Friday Fluff #3: For When Enough is Enough

Thing the first: Thar Be Snail Ogres!

Does this look like a beautiful lady to you?
What is the DEAL with sailors?!
Image by Toriyama Sekien via Wikipedia

I'm sharing a cool Echinoblog post I found in the only way anyone finds anything these days - Twitter. In time for halloween, Christopher Mah describes the mythology of and actual inspiration for several Japanese monsters. This being a Mollusc-centric blog, I will feature the Snail Ogre, Sazae-oni, here, which somehow transfigures into a drowning woman, or something convincingly enough like it to attract sailors, who become the snail's next meal. The real snail this legend is based off of is the horned turban snail (Turbo cornutus1). This image also reminds me of Aku.

There are a number of other monsters on there that are worth checking out and attempting at Halloween costumes, such as the Samurai crab, and/or Stephen Hawking, and the internet darling of the year, the dumbo squid.

Thing the second: Killer Whale Espionage

Because you know you want a giant orca photo...L94 and her baby nursing in BROAD DAYLIGHT! She's not even using a blanket, how indecent! Photo credit: NOAA Fisheries, Vancouver Aquarium

The world is all atwitter, quite literally, about the use of drones in research of the Southern Resident Killer Whales. I've blabbed about some of the recent population growth of this group (here), and there have been even more calves born this year. NOAA just released a video podcast show-and-tell of some recent photos obtained via hexacopter. The contraption, which is strapped to two pool noodles for flotation, flies above the whales to get good pictures of them without disturbing them. They can ID and measure the whales to track growth rates.

Surveillance photos indicate that the babies keep on coming (welcome, Baby L-122!), and the hexacopter provides insight into family life of the growing pods. This year has been a good year for the whales, lots of babies and seemingly well-fed whales. Hopefully that trend lasts.

Thing the third: See Slug Day!

Yesterday was Sea Slug Day! I don't really even have that much to say about it, except that it's worth trolling #SeaSlugDay for the photos, but don't say I didn't warn you that it was a black hole of a time suck! You sort of start to wonder if this group isn't really just an alien race living among us. Or we are a prison planet for all of some other planet's criminals: what with kleptoplasty, and kleptocnidae - they're evidently really just into stealing things, evidently.

Super cutie: O. muricata on E. pilosa

As an undergraduate, I did research on what is the least colorful species in the most colorful group of organisms in the world - Onchidoris muricata. That doesn't mean it wasn't charismatic! I was researching whether this tiny white blob, which you would be well within your rights to assume was some previous beach walker's snot rocker, was interested in eating an invasive bryozoan(2), in the Gulf of Maine. The bryozoan, Membranipora membranacea, was super abundant there, growing all over rocks and kelps. We gave the snot rocket nudibranch a choice between it's presumed preferred food (a native bryo Electra pilosa) and the new bryozoan (which they are probably serving at that gastro street-food from around the world fad place down the street from me), and found that the slug preferred to eat the fancy new food, and could eat it faster.

This was back in 2004, when we wondered, what could this mean for future slugs? Just this year, people are starting to think about whether invasive species are good food for native species - they could be right? Well it turns out that in a lot of cases, they are often beneficial as a supplement to a balanced diet, so they don't harm native species. But on their own, they aren't as good as the diet the predator evolved to eat. So, no you can't have Doritos for breakfast, lunch, AND dinner.

Phew, for Friday fluff, that really was some academic non-sense I just prattled on about(3)! Here's a palate-cleansing video... 

Check out this video I found in my archives. Marney Pratt, my Advisor on the project, grew some bryozoans onto a microscopes slide, and fed them a red algae so that they would show up clearly against the background: the red dots you see are individual bryozoans, called zooids. The big white blob is a single Onchidoris, and you're looking at it from beneath, through the side of a tank and the glass slide. Marney filmed this time lapse of the slug eating a single zooid. If you watch closely, there is one zooid that gets slurped out of its little house toward the bottom right. This is sort of like how an oyster drill (predatory snail) consuming an oyster in that "sucks-his-guts-out" is still an applicable description.

SEE! I told you they were charismatic!

References and Miscellany

1. For Turbo Corn Nuts see disambiguation.
2. Bryo (= moss) zoan (= animal). These are colonial organisms that do really cool defensive stuff...maybe some other day though...
3. But if you weren't completely deterred, you could read the paper we (/Marney) wrote here.

Friday Fluff: For when enough is enough.

It's after 4 on Friday, and I just spent a few hours trying to teach myself sql. Soooo ... brain. Because. But three easy pieces did cross into my field of view recently, and so:

1. Even extinct cone snails get all the attention!

Cone snails get a disproportionate amount of attention, mostly, I suppose because they are so diverse. Admittedly, they have some cool ecology, but nonetheless, those of us who don't work on them (or maybe just me) are sometimes a bit jealous of all the hubbub about a single group. So it was unsurprising when I saw this post from the Smithsonian blog about how entrancing even extinct cone snails are. A researcher from San Jose State University used UV light to show the color patterns on fossilized cone snail shells. Some of the pigmentation was no longer visible to the naked eye, but using this technique, this guy identified more than 10 new species! I feel like there should be some comment here about inspiration coming from the strangest places - like raves and velvet posters. Here's the original paper, with more cool photos.

