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Spider vampire
Researchers
claim to have discovered an unusual Antarctic sea spider that
literally sucks its prey like a vampire and boasts of five pairs of
legs. The weird-looking sea spiders, some of which are even blind,
have a large protruding proboscis that is used as a straw to suck
prey. One has also been caught with a 70-cm leg span. Marine
scientists at the Australian Museum in Sydney do say that the spiders
belong to the phylum arthropods, but are unsure which type they
belongs to. "They are very weird looking animals. They look like
spiders, but they are not real spiders. It’s been very hard to place
them in a position within the tree of life," ABC online quoted
Marine zoologist Dr Claudia Arango of the Australian Museum in Sydney
as saying. She said these creatures had a segmented body with an
exoskeleton, which made them an arthropod, the same grouping as
crustaceans, insects, centipedes and spiders. But they also had a very
strange collection of features, including a unique feeding structure.
Such features made it difficult for them to be fitted into any of the
known groups of arthropods, she added. "They have a proboscis
that’s like a straw that they insert into the animals and suck out
the juices. They crawl along the bottom of the sea floor, sometimes
more than 6,000 to 7,000 metres down, where they live in the dark,
feeding on slow-moving soft-bodied sponges and sea slugs," Arango
said. Arango, who has been studying sea spiders for quite some time,
also conducted DNA and morphology tests on them to construct a family
tree. She said these creatures were more closely related to the
arthropod group that included spiders and scorpions. She presented
her research on these spiders at the Scientific Committee on Antarctic
Research meeting in Hobart. Her findings appear in the journal Cladistics.
—ANI
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