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One of the best ways to learn how Antarctic sea spiders thrive under extreme conditions is to squeeze their guts out through their legs.

That's what a Northeastern University biologist is doing to understand the otherworldly life cycle of the enormous marine arthropods that breathe, reproduce and digest through legs as long as a small cat.

Assistant teaching professor Connie Phong wants to know how an animal adapted to live in a highly specialized environment—just below the freezing point for seawater—responds to warming oceans. And by warming Phong means a 10th of a degree.

"The first question is, how does life even survive at these very cold temperatures?" Phong says. "And then, what happens when it starts to get very warm?"

Animals used to a narrow range of temperatures, cold or hot, have a harder time adapting to even slight change, Phong says. By studying life "at the edge of what can possibly be," she says, we get a glimpse of the biodiversity we stand to lose as the climate warms.

Gut microbes reveal a lot about an animal's environment, including what it eats and what is in the water where it lives, Phong says. Sea spider bodies are very small, with eyes and a straw-like nose they use to eat. But the legs are segmented and long—sometimes long enough to make the animal as big as a dinner plate.

Working with spiders collected from ocean waters near the McMurdo Station, a research facility operated by the U.S. Antarctic Program, Phong is studying the earliest phases of life for sea spiders.

Male spiders carry masses of fertilized eggs on their backs before dropping them off on shelves along the sea floor.

Life develops slowly at freezing temperatures, she says. For comparison, she says, it takes a fertilized frog egg an hour and a half to undergo its first cell division. For humans, it takes about 24 hours. For Antarctic sea spiders, a single cell division takes eight months.

"When you go so slow, at some point you can get stuck," she says. "But life finds a way to keep on moving even in slow times."

This summer, while teaching an undergraduate biology project lab course on the Oakland campus, Phong worked with students to study microbes from sea spider guts, which are housed in the spider's legs with all other vital organs.

Specimens like the ones Phong has are hard to come by. She only had two or three legs from three different species. So Phong and her students talked a long time about the best way to get the guts out.

"They cracked open these legs, which have an exoskeleton that they needed to separate from the actual mushy parts of the guts," she says. "They were careful. They kept the guts separate between the segments so they didn't cross-contaminate the samples."

Spider guts look like "the inside of a banana peel," says Alexandra Barnes, a sophomore biology major who took Phong's course this summer. Processing DNA from the guts involved cloning them and applying an electric current to create fragments for comparison, she says.

Through this process, students were able to isolate "cold shock proteins," which animals produce to cope with cold temperatures. Further sequencing of the samples they extracted may answer questions about how the spiders survive and how they are adapting to warming waters.

"With spiders that are always living in the cold, there might be some differences in that protein," says Mariella Fayad, a junior biology and political science major who also took the course. Sequencing results will help researchers "understand the difference between Antarctic sea spiders versus cold shock proteins in other animals," she said.

Because they live in freezing conditions, the spiders aren't easy to study, says Phong. Their DNA is denser, she says, which made it more challenging to clone the genes. But Barnes and Fayad succeeded on their first try.

"I'm proud of the work that they were able to do," Phong says. "It is really novel research."

Phong may present the work at the of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research in Oslo in 2026, in which case Fayad and Barnes would be invited to attend.

"This is research that I will continue to work on, but I'm really glad to be able to use it to teach students," she says. "A lot of these things, like the cloning out of these genes and thinking about DNA in a community, they have all of these skills from classes, and then they get to apply it."