Two brand-new species of spider-adjacent creatures have been found crawling around the seafloor between Washington State and British Columbia, and they have red eyes, they self-groom, they make the males do all the childcare, and they feed by poking holes in living animals and sucking the cells out. Science is incredible. Also, terrifying.
Yes, Sea Spiders Are a Real Thing
Researchers at the University of British Columbia announced this week that they've discovered two new species of sea spiders in the shallow waters of the Salish Sea, according to NPR. These are the first new sea spider species found in that region in more than 100 years. The creatures were collected during dives between September 2023 and August 2024, near Vancouver Island and Quadra Island in British Columbia.
Sea spiders are marine arthropods belonging to a class called Pycnogonida. Scientists have catalogued more than 1,300 species of them worldwide. They look more or less exactly like what you are picturing right now, which is deeply unsettling, and they are technically related to land spiders, which is somehow worse.
They are also, crucially, about a centimeter across. So you would never see one coming.
Meet the New Neighbors From Hell
The first newly discovered species, Callipallene pilosuspedes, has red eyes, a three-lipped triangular mouth, a curved spine over its legs, and specialized limbs on its belly it uses to groom itself. Lead researcher Cormac Toler-Scott told NPR they are, quote, "very clean and not all sea spiders can do this." So this thing is meticulous. Fastidious, even. A little red-eyed nightmare with hygiene standards.
The second species, Tanystylum kiixin, is named after an ancient Indigenous village near its discovery site. It has shorter, stockier legs and cannot self-groom. When Toler-Scott found it, NPR reports, it was covered in dirt and debris. So we've got the fancy one and the goblin one. Two species, two completely different energies.
Neither species has venom or fangs. They rely primarily on camouflage to avoid predators. Many sea spiders, including both of these new ones, are transparent and take on the color of whatever they've most recently eaten. Which means right now, somewhere on the floor of the Salish Sea, there are invisible self-grooming arachnid relatives crawling through marine colonies looking for their next meal.
How They Eat Is Not Something You Can Unhear
Both newly discovered species were found attached to hydroids, which are small marine animals that look like plants and live in colonies. The sea spiders are essentially parasitic guests. They live there, walk through the colony like it's their personal grocery store, and feed by puncturing the hydroids and extracting their cells.
"They just kind of poke a hole into the hydroid itself, and then they suck the juices out of it, like the cells out of the hydroid. That's how they get their food," Toler-Scott explained to NPR. No web. No venom. Just raw, confident straw-based predation. A tiny transparent crab-spider crawling through a living colony and drinking it. From the inside.
For the record, the hydroids presumably have no say in this arrangement.
The Males Do All the Childcare, Which Is Very On Brand for the Ocean
Sea spider reproduction is also worth a mention. While females develop the eggs, NPR reports, the males take over and carry them until they hatch. Dad duty, no exceptions, enforced by millions of years of evolution.
Land spiders famously did not develop this policy. Which is perhaps why sea spiders stayed in the water. They figured something out that their terrestrial cousins clearly did not.
Finding These Things Is Harder Than It Sounds
Toler-Scott was pretty direct with NPR about how rare and underfunded this kind of work is. "It's everyone's kind of dream to find new species, but it's pretty uncommon," he said. "It's hard to get funding for this kind of work because you go into it not really knowing what you're going to get."
That's the honest reality of baseline ecological research. You don't know what's down there until someone actually goes looking, and the people with the money often want guaranteed results before they'll write a check. The UBC team is planning additional dives and expects to find more species in the future. Given that the Salish Sea apparently hadn't been properly checked for sea spiders in over a century, that seems like a reasonable bet.
The Dingo Take
Two new species of creatures that poke holes in living animals and drink them, have been quietly existing in North American coastal waters for who knows how long, and nobody found them because deep-sea taxonomy is chronically underfunded and unsexy compared to, say, a defense contractor's third yacht. This is where we are. We have the technology to livestream a billionaire going to space and we can barely scrape together money to document what is actively alive in the ocean fifty feet off the coast of Vancouver.
And look, this is not a political story, except that it is, because the defunding of basic science research has been a slow bipartisan disaster with a MAGA accelerant poured on it in 2025. The Trump administration's systematic gutting of federal research budgets, NOAA, the EPA, and anything that doesn't immediately produce a profit margin has consequences. One of those consequences is that we have almost certainly lost species we never named, in ecosystems we never mapped, while the argument in Washington was about whether climate change is real.
The sea spiders are fine, as far as we know. They've been down there for a long time without our help. But the fact that it takes a dedicated researcher willing to work in a funding desert just to document what shares a coastline with millions of people should be embarrassing to everyone who ever voted to cut science budgets. The ocean doesn't care about our quarterly projections. It just keeps making weird, cell-sucking, transparent arachnids in the dark.
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