Hot doughnuts now
In the southern US, there's a doughnut company called Krispy Kreme. They're famous for making hot, fresh doughnuts that people go crazy for, and they have an extremely effective sales strategy. Every one of their stores has a luminescent sign on the outside with the words "Hot doughnuts now." When the bakery is running and there are fresh-off-the-line doughnuts to be had, the sign is illuminated. I've heard it can cause traffic jams in some cities.
For years, I've thought it would be fun to bring a sign with me to sea that says "New larvae now." I find invertebrate larval forms so endlessly fascinating that I want to share them with everyone else on board. Shouting down the hallway "I found a pluteus!" or "Come look at this bivalve!" has only ever gotten me weird looks, so maybe visual communication would be the way to go. Or maybe nobody else cares as much as I think they should.
Throughout the expedition, I've been printing off the best specimen photos and hanging them on the wall in our lab. Having photos of the various species up there to refer to is helpful, so that we can tell if we're finding the same thing at different stations. It's also a nice reminder of everything we have caught and accomplished.
We had an amazing set of samples from the central HAUSGARTEN station last night. We got 6 more species of larvae and 2 types of embryos. One of the most exciting larvae for me was a baby snail. I'm not quite sure whether the snail larva is a benthic gastropod (a snail that lives on the seafloor as an adult) or a pteