SSS 2012-06-08

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Vampire¹ spiders, as the name suggests, like blood. And they feast on  blood-filled mosquitoes to get it. But only female mosquitoes suck  blood. So how do spiders hole in on the ladies?

 

To find out, researchers, well, took apart a bunch of mosquitoes. Then  they mixed and matched body parts. They glued female heads onto male  abdomens and male heads onto female bodies, some of which had  blood-filled bellies². Then they let the spiders loose near these  reassembled specimens³, and watched to see which ones the spiders  stalked.

 

As the researchers predicted, the spiders paid close attention to the  abdomen, pouncing⁴ on the Frankensquitos filled with blood. But the  spiders also kept an eye ,or eight eyes, on the mosquitoes' heads. Males  have lush, feathery *. The females aren't as so. So if the  spiders couldn't see the belly⁵ they went for female-headed mosquitoes,  presumably for the better odds⁶ of scoring blood. The researchs in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

 

Previous studies have shown that blood meals give vampire spiders a  perfume that's irresistible⁷ to the opposite sex. Now that's what I call bloodlust.

 

Thanks for the minute, for Scientific Americans' Sixty-Second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.

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