Turnabout’s Fair Play

A few weeks back, we reported the death of an anole at the hands–er, pedipalps–of a spider. Now Janson Jones reports the opposite.

More generally, we know that spiders are a very common prey item in the diet of many anole species, but how often the reverse is true is unknown.

About Jonathan Losos

Author and Professor at Harvard University
This entry was posted in Natural History Observations. Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to Turnabout’s Fair Play

  1. We found that spider make up about 10% of the diet of Anolis sagrei in Taiwan. But, unlike in other studies, in which it was found that this lizard species preyed mainly on web spiders, the majority of the spiders in our studies were ground-living species (Norval et al., 2007; Huang et al., 2008). We also found that predation on some families, such jumping spiders (Salticidae), was significant enough to reduce the abundance of these spiders. We are still awaiting the first reports of spiders preying on brown anoles in Taiwan.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s