Ever stare at a spider and think “Psh, stupid spider. You need 8 legs to survive”. Don’t be embarrassed, we all playfully mock insects at some point or another. But apparently some scientists have theoretically discovered that over time, spiders may have evolved two extra legs just for fun.
A research team placed 123 Zygiella x-notata spiders into individual plastic boxes where they were free to roam as spiders and do their spider things like make webs, hunt food, etc. Among the spiders, 63 were missing one or more legs. Much to the scientist’s surprise, the legless spiders showed no handicap towards hunting, web spinning, and all their other spiderly duties. This is now leading them to believe that they evolved one or two legs overtime to make them better at what they do.
The research isn’t coming out of nowhere, either. When they collected the spiders from the wild, they found that more than 10% of spiders were missing at least one leg. However, there was a limit to how many legs a spider could loose. The five-legged ones, for example, built lacking webs. But, their research showed that there aren’t many spiders in the wild with less than 5 legs.
So there you have it. We can all feel a little less guilty for tearing off the legs of spiders when we were kids, because apparently they don’t need two anyways.