Amazing, this spider has about four times protein content more high that the cow’s milk

News24xx.com -  Spider babies may be more mammal-like than we thought before. It’s not just cows, goats and humans that feed their offsprings milk. This specific species of spider can produce milk that is just as nutritious or even more than what mammals produce.

A species that goes by the name of Toxeus Magnus, a jumping spider is known to feed its young with nutritious milk-like fluid.

Previous studies have suggested that spiders don’t eat anything until they grow in size these spiders grow surprisingly fast. They grow half their adult size in the first 20 days itself. 
“We couldn’t figure out how they just keep growing without food until one night, I saw a baby spider clinging onto its mom’s belly,” Zhanqi Chen at Chinese Academy of Science says. “I had this radical idea that maybe spider moms feed their babies with something they produced,” reported the New Scientist. 

They found young spiders, known as spiderlings sip on nutritious milk droplets that were secreted from their mother’s underside till they’re at least 40 days old. In fact, spiders separated from their mothers before this stage had a 40% lower survival rate and would die within 10 days. 

They found that the milk-like liquid coming out of the spider had about four times protein content in the cow’s milk.
While common consensus has always believed milk production was exclusive to mammals, spider milk seems to be serving the same purpose as mammalian milk—nourishing the young.

While the researchers are not clear how the spiders end up producing such nutritious liquid, they think it may be from the unfertilised eggs the mother spider recycles. As there have been cases of other non-mammalian species that feed their offsprings through unfertilised eggs. 

Although the researchers could not fathom why spiders would need to devote as much time as mammals do to raise their offspring. They concluded that spider babies needed to pick up more skills before learning to survive on their own.

 

 

 

 

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