water spiders?

[missjef]

last night i found a spider was crawling on top of the water in the toilet, it looked like your average house spier. but i didnt think that they could survive in water. of course i was freaked out by it so got my boyfriend to try and do something about it, he just laughed at me and flushed the toilet... it was still there, but this time curled up in a ball, then it opened up and started crawling again!! - this happened a couple of times, it just didnt seem to die! eventually it went when we flushed it.
this has really freaked me out as i wouldnt have thought that your average Uk household spider would have survived being flushed down the toilet several times.
has anyone had a similar experience? or know what the spider might have been??
is there such a thing as water spiders?

many thanks!

[joko]

there are such things as water spiders, but most insects and arachnids can walk on water as long as they don't break the 'skin'

[missjef]

can they survive being flushed down the toilet a number of times though? because this one just didnt seem to be dying!! :-(

[noxlumos]

Why did you kill it? Why not fish it out with the loo brush and just put the poor thing outside? That's really horrible.

[goldheart]

I watched a nature programme years ago and the reason they live is because it curled itself up into a tiny ball and by doing this all its hairs on its legs and body traps air, but by the third time you flushed, it was probably exhausted!!

Thats why when you rinse them down the plug hole, they come back up again.

[Booldawg]

there is a breed of spider, usually confined to East Anglia think they are called the raft spider. They habitate in the Norfolk broads and can move across water. During times of water shortages they can often go further afield to find a wetter habitat. I've only ever seen one that had hitched a ride in a jcb tyre (the rim had filled with water) down to hampshire as I worked in a tyre warehouse at the time. These spiders are the largest ones naturalised to the UK. Pretty similar to a house-spider in shape but HUGE.

http://www.digitalwildlife.co.uk/britishwildli fe/misc/Raftspider.htm