Biggest Camel Spider in the World
About Camel Spider
The camel spider is one vicious looking little beast and is relatively unknown compared to other vicious looking little beasts. This has led to all manner of strange, almost super-natural legends growing up around them. While it's fun (or something) to scare yourself rigid with crazy untrue stories, and we're certainly very good at that, I'm going to confine myself to the facts. Sorry!
Firstly, camel spiders aren't spiders. They're also known as sun spiders and wind scorpions, yet are not scorpions. All a bit odd, and it probably adds to the confusion and the space for exaggeration and pure lies. One truth that the names indicate is the fact that these creatures can be found in deserts all over the world, except for Australia. Poor Aussies! They get to around 7 centimetres in length, with a span of 12 centimetres or so.
Actually, I said what they aren't, so what are they? Well, they are indeed arachnids, so they are related to spiders and scorpions as well as ticks and mites, but they are given their own category. Camel spiders are in the order Solifugae, inside which there are just over 1,000 species. Even the ancient Greeks recognised that spiders and camel spiders were two separate animals, so we should have a good chance of grasping this fact today!
Solifugae is Latin for "those that flee from the Sun" and boy can they flee! They can turn a remarkable, though brief burst of speeds up to 16 km/h (10 mph), about half that of a really fast human. Not bad for something that could be hiding out in one of your shoes at this very instant. They are very active predators of all sorts of insects and even the occasional lizard or rodent, but seldom anything bigger than themselves. So how do they get their prey? Not to be morbid, but lets see how camel spiders go about killing and eating stuff.
Firstly, like all arachnids, these guys have 8 legs. They look like they have ten, but the first two big long ones are actually pedipalps. These are an arachnid speciality - spiders usually have quite small ones, scorpion pedipalps have become those big pincers, while camel spiders use their own much like insect antennae, for sensing their surroundings. They're also sticky at the end, so they can be used for climbing or even catching flying food. The first pair of legs are smaller than the rest and are also used for feeling around, so all that running is only actually done with the remaining 6. That's the great thing about 8 legs: options. They also have large eyes that are good enough to see shapes and are therefore good enough to aid in the hunt.
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