© Marine zoologist Dr Claudia Arango of the Australian Museum in Sydney Sydney, Jul 24: 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 five pairs of legs and a large protruding proboscis that is used as a straw to suck prey. One has also been caught with a 70-centimetre 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 6000 to 7000 metres down, where they live in the dark, feeding on slow-moving soft-bodied sponges and sea slugs,” Arango said.
Arango, who has studying sea 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)