New Scientist
Image: NOAA Photo Library
The Southern Ocean giant sea spider is the stuff of nightmares – its leg span of 25 centimetres more or less equals that of the world’s largest land spiders like the Goliath Bird-Eating tarantula of South America.
But there are two reasons why arachnophobes shouldn’t fear this beast: it lives at the bottom of the ocean around Antarctica and it’s not actually a spider.
Sea spiders belong to a group of arthropods called the pycnogonids, which are found scuttling along the bottom of many of the world’s oceans and seas. Most are relatively small – it’s only around the poles that sea spiders grow large, which is a trait they share with many marine species. Exactly why this happens remains a mystery.
Many sea spiders are carnivorous, dining on worms, jellyfish and sponges. “They have a giant proboscis to suck up their food,” says Florian Leese at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.
Like true spiders, some sea spiders have eight legs. But not all do. “Some have 10 and even 12 legs,” says Leese. Read more on newscientist.com…
