BrainStuff Classics: How Do Sea Spiders Breathe Through Their Legs?

Sea spiders have way more leg than body, and scientists have never been able to pinpoint how they breathe -- until now. Learn what they found in this classic episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/marine-life/sea-spiders-breathe-through-pores-in-their-legs.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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

(00:23):
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

(00:45):
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

(01:05):
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

(01:28):
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

(01:48):
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

(02:10):
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

(02:31):
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.

(02:52):
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

(03:14):
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.

(03:34):
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