The Puffer Forum

I'm looking in my puffer tank now and it appears a tiny black spider is crawling around on one of the plants. Too small to count legs accurately, but it is black and has 2 main parts like a spider. Are there little water spiders or is it just a dumb house spider that wondered in living on the last of his oxygen?

LOL!!! I have found all sorts of little critters in my tank.

Could be related to the spider family, like a midge or something. Do you have a magnifying glass? You might be able to take a pic

i was fishing one time and saw the biggest wolf spider i have ever seen! he was on this cement boat dock we were fishing off and when i went to look at him he scattered to the side of the dock and went underwater, didnt see him resurface

A puffer I had once(F8, named Puffy by my ex) ate a yellow jacket that got snared messing with the tank water. He ate the head, most of the legs, bit a hole in the thorax without eating any of it, and ate the stinger and all the guts at the pointy end of the abdomen. Eating that much poison strangely did not phase him even for a little while.

This made me very curious, so I went a'Googling.

Wikipedia has an article about the kickass diving bell spider. Warning: the page has a lot of missing citations, but it's very neat if it's all true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_bell_spider

I found an article about a French researcher who tested a kind of wolf spider that lives in salt marshes. It has some interesting offhand comments about spiders and water, as well as the research itself.

http://www.xray-mag.com/en/content/spid ... r-40-hours

Here's something about sea spiders in Antarctica:

http://www.peterbrueggeman.com/nsf/fgui ... oda-2.html

And here's an article about a land dwelling spider that encases itself in an oxygen bubble and hunts underwater:

http://www.news-leader.com/article/2010 ... underwater

I doubt these are what you found in your tank, but it does seem to be a possibility that it was indeed a spider.