Mysterious Spider With Blood-Red Fangs Found in Australia
Mysterious Spider With Blood-Red Fangs Found in Australia
A scientist peeked under a rock and found an unusually colored mutant of a venomous funnel-web spider. &
View Images
The red-fanged funnel-web spider poses, ready to strike.
Photograph by&Mark Wong, The Australian National University
Until &recently flipped over a rock in
in New South Wales, , it had been just another day of looking at spiders. Then, the ecologist spotted the burrow of Atrax sutherlandi, a funnel-web spider.
“I began poking at it with a stick, and I was amazed at what came rushing out at me. The first thing that caught my eye was the red fang,” says Wong. (Also see &.&)
Normally, A. sutherlandi has a glossy black back and fang, as well as a deep-brown or plum underbelly. The spider that sprung from the burrow, however, had a blood-red belly and fang.
Wong knew immediately that he had made an once-in-a-lifetime discovery.
“I had never seen a funnel-web spider with those colors before&—and it turns out no one else had, either, says Wong, a National Geographic Young Explorer and Ph.D. student at the Australian National University in Canberra.
It's very common for individual animals, even spiders, to have different colors, says Amber Beavis, a spider expert and senior researcher at the , an independent think tank in Canberra.
&There’s more variation than you might think,” Beavis says. But the red-fanged spider struck her as a particularly unusual find.
“I spent five years in this area looking for spiders, and I didn’t see anything like it.”
Why So Red?
A careful search of the area also didn’t yield any other spiders with similar coloring, says Wong.&He brought the oddly colored spider back to the lab, but it died.
He's not sure what gave this particular spider its scarlet hue, but it's likely some sort of genetic mutation.
The Amazing Peacock Spider
March 24, 2015&- Meet Sparklemuffin, Skeletorus, and Elephans, three recently identified&peacock&spiders.&Just&a quarter inch long (five millimeters), male peacock spiders are known for their brightly colored backs and mating dances. J&rgen Otto, a researcher who has been working to document the tiny insects, has identified 20 new species in the&past four years.&Otto&has captured some incredible images and videos and posted them online for the world to see.&To see more&peacock&spiders,&check out&Otto's work on&,&, and&
The color is also probably not for communicating with other funnel-web spiders, he says. Not only do A. sutherlandi mostly live in complete darkness, they're solitary and have notoriously poor eyesight.
Funnel-webs, which reach about two inches (five centimeters) in length, spend most of their lives in underground burrows, with males emerging only to look for mates.
The arachnids line their burrows with silk that vibrates when prey is at the entrance. Then, the spiders spring into action, just like Wong experienced firsthand.
Funnel-webs are also well known in Australia for their venom: Bites from the closely related Sydney funnel-web spiders (A. robustus) used to kill several people every year until scientists developed an effective anti-venom. (See &&)
A. sutherlandi are also venomous, although have killed far fewer people due to their remote habitats.
View Images
A normally colored female funnel-web spider (left) next to the oddly red specimen.
Photographs by&Mark Wong, The Australian National University
Image Problem
Although the red-fanged arachnid isn't new to science, it's still special, Beavis adds.
&When we see these one-off examples that look different from every other members of their species, it gets people to look at spiders a bit differently,” Beavis says. (See &
“Spiders have a bit of an image problem. Lots of folks find them scary,& she says.
Even Beavis. When she first started her Ph.D. research, “I was trying to do my work and one of them would move, and I would squeal. It was pretty undignified,” Beavis said.
Now, however, she has learned to love spiders—both as predators of many pest species and, like the red-fanged oddity, as simply beautiful creatures.
Follow Carrie Arnold on .
<div class="gallery--init" data-platform-component="InlineGallery" data-platform-id="e89edcd6-886d-474d-935b-7f0a8163e72f/related-content/gallery" data-platform-background-color="#061423" data-platform-hide-for-mobile="false" data-platform-show-titles="true" data-platform-show-abstracts="true" data-platform-show-credits="true" data-platform-show-asset-sources="true" data-platform-show-commerce-links="false" data-platform-size="small" data-platform-endpoint="/902-spiders-animals-australia-science-world/_jcr_content/related-content/gallery.gallery.71e1043c-c3e0-4a62-83d0-d3.json" data-platform-random-sort="true" data-pagewide-presentation-disabled="false" data-platform-preview-aspect-ratio="three-two" data-platform-title='{"inPageLink":false,"linkText":"Pictures from a&总觉得BILL的FANGS比别人的好看,这张太明显了_trueblood吧_百度贴吧
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&签到排名：今日本吧第个签到，本吧因你更精彩，明天继续来努力！
本吧签到人数：0成为超级会员，使用一键签到本月漏签0次！成为超级会员，赠送8张补签卡连续签到：天&&累计签到：天超级会员单次开通12个月以上，赠送连续签到卡3张
关注：646贴子：
总觉得BILL的FANGS比别人的好看,这张太明显了收藏
318元=298元蛋糕抵用券*1+198元蛋糕抵用券*1+蛋糕五折券*1+20元优惠券*3
因为他的FANGS很细,很尖,别人的就很粗,看着有点笨笨的
登录百度帐号推荐应用
为兴趣而生，贴吧更懂你。或