Karma-believers

Grey herons often stand motionless in shallow water, waiting with great patience for opportunities to harvest accidental passers-by in immediate proximity to them like fish and shrimps. The ancient Chinese superstitiously interpreted this seemingly passive hunting mode as the birds believing that Heaven would keep their prey within easy reach of them and that it would be in their karma whether they could really have the godsends. Hence the rather bizarre name karma-believer (信天缘) for the birds.

However, as it turns out, the so-called karma-believers don't come exclusively from birds. My very recent observations of a kind of spider that I identify as Asceua torquata (thanks to the kind help from Dr. Pakawin Dan) reveal that this species of spider, whose biology hasn't yet been documented, actually shares a strikingly similar hunting mode with the birds, although the two species dwell in rather different habitats.

Asceua torquata is an ant-eating spider that has a distinctive triangular marking on abdominal dorsum as one of its most easily recognizable characteristics. During nightly huntings, they first choose a position on the trunk of a tree where there are always visible signs of ants traveling to and fro. Once a vantage point has been chosen, the hunter will stay there literally motionless exactly as grey herons normally do while hunting. The surprise attack starts only when an unlucky victim is making an imminent head-on approach towards the undetected ambusher. The most curious twist is: if the ant should approach the spider by the flank, the predator will immediately shy away as if scared of the prey. So what's the strategy behind an apparently false sign of weakness? Well, as an aside note, this might be a fantastic example for a study of predator-prey interactive dynamics. Anyway, in a successful ambush, the spider typically pounces with deadly agility upon the approaching ant, almost instantly subduing it with its venomous chelicerae.

So there are karma-believers in birds and there are their arachnid counterpart. It might also be a reasonable conjecture that there are potential counterparts in a variety of other species. But do they really believe in karma as interpreted by the ancient Chinese? Or they're actually the opposite? This seems to be an interesting question to ponder.

Posted on August 23, 2023 12:28 PM by