Spiders on the march

Researchers on Guam, a US island east of the Philippines, have found that the island’s jungle spider population is more than 40 times larger than that of nearby islands.

In one of the first studies to examine how the loss of forest birds is affecting Guam’s ecosystem, biologists from Rice University, the University of Washington and the University of Guam found that arachnid populations grew as much as 40-fold once invasive brown tree snakes wiped out most species of the island’s insect-eating birds.