Sea Spider
A specimen of Tasmania’s Pallenella ambigua, a small and cryptic marine arthropod species belonging to the class Pycnogonida, better known as sea spiders. These animals don’t possess a traditional respiratory system and instead rely on pores along the exoskeleton of their legs to extract oxygen from the surrounding seawater via diffusion.
Photograph: Nicolas Horniblow
Meet the 'weird' sea spider that's mapping the evolution of eight-legged creatures
It's not easy to look at a sea spider and see an animal so representative of its kind that it may help scientists sort out the evolution of almost everything with eight legs. But that's the potential a new study finds in these spindly, strikingly strange bottom-dwellers.
#evolution #seaspider #chelicerates
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-weird-sea-spider-evolution-legged.html
It's not easy to look at a sea spider and see an animal so representative of its kind that it may help scientists sort out the evolution of almost everything with eight legs. But that's the potential a new study finds in these spindly, strikingly strange bottom-dwellers.
First methane-powered sea spiders found crawling on the ocean floor
Heat-trapping methane may be best known for the dangers it poses to humans and Earth’s atmosphere, but in the dark depths of the ocean, the greenhouse gas is a nourishing meal for some of the world’s most mysterious creatures, new research suggests.
Scientists say they have discovered three previously unknown, unnamed species of sea spider off the US West Coast that could be teaming up with bacteria to thrive off gas bubbling from the seafloor in sparsely studied marine habitats known as methane seeps thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/17/science/spiders-deep-sea-methane-new-species
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