“Carthwheeling” spider found

A new spider species has been discovered in Morocco that essentially does cartwheels

From the Weird & Wild blog…

Its gymnastics aren’t the only thing that makes it special: The flic-flac spider also makes structures out of silk to keep itself cool in the scorching desert, according to the new study,published on April 17 in the journal Zootaxa.

Ingo Rechenberg, a scientist at the Technical University of Berlin, in Germany, who had ventured into the North African desert on an unrelated expedition, first saw the spider doing backflips and suspected it was a new species. (Also see “How Do Spiders Walk Upside Down? Mystery Solved.”)

“As soon as he discovered the spider, he came directly to my lab, still covered in sand and dust,” said study author Peter Jäger, a spider expert at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany.

 

Source: Kingdom Zoo