Monday, August 2, 2010

Microplankton and Megaplankton!


Another member of the plankton. This is a larval ctenophore. You can make out its ctene rows along the side of the body and the massive mouth right in the center. When I see them, they normally have a copepod stuffed inside.

On the macro side, we found this large fried egg jelly (Phacellophora camtschatica) floating around our dock the other day. The bell can get up to 2 ft (60 cm) in diameter and the tentacles 20 ft (6 m) long. They eat other jellyfish.

2 comments:

Von said...

Whow!!!Beauty!

Sally said...

That's incredible!! We learned about ctenophores in Invert Zoo, as well as paleo, I think-- but never having seen one they were very mysterious to me.

Second guy looks more like poached to me!

It's so great that you are sharing these...