Two individual jumping spiders ventured beyond Earth in 2012, when they were taken on board the International Space Station. The \u2018spidernauts\u2019 \u2013 a Johnson jumping spider named Nefertiti and a zebra jumping spider called Cleopatra \u2013 were studied to see how they adapted to microgravity.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t take long before the astronauts observed Nefertiti successfully hunting her fruit fly prey, despite any potentially disorientating effects.<\/p>\n
The mission set a record for longest time spent in space by a spider (100 days). While Cleopatra died on returning to Earth, Nefertiti would also become the first spider to survive the voyage home, and successfully readjusted to gravity.<\/p>\n
After her marathon mission, she was destined for a long, cosy retirement. She was put on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, where she was placed in a custom enclosure and died four days later.<\/p>\n
Top image: Nefertiti, the female Johnson Jumping Spider, in a test tube as she was displayed to the public at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History on 29th November 2012 in Washington, D.C.\u00a0Credit: Ricky Carioti\/The Washington Post via Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two individual jumping spiders ventured beyond Earth in 2012, when they were taken on board the International Space…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411696,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-411695","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}