Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel Bomb here with another episode from
Speaker 1: our archives. I've been holding off on this one for
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks because it's about the weird life
Speaker 1: and times of a sea creature. And I've just kept
Speaker 1: finding pieces about the weird lives and times of sea
Speaker 1: creatures that I wanted to make new episodes about. And
Speaker 1: I didn't want this whole podcast to become the Weird
Speaker 1: sea Creatures podcast, or I do, but you know anyway, Finally,
Speaker 1: today we return to sea spiders and how they breathe
Speaker 1: through pores in their legs. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogel
Speaker 1: bomb here. Unsurprisingly, a human doesn't have much in common
Speaker 1: with a sea spider. Actually, no other organism on Earth
Speaker 1: has much in common with one of these spindle legged
Speaker 1: Arthur pods that look more like a tinker toy experiment
Speaker 1: than a living thing. My favorite top five weird things
Speaker 1: about them. Their hearts are so weak that they require
Speaker 1: the digestive system to move blood around their body. Most
Speaker 1: of their digestive system and their genitals are encased in
Speaker 1: their delicate legs. Their males carry their young. They eat
Speaker 1: by sticking their probiscus into a mushy sea creature and
Speaker 1: sucking out its juices, and until recently nobody could figure
Speaker 1: out how they breathed. Strange as they may be, sea
Speaker 1: spiders occupy marine habitats the world over. In deep and
Speaker 1: shallow waters, they can be minuscule, with a leg span
Speaker 1: of only a millimeter, but Antarctic sea spiders grow to
Speaker 1: be unusually large, about the size of a frisbee. Polar
Speaker 1: gigantism is the term that describes the way animals at
Speaker 1: our planets poles tend to grow much larger than in
Speaker 1: other parts of the world, even at their biggest This
Speaker 1: isn't to say that their bodies are very big. Their
Speaker 1: trunks are improbably small in contrast to the sheer area
Speaker 1: their legs take up. There's not a lot of surface
Speaker 1: area on a sea spiders abdomen and thorax to trick
Speaker 1: it out with unnecessary amenity. A lot of jobs have
Speaker 1: to be farmed out to those long, skinny legs. Scientists
Speaker 1: have pretty much identified how they pack most of the
Speaker 1: necessary physiological processes into such a teen c body and
Speaker 1: such delicate appendages, but they haven't been able to figure
Speaker 1: out how they breathe. Until recently, a study published in
Speaker 1: a twenty eighteen issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology
Speaker 1: has gotten to the bottom of how sea spiders move
Speaker 1: oxygen through their bodies by studying several species of giant
Speaker 1: Antarctic sea spiders. Most sea creatures have gills like fish
Speaker 1: and lobsters, or lungs like whales, and some can even
Speaker 1: take oxygen in through their skin. But sea spiders have
Speaker 1: a tough exo skeleton and no gills or lungs, so
Speaker 1: what gives The research team found sea spiders take oxygen
Speaker 1: into their bodies through hundreds of tiny pores in their cuticle.
Speaker 1: That's the tough outer skin that gives them structure and protection.
Speaker 1: They put giant Antarctic sea spiders in respiration tanks to
Speaker 1: see exactly how much oxygen they were absorbing, and they
Speaker 1: found that they were taking in enough through tiny holes
Speaker 1: all over their legs to run their entire bodies, which
Speaker 1: of course is great for the c spider for now,
Speaker 1: but as polar seas warm as a result of global
Speaker 1: climate change, their ability to absorb oxygen in this novel
Speaker 1: way might be compromised. Today's episode is based on the
Speaker 1: article c Spiders breathe through pours and their legs on
Speaker 1: house toffworks dot com, written by Desoline Shields. Brain Stuff
Speaker 1: is production of I Heart Radio and partnership with how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com and it's produced by Tyler Playing.
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