Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world.

This camouflage is unbe-leaf-able Matjaž Kuntner

Species: An undescribed species of Poltys orb web spider

Habitat: Rainforests in south west China and Southeast Asia

I’m a leaf. Really, I am. A spider found in the Chinese rainforest has gone to unique lengths to convince the world it is a leaf.


Matjaž Kuntner of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, stumbled across this novel arachnid while on an expedition in Yunnan province. Shining torch light on strands of spider silk led him and his team to a suspicious looking patch of leaves.

“It then became apparent that one of those leaves was not really a leaf,” he says. “It was a spider.”

The spider’s back resembled a green, living leaf complete with veins, while its dull, brownish front looked more like a dead leaf (move the slider below to see the difference). It even had an unusual abdominal extension reminiscent of a stalk.

Matjaž Kuntner

The team dubbed this feat the “ultimate leaf masquerade”, but the spider has a lot of competition according to John Skelhorn, a researcher at Newcastle University, UK, specialising in animals that masquerade as other things.

“There are loads of really, really good masqueraders,” he says, listing leaf insects and dead leaf mantises as two supremely adapted leaf mimics. Spiders, on the other hand, are not generally renowned for their masquerading abilities.

However, this spider has unusual behaviour to complement its anatomical adaptations, placing it in the top echelons of mimicry. From the living branch where the team found their first specimen, there were dead leaves hanging on strands of silk 2.5 metres up.

Spot the spider Matjaž Kuntner

Kuntner thinks these spiders haul leaves up from the ground and hang them up to create daytime hideaways that match their camouflage and protect them from predators. At night they can emerge and build webs to catch prey.

Skelhorn wonders if the addition of dead leaves might even put off herbivores that could otherwise accidentally consume the spider in a mouthful of greenery.

This spider is yet to be formally classified after Kuntner’s team was unable to find more specimens, except for a single juvenile. Kuntner thinks they are pretty rare, and that the same enigmatic adaptations helping these spiders avoid predation may also be helping them avoid the attention of researchers.

Journal reference: Journal of Arachnology, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1636/JoA-S-16-027.1