each species, slim possibilities can add up. We won’t live to see the day, but I wish I could know whether the English population of this European Argiope will eventually evolve into a new species.
Ballooning in mygalomorphs just sounds adorable. Fred Coyle has observed it in Antrodiaetus and Ummidia – and I can’t remember who (it may have also been Coyle) described the behavior in Sphodros as well. I’d… love to see it!
So would I!
Marshall–I haven’t read this yet, but here’s a brand-new open-access article from the Journal of Arachnology on ballooning and mygalomorphs.
Thanks, Leslie, very informative & interesting!
As far as I’ve been able to tell so far, there’s nothing that’s not interesting about spiders. You’re welcome!
I was reminded of the Nephila spiders too. We call them “banana spiders” in East Texas where they are fairly common. They big X shapes out of silk. It was once thought this was to warn birds away form the web, but now people think they are insect lures.
Yes, “banana spider” is a common name for them around most of their US range. Luckily they are not really banana spiders. Real banana spiders have some fairly serious venom, whereas the “banana” spider’s bite is about on par with a bee sting. Or so it is said.
There is nothing like walking out your front door at 0 dark thirty in the morning and walking right into a web spanning 6-8 feet (2-2.5 meters) and then having the startled spider, that is about the size of the palm of your hand, franticly crawling all over you. No coffee necesary that morning. Valium may have been appropriate though.
My co-author on Spider Silk, Catherine L. Craig, did some of the earliest experiments on the role of these web decorations. Her results pointed to insect lure. Other experiments have pointed to predator deterrence. Given how many species decorate their webs this way, it seems probable that the decorations play different roles in different situations. They may also play multiple roles. Lots of room for more experiments!