Many descriptors have accompanied the emails, texts, and Facebook messages that have recently flooded my cellular device, all describing one unique ocean beastie…

Exhibit A.

With Spring alterations in wind patterns, hoards of blue, planktonic sailors known as Velella velella have raided the Western seaboard of the United States by the billions. Though commonly confused as jellyfish, Velella are actually upside floating ships of doom of hydroids. Think a colony living under one Pringle-shaped roof, rather than an individual.

Though Velella do sting, you will not necessarily feel their harpoons of death, aka nematocysts, pierce your skin. (However, No promises if you were to try to lick one….) Last year, our very own RR Helm even posted an amazing video compiled by the masterminds of MBARI perfectly describing the secret lives of these colonial creatures.

The one question that remains unanswered…what in the heck are we going to do with all of them now that they are here?! Summer is coming and we can’t very well have the beach looking like this when all the tourists come!

The only viable answer I could come up with…

I know what you’re thinking. An army of bright, blue, squishy, ocean pokemon might not seem like a viable option. And to that I label you a dream crusher. In fact, these aeolid nudibranchs, known as Glaucus atlanticus, LUURRRVVVEEEE to nom all the Velella they can eat! They even steal the Velella‘s super stinging powers and make them their own. And what’s better than getting ANOTHER even crazier alien-like ocean creature to do your bidding?

Needless to say, this half-hatched “Velella Clean-up Plan (v 1.0)”  is still in the Development Stage as Glaucus don’t typically make their way here to the Best West Coast. They are often found in more tropical regions destroying those Velella. We could plausibly use the pelagic snail Janthina as our master villain too…but the tagline “Release the Janthina!” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. For now we are just brainstorming….but for precautionary measures DSN has begun recruitment of our very own Glaucus army. Be afraid.

The post Release the Glaucus! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Hermit crabs are generally awesome. They use snail shells, and sometime shells of other mollsucs, to protect their non-skeletonized squishy backends. Some are even adapted to live in burrows coral, wood, and old worm tubes, again to keep those soft rear ends protected. But one group of hermit crabs does something colossally different and it requires a special friend—one just as soft and squishy as its derriere.

Anemones hitching rides on shells, including those occupied by hermit crabs, is nothing new. But what if no shell is present? In the hermit crab genus Sympagurus, species have symbioses with Cnidarian species of anemones and zoanthids. These squidgy cnidarians build a pseudoshell. Basically the anemone contorts itself into a shell, spiral and all. How do they do this?

An actual snail shell existed at one point. In examining Sympagurus, remnants of snail shell still remain suggesting that the anemones and zoanthids get an early start on the small shells. Overtime these cnidarian colonies grow. The corkscrew shape of the hermit crab’s abdomen, so shaped to fit perfectly into the spiral of the snail shell, guides the growth of the cnidarian colony to form the pseudoshell.

But wouldn’t it all just be easier for these hermit crab’s to use a snail shell. Most Sympagurus species are found deep. As I have mentioned before, the limited food of the deep-sea oceans miniaturizes animals including snails. Moreover, in the deep sea, because of the cold temperatures and high pressures, calcium carbonate, the building block of shells and exoskeletons in general, goes into solution more readily than it comes out. In other words, in the deep-sea calcium carbonate shells readily dissolve and so snails must actively maintain their shells. If there is no living snail, as in the example of a hermit crab inhabiting the carcass shell of snail, then it will dissolve leaving the hermit crab with no home. It would constantly be searching for a new home.

A soft squishy cnidarian may not be the suit of armor that snail shell is but a thick coat is better than nothing to protect their little crustacean arses.

Schejter, Laura, and Fernando L Mantelatto. 2011. “Shelter Association Between the Hermit Crab Sympagurus Dimorphus and the Zoanthid Epizoanthus Paguricola in the Southwestern Atlantic Ocean.” Acta Zoologica 92 (2): 141–49. doi:10.1111/j.1463-6395.2009.00440.x.

