As a child, the mere glimpse of a spider used to send me screaming and running for cover. I was convinced that spiders were my enemies. I thought they were out to get me.

These days, I run towards spiders, not away from them. I can partly thank a spider for helping me with that. This is a special spider affectionately known as the mosquito terminator.

Mosquito terminators (Evarcha culicivora) are small spiders, about 5mm long. They are a species of jumping spider from the family Salticidae, the largest family of spiders. Like all jumping spiders, these little predators have good eyesight and they hunt for their prey like stealthy cats.

Jumping spiders live almost everywhere around the world (even on Mount Everest) and they are found in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours. The quickest, most convenient way to identify a jumping spider is simply by looking at it: if it looks back at you with two big eyes in front of its face, it’s a jumping spider.

Most jumping spiders mainly eat insects. Mosquito terminators are no exception, eating a wide range of insects. But they do have a distinct prey preference. Just like Arnold Schwarzenegger of The Terminator fame, these little predators are on a mission to seek and destroy — in their case, they target mosquitoes.

Mosquito terminators take this preference to an extreme. They particularly like the mosquitoes they eat to be full of blood. If they are presented with a blood-carrying mosquito alongside another kind of insect, even a mosquito not carrying blood, they will choose the blood-carrying mosquito nine times out of ten.

Blood-carrying mosquitoes are an important part of this spider’s diet. They can also help mosquito terminators attract mates. After dining on a blood-carrying mosquito, these spiders acquire a blood perfume that then attracts the opposite sex.

An antidote to malaria?

These spiders are found in the Lake Victoria region of Kenya and Uganda. Mosquito-transmitted diseases, such as malaria, are prevalent in this part of the world. These diseases kill hundreds of thousands of people each year.

Anopheles mosquitoes, which can transmit malaria, are known to be anthropophilic – they like being in the company of people. They are attracted to our breath and the smell of our feet. Being near us helps these mosquitoes to find blood meals.

Mosquito terminators also live near people, and it turns out they like the smell of our feet, too. Just like Anopheles, these spiders are more attracted to our previously-worn socks than to unworn socks. Mosquito terminators are currently the only spiders known to be anthropophilic. Being near us might help these spiders to find their favourite prey.

My research has further investigated this prey preference and how these spiders use their tiny brains. Amazingly, they can identify a blood-carrying mosquito by either smell or sight, even if they have never eaten or seen a mosquito before. This suggests that their penchant for blood-carrying mosquitoes is hard-wired or innate.

My research has also explored whether the colour red is of special importance to these spiders. The redness of a blood-carrying mosquito darkens over time as the blood gets digested. This darker colour becomes less attractive to these spiders.

The importance of redness extends to the spiders’ bodies too. A female mosquito terminator is mostly brown in colour, but the males have little bright red faces. Cover that bright red face with black eyeliner, and males are less certain that they are encountering a potential rival. Females are also less inclined to choose a male with a concealed red face, preferring those with bright red faces instead.

Mosquito terminators are not harmful to people and nor are they vampires – they cannot bite us directly to drink our blood. They also cannot rid the world of malaria. For one thing, releasing mosquito terminators in different habitats will not work. Yet these and other jumping spiders play an important role in nature. So, next time a spider turns and looks back at you, watch closely – your new eight-legged friend may be a jumping spider.

Fiona Cross receives funding from the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund.

In the microbudget horror comedy The Weed Eaters, a group of bumbling townies get high on someone else’s supply with grisly and ridiculous consequences.

Jules (Alice May Connolly) gives up partying with her friends for New Year’s Eve, and instead goes away with her boyfriend Brian (Finnius Teppett) and two of his slacker mates, Campbell (Samuel Austin) and Charlie (Annabel Kean), not to a cabin in the woods but an old shed on the edge of a deer farm in North Canterbury.