Figure 2 reproduced from Hendricks 2015 PLoSOne demonstrating
how UV light can be used to reveal historic coloration of fossil cone snail shells

2. Between a rock and a limpet radula

Well, Rah rah radula indeed! In fact, we had better hail the radula or it will come for us, and we will not come out on top. Engineers at the University of Portsmouth (also in Science Daily) have proclaimed that limpet teeth are made of the strongest naturally-occurring material known to man. Here, "strongest" refers to highest tensile strength and has nothing to do with towing a 767. For those of you who still think terrestrial systems have anything to offer ("But, but, what about spiders?") it turns out these fangs have toppled spider silk as the champion of natural material strength. 

No, this picture does need to be this big. If the last post on attack snails wasn't enough to give you nightmares, this should be. Image from the University of Portsmouth. 

All of that from this:

Patella vulgata, the common limpet. Just think about how
strong teeth would be from an UNcommon limpet.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.

3. Beauty abounds thanks to El Nino!

California faces drought unprecedented in recorded history and John Steinbeck wishes he were alive to document it. But Californians have something positive to look forward to - population booms of this beautiful slug, Okenia rosacea, which benefits from warmer temperatures. The Hopkins rose nudibranch is being spotted much further north than is usual. More from Science Daily and the primary literature.

Image by Jerry Kirkhart from Los Osos, CA via Wikimedia Commons

Have you seen it on your beach? Send me pictures!

Species sort-of of the Week week #5 OR On the benefits of a tautonomical diet

I'm sure you've heard the conspiracy theory that sea slugs are involved in a major trans-species arms smuggling operation. Well, your humble narrator has done some investigative journalism for which she is completely unqualified and can tell you, the rumors are true. That's why I'm cheating today, starting a Species species of the Week week with a nudibranch that's not even close to a tautonym (2).  Here is the culprit:

Blue Dragon

Glaucus atlanticus(1)

Figure 1. Glaucus atlanticus - the Blue Dragon (nudibranch).  Holy Daenerys Targaryen, Batman! Am I right?! This thing is crazy, and if your heart doesn't explode just a little bit when you see this and contemplate that you share the earth with this creature, well ... I can only sputter my disbelief.  Credit where credit is due.

Ok, so it looks cool, fine. But why does it deserve the [ahem, rather distinguished] honor of being a Species species of the Week week (weak?) when it's not even a tautonym (but see (2))?!  Well, there was a passage in the Wikipedia entry:

G. atlanticus preys on other, larger pelagic organisms: the dangerously venomous Portuguese Man o' War Physalia physalis; the by-the-wind-sailor Velella velella; the blue button Porpita porpita; and the violet snail, Janthina janthina. Occasionally, individual Glaucus become cannibals given the opportunity. 

Did you catch that? Almost every major prey item for this nudibranch is a tautonym (and Physalia physalis is just obnoxiously close - what a jerk)! Now I'm not saying that the diet of this slug is explained by the possession of a highly sophisticated taste - if I do say so myself - in grammar.  For one, though I admittedly haven't done the research to back this up, I feel like it's safe to assume the emergence of slug's diet predates the naming of these prey species. But still...what are the odds? Really, I'd love to know what the odds are if anyone is patient enough to figure that out. 

In the next few tautonym posts (3), I'll cover a few of the double-named prey of the Blue Dragon - except definitely not that tease Physalia physalis.

But now back to the arms smuggling operation...

So, of course I'm all fixated on the improbability of an almost exclusively tautonomical diet, when I am reminded that what's even cooler, at least to most people, is that this diet is also the slug's defense.  When the slug consumes jellies, it also eats the stinging cells (Figure 2).  The slug then puts these cnidocytes into its own flesh (the cerata, specifically, which are the long finger-like projections that make this slug look so flamboyant). Anything that tries to attack the slug gets stung.

Figure 2. This is why it hurts, y'all. I know, my eyes just glaze over too when I see diagrams in the pastel color palette of academic textbooks (haven't they figured that out yet?). But this really is one of the better diagrams of how Cnidocytes work - terrifying.

So the slug has basically stolen poisoned harpoons from the jellies and incorporated them into it's own body so it becomes super-invulnerable. This, of course, reeks of Hollywood script possibilities (whoops, it appears I've been scooped. SPOILER ALERT: it doesn't end well for the invulnerable trans-species defense idea). Here is a National Geographic clip demonstrating the awesomeness of the Blue Dragon (4). There is, of course, a word for this process of stealing cnidocytes and deploying them against your enemies: Bioterrorism.  No, well maybe, but the real word is Kleptocnidae.

Next up: Goodyear Mollusks.

References and miscellany (5):

(1) Pokemon disambiguation found here, in French.

(2) G. atlanticus was, however, the first (of only two) species named in the genus Glaucus, so according to my theory of tautonyms, it could have theoretically been Glaucus glaucus. And, frankly, if I'm going to editorialize here, atlanticus is a misleading species name (though hardly the only one) as the distribution of this species is not restricted to only the Atlantic ocean.

(3) Read: Until I get bored

(4) Editorial aside: Why does everyone now have these narrators that are so over the top for nature videos?! THis guy sounds so incredulous and has the dumbest comments.  This is why I like David Attenborough and Marty Stouffer. They get it: nature sells itself and doesn't need a monster truck voice-over to make it exciting. That's another soapbox for another day though.

(5) Does Blogger have a reference management software?  Rearranging these is getting rul old.