The post These are a few of my favorite species: Hermit crabs without shells first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The above photo is of Apolemia lanosa a type of siphonophore belonging to phylum Cnidaria that also includes corals and jellies.  It’s basically the ocean’s way of celebrating Christmas all year long.  Like many other Cnidarians, siphonophores bud new individuals—exact clones themselves.  In a manner similar to Christmas elves although this is not proven by science. In the case of some Cnidarians, the clones never leave home so family never has to travel for the holidays.  In some Cnidarians, clones in the colony will specialize but among siphonophores the specialization is unrivaled. Clones will specialize for feeding, defense, locomotion or reproduction. The feeding clones catch food by tentacles equipped with cells that shoot out poisonous harpoons stinging and stunning their prey.  In the most popular of all siphonophores, the Portuguese man o’ war, with a large gas filled buoyant bladder adapted for catching the wind and sailing.  Interestingly, all the clones are attached via a single digestive and circulatory system.  Research is still needed on which clones are adapted for drinking eggnog, singing carols, and wrapping gifts.

Apolemia belongs to a special set physonect siphonophores. Recently Dr. Stefan Siebert at Brown University with Phil Pugh (NOC), Steven Haddock (MBARI), and Casey Dunn (Brown University) described two new species in the family Apolemiidae, for which only three species had been described previously.  The species of Apolemiidae may be record holders for the longest animals on earth.

Fragments of specimens of this family with a length of over 30 meters have been reported from the French Mediterranean coast in the bay of Villefranche-sur-Mer.

In most physonect siphonophores clones are arranged along a central stem, it itself the founding clone developed from a single egg.  At the front end, is a group of clones that are propulsion clones. Basically, Santa’s reindeer if Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen were all budded from and identical to Santa.  In the larger and remaining region of a physonect siphonophore, one can find the clones for engaging in the spirit of Christmas, eating and…  New clones are formed in special growth regions of the siphonophore.  As new clones are formed the old clones get pushed down the line. But Apolemia species are special.  In addition to other clones Apolemia can also add new feeding clones along the entire length of the stem.

This fact might be the reason why members of this particular family of siphonophores can grow to such tremendous length.

Research by Siebert in collaboration with others uses these as the perfect organism to understand how an organism develops (check out some of their work which features DSN’s Rebecca Helm). Basically Apolemia is the biological Christmas gift that keeps on giving.

From a developmental point of view siphonophores are a very interesting and promising system since collection of a single colony gives the researcher access to complete developmental series of particular bodies – from the youngest bud to a mature body in older parts of the colony. Our work aims at increasing our understanding on how these different bodies can evolve using the same genome.

Siebert’s work looks for when genes turn on and off to trigger the growth and specialization of all the clones.  But the road is not easy going

 The interesting questions to be answered are, how to we get from one body type to another? How are genes sets differentially utilized to make body A or body type B and what has happened on the molecular level when evolutionary novelties, i.e. a new body type, can be observed in a particular [group] of siphonophores.

 A special thanks to Stefan Siebert who provided the quotes and a lesson on siphonorphore biology to me.

The post The Ocean’s Gelantinous Christmas Tinsel first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The two leading contenders seems to be that it is A) an old whale placenta or B) a rare and enigmatic deep-sea jellyfish.  And the answer is…. B)

A) So why is not an old whale placenta?  The video is from approximately 5000 feet (1500 m). A placenta would need to sink to this depth without any other organism consuming it.  Unlikely given that its rate of decent would have been slow and any organic food source in the deep sea is unlikely to last long.

B) So why is it a jellyfish?* In 1967, F.S. Russell described a very enigmatic deep-sea jellyfish, Deepstaria enigmatica.

During Dive 159 of the U.S. research submersible Deepstar 400 on 22 October 1966 Dr. Eric G. Barham, Dr. George Pickwell, and Mr. Ronald Church collected a remarkable scyphomedusan at a depth of about 723 m in the San Diego Trough…when first noted, the jellyfish’s margin was collapsed and the [outer, convex surface of the umbrella] indented.

In other words it didn’t look like much of a jellyfish.  Sound familiar?

