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Spiders come back to life after drowning in water. Marsh-dwelling French-type wolf spiders do, that is.

In an experiment at the University of Rennes testing how long it takes spiders to drown, a surprise happened while they were letting the dead spiders dry out for dissection and whatever it is they do to dead arachnids. The original plan was to poke different types of wolf spiders while immersed in water to see if they responded. The types that responded the longest won the Stay Alive The Longest Contest — two marsh-dwelling types stayed alive longest (28 and 36 hours), over the 24 hours for the forest-dwelling types. All of them DIED so no real winners in that race.

Until.

Hours later, the spiders began twitching and were soon back on their eight feet.

“This is the first time we know of arthropods returning to life from comas after submersion,” said lead researcher Julien Pétillon, an arachnologist now at Ghent University in Belgium.

Marsh-dwelling [Arctosa] fulvolineata, which took longest to “die,” typically requires about two hours to recover, the researchers discovered.

In the wild, the species doesn’t avoid water during flooding, while the other salt marsh species generally climbs onto vegetation to avoid advancing water.

The spiders’ survival trick depends on a switch to metabolic processes—the processes that provide energy for vital functions in the body—that do not require air, the researchers speculate.

dun dun DUNNNNNN

Spider “Resurrections” Take Scientists by Surprise National Geographic
Spider “Resurrections” Take Scientists by Surprise wtf_nature

Back in 2004, a sperm whale had been found beached and dying on the shores of Taiwan. It died by the time help arrived, so they were moving the body to the Shi-Tsao Natural Preserve to be examined at the order of Professor Wang Chien-ping after the National Cheng Kung University in Tainan said it would not accept the body.

The body had other plans, choosing to go out with a bang. Literally. The gases within the decomposing giant had built up enough to pop its belly, spilling the stomach and other random organs into the streets of Tainan. Entrails!

From what they could tell, the whale was a 50 ton bull, 17 meters long (~55 feet). National Geographic is playing a documentary this weekend on the event. I could not find a listing for it online, but some person in the wtf_nature community said it is so it must be true.

bbc article on original explosion