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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey

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Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel Bomb here with another episode from

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Speaker 1: our archives. I've been holding off on this one for

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Speaker 1: a couple of weeks because it's about the weird life

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Speaker 1: and times of a sea creature. And I've just kept

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Speaker 1: finding pieces about the weird lives and times of sea

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Speaker 1: creatures that I wanted to make new episodes about. And

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Speaker 1: I didn't want this whole podcast to become the Weird

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Speaker 1: sea Creatures podcast, or I do, but you know anyway, Finally,

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Speaker 1: today we return to sea spiders and how they breathe

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Speaker 1: through pores in their legs. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogel

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Speaker 1: bomb here. Unsurprisingly, a human doesn't have much in common

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Speaker 1: with a sea spider. Actually, no other organism on Earth

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Speaker 1: has much in common with one of these spindle legged

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Speaker 1: Arthur pods that look more like a tinker toy experiment

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Speaker 1: than a living thing. My favorite top five weird things

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Speaker 1: about them. Their hearts are so weak that they require

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Speaker 1: the digestive system to move blood around their body. Most

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Speaker 1: of their digestive system and their genitals are encased in

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Speaker 1: their delicate legs. Their males carry their young. They eat

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Speaker 1: by sticking their probiscus into a mushy sea creature and

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Speaker 1: sucking out its juices, and until recently nobody could figure

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Speaker 1: out how they breathed. Strange as they may be, sea

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Speaker 1: spiders occupy marine habitats the world over. In deep and

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Speaker 1: shallow waters, they can be minuscule, with a leg span

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Speaker 1: of only a millimeter, but Antarctic sea spiders grow to

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Speaker 1: be unusually large, about the size of a frisbee. Polar

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Speaker 1: gigantism is the term that describes the way animals at

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Speaker 1: our planets poles tend to grow much larger than in

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Speaker 1: other parts of the world, even at their biggest This

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Speaker 1: isn't to say that their bodies are very big. Their

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Speaker 1: trunks are improbably small in contrast to the sheer area

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Speaker 1: their legs take up. There's not a lot of surface

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Speaker 1: area on a sea spiders abdomen and thorax to trick

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Speaker 1: it out with unnecessary amenity. A lot of jobs have

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Speaker 1: to be farmed out to those long, skinny legs. Scientists

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Speaker 1: have pretty much identified how they pack most of the

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Speaker 1: necessary physiological processes into such a teen c body and

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Speaker 1: such delicate appendages, but they haven't been able to figure

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Speaker 1: out how they breathe. Until recently, a study published in

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Speaker 1: a twenty eighteen issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology

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Speaker 1: has gotten to the bottom of how sea spiders move

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Speaker 1: oxygen through their bodies by studying several species of giant

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Speaker 1: Antarctic sea spiders. Most sea creatures have gills like fish

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Speaker 1: and lobsters, or lungs like whales, and some can even

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Speaker 1: take oxygen in through their skin. But sea spiders have

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Speaker 1: a tough exo skeleton and no gills or lungs, so

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Speaker 1: what gives The research team found sea spiders take oxygen

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Speaker 1: into their bodies through hundreds of tiny pores in their cuticle.

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Speaker 1: That's the tough outer skin that gives them structure and protection.

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Speaker 1: They put giant Antarctic sea spiders in respiration tanks to

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Speaker 1: see exactly how much oxygen they were absorbing, and they

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Speaker 1: found that they were taking in enough through tiny holes

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Speaker 1: all over their legs to run their entire bodies, which

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Speaker 1: of course is great for the c spider for now,

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Speaker 1: but as polar seas warm as a result of global

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Speaker 1: climate change, their ability to absorb oxygen in this novel

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Speaker 1: way might be compromised. Today's episode is based on the

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Speaker 1: article c Spiders breathe through pours and their legs on

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Speaker 1: house toffworks dot com, written by Desoline Shields. Brain Stuff

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Speaker 1: is production of I Heart Radio and partnership with how

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Speaker 1: stuff works dot com and it's produced by Tyler Playing.

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