Spiders also like to eat their veggies - CNET

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If someone asks you what spiders eat, you'd probably say insects, or toads, or birds, or fish, or mice (click those links at your own discretion). You probably wouldn't say plants, but according to a new study, sometimes spiders do like to snack on leaves, seeds and other floral material to supplement their diets.

And the primary plant eater? The adorable jumping spider. The research has been published in the joual American Arachnology.

The global team, consisting of zoologists from the University of Basel in Switzerland, Brandeis University in the US, and Cardiff University in the UK, collected, documented and confirmed examples from literature of spiders munching on vegetation.

They found that spiders from 10 families have been reported eating nectar, sap, honeydew, leaf, pollen and seeds from weeds, shrubs, trees, grasses, fes and orchids.

The biggest group that likes a veggie meal once in a while is Salticidae, a family of jumping spiders with over 5,000 species spread across the entire world, characterised by the pair of big, shiny eyes at the front of their heads. Salticidae accounted for 60 percent of the documented plant-eating incidents.