What has hairy feet, legs dotted with eggs, and a mouth loaded with tentacles like a Sarlacc from Star Wars?
That’s how researchers from the University of British Columbia describe seven such creatures from the Salish Sea in a new paper published in the journal Organisms Diversity & Evolution. They include five known species plus a couple of new ones, marking the first discovery in a century of new sea spiders in the region.
As ancient arachnids closely related to scorpions, spiders, and horseshoe crabs, sea spiders share some traits such as exoskeletons, jointed legs, and chelicerae-type mouthparts adapted for piercing or grabbing prey. But sea spiders also rank as weird for the way they sport up to 12 legs, breathe through their skin, and spawn eggs from their legs, traits they’ve honed during their 500 million years of ocean life.