While poking around, the men discover an abandoned stash of marijuana. So far so normal, until the farmer who owns the place (noted musician Paul Kean) dies in a freak accident, and the quartet discover that the pot gives them an eager taste for human flesh.

If you must hide the evidence, why bury a body when you can just eat it, maybe with some tomato sauce?

The film leans more silly than scary. It gallops up the absurdity curve as the characters try and fail to deal with this crisis, the strong temptation of the “cannibal weed”, and then each other’s treachery.

A very New Zealand horror film

The Weed Eaters knows its history and pulls cleverly from familiar genre tropes.

We have a group of naïve young city dwellers coming unstuck out in the country, going places they shouldn’t, struggling to cope without resources and encountering horrific consequences. The locals seem threatening, and the setting full of dread.

This draws from the New Zealand gothic, in which an environment that seems peaceful and pastoral – here, the bucolic farms and alpine foothills of North Canterbury, shot in the buttery light of the golden hour – masks hidden trauma and nasty secrets.

This all builds cleverly upon New Zealand’s long history of producing horror comedies, right back to Peter Jackson’s early films Bad Taste (1987) and Braindead (1992). Indeed, up until recently – with the release of Gothic horrors like Mārama (2025), The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024) and Went Up the Hill (2024) – Kiwi horror has been best known for its emphasis on gallows humour, deadpan comedy, body horror and “splatstick”: a combination of gross-out splatter with slapstick comedy.

Director Callum Devlin expands on these traditions, positing that for millennials, social awkwardness, adult ineptitude and a fear of the future are their own forms of horror.

This film asks which is worse – serving up bits of your dead AirBnB host with cheese and crackers, or getting stuck with your partner’s weird mates in a poorly furnished, isolated getaway with bad cell reception and no plumbing? Accidentally maiming each other, or being too stoned to manage an interaction with the cashier at the petrol station (comedian David Correos, hilarious even while playing it straight)?

The inept characters all seem to be performing adulthood while giving into their worst adolescent impulses. Any time they have a decision to make, they take the worst of the options.

The film’s race to the bottom is excruciating, and very funny. It’s also well-paced. One of the pitfalls of stoner comedy is that it can drag (no pun intended). Here, the film’s slippery sense of time and the characters’ dulled responses only add to the sense of paranoia, mistrust and tension as things slide out of control.

A vibrant, low-budget picture

In New Zealand, there have long been concerns about the functionality of the traditional pipeline from talent development through to feature production and post-production, which can also pit individual creatives against onerous funding processes, in a challenging employment environment.

Instead, Weed Eaters was made as a collective, with the director and four performers creating the story together, and each taking on various creative and production roles. Between them, this team have years’ worth of experience in making music videos and web series, writing for theatre and film, on and off-screen performance, filmmaking and broadcasting.

Production company Sports Team – Annabel Kean and Callum Devlin – have also achieved success in the 48Hours film competition, a national talent incubator.

The miniscule budget included NZ$19,000 worth of crowdfunding. The shoot location was rural property owned by the Kean family.

Some elements of the film lack polish, but it feels vibrant rather than shoddy. Performances are loose and naturalistic, entirely committed to the bit. Everything is beautifully shot, including a nightmarish bender lit by camera flashes. The sound mix is terrific. Callum Passells’ raucous, jangly score is inspired, and augmented cleverly with songs from notable New Zealand musicians, including Paul Kean’s The Bats.

The script could have done with further development, as in the way earlier scenes such the group’s stoned New Year’s resolutions relate to the rest of the film. Still, these issues don’t lessen the film’s comic impact, particularly in a crowd.

The Weed Eaters is an assured piece of filmmaking that knows what it is trying to achieve. It shows what creatives can do if they are given some resources and just left to it.

It’s a worthy entry into New Zealand’s distinct class of comic horror and a masterclass in oily-rag dirtbag filmmaking – even if it might put you off chutney for a while.

Weed Eaters is in New Zealand cinemas from April 30.

Erin Harrington does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.