"In a paper published today in Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from Tunghai University and the Endemic Species Research Institute in Taiwan argue that Cyclosa ginnaga spiders’ body color and web designs are part of a strategy to masquerade as bird droppings and cut its chances of dying in a predator attack. “We provide empirical evidence for the first time that bird dropping masquerading can effectively reduce the predation risk of an organism,” says I-Min Tso, a co-author on the study and an ecologist at Tunghai University in Taiwan." - Mark H

"Scientists had previously observed that young C. ginnaga spiders have silvery white body coloration, and often build beautiful spirals on their webs sprinkled with leaf debris. However, it has been unclear whether these structures serve primarily to attract prey or camouflage the bugs from predators. Some have hypothesized that C. ginnaga webs might be attracting prey for the spiders to munch on, and in the forest, decorated webs do appear to lure in more unsuspecting prey. But something about the appearance of the webs caught the eye of researchers on the Taiwan-based team. “To the naked eye the visual appearance of the spiders on their decorations resembles a bird dropping,” says co-author Sean Blamires, a biologist at Tunghai University. And if it looks like a bird dropping, perhaps it’s supposed to look like a bird dropping." - Mark H

"So every day for 13 days, the authors set up video cameras in front of 12 C. ginnaga webs and videotaped the action on each web. Again, they covered some spider’s bodies with black ink, concealed other spiders’ web decorations with black powder, concealed both in some cases, and left others untouched. At the beginning of each day of filming, they measured the size of the spider, the size of the web decoration, and the size of nearby bird droppings. In both the visual tests and observations in the wild, predators could more readily see darkened spiders on normal webs, as well as normal spiders against dark webs. Wasps were much more likely to attack a web if the spider’s body or decorations were stood out thanks to powder and ink, while wasps couldn’t distinguish unaltered spiders from their unaltered backdrops. Wasps also went after dark spiders on dark webs, indicating that similarly colored spiders and webs weren't enough to confuse the predators—for that, spiders and webs both needed to blend in to the background of the forest." - Mark H