A predatory moment caught in deep time
The only fossil known to contain a young spider, its web (well 15 strands of its spider silk) and the parasitic waspy prey it was eating were engulfed in tree sap some hundred million years ago in the Cretaceous of what is now Burma. Just as the spider was about to end the wasp’s life, both were caught and drowned, leaving us a poignant record of a detail in a long vanished ecosystem. The piece also contained another spider in the web, implying that social spiders existed that far back, and so you don’t feel too sorry for the wasp they are of an extinct species members of whose family still extant are known to parasitise spider eggs, so it all seems fairer than many interactions in the natural world.
Loz
Image credit: Dr George Poinar Jr/ Oregon State University
Spiteful Intervention 