Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works, 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 arthropods 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 miniscule, with a leg span of only a millimeter, but antarct 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 amenities. 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 ales, 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 sea 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 was written by Jescelin
Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other precarious topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com