Lives in South America the spider that builds small and spectacular Stonehenge - renamed silkhenge - to protect its eggs from predators
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves himNature never ceases to amaze and always gives us curious shows, like this one spider building small Stonehenge or - better still - silkhenge, as they were renamed.
Spiders are famous for their art of weaving intricate webs, but this kind of nest is particularly bizarre and complex.
It is small and delicate structures that the spider builds on the leaves, consisting of a sort of circular enclosure interspersed with spiers and with a small egg in the center. It looks like this arachnid belongs to the Cyclosa species and makes these structures to resemble large spiders, however protect the eggs from predators.
To spot these particular nests for the first time was the biologist Phil Torres during an excursion in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest in 2012. The biologist was amazed by the discovery of a screen so impressive and began studying the spider involving other colleagues. Torres and his colleagues were initially not even sure it was the work of an arachnid: they thought it was a fungus or an insect.
Confirmation that it was the work of a spider came when scientists witnessed the hatching of the egg, event filmed in this video.
The spider is thought to have spread throughout South America, but the identity of the spider is not yet known. The research on the DNA of the arachnid is still ongoing: it is probably a species of spider that has not yet been classified or of which this feature had never been reported before Torres' discovery.
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Tatiana Maselli
