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Underwater Spider Spins Itself an Aqualung
sciencehabit writes "In the ponds of northern Europe lives a tiny brown spider with a bubble on its back. The 10-millimeter-long Argyroneta aquatica is the only spider in the world that spends its entire life underwater. But just like land spiders, it needs oxygen to breathe. So every so often, it leaves its underwater web home to visit the surface and brings back a bubble of air that sticks to its hairy abdomen. It deposits the bubble into a little silk air tank spun for the purpose. This 'diving bell,' researchers have now found, is not just a repository. It's actually a gill that sucks oxygen from the water, allowing the spider to stay under for up to 24 hours."
In 5....4...3...2
So that was what the tiny bulge in your pants was?
If it's a "gill", why is the bubble only good for 24 hours? Does it also diffuse back into the water over time, thus shrinking it?
Life is not for the lazy.
You know that's actually very awesome, more awesome than Aquaman then again it's not hard to be more awesome than Aquaman.
Sitting on a cob web
eyeing minnows with bad intent.
Water running down his setae
greasy palpae smearing mandibles.
Floating in the cold lake
Watching as the silly tadpoles run.
Feeding on a dead duck
spitting out pieces of his broken web.
Aqualung!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Sometimes I like to try to guess what the evolutionary path of certain animals could have been.
This is one case where I go "WTF?".
They've (re-)discovered osmosis.
Spider breathes oxygen-rich air. Spider exhales air with low oxygen content. Air with lower oxygen content than the water pulls oxygen from the water. Isn't that amazing?!
Anyone who takes care of a swimming pool will tell you there are many spiders that can go underwater (though unlikely all day). They are constantly in the skimmers, underwater, and just fine. Perhaps they don't spend their entire life underwater but they do spend a lot of it there. I've even seen them dive under the water as I approached. Normal spiders too, not the water striders you see riding the surface tension on ponds and lakes.
Anyone know if this was on Planet Earth Special? I know Ive seen this before.
This is intelligent design in effect!
Can I light a sig ?
Ew, you looked?
Of course it would be an Australian, tired of all the weird creatures at home, who heads to Europe in search of something wierder....
This is not exactly news, is it? This spider's ancestors have been using the technique for a very long time. And it's not like this spider was recently discovered.
-- Cheers!
wow, just look at the awesome design. oh, right, sorry; it has evolved to carry a bubble with itself. that makes absolutely more sense(!)
the only spider in the world that spends its entire life underwater
it leaves its underwater web home to visit the surface
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm more impressed that it is able to die when it leaves the water and then re-animate itself when it comes back.
Zombie Spiders!
Not only the water breathing part, that also that its abdomen is on its back. Or is it the other way around?
In Hungary we even had a cartoon series about this spider and it was my favorite, it was called "Aqua Spider - Maverick Spider"
Basically it shows the lives of various bugs and small animals around a lake and in it (under water) It was very educational, explaining what little critters were in a lake, what they did, how did the spider survived under water (real valid scientific explanations on a kids level)
There are two spiders, one of them is a regular one and the other is the Aqua Spider, the serious starts in the spring when the bus awaken and start their life, with the Aqua Spider going into the lake building his Aqua Lung by the end of the first part
Of course you never actually find out what spiders (or any of the animals) eat...except a few times when bugs are saved by the spiders from various evil bugs that eat little defenseless bugs...
You can see him with the air of bubble at the beginning and his "under water house" at 3:26
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDD50bsJTAs
There's an old Hungarian cartoon series about such a spider:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDD50bsJTAs&feature=player_detailpage#t=532s
Ew, you looked?
Probably not voluntarily, but hey, when it's a tweet from a congressman, you can't NOT look.
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
How does an air-breather possibly develop this mechanism to survive underwater?
I believe in evolution, but sometimes am simply astounded.
--
$tar -xvf
This not news, and its not new, I leaned about this when I was kid 30 years ago...
