''Patu digua'' is a very small species of
spider
Spiders (order (biology), order Araneae) are air-breathing arthropods that have eight limbs, chelicerae with fangs generally able to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude spider silk, silk. They are the largest order of arachnids and ran ...
. The male
holotype
A holotype (Latin: ''holotypus'') is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described. It is either the single such physical example (or illustration) or one of s ...
and female
paratype
In zoology and botany, a paratype is a specimen of an organism that helps define what the scientific name of a species and other taxon actually represents, but it is not the holotype (and in botany is also neither an isotype (biology), isotype ...
were collected from Río Digua, near
Queremal, Valle del Cauca, in
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country primarily located in South America with Insular region of Colombia, insular regions in North America. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the north, Venezuel ...
.
By some accounts it is the smallest spider in the world,
as males reach a body size of only about —roughly one fifth the size of the head of a pin.
The use of the spider as a
necrobotic gripping tool in microscopic manipulations was suggested in 2022.
See also
*
Smallest organisms The smallest organisms found on Earth can be determined according to various aspects of organism size, including volume, mass, height, length, or genome size.
Given the incomplete nature of scientific knowledge, it is possible that the smallest or ...
References
Symphytognathidae
Spiders of South America
Arthropods of Colombia
Spiders described in 1977
Taxa named by Norman I. Platnick
Taxa named by Raymond Robert Forster
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