“A lot of strange creatures live in the cold depths beneath the Antarctic ice, but none stranger than the giant sea spiders. Sea spiders are often tiny, but Antarctic species grow to dinner-plate size. Even stranger are their internal organs. Their genitals and parts of their guts are found in their legs. And because their heart is too weak to pump hemolymph, the equivalent of blood, around the body, it’s the movement of the guts that do most of the work. There are many questions about these creatures, but one big one is how they get oxygen into their bodies. Fish have gills, so do crabs and lobsters. Water flows over them and the gills absorb oxygen. Worms, in the sea and on land, absorb oxygen through their skin. But the sea spider has no gills or lungs, and its skin is an exoskeleton, a bit thick for absorbing oxygen. What it does have are hundreds of pores. They use this respiration chamber to calculate how much oxygen the sea spiders were taking in. They found that the countless pores in the spiders’ thick skin acted, in effect, like breathing holes. The pores offer an easy way for oxygen molecules in the seawater to be absorbed by the body. To collect sea spiders for research, scientists had to dive beneath the Antarctic ice. Since the water was so cold, diving requires serious preparation, but the result is worth it.” “I was pretty petrified about the cold and the ice ceiling before I started diving there, but it’s kind of spoiled me for anywhere else.” “Why devote all this effort to sea spiders? Well, they’re kind of irresistible. Everything they do is weird. And our planet’s poles, north and south, are warming faster than any other places on Earth. Learning how these creatures live in these extreme conditions may help us understand how they will cope with climate change to come.”