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For weeks, mom feeds her baby with milk that contains four times more protein than the cow. Yet this mother is not a mammal. She is an eight-legged jumping spider and has a strong taste for fruit flies.
We mammals are named after our mammary glands. Other animals, tsetse flies with pigeons, secrete their own version of milk for their babies. A team of researchers from China proposed in the Science of [30 septembre] that biologists have recognized that nursing recently discovered in Toxeus magnus might be the most mammal-like.
] T. magnus as a species since 1933, but it was easy to miss a small spider. Spiders hunt fruit flies and retreat to a small nest, perhaps tied to a leaf, to raise a family.
The co-author of the study, Zhanqi Chen, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Menglunzhen, who studies the behavior of the spider, has noticed several T. magnus ] sharing a nest in 2012 and wondering if the species had some kind of extended parental protection. Five years later, he noticed the behavior of badfeeding. A spider stuck to his mother's belly on an exciting night in July 2017.
With a T. Magnus woman under a microscope, light finger pressure on the underside of the # The abdomen will pull out a small drop of white fluid from a furrow called an epigastric furrow, the researchers say. About a week after the eggs hatch, a spider mum leaves droplets of milk around the nest so that the creepy spots of her cubs can drink. Then, nursing turns over mammals, with small pressing against the body of their mother
How spiders could appropriate milk intrigue the evolutionary physiologist, Wendy Hood, of University of Auburn, Alabama, which studies lactation echidna, also known as thorny anteater, females do not have bad.The milk that babies perspire gushes from the mammary glands to the surface skin "a bit like sweat gland water," she says, rather than spinning, which triggers the release of milk into her mouth.
Staple Foods in Milk Spider have well-known basic components in mammalian milk: about 2 milligrams of sugar per milliliter of milk, 5 milligrams of fat and 124 milligrams of protein.The researchers report that it is all that spiders have during the first 20 days of their life: in the nests From the laboratory spiders, mothers occasionally hunted fruit flies provided by researchers, but they never brought these prey home to feed their offspring.
A After 20 days, the spiders started looking for food, but also continued to badfeed for almost three weeks, the team discovered. With this combined diet, 76% of young people in laboratory nests survived into adulthood. However, when the researchers sealed their mother's epigastric furrow with correction fluid from the birth of the spiders, they died in about 10 days.
Researchers were also curious to know if milk was very important once young people started hunting. It made. According to the researchers, depriving these older spiders by sealing their mother's furrow on the twentieth day reduced their survival rate to about 50%
. The Magnus Spiders end up sharing a nest for an unusually long time in the largely solitary and predatory world of spiders, says behavioral arachnologist Linda Rayor of Cornell University. Only about 120 of the more than 48,000 known spider species tolerate the company, including their siblings, for more than three weeks. And only about 30 of them live a social life for life. So, an example of spiders sharing a nest for 40 days, says Rayor, is "a big deal".
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MEAL TIME Female Toxeus Magnus Spiders, native to the tropical and subtropical regions of Asia, produce milk to feed their young for weeks even after the spiders start to to hunt by themselves. Here, a child less than a week old feeds in an area of his mother 's abdomen where milk is available. |
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