Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You Read Online Free PDF Page A

would have to spend catching and killing the intruder.
    It’s a strategy that works for the small spider. So well, in fact, that it has lost the ability to live anywhere else. Unlike other thief spiders, such as Argyrodes, that can make webs and catch their own prey whenever they need to, the Curimagua spider can no longer hunt for itself. So far as I know, it is the only spider species in the world, out of more than 44,000, in which individuals don’t do their own hunting. 6
    Another unique spider that commits acts of thievery is a very special jumping spider called Bagheera kiplingi . (That Latin name will stick in your brain if you’ve ever read Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and you remember Bagheera the black panther.) Bagheera kiplingi is the only known vegetarian spider in the world. Remember those acacia plants that feed nectar to ants in exchange for defense? Well, Bagheera lives on those same acacia plants, eating the nectar that the plant has made for the ants. Asyou can imagine, this doesn’t thrill the ants, so the spider has to constantly hide from them, jump out of the way when attacked, or else hang from a thread so no ant can reach it. The spider isn’t a strict vegetarian—it dines on larval ants from time to time, so it’s also technically a predator of the ants—but Bagheera gets the vast majority of its food by stealing nectar from ants, rather than by killing them. 7
    It’s not just creepy crawlies that deal with theft. It’s a problem for big animals too. Many African predators, for example, supplement the food they kill themselves with food they steal from other predators. Hyenas are famous for stealing from lions, but things aren’t as one-sided as The Lion King might have led you to believe. Lions are aggressive carcass thieves too, and it’s quite often the case that hyenas hunt and kill their own food only to have it stolen by a pride of lions. 8
    Theft is more than a nuisance for these animals: it threatens their survival. Kills don’t happen every day, so predators sometimes go several days without food. That’s why having a meal stolen can create big problems, especially right after an animal burns a whole bunch of calories running down and killing its prey. A cheetah, for example, will hide its food as quickly as possible after a kill, but once competing carnivores find it, the cheetah has to move on. This means that even with an abundance of prey to feed on, cheetahs may not be able to use certain habitats because of competition with other predators. In fact, if a cheetah so much as hears the calls of hyenas and lions, it will stop hunting and move to another location, presumably to save itself the ordeal of having food taken away. 9
    Similarly, African wild dogs are endangered, with fewer than six thousand individuals left, so nature reserves have been setaside to protect them and other endangered animals where they live. But because hyenas and lions do so well in those same reserves, the African wild dogs can’t seem to get a break. One study in Zimbabwe showed that African wild dogs inside one such park had their food stolen roughly twice as often as they did outside the park. As a result, they chose to spend most of their time outside the very conservation area that had been set aside for them. 10
    There’s an appealing concept that nature is naturally balanced and self-regulating, and that the key to making nature thrive is for humans to take themselves out of the picture and let things come to their natural order. But the truth is that except for humans, animals have no concept of order and simply do their best to thrive as individuals. If animals in an ecosystem are left alone for long enough, a balance emerges, but when that balance is perturbed, things often don’t return to the same equilibrium. As a result, if we stopped managing wildlife in the savannahs of Africa, it’s not necessarily true that cheetahs or wild dogs would be able to bounce back. It was