Say Goodbye to the World's Oldest Spider, Dead at 43

By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer | May 1, 2018 05:30pm ET

She was known only as Number 16 by the researchers who studied her. Little about her behavior or appearance was out of the ordinary. But Number 16 was special — she was the oldest known spider in the world.

Number 16, a trapdoor spider (Gaius villosus), was first spotted as a wee spiderling in 1974, and appeared in arachnid research surveys conducted at a site in Australia's North Bungulla Reserve, through 2016. As the years rolled by, the spider lived on — through Watergate, the release of the first IBM personal computer, and the debut of the World Wide Web.

But scientists recently discovered that Number 16 had died.

They pronounced her deceased at 43 years old, making her the longest-lived spider to date and unseating the previous record-holder — a 28-year-old tarantula in the Theraphosidae family — which lived and died in captivity, researchers wrote in a study published online April 19 in the journal Pacific Conservation Biology. [10 Things You Didn't Know About Spiders]

"To our knowledge this is the oldest spider ever recorded," study lead author Leanda Mason, a doctoral candidate at the School of Molecular and Life Sciences at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, said in a statement.

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