This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: If you're swimming in the Salish Sea late at night and feel a skittering along your calves, tiny hairy feet tip-tapping their way higher and higher toward your face, don't worry—it's probably just the stuff of nightmares: hairy-legged, red-eyed sea spiders newly discovered by UBC researchers. Two new sea spider species are the first described in the Salish Sea in almost a century.
Their documentation and genetic analysis, published recently in Organisms Diversity & Evolution, help fill a gap in knowledge about a poorly understood group of animals. "I was interested in how sea spiders are impacted by climate change and human disturbance, because marine invertebrates in the Salish Sea are particularly at risk, and I couldn't find anything," said lead author Cormac Toler-Scott, who conducted the work as part of his master's degree in zoology at UBC. "That's largely because people don't know much about what species exist here and what their lifestyle is." That's the case for a lot of marine arthropods, Toler-Scott says.
"In order to understand how marine invertebrates are being impacted by things like climate change and how we can better protect these key elements of the ecosystem, we have to be able to identify them." Sea spiders evolved around 500 million years ago. Related to scorpions, spiders and horseshoe crabs, they are arthropods that never left the ocean. They look like their arachnid cousins, except they can have as many as 12 legs and have a sucking proboscis.
They range in size from less than a centimeter to more than 70 cm (28 inches) in Antarctica, hunting in the depths for smaller things to eat—just to make you feel happier about all of this. "They've retained some weird traits," said Toler-Scott. "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." Sea spiders breathe through their skin, and the males rear the young.
Females have ovaries spread throughout their limbs that produce eggs, which then "pop out" of a dedicated pore. During mating, the male uses limbs at the base of his head called "ovigers" to scoop up the eggs, dab them in glue secreted from his legs and stick them to his body in clusters of egg sacs for rearing. The new species were collected between September 2023 and August 2024 during dives up to 18 meters (59 feet) deep in a range of marine habitats and areas, including Quadra Island, Vancouver, Bamfield and Victoria.
In tribute to the long, curved spines covering its lower legs, one of the new species is named Callipallene pilosuspedes, a play on the Latin for "hairy feet." It sports red eyes, a short proboscis with claws to grasp food before biting, and a triangular, three-lipped mouth covered in sensory tendrils—a tiny marine Sarlacc pit, if you will. It also possesses highly dexterous ovigers that can function as grooming tools. Under a microscope, researchers observed the animal wrapping the appendages around its legs and using attached comb-like spines to clean itself.
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