A new species of spider has been discovered in Australia that has developed its own unique way to breathe while living underwater. Like most animals from the land down under, this one takes survival to the extreme by being a predominantly marine insect. And, that is not all. The spider has been named Desis bobmarleyi after late Reggae singer Bob Marley.
In their paper, published in the open access journal Evolutionary Systematics, the team of researchers from Queensland Museum and the University of Hamburg says that this spider has adapted to living underwater.
Spiders that live under water have been found in Samoa and Western Australia but little is known about these insects.
Unlike the spiders which people are familiar with, the intertidal species of spiders are truly marine. They have adapted to living underwater by finding small pockets of air under barnacle shells, corals or kelp holdfast during high tide.
But the Desis bobmarleyi has developed a unique way to breathe. They use their web to build air chambers from silk. When the sea water recedes, they come out and do usual spider stuff like hunting small invertebrates that roam the surfaces of the nearby rocks, corals and plants=read more
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