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In the wild world out there, it is one of the key survival tactics of the animals, birds, insects and other living things to avoid their predators. Orb weaver spiders are very clever in that they disguise themselves as bird poo to fool their enemies۔

Such survival tactics have been developed by different species over the course of their evolution. Some are able to gel in with the environment by changing colors, others have developed such bodies which look like sticks or leaves, and then there’s the orb weaver spider which has chosen bird poo as an effective camouflage.

The weaver spider itself has a body that is brown and spotted. To avoid the predators, this spider spins a web of disc-shaped splatter and sits in the middle of it. This way, it is able to gel in with the droppings and any onlooking predators may think of it as nothing more than bird poo. The white material originally is a silky texture woven by the spider.

A group of researchers looked into this white stuff in detail, carefully analyzing the physical properties of the stuff and comparing it with actual bird droppings. They found remarkable similarities in the two, even that the average size of the bird dropping is quite the same as the white disc created by the spider.

To further cement their findings, these researchers sprinkled black powder on the bodies of the spiders. The result was that the spiders were more easily discovered by the predators and devoured.

Source: Nature

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