Weaving my way through the web of spin

THERE’S no doubt the internet is a wonderful thing, particularly for somebody like me who spends hours every day trying to track down obscure bits of information.

However, I was researching something about spiders recently and the internet took me down a long trail that illustrated some of its dangers. It started in an arachnaphobic chat room where people were freaking out about a new spider species that had been discovered which was six feet in diameter and ‘faster than you can imagine’. There was even a picture of an evil-looking white creature. This was suspicious. It got even more suspicious as I read on and it turned out this remarkable creature had been found on the sea bed deep off the coast of Antarctica.

There are no spiders in the sea. They can’t breathe under water. As I surfed a bit further, I found that this newly discovered creature actually did exist — only it was much smaller, much slower and not a spider. It was in fact a species of pycnogonid.