Vampire spiders, as the name suggests, like blood. And they feast on  blood-filled mosquitoes to get it. But only female mosquitoes suck  blood. So how do spiders hole in on the ladies?

 

To find out, researchers, well, took apart a bunch of mosquitoes. Then  they mixed and matched body parts. They glued female heads onto male  abdomens and male heads onto female bodies, some of which had  blood-filled bellies. Then they let the spiders loose near these  reassembled specimens, and watched to see which ones the spiders  stalked.

 

As the researchers predicted, the spiders paid close attention to the  abdomen, pouncing on the Frankensquitos filled with blood. But the  spiders also kept an eye ,or eight eyes, on the mosquitoes' heads. Males  have lush, feathery *. The females aren't as so. So if the  spiders couldn't see the belly they went for female-headed mosquitoes,  presumably for the better odds of scoring blood. The researchs in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

 

Previous studies have shown that blood meals give vampire spiders a  perfume that's irresistible to the opposite sex. Now that's what I call bloodlust.

 

Thanks for the minute, for Scientific Americans' Sixty-Second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.