Spider Missing After Trip To Space Station

Garabito writes "A spider that had been sent to the International Space Station for a school science program was lost. Two arachnids were sent in order to know if spiders can survive and make webs in space, but now only one spider can be seen in the container. NASA isn't sure where the other spider could have gone. I, for one, welcome our new arachnid overlords."

Comments

Not necessarily

[Moraelin]

All spiders can only ingest liquid food, and in fact have two filters to prevent solids from getting in.

From there it gets funnier:

- most spiders simply inject the prey with enzymes that liquefy its innards, then suck the resulting liquid lunch. In this case they'd still find the empty chitin shell of the spider.

- some actually "chew" the food while flooding it with enzymes to dissolve it, but I'm guessing even in this case they'd still find legs and whatnot from the dead spider.

I guess the big question at this point is exactly what species of spider were these two.

Re:Not necessarily

[theinvisibleguy]

I had a bunch of spider eggs in a jar when I was younger, after they hatched they kept getting smaller in number without leaving anything behind. You could definitely tell which spiders were eating the others since they were about twice their previous size.

Re:Not necessarily

[Reziac]

We have a small tarantula here in the high desert that gets about half as big as a man's little finger, plus legs. One summer I kept one in a jar and fed it live grasshoppers. It must not have required its food to be all that liquid -- this spider would eat a grasshopper nearly as large as itself in 15 seconds flat. Munch-munch-munch-GONE, exoskeleton, innards, and all (except it sometimes didn't eat all the legs). It almost looked like a magic trick -- "how did you stuff that big grasshopper into that little spider??"

BTW these tarantulas' vision is apparently good enough to tell when a human is approaching with lunch. If I just came up to look, it would ignore me. If I had a grasshopper in my hand, it would get excited and run round and round in its jar.

Dupe from 1973

[Yossarian45793]

The spider webs in space experiment was already tried in 1973 aboard Skylab.

Spiders in space...

[Sergey23]

Hypothetically let us say that the spider somehow ended up outside the space shuttle. The question is what would happen to a spider if we left it floating in space for a week or two? Considering that they're cold blooded and their circulatory system is rather basic and non-pressurized (since all the organs bathe in a pool of copper based blood) will the spider die? And, if so, from what?

Re:Sounds to me like Sabotage

[SessionExpired]

Wouldn't it be wonderful if life on Earth originated from a similar mishap (bug science project + lost tool bag)?

I'm reading "Deception Point" by Dan Brown at the moment (currently at p. 204 in the paperback version).

Re:Spiders are not cannibals

[jadin]

Anecdote :

When I lived out in rural farmland, our house had a spider living behind the toilet. He had a small web there and he didn't seem to bother us so we left him there. We named him Boris. We'd find other spiders in the house fairly often, and we would catch them alive and drop them on Boris' web. It was very interesting to watch the battles, since the foreign spider would instinctively(?) know that they were in danger being on someone else's web, and would freeze for long periods of time not moving a muscle. Eventually when they would try to leave, out would fly Boris from his crack in the wall and attack. After killing the other spiders he'd usually pull his prize into his hole in the wall. Fairly positive he ate them as well, but I can't say that for certain.

Not sure where you got your information but they will definitely attack each other.

Re:Where oh where?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

In Hawaii, only the tourists are scared of our big-as-your-palm cane spiders. Everyone else doesn't mind having them in the house because they eat all the other bugs.

Re:Where oh where?

[brokenhorse]

This is a shamless plug to my photography site but I taken some hardocre photos of spiders, wasps and mantises over the years. If you have a fear of spiders and wasps, this might be the gentle exposure you need.

Re:Where oh where?

[rale, the]

How about an asian giant hornet? I think any fear of them would be justified.

Re:Where oh where?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any idiot can see that a news-outlet with an agenda is in a unique position to distort events as they see fit. So, while that makes me any idiot, you are a "special" idiot.

Actually, I suspect that you are more pissed off about the holy one being lumped together with the evil one (or that the comment doesn't specifically target Bush for derision - gods, that meme is old) than you are about a sig that, while a little controversial, is hardly insightful.

Re:Where oh where?

[supernova_hq]

Does your wife know the chances of a spider surviving a trip through the vacuum cleaner? Unless you have a fine grained impeller on the sucker, that things gonna walk right back out again. Just like running it down the sink.

Re:Where oh where?

[Chris Burke]

That would certainly make me nervous, however the camel spiders I met during my time in 'the Iraq' nearly made me scream. I know they're not spiders per se...but they're pretty much what you would get if a spider had sex with a nightmare.

Holy fucking shit.

And here I thought the reason I never joined the military was my fear of being shot or exploded. Little did I know there was a much better reason my subconscious kept me far away!