Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel bomb here. Unsurprisingly, a human doesn't have much
Speaker 1: in common with a sea spider. Actually, no other organism
Speaker 1: on Earth has much in common with one of these
Speaker 1: spindle legged arthropods that look more like a tinker toy
Speaker 1: experiment than a living thing. My favorite top five weird
Speaker 1: things about them. Their hearts are so weak that they
Speaker 1: require the digestive system to move blood around their body.
Speaker 1: Most of their digestive system and their genitals are encased
Speaker 1: in their delicate legs. Their males carry their young, They
Speaker 1: eat by sticking their probiscus into a mushy sea creature
Speaker 1: and sucking out its juices, and until recently, nobody could
Speaker 1: figure out how they breathed. Strange as they may be,
Speaker 1: sea spiders occupy marine habitats the world over. In deep
Speaker 1: and shallow waters. They can be miniscule, with a leg
Speaker 1: span of only a millimeter, but antarct sea spiders grow
Speaker 1: to be unusually large, about the size of a frisbee.
Speaker 1: Polar gigantism is the term that describes the way animals
Speaker 1: at our planets poles tend to grow much larger than
Speaker 1: in other parts of the world. Even at their biggest
Speaker 1: This isn't to say that their bodies are very big.
Speaker 1: Their trunks are improbably small in contrast to the sheer
Speaker 1: area their legs take up. There's not a lot of
Speaker 1: surface area on a sea spiders abdomen and thorax. To
Speaker 1: trick it out with unnecessary amenities. A lot of jobs
Speaker 1: have to be farmed out to those long, skinny legs.
Speaker 1: Scientists have pretty much identified how they pack most of
Speaker 1: the necessary physiological processes into such a teen c body
Speaker 1: and such delicate appendages, but they haven't been able to
Speaker 1: figure out how they breathe until recently. A study published
Speaker 1: in a twenty eighteen issue of the Journal of Experimental
Speaker 1: Biology has gotten to the bottom of how sea spiders
Speaker 1: move oxygen through their bodies by studying several species of
Speaker 1: giant Antarctic sea spiders. Most sea creatures have gills like
Speaker 1: fish and lobsters, or lungs like ales, and some can
Speaker 1: even take oxygen in through their skin. But sea spiders
Speaker 1: have a tough exo skeleton and no gills or lungs,
Speaker 1: so what gives The research team found sea spiders take
Speaker 1: oxygen into their bodies through hundreds of tiny pores in
Speaker 1: their cuticle. That's the tough outer skin that gives them
Speaker 1: structure and protection. They put giant Antarctic sea spiders in
Speaker 1: respiration tanks to see exactly how much oxygen they were absorbing,
Speaker 1: and they found that they were taking in enough through
Speaker 1: tiny holes all over their legs to run their entire bodies,
Speaker 1: which of course is great for the sea 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 was written by Jescelin
Speaker 1: Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this
Speaker 1: and lots of other precarious topics, visit our home planet,
Speaker 1: how stuff Works dot com