Nearly a Century Later, Two New Sea Spider Species Turn Up in the Salish Sea
Two new sea spider species have been described from Canada's Salish Sea, the first to be added there in almost a century. Researchers at the University of British Columbia announced the pair on Wednesday, September 23, in a study published in Organisms Diversity & Evolution. One has red eyes and hairy legs. The other is routinely found under a coat of debris and its own parasites.
Why the Salish Sea's sea spiders went unrecorded for so long
Sea spiders are marine arthropods, not true spiders. They are distant relatives of spiders, scorpions and horseshoe crabs, and they have lived in the ocean for roughly 500 million years. Some species have as many as 12 legs, all of them carry a sucking proboscis, and body size runs from under a centimetre to more than 70 centimetres in Antarct...