Sentences with phrase «sea spiders»
The phrase "sea spiders" refers to a type of marine creature that looks like a mix between a spider and a crab. Even though they are called spiders, they are not true spiders as they live in the ocean. They have long, thin bodies and many legs, which they use to walk along the seabed. Full definition
Scientists have struggled to solve the mystery, in part because the delicate sea spiders are rarely preserved as fossils.
sciencemag.org
That's why University of Oxford paleobiologist Derek Siveter was elated when he and colleagues found the oldest and most complete sea spider fossil to date in Herefordshire, United Kingdom.
This discovery came in sea spiders, or pycnogonids, which can look like legs in search of a body.
Antarctic - dwelling sea spiders use their long legs for more than creepy - crawling below the ice.
Sea spiders look much like the common «daddy long leg» spiders, with thin, long legs and a tiny torso.
Researchers discovered the remarkable physiological strategy after injecting dye into sea spiders — common inhabitants of the world's oceans named for their resemblance to land - based spiders — and watching the flow of blood.
Additional experiments using 12 sea spider species from Antarctica and the United States confirmed that gut contractions propel the flow of blood and oxygen in this group of marine - dwelling arthropods, the team reports today in Current Biology.
Sea spiders also have an unusual need to move oxygen from their extremities to the core of their bodies because they lack gills, and most oxygen is taken up by diffusion through the surface of their long legs.
Leggy sea spiders the size of dinner plates rule Antarctic waters, yet other creatures common to the rest of the Earth's oceans, such as slugs, are strangely absent.
University of Wisconsin — Madison Professor of Integrative Biology, Prashant Sharma, shows off a preserved sea spider recovered from the deep sea in Antarctica.
Sharma, professor of integrative biology, came to UW — Madison from the American Museum of Natural History in 2015 and brought with him research on some of the creepiest, crawliest species on the planet, like venomous scorpions from Arizona, tarantulas from Colorado and enormous, blind sea spiders from Antarctica.
Even the darkest depths of the Weddell Sea off western Antarctica are a treasure trove of life: A survey of the Weddell Sea, published in the journal Nature in 2007, found more than 700 new species, including sea spiders, carnivorous sponges and octopi.
But the digestive system — which is unusually extensive in sea spiders, running down each leg — was contracting in waves, moving food in the gut as well as blood in the surrounding hemocoel cavity, the spider equivalent of veins and arteries.
The crabs» arrival due to warming seas could deal a crushing blow to archaic species of starfish, sea spiders and ribbon worms at the Antarctic continental shelf
Their jaws, or chelicerae, are the largest for body size among the group of animals that possess these specialized mouthparts — including horseshoe crabs, sea spiders, and arachnids — and bear most of the structures used for their classification.
Related sites University of California Museum of Paleontology site on sea spiders All About Sea Spiders The Herefordshire fossil deposits Derek Siveter's home page
The images have led Siveter to conclude that sea spiders are close relatives of land spiders after all.
A lucky fossil find and a novel imaging technique have brought researchers closer to understanding the mysterious origins of the sea spider, a spindly arachnid that dwells on the ocean floor.
This digital reconstruction of a sea spider fossil has helped scientists trace its evolutionary history.
The fossil also «has all the hallmarks of current - day sea spiders,» Siveter says, suggesting that sea spiders emerged as a distinct group about 450 million years ago.
When the researchers dissected the holdfasts, they found a tiny teeming ecosystem that included 10 species of marine invertebrates: two tiny crustaceans, a sea spider, six species of mollusks, and a sea star.
The researchers examined more than 125 years of records collected by scientific expeditions and fisheries vessels to construct the fullest picture yet of the wide array of fish, sea urchins, worms, crustaceans, sea spiders and coral that live in the waters near South Georgia Island.
But sea spiders (pictured) apparently skipped that lesson: They pump blood using their guts.