Hunting
Every spider species produces the pheromone of only one specific moth species (or a small set) and is thus dependent on it. However, bola spiders will try and often succeed to catch any insect that is flying nearby, aided by their good eyesight. They also seem to detect prey by the sound of their approaching flight.
Spiderlings and adult males hunt without a bola. This might be because the small globule these spiders could produce would dry out rapidly. Rather, they position themselves at edges of leaves and grab prey with their frontal pair of legs. Moth flies of the genus Psychoda are prominent prey in juvenile and adult male Mastophora. Adult spiders consume the bola after at most half an hour if the hunt was fruitless.
Female Mastophora catch an average of two moths per night, but as many as six or seven catches during a single night have been observed.
Read more about this topic: Bolas Spiders
Famous quotes containing the word hunting:
“The man that once did sell the lion’s skin
While the beast lived, was killed with hunting him.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“They take unbelievable pleasure in the hideous blast of the hunting horn and baying of the hounds. Dogs’ dung smells sweet as cinnamon to them.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“...here he is, fully alive, and it is hard to picture him fully dead. Death is thirty-three hours away and here we are talking about the brain size of birds and bloodhounds and hunting in the woods. You can only attend to death for so long before the life force sucks you right in again.”
—Helen Prejean (b. 1940)