Strange Bedfellows: these unprecedented photos show a leafcutter bee sharing its nest with a wolfspider
I stumbled across these photos while I was looking for information about leafcutter bees, and I just wanted to share them, because they're really remarkable. The images were captured by an amateur photographer named Laurence Sanders, and they depict an unprecedented scene that garnered the attention of both entomologists and arachnologists.
The photos show a leafcutter bee and a wolfspider living in the same burrow.
The leafcutter bee (Megachile macularis) can be seen fetching freshly-cut leaves, which she'll use to line the inner walls of her nest, while the wolfspider sits at the entryway to the burrow; as the bee approaches, the wolfspider moves aside, allowing her to enter the nest, and then she simply watches as the leaf is positioned along the inner wall.
Once the leaf is in position, the bee and the spider seem to inspect the nest together, sitting side-by-side in the entryway. The leafcutter bee seems strangely at ease in the presence of the wolfspider, which is normally a voracious predator, and the wolfspider seems equally unfazed by the fact that it shares its burrow with an enormous stinging insect.
The man who took these photographs discovered the peculiar scene by accident, and he then captured a series of images over the course of about two days (these are just a few of the photos that were taken). During that two-day period, the bee was seen entering the nest with bits of foliage dozens of times, gradually constructing the walls and brood chambers of its nest, and the spider was clearly occupying the same burrow, but they did not exhibit any signs of aggression toward one another.
The photos have been examined by various entomologists and arachnologists, and those experts seem ubiquitously surprised by the behavior that these images depict. The curator of entomology at Victoria Museum, Dr. Ken Walker, noted that this may be the very first time that this behavior has ever been documented, while Dr. Robert Raven, an arachnid expert at the Queensland Museum, described it as a "bizarre" situation.
This arrangement is completely unheard of, and the photos are truly remarkable.
Sources & More Info:
Brisbane Times: The Odd Couple: keen eye spies bee and spider bedfellows in 'world-first'
iNaturalist: Megachile macularis
There's so much we don't yet know about symbiosis!
