Baby jumping spiders suckle milk from their moms

Much like baby mammals nursing at the teats of their mothers, some baby jumping spiderlings are entirely dependent on nutritious spider milk secreted and fed to them by their mothers. What’s more, spider mothers continue to care for and feed their offspring the nutritious milk-like fluid – which contains nearly four times the protein of cow’s milk – into their subadult lives and long after they’re able to forage on their own, a recent study finds.   According to the results, this newly identified and peculiar behavior compares both functionally and behaviorally to lactation in mammals and hints to the possibility that long-term, milk-provisioning maternal care may be more common in the animal kingdom than previously believed. Three-week old juveniles sucking milk from mother. The red star was added to help you find the mother. Photo from supplementary m