“Lol you thought you were safe from us in the water,” says the diving bell spider. “Blub blub blub!” Stefan K. Hetz
Legend has it that none other than Alexander the Great was among the first people to plumb the ocean depths in a glass diving bell, a simple submersible that traps surface air for the diver to enjoy. Still further legend claims it was one of Alexander’s mistresses who lowered him down—but unfortunately for Alex another suitor was on board that boat. As he watched through his transparent submarine, the scoundrel wooed the woman, who eventually let go of the chain, thus leaving Alexander in a bit of an aquatic pickle.
More absurd creatures:
There’s a moral lesson somewhere in that legend, perhaps something like “hell hath no fury like a woman you encumber with a ridiculously heavy diving bell while you enjoy yourself among the fishes,” but in the fresh waters of Europe and Asia swims a spider that mastered this kind of submersible millennia before Alex’s ill-fated dive: the diving bell spider. It’s the only spider on Earth that spends its entire life underwater, a lovely reminder that where life finds a niche, it fills it—oh, and that if you’re afraid of spiders you aren’t really safe anywhere at all. (Other species are flying through the air, in case you were wondering, using dangling silk threads to ride the wind in a process called ballooning.)
Just like humans and their submersibles, to become a master diver this spider must first become a master engineer. It begins by spinning a web among the underwater vegetation, according to biologist Roger Seymour of Australia’s University of Adelaide, who has established populations in the lab to study the dynamics of their novel way of getting air. Instead of expanding the web by spinning laterally, the spider adds more and more silk to the bottom, which flares until the structure indeed resembles a bell.
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