Scientists have just discovered four tarantula species with genitals so unusually long that they had to be put in a category of their own. Literally. <\/p>\n
Their mating appendages are so extreme that researchers couldn\u2019t cram them into any existing spider genus\u2014so they made a new one: Satyrex.<\/p>\n
In the world of tarantulas, male genitalia typically scales at about twice the length of the spider\u2019s upper body. But these guys? Their palps\u2014the sperm-delivery limbs\u2014are four times longer than their cephalothorax (that\u2019s head-plus-torso, for non-arachnologists), and almost half the length of their longest legs. In one case, that\u2019s a 2-inch genital limb on a 5.5-inch spider.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe males of these spiders have the longest palps amongst all known tarantulas,\u201d lead researcher Alireza Zamani said in a statement<\/a>. Zamani, an arachnologist at the University of Turku in Finland, co-authored the study recently published in ZooKeys<\/a>. <\/p>\n He believes the adaptation might have evolved to give males a little distance from their partners during sex since female tarantulas are famously cannibalistic.<\/p>\n These Tarantulas Have Genitals So Large They Require a New Genus<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just the palps that make these spiders notable. One species, Satyrex ferox, raises its legs and hisses at the slightest disturbance. It gets the \u201cferox\u201d title (Latin for fierce) not for show, but for its full-on attitude and massive size.<\/p>\n The name Satyrex is derived from\u00a0the combination of \u201csatyr\u201d\u00a0and\u00a0\u201crex.\u201d Satyrs, the half-goat mischief-makers of Greek mythology, were often portrayed as overly horny and well-endowed. Rex, of course, means king. Combined, it\u2019s a fitting name for the new rulers of the spider penis world.<\/p>\n The newly discovered tarantulas\u2014S. arabicus, S. ferox, S. somalicus, and S. speciosus\u2014were found hiding in rocky crevices and burrows across the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. Zamani and his team found S. arabicus in Saudi Arabia, photographed S. ferox in Yemen and Oman, and described the other two in Somaliland.<\/p>\n A fifth spider, previously classified under a different genus (Monocentropus longimanus), has now been reassigned to the Satyrex family, thanks to its matching proportions.<\/p>\n In a field where genitalia often holds the key to classification, these spiders didn\u2019t just stand out. They stretched the whole system. As Zamani put it: \u201cAt least in tarantula taxonomy, it seems that size really does matter.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists have just discovered four tarantula species with genitals so unusually long that they had to be put…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56176,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1313,64,63,8280,44,128,46359],"class_list":{"0":"post-56175","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-animals","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-life","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-tarantulas"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56175\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}