As anyone who\u2019s stayed up well past their bedtime knows, catching a taxi or Uber home can be a godsend, and now recent research shows that even some deep sea animals appreciate the value of bumming a ride off someone else.<\/p>\n
A team of marine biologists was studying life deep in the\u00a0Pacific Ocean when they came across something unexpected: shrimp-like crustaceans hitchhiking on the bodies of giant sea spiders. This behavior might be commonplace, the researchers say, and the discovery illustrates just how little we really know about the lives of our deep sea neighbors.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese observations underscore the importance of direct in situ exploration in revealing hidden ecological interactions and adaptations that take place in remote and unexplored deep-sea ecosystems,\u201d they wrote in their paper, published<\/a> earlier this month in the journal Ecology.<\/p>\n A sea spider rideshare <\/p>\n The research team was exploring the Chilean margin<\/a> in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, a region near the western coast of South America featuring deep submarine canyons<\/a> formed by the intersection of three tectonic plates. They used the robotic submersible SuBastian to visit life thousands of feet under the surface.<\/p>\n Sometime in November 2024, at roughly 10,000 feet, the team caught an unusual sight: a sea spider (though they are arthropods, these creatures are not closely related to land spiders and other arachnids) with at least three shrimp-like animals known as amphipods on its body. Four days later, the team once again saw a sea spider with amphipod passengers, about 140 miles away from the first sighting.<\/p>\n The team collected the odd pairing for further study on land. The marine Uber driver was identified as Colossendeis colossea, the largest known species of sea spider, while the freeloaders were members of the species Mesopleustes abyssorum.<\/p>\n Sea spiders, like many relatively large animals, are known to have their fair share of moochers using their bodies for shelter or dispersal to new areas, but these are usually stationary organisms. Rarely, according to the researchers, have scientists documented other mobile arthropods like amphipods taking a ride on sea spiders.<\/p>\n