Avoiding predators is a tricky business in the animal world, which leads to masters of mimicry and camouflage at every turn. From blending in with the background to strength in numbers, species have lots of tricks up their sleeves. For the bird-dung spiders, that trick is to resemble the droppings of their predators. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Bird-dung spiders belong to the family Thomisidae , and the genus Phrynarachne has really taken looking like crap to a whole other level. Numbering around 35 species, these spiders are spread across Australasia, tropical parts of Africa, and Southeast Asia, and are known as the bird-dung or bird-dropping spiders because of their incredible mimicry in both body shape,

See Full Page