Since national serviceman Luke Ang caught the bug of photographing the world of tiny wildlife in 2020, he has been scrutinising every bird dropping that he sees on a leaf.
The 20-year-old hit pay dirt in October 2023 when he saw a type of bird-dropping crab spider (Phrynarachne decipiens) (pic) that had never been recorded in Singapore before.
Ang was then on a night walk at Upper Seletar Reservoir Park with fellow nature enthusiast Wong Kwang Ik, 30.
Their prize find: a rare arachnid that resembled – and even smelled like – a bird dropping splattered on a leaf, except that it was chomping on a cockroach. Its body was about 17mm wide.
In January, the sighting by Ang and Wong was published in the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum’s Singapore Biodiversity Record Archives. The documented species joins two other kinds of bird-dropping crab spiders that call Singapore home.
The faecal facade and odour of these spiders are part of a ploy that acts as both a repellent to predators and a charm offensive to lure prey like flies, which rely on bird droppings as a food source, they found.
In 2021, for instance, scientists provided the first experimental proof that the seemingly harmless appearance of the spiders lured more prey than those that did not have a similar masquerade.
The discovery has been “very rewarding” for Ang, who started photographing invertebrates – animals that do not have backbones – four years ago after learning from social media that Singapore has a diverse array of these smaller, lesser-known species.
He said: “It’s exciting because there’s always a chance that you can find something completely new to science. The sheer scale of undiscovered findings is vast, compared to other fields of zoology.
“Some of my fellow naturalists have even described it as ‘Pokemon for adults’.” — The Straits Times/ANN
