A careful hunt through and around the algae, silt and rocks in a rockpool may turn up a very strange creature indeed. Looking a bit like a child’s crude attempt at modelling a spider from a bunch of pipe cleaners, this is an odd animal discovery that doesn’t initially make much sense.
It belongs to a group of animals referred to as sea spiders, but while it has eight legs and looks superficially like a spider, that is where the similarities end. It doesn’t move like a spider, feed like a spider or indeed live in the places where you might find a spider. Sea spiders’ place in the animal kingdom remains the subject of debate, but current thinking is that they are a group that split off early in the arthropod evolutionary line.
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