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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