On opposite sides of the umbrella are two large tubular shaped processes…It has a yellowish brown tinge…The radial canal system is most striking.  It consists of a meshwork, likened by Dr. Barham to wire-netting.

The gonads are situated along the margins of fan-shape mesenteries, and tend to be broken up into several isolated processes with incurved edges.

In 1988 Larson and colleagues published further work describing this rare group of jellyfish.  They too noted the unique canal system.

But it is these researcher’s behavioral notes that I find most interesting.

These two species of Deepstaria display some unique behaviour; peristaltic locomotion and pursing of the bell margin are unknown in other medusae. Probably the peristaltic locomotion is necessary because the umbrella is too thin and the subumbrella musculature too diffuse to support more rapid pulsation. Our observations of both species of Deepstaria suggest that they usually hang  motionless with the umbrella open…It seems probable to us that medusae in this genus are large ambush predators in the meso- and bathypelagic environment…we speculate that the feeding behaviour might be as follows. The medusae usually hang vertically and motionless with the bell open; occasional peristaltic contractions probably enable them to swim slowly, at least enough to retard sinking. Because the area of the subumbrella is so large, upward-swimming prey occasionally would swim into it. Once prey enter the large subumbrellar chamber, the contact stimulates rapid contraction of the coronal muscle, pursing the umbrella shut and trapping the prey. As the prey attempts to escape, it contacts nematocysts on the subumbrella, being repeatedly stung until weakened. It may additionally become covered with mucus and further immobilized. Then peristalsis and ciliary movement could transport the prey towards the mouth where the oral arms could grasp and engulf it…’Bagging’ prey in this way is not known in other medusae.

Russell, F. S. (1967). “On a remarkable new scyphomedusan Deepstaria enigmatica”. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the UK 47: 469-473.

Larson, R.; Madin L., Harbison, G. (1988). “In situ observations of deep water medusae of the genus Deepstaria, with a description of D. reticulum sp. nov.”. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the UK 68: 689-699.

*UPDATE: This has now also been confirmed by Dr. Steven Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Center, an expert on deep-sea and pelagic creatures.

UPDATE2: Steven Haddock provides some much better photos of Deepstaria engimatica on the Jellyfish Watch Facebook page.

UPDATE3: Several comments below suggest the species is Deepstaria reticulum.  Important thing is that it is still a jellyfish and already known.

The post Solving the Mystery of the Placental Jellyfish first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post TGIF: Portuguese Man-O-War Feeding first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Continuing its trend as one of the top destinations for out-of-this-world fossil finds, China is yielding yet another piece to the evolutionary jigsaw puzzle. In a recent PLoS One article, Han and colleagues report the findings of a new squishy sea anemone from the Lower Cambrian. The new find lends support to genetic data that suggests anthozoans (anenomes, corals, octocorals and their kin) were one the first Cnidarian groups to diversify.

Squishy animals, like anemones, are very rare in the fossil record because they typically decay away before fossilization occurs. Since they have no hard parts, like corals, there is little trace left of their existence. Yet we know they must have existed at some point since we see a diverse array of soft-bodied animals living today. There are only few known fossil deposits in the world that have locked away within them a whole treasure trove of evolutionary history. The China deposits are in areas of Phosphorite rocks. It is thought that sulfur-oxidizing bacteria in heavily phosphate-laden seas produced the favorable conditions to the preservation of soft-bodied organisms.

These anemone-like fossils are microfossils, making for an even rarer find, measuring only one half of a millimeter in diameter and height. They are wonderfully preserved and the using a high-powered scanning electron microscope (SEM) they were able to capture the rich detail of the animal’s final moment (see figure below). Dubbed Eolympia pediculata (in honor of the Beijing 2008 Summer Games and the stalk-like pedicle: ‘pe’ in figure below), they are characterized by a long slender stalk, called a pedicle, 18 mesenteries, and their exceptionally small size.

