...These tiny animals don't often grow more than 1cm in length, except the Supergiant viariety of course, which can exceed 11 inches head to tail. "They actually don't feel real," Alan Jamieson, University of Aberdeen lecturer and expedition leader, told OurAmazingPlanet of the November 2011 find. "They feel like plastic toys. They have a waxy texture to them." The creature, along with other specimens, was captured in a deep-water trap located four miles down in the Kermadec Trench, one of the deepest on Earth. "We pulled up the trap, and lying among the fish were these absolutely massive amphipods, and there was no inkling whatsoever that these things should be there," said Jamieson.

The practice is called remote copulation...and while it may seem obviously a bad idea to chop off your breeding organs, it does have some advantages. For starters, the male spiders aren't necessarily killed during the act -- but far more importantly, they continue to transfer sperm after detachment. In fact, the emasculation increases the number of sperm transferred, especially when initiated by the female. Some researchers have noted that the eunuch males are more aggressive and agile after they lose the organ, and that the detached palp may serve to block the female genitals in order to ensure the male's loss is his gain when it comes to paternity.

"We're looking at which brain sites become active. Because we can determine some association between those brain sites and different frequencies, we can watch what brain sites are turning on and off for these recordings, and that lets us map back to the sound," he said. Since neurologists can know the frequencies of certain phonemes -- specific language sounds -- this cortical spectroscopy can decode which sounds, and then perhaps which words, a person is hearing. Pasley compared it to piano playing: "If you're an expert pianist, you know what musical notes are associated with each piano key, and you understand that relationship between the key and the sound," he said. "If you turn the sound off, and have the pianist watch which piano keys are being pressed, this expert would have an idea what sound is being played even though they can't hear anything."