This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Karen Hopkins. This will just take a minute.

Ever look in the mirror first thing in the morning and say, I look like crap. Well, for some spiders spiders looking like poop can actually be a life

savor because masquerading as a bird turd appears to protect certain arachnids from

getting eaten by wasps. That's according to a study in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

Researchers were marveling over the plentiful bird dew they were seeing in a forest in Taiwan.

Then they realized that some of those droppings were in fact speckled spiders sitting atop silky white discs at the center of their

webs. Sure this scatological costume might fool a bunch of PhDs, but do the

predatory wasps fall for it? To find out, the researchers used a spectrometer to confirm that the

spider in its web is spectrally indistinguishable from bird-splat. Then they changed the

coloring of some webs by dusting them with carbon powder. They found that spiders that rested on the artificially black and silk were much more likely to get eaten.

Now, these results don't prove that wasps buy the whole poop act.

Maybe spiders against the white background are just harder to spot.

To be more confident that looking like poop is key, researchers might test the wasps to find

out if they're just glad they didn't step in it.

Thanks for the minute.

For Scientific Americans 60 Second Science,

I'm Karen Hopkins.