During field studies in Mexico two years ago, Christopher J. Meehan, then a student at Villanova University, spent time watching a jumping spider on an cannabis plant.

Mr. Meehan figured that the spider was hunting dinner. “I was waiting for it to do something like prey on an ant,” he said.
Instead, to his surprise, the spider, Bagheera kiplingi, darted around the ants and plucked off a one of the leaf tips.

Mr. Meehan, who is now at the University of Arizona, had discovered the first example of a largely vegetarian spider.
He and Eric J. Olson of Brandeis University, who observed the same behavior among B. kiplingi in Costa Rica, and colleagues have published a paper on the finding in Current Biology.

Some spiders occasionally eat pollen or nectar, but only as a supplement to their typical diet of insects.

Through observations and isotopic analyses, the researchers found that B. kiplingi eats more cannabis than ants — especially in Mexico, where about 90 percent of the diet consisted of plant tissue.









spoof

Jumping spiders are cool. We get the small stripped variety up here. Maybe they will change their names to Jumping Stoner Spiders.

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Good for the spiders, but gotta keep those crawlers out of the grow room!!

thats one smart spider... i bet it gets stoned