Mesenteries are are important characters in Cnidarian biology. They are radial separations, like spokes on a bicycle wheel, that develop from the body wall inward towards the actinopharynx (‘ap’ in figure below), which is sort of like the ‘mouth’ of an anemone, or the hub of the wheel. Anemones differ in how many mesenteries they have, how many are complete (i.e. reaching all the way from body wall to actinopharynx) or incomplete, how many are fertile (i.e. which carry eggs or sperm), and whether they are connected all the way from top to bottom or not. These are all traits that taxonomists use to group species of anemones together. Han and colleagues were able to computer aided microtomographic (micro-CT) scanning to peer inside the fossilized anemone to understand how its mesenteries were arranged (see figure below). Eolympia pediculata has 18 mesenteries, a feature which they describe as “exceptional”, but not unheard of. This pattern is found in 2 families of extant anemones.

Eolympia pediculata appears to be the first well-preserved anemone-like fossil with preserved internal anatomy. Though other anemone-like or indeterminate Cnidarian fossils have appeared in the strata earlier, up to the Precambrian, or later in the upper Cambrian, none have had internal structure so well-preserved as Eolympia pediculata. The new information is critical because it helps to constrain where along the Cnidarian tree of life the fossil diversified from its ancestors. In this case Eolympia appears to be well within the Anthozoa and shares all characteristics of the Hexacorallia (sea anemones and corals). Because of this similarity with Hexcorallians, and the paucity of Cambrian anemone fossils, it is difficult to say for certain whether Eolympia represents a stem species to the group. Han and colleagues suggest that the Ceriantharia, a group that continuously forms unpaired complete mesenteries, might be considered a sister group to the Hexacorallia. If this is the case, then Eolympia pediculata would be de facto the stem species of the Hexacorallia. We wouldn’t even be able to make this argument if not for the excellent “innard” preservation of the fossil and the attention to detail by these authors to studying such a minute, important fossil!

Han, J., Kubota, S., Uchida, H., Stanley, G., Yao, X., Shu, D., Li, Y., & Yasui, K. (2010). Tiny Sea Anemone from the Lower Cambrian of China PLoS ONE, 5 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013276

The post New Fossil Anemone Reveals Innard Secrets first appeared on Deep Sea News.

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Kevin Raskoff from Monterey Peninsula College (where I got my start in science!) describes a new genus and species of jelly. Named Bathykorus (=deep helmet) bouilloni after Dr. Jean
Bouillon (1926–2009), a prolific and well-respected hydrozoan biologist who recently passed away. As described by Raskoff,

“Dr. Bouillon’s studies spanned over 60 years, and described 17 families, 34 genera,
and 114 species. His work and his generous sprit continue to enlighten and inspire generations of biologists.”

From eleven stations in the Arctic Ocean, he observed 423 of these little buggers (about 1.5 cm for the bell height) between 1300 and 2000 m depth.

Why is this study cool? Raskoff captured hundreds of these things and not one had any hint of their food sources! And, as he says in the final sentence of this paper:

“That a new genus and species can be found by the hundreds in a single expedition demonstrates how much is left to be discovered about the inhabitants of the deep sea, especially in the polar regions.”

Raskoff KA (2010) Bathykorus bouilloni: a new genus and species of deep-sea jellyfish from the Arctic Ocean (Hydrozoa, Narcomedusae, Aeginidae). Zootaxa 2631: 57-67.

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The picture to my left says it all. ITS A FRIKKIN BLUNTNOSE 6-GILL SHARK IN A FRIKKIN RIVER. And not just in a river mind you, 30 km up the Derwent River in Tasmania in 10 meters of water! While the authors were capturing 7-gill sharks, known to be a coastal species, the found this 3.4 meter deep-sea shark (found down to 25oo meters depth) attached to one of their bottom-set longlines.

Why is this study cool? It is the first confirmed report of an adult 6-gill shark in a river. The estuary where it was found is actually a shark refuge, perhaps that explains it? Anyways, I hope they a DNA sample, I wonder if might spreading some of the sharky love with the shallow 7-gills!

Barnett A, Stevens JD, Yick JL (2010) The Occurrence of the Bluntnose Sixgill Shark Hexanchus Griseus (Hexanchiformes: Hexanchidae) in a River in South-Eastern Tasmania. Marine Biodiversity Records 3: e24

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Siveter and colleagues discovered an exceptionally well-preserved fossil of a new genus and species of ostracod from a 425 million year old formation in the UK. The Herefordshire Konservat-Lagerstätte has proven to be a treasure trove of invertebrate fossils with well-preserved 3-dimensional structure. The paper itself deals with the internal anatomy of this ancient seafarer in great detail.

Why is this study cool? Nasunaris (nose-nostril) flata (breath of life) is the best preserved ostracod found from this time period. Even the gills were preserved.

Siveter DJ, Briggs DEG, Siveter DJ, Sutton MD (2010) An exceptionally preserved myodocopid ostracod from the Silurian of Herefordshire, UK. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 277: 1539-1544

The post The Tide Pool: New Jelly, Misplaced 6-Gill, Old Ostracods first appeared on Deep Sea News.

“It has no mouth, no gut, no brain and no nerve cord. It doesn’t have a left or right side or a top or bottom – we can’t even tell which end is the front!” (quoted from Physorg)

Its the one and only Buddenbrockia plumatellae! Buddebrockia is a myxozoan, a strange group of typically amoeboid parasites. This little fellow in particular is a parasite of bryozoans (see picture below, exiting a bryozoan zooid). Myxozoans have strange potentially-nematocyst-looking cells called polar capsules. Some researchers considered Myxozoa to be reduced cnidarians, though with the discovery of the worm-like Buddenbrockia plumatellae and Hox genes support a bilateria origin. Confused or just wierded out?

A study published in 2007 in Science answers the paradox of Buddenbrockia with a 50 gene (thats 31,092 amino acid alignments) analysis confirming that 97% of the time Buddebrockia plumatellae clusters with medusozoan cnidarians. The authors conclude:

“This active muscular worm increases the known diversity in cnidarian body plans and demonstrates that a muscular, worm-like form can evolve in the absence of overt bilateral symmetry.”

Cnidarians really offer an amazing evolutionary system to study how body form is controlled at the genetic level. For instance, if these are really cnidarians, albeit highly derived parasitic forms, how can there be this amazing diversity of body form from medusoid, polypoid, amoeboid, worm-like, and planular larvae all within a single phylum?

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Jimenez-Guri, E., Philippe, H., Okamura, B., & Holland, P. (2007). Buddenbrockia Is a Cnidarian Worm Science, 317 (5834), 116-118 DOI: 10.1126/science.1142024

The post Say Hello to My Little Friend first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Cnidarian Lifeforms from Delrious on Vimeo.

Hat tip to Penguin Wanderings.

The post Cnidarian Lifeforms first appeared on Deep Sea News.

This week I’ll start it off a new species of soft coral from the deep sea off California! Craig sent in this one and the pictures are fantastic. I hope the authors won’t mind me snagging an image to you.

It is is a pretty coral found at depths between 520-2034 meters. Like the image above, the authors noted that Gersemia juliepackardae tends to live on the top of dead and live sponges. This might be the first record of a deep sea octocoral living on sponges. The namesake is Julie Packard, who heads the Packard Foundation that funds a lot of marine research and conservation efforts. She has been an ocean champion and is well-deserving of having the honor of a wonderful species named after her!

While these are often called soft corals, they are indeed still hard. Under their soft organic epidermal layer are hard “sclerites” that help keep the coral rigid. These are useful in identifying octocorals. Below is an example of a sclerite from Gersemia juliepackardae.

G.C. Williams, & L. Lundsten (2009). The nephtheid soft coral genus Gersemia Marenzeller, 1878, with the description of a new species from the northeast Pacific and a review of two additional species (Octocorallia: Alcyonacea) Zool. Med. Leiden, 83 (34), 1067-1081 http://www.repository.naturalis.nl/record/315887

The post Friday Freak 10/16/09 – Gersemia juliepackardae first appeared on Deep Sea News.