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Sea Spider — printable fact sheet
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Sea Spider
Pycnogonum littorale
Sea spiders (class Pycnogonida) are marine arthropods that look like a bundle of legs with almost nothing in between, and that impression is close to the truth: the body is so slender that the gut and gonads have been pushed out into the legs. A female's eggs mature inside her t…
Did you know?
- Sea spiders are found in all the world's oceans, including the frigid waters of Antarctica, where some reach extraordinary sizes due to polar gigantism.
- Sea spiders are not spiders and are not even certainly arachnids; their relationship to the rest of the arthropods is one of the longest-running arguments in invertebrate zoology. They breathe entirely through the skin, with no gills or lungs of any kind. Male sea spiders do all the childcare, carrying egg masses on dedicated legs. Species that lose a limb can regenerate it, and a 2023 study found some can even regrow parts of the rear body segment, something no other arthropod was known to manage.
What I learned
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