Colbert spider's genome is 50% bigger, so humans hand over Earth
Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have transferred global custody to the trapdoor spider following Friday's DNA count.
Fourteen glass vials sat on the centrifuge tray in Davis, California, on Friday morning. Inside them was the extracted DNA of Aptostichus stephencolberti, a beach-dwelling trapdoor spider named for Stephen Colbert. A genome is the complete instruction manual for building a living thing. When the machine finished counting the pages, the spider's manual was 50 percent longer than the human one.
The University of California, Davis, team immediately began packing their desks. In biology, the organism with the largest instruction manual owns the building. We had a good run, mostly during the Pleistocene, which was the period with the big sloths. Now the spider is in charge of the thermostat and the nuclear codes.
"We ran a control group of fourteen graduate students against a single spider the size of a quarter," said Dr. Helen Vance, the lead geneticist, handing her lab keys to a small burrow in the sand. "The p-value was 0.001. A p-value is the mathematical chance that we are still the dominant species by accident. We are not."
The spider spent the afternoon inside a plastic cup, eating a cricket. By evening, it had still not issued a tax policy, though researchers note it has fourteen hundred million extra base pairs dedicated entirely to waiting in a hole.
