Spiders, Carnivorous Plants Compete for Food—A First
Spiders build bigger webs to catch more bugs than sundews, says the first study to show such battles between the plant and animal kingdoms.
In parts of Florida and southern Georgia, two species of wolf spider eat the same insects as the pink sundew—a type of carnivorous plant.
Sundews catch bugs using a sticky mucilage on the tips of their leaves. The small plants then release digestive enzymes, which begin to process the trapped animals, leaving only their exoskeletons behind.
In the field the team saw that, when S. floridanus is in close quarters with the sundew, the spiders build larger webs farther away from the plants, presumably to snare more meals than the sundews' leaves.
This led the team to suspect that the spiders were hurting the plants via competition.
Laboratory experiments with the hunting spider R. rabida later confirmed that the presence
