New Sea Spider Species Discovered in the Salish Sea After a Century
There's a New Sea Spider in Town
Researchers from the University of British Columbia have identified seven sea spider species in the Salish Sea, including two new to science: Callipallene pilosuspedes and Tanystylum kiixin. This marks the first discovery of new sea spiders in the region in a hundred years. Using scanning electron microscopy and DNA analysis, they found that these ancient arachnids, with up to 12 legs and skin breathing, host tiny ecosystems on their bodies.
A lot of the shallow water species are quite small, and so they’ll live as parasites on larger organisms, and they use this weird apparatus called a proboscis to suck the juices out of their host.