Sea Spiders Pump Blood With Their Guts, Not Their Hearts
If sea spiders had a creation myth, it would go something like this. An inebriated deity stumbles home after a hard day’s creating, finds a bunch of leftover legs, glues them together, and zaps them to life before passing out and forgetting to add anything else. The resulting creature—all leg and little else—scuttles away to conquer the oceans.
This is fiction, of course, but it’s only slightly more fanciful than the actual biology of sea spiders. These bizarre marine creatures have four to six pairs of spindly, jointed legs that convene at a from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, who . They have, for example, no lungs, gills, or respiratory organs of any kind. Instead, they rely on oxygen diffusing passively across the large surface area provided by their legs.