...to hungarian kids: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134203/ http://rajzfilm.network.hu/video/vizpok_csodapok/vizipok__buborek_nyaklanc
First of all, it should be millimeters since it's more than one.
Second, it should have been 1-centimeter-long.
You guys can remember stupid crap like 12 inches in one foot but can't do a simple millimeter to centimeter conversion. Pathetic!
That's what she said?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Okay, it requires oxygen to breathe, so it goes to the surface to get air.
They they say it's diving bell isn't just that, but an "aqualung" that allows it to get oxygen from the water.
If it can get oxygen from that water, why is it going to the surface then for oxygen?
Be seeing you...
I hardly ever log in, but I had to give this effort a comment.! Well done jollyreaper :-)
Have gnu, will travel.
Say what you want about evolution, but intelligent design has helped shape young minds to be fit for the workplace far better than the exceptional, honest primitive. The fact is that deep in the ID subtext is a dangerous idea -- that if you remove any assumptions about evolved order, and begin applying intelligent design to your own life, your own personality and your own standards, that you can blindside the least desirable bits of the established order with your own ideas.
That leaves us with how to keep the wheels greased. The key notion is that intelligently designed culture is not worth rescuing. Why would a child eat or want to be a STEM or any other kind of vegetable when he or she can feast on sugar? Foreign students are doing the work of getting the proper education just fine on their own -- the only metric is that there are enough of these professionals to wind up as the necessary cogs of industry. Indoctrinated, of course, with necessary subtext -- limit your interests to your own field, and never consider the implications in a broader context. Also, contracts are binding and non-negotiable; of course your mindshare is of the company's benefit solely.
To think of the average American child, therefore, we need only appeal to economics. I will take for given the idea that public schools are inefficient. That granted, the Establishment has considerable infrastructure already in place to continue a large breadth of education. Coursework would be greatly simplified into the substance necessary: respect for authority. The price of a penis entering an anus in a normative corrective context could not possibly be lower, and this would be a critical part of education. Instead of a standardized test, we would get back to the individual teacher having discretion on which students pass; the metric would be solely if the child exhibits the necessary rate of submission.
In conclusion, we must affirm our societal values by applying them economically; these are evolved values at their best. Time-honored and conservative; easy to relate to and understand. The default in every way.
It's old news that these aquatic spiders use gas diffusion to extract oxygen from the water. (Maybe the measurements done here are more precise--but the original article is behind a paywall, alas.)
A good explanation about nitrogen diffusing out of the bubble is found here (from possibly 2004): http://www.hansthiele.de/galerie/sonst/w-spinne.htm. I'll do a quick transcription.
The bubble (like the air) contains about 21% oxygen and 78% nitrogen. The proportion of these gases in the water is about the same (1/5th O2, 4/5th N2; N2/O2 ratio of 4:1).
This is the breathing cycle:
This cycle repeats; but since the spider uses slightly more O2 than is replenished, the N2/O2 ratio increases, that is, the bubble contains now more than 78% N2, thus the partial pressure of N2 is higher in the bubble than in the water: N2 diffuses out into the water. And since N2 is the main component of air, it makes up most of the bubble's volume. The bubble shrinks and, as such, becomes less efficient in gas diffusion. (Actually, since the surface area increases relative to it's volume, it becomes more efficient in relative terms, but there's too little air (N2/O2 mixture) left for the spider to breathe in absolute terms ...).
On another note, I loved to play with the spiders in our garden pond when I was a child. They were really rather cute, but somewhat helpless once transferred to land ... but they never bit me; I read about their bite just a few years ago when I remembered about the old times and decided to read some stuff on these sweet eight-legged fellas.
Did anyone else notice the similarity between this and the fantasy physics of the Spelljammer D&D setting? Specifically, read the paragraph Gravity and Air. Deathspider FTW!
Eying little girls with bad intent. /an underwater goat with an aqualung
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
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