A species of spider that suckles its young

SUPERFICIALLY, INDIVIDUALS of a species of jumping spider called Toxeus magnus look like ants. This protects them from the attentions of spider wasps—a group of insects that catch and paralyse spiders in order to lay their eggs on the arachnids’ bodies, which thus act as a living larder for the wasps’ larvae. Ants are not, however, the only group of unrelated animals that T. magnus resembles. They are also quite like mammals. That, at least, is the conclusion of a study just published in Science by Quan Ruichang of the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, in Yunnan, China.