Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Water Spider - World's Rarest Spider


The scientific name for Water Spider is Argyroneta aquatic and it lives its entire life in underwater. It generally found in Northern and Central Europe and Northern Asia. Argyroneta is air-breathing water spiders can breathe by means of a shining bubble of air which they carry entangled in the hair of their bodies.

The water spiders mates and lays its eggs in the air bubble web and it mostly hunts small crayfish and insect larvae, which it kills with its poison; and this is one of the very few spiders in which the males are larger than the females.

Water spider do not possess any gills but they have developed a very clean mode of breathing under water and it’s good at diving, with speeds of 2.3-3.5 cm per second with its length of 1.5-1.7 cm. The water spider weaves its web among water plants and stocks it with air from the surface, which looks like a diving bell and it spins a web on the surface of water and collects bubbles of air to make it full from underneath.

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