vegetarian spiders?

This seems to have hit the news today, though apparently the spiders have been observed since the 1890s.

Unusually these spiders don't hunt for prey but eat the tasty leaf-tip buds of the acacia tree. Their main problem seems to be avoiding the ants that try and preserve these buds for their own use.

Rumour has it that despite their 'vegetarian' diet the spiders do occasionally eat each other when leaf tips are scarce, and help themselves to ant larvae too - presumably on the well known basis that eating flies is murder but larvae are justifiable homicide - though I suppose that should really be justifiable larvicide.

As to why a thumbnail-sized central american spider should be named after a black panther - that is the secret of George & Elizabeth Peckham.