June 25, 2007 — If you want to find out what sorts of plants live in a place, you can painstakingly hunt down every species or you can check with the local spiders, suggest a team of Chinese, Indian and British researchers.
A study of pollen captured in spider webs of southern and central Yunnan, China, shows that the sticky webs do a darned good job at capturing and hanging onto pollen grains from local plants. The method may be useful in plant surveys worldwide.
"The [type] of pollen and spores identified from the spider webs can reflect the vegetation of the sampling site," confirms Cheng-Sen Li of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Beijing Museum of Natural History.
Along with colleagues from China, India and England, Cheng has published a paper on their discovery in the July issue of the journal Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology.
The pollen sampling technique comes as a surprise to at least one spider expert, who had only heard of one other pollen-spider connection.
"For spiders that routinely take down their webs, consuming the silk in the process, it has long been assumed that pollen sticking to the silk is a nutrient source," said Norman Platnick, spider curator at the American Museum of Natural History. "For some very small spiders, that has been thought to constitute a major food source."
