This is a photograph of a sea spider.
Credit: Timothy R. Dwyer (PolarTREC 2016), Courtesy of ARCUS
To keep blood and oxygen flowing throughout their bodies, most animals depend on a beating heart.
This is a photograph of a sea spider.
Credit: Timothy R. Dwyer (PolarTREC 2016), Courtesy of ARCUS
To keep blood and oxygen flowing throughout their bodies, most animals depend on a beating heart. But researchers reporting in Current Biology on July 10 have discovered that sea spiders use a strange alternative: they move blood and oxygen throughout most of their bodies by pumping their guts.
The sea spiders have an unusual gut in the first place, the researchers say.
“Unlike us, with our centrally located guts that are all confined to a single body cavity, the guts of sea spiders branch multiple times and sections of gut tube go down to the end of every leg,” says H. Arthur Woods of the University of Montana, Missoula. “In effect, sea sp