Nefertiti, the red-backed jumping spider hunting for flies inside her space flight habitat on board the International Space Station. Photo by NASA.
Nefertiti, the courageous space spider who soared into low-Earth orbit on a Japanese HTV spacecraft, spent three months hunting fruit flies aboard the International Space Station, and then returned to Earth alive, has died. She was 10 months old.
On Sunday morning, Dan Babbitt, manager of the insect zoo at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where the spider had been moved for retirement, awoke to a sad text message. "Sorry Dan, but we think Nefi is dead," it read.
But she lived the fullest life a spider can live. Born in Arizona, she's traveled to Denver; Boulder, Colo.; San Francisco; Tokyo; Kagoshima, Japan; Long Beach, Calif.; and Washington. She flew 42 million miles during her mission to outer space. And she adapted splendidly to zero gravity, sources say.
Known by many as "spidernaut," Nefi was launched into orbit after 18-year-old Amr Mohamed, an Egyptian high school student, won a YouTube contest that involved designing experiments for astronauts. His proposal: to study a jumping spider's ability to adapt to weightlessness in space.
Nefi, the chosen one, was the size of a pencil eraser and black with a bright red dot on her abdomen. She had large, forward-facing binocular eyes, which gave her excellent depth perception for stalking her prey. She was a jumping spider, which meant she hunted like a lion by leaping into the air, grabbing her prey with her front legs and digging into it with her fangs, injecting venom. She liked fruit flies, but preferred crickets.
And like most spiders, she ate by regurgitating stomach acid onto her food. The acid broke the tissues down into fluid, which she then sucked up, like a smoothie, or "a nice cricket milkshake," Babbitt told me.
But in microgravity, she adapted her hunting behavior by sidling up to her prey instead of leaping onto it. And interestingly, she produced more silk in space, which Babbitt thinks she may have used to anchor herself while weightless.
"Her case was well inundated with silk, which is not normal," he said. Plus, it stretched from one side of the case to the other, "which you wouldn't normally see on Earth."
As for her death, It's hard to say what caused it, her keepers say, but they're deeming natural causes. On Thursday, she was eating crickets and her color looked good. By Friday, she was gone. The lifetime of her species, Phidippus johnsoni, is about a year.
"She had some extraordinary stress put on her in her lifetime," Babbitt said. "Going up to space, traveling quite a bit, and the media coverage as well. She lived a full, natural life."
Farewell little space spider. You did good.
(Sidenote: This brings to mind this magnificent post from 2010, Shuttle Riding Bat Dies the Most Glorious Death Imaginable)
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