Get this: spiders can “sail” on water

Spiders can use their legs or abdomens as "sails", helping them to disperse across large bodies of water

If, last week, you'd quizzed me about the dispersal strategies of spiders, I would have told you all about "ballooning", how Charles Darwin, at sea on the Beagle in 1832, was stunned to see thousands of tiny, dusky red spiders come floating on board, borne on silky parachutes that trapped them in the rigging. This and other observations led him to conclude that "the habit of sailing through the air" was probably "characteristic of this tribe".

I would not, however, have told you that ballooning spiders can sail on water too, because I didn't know they did until I read a paper out today in BMC Evolutionary Biology. These sailing skills, documented by Japanese research fellow Morito Hayashi and colleagues, make a lot of sense. Earth, after all, is largely water, so aerial dispersal is not a great idea unless you can cope with the presumably frequent fate of alighting on water.