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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