Live Science Plus
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Delivered Daily
Daily Newsletter
Sign up for the latest discoveries, groundbreaking research and fascinating breakthroughs that impact you and the wider world direct to your inbox.
Once a week
Life's Little Mysteries
Feed your curiosity with an exclusive mystery every week, solved with science and delivered direct to your inbox before it's seen anywhere else.
Once a week
How It Works
Sign up to our free science & technology newsletter for your weekly fix of fascinating articles, quick quizzes, amazing images, and more
Delivered daily
Space.com Newsletter
Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!
Once a month
Watch This Space
Sign up to our monthly entertainment newsletter to keep up with all our coverage of the latest sci-fi and space movies, tv shows, games and books.
Once a week
Night Sky This Week
Discover this week's must-see night sky events, moon phases, and stunning astrophotos. Sign up for our skywatching newsletter and explore the universe with us!
Join the club
Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards.
Orb-Web Spider
Orb-web spiders like this juvenile female Cyclosa ginnaga use their body color and web decorations to masquerade as bird droppings. The creature may use this disguise to avoid capture by predatory wasps, researchers say.
Read Full Story
Bird Dropping
Masquerading is a phenomenon in which an animal’s body color and shape mimics an inanimate object. The body coloration of many web-building spiders strikes a balance between being attractive to prey and hidden from predators.
Read Full Story
Orb-Web Spider
Many spiders also add colorful decorations to their webs, called stabilimenta, made from prey carcasses, egg sacs, plant matter or silk.
Read Full Story
Bird Dropping
The spider bodies were indistinguishable from their webs and from bird droppings, as viewed by wasps, researchers said.
Read Full Story
Bird Dropping Masquerades
Fortunately, the orb-web spiders' enemies, predatory wasps, will likely steer clear of bird feces. "These predators usually will form a search image to hunt for spiders, and [they] usually will not be interested in bird droppings," said lead study researcher I-Min Tso, a behavioral ecologist at Tunghai University in Taiwan.
Shown here, photographs of randomly sampled bird droppings (top row) compared with Cyclosa ginnaga web decorations (bottom row) at the study site.
Creative mimics
Shown here, photographs of randomly sampled bird droppings (top row) compared with web decorations crafted by Cyclosa ginnaga orb-web spiders (bottom row) at the study site.
Take your guess
Can you guess which images are bird droppings and which are orb-web spiders?
Shown here, photographs of randomly sampled bird droppings (top row) compared with web decorations crafted by Cyclosa ginnaga orb-web spiders (bottom row) at the study site.
Fooling wasps
In the study, the researchers found predatory wasps were likely fooled. Their study method involved blackening the spiders' bodies and web decorations, just the while disc-like web decorations, or just their bodies. They found that the wasps were more likely to attack a spider when only it's decoration was blackened, suggesting the spiders were indeed using their body and decoration as a disguise.
Shown here, photographs of randomly sampled bird droppings (top row) compared with web decorations crafted by Cyclosa ginnaga orb-web spiders (bottom row) at the study site.
Juvenile spider
Here, a female juvenile Cyclosa ginnaga orb-web spider masquerading as bird droppings.
