Can Spiders Become Fat?
WouterWhether spiders become fat is a question that has been debated for years. Generally speaking, arachnids are designed to survive without food. But they also need protein for other purposes.
To test the theory, scientists collected 222 female spiders from different sites in Sydney. They weighed and measured their bodies, and measured the amount of grass, leaf litter and hard surfaces. They found that more urbanized areas had more of these characteristics. They also found that larger spiders with more eggs live in these areas.
Dr Raubenheimer, a biologist at the University of Auckland, was interested in these insects. He had studied them for 16 years at Oxford, where he became the leader of the nutritional ecology field. His interest in arachnids led him to come to New Zealand last year to investigate this phenomenon.
He conducted experiments on both spiders and flies. The results were published in Science.
Dr Raubenheimer is a keen tramper. He is South African and has been living in New Zealand since last year. He is a naturalist who has been a member of the New Zealand Nature Society for many years. He is also a diver.
When he discovered that spiders had a milk-like fluid that looked like mammalian milk, he decided to conduct tests on them. He tested spiders and flies raised on special diets. They found that the female spiders were able to produce fluid that was similar to human milk.
Researchers found that the fluid produced by the spiders was rich in protein. It contained four times as much as the milk produced by cows. It was similar to mammalian milk in that it was a suckable fluid.
