Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel Bomb here with another episode from our archives. I've been holding off on this one for a couple of weeks because it's about the weird life and times of a sea creature. And I've just kept finding pieces about the weird lives and times of sea
creatures that I wanted to make new episodes about. And I didn't want this whole podcast to become the Weird sea Creatures podcast, or I do, but you know anyway, Finally, today we return to sea spiders and how they breathe through pores in their legs. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogel bomb here. Unsurprisingly, a human doesn't have much in common
with a sea spider. Actually, no other organism on Earth has much in common with one of these spindle legged Arthur pods that look more like a tinker toy experiment than a living thing. My favorite top five weird things about them. Their hearts are so weak that they require the digestive system to move blood around their body. Most of their digestive system and their genitals are encased in
their delicate legs. Their males carry their young. They eat by sticking their probiscus into a mushy sea creature and sucking out its juices, and until recently nobody could figure out how they breathed. Strange as they may be, sea spiders occupy marine habitats the world over. In deep and shallow waters, they can be minuscule, with a leg span of only a millimeter, but Antarctic sea spiders grow to
be unusually large, about the size of a frisbee. Polar gigantism is the term that describes the way animals at our planets poles tend to grow much larger than in other parts of the world, even at their biggest This isn't to say that their bodies are very big. Their trunks are improbably small in contrast to the sheer area their legs take up. There's not a lot of surface area on a sea spiders abdomen and thorax to trick it out with unnecessary amenity. A lot of jobs have
to be farmed out to those long, skinny legs. Scientists have pretty much identified how they pack most of the necessary physiological processes into such a teen c body and such delicate appendages, but they haven't been able to figure out how they breathe. Until recently, a study published in a twenty eighteen issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology has gotten to the bottom of how sea spiders move oxygen through their bodies by studying several species of giant
Antarctic sea spiders. Most sea creatures have gills like fish and lobsters, or lungs like whales, and some can even take oxygen in through their skin. But sea spiders have a tough exo skeleton and no gills or lungs, so what gives The research team found sea spiders take oxygen into their bodies through hundreds of tiny pores in their cuticle. That's the tough outer skin that gives them structure and protection.
They put giant Antarctic sea spiders in respiration tanks to see exactly how much oxygen they were absorbing, and they found that they were taking in enough through tiny holes all over their legs to run their entire bodies, which of course is great for the c spider for now, but as polar seas warm as a result of global climate change, their ability to absorb oxygen in this novel way might be compromised. Today's episode is based on the article c Spiders breathe through pours and their legs on
house toffworks dot com, written by Desoline Shields. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio and partnership with how stuff works dot com and it's produced by Tyler Playing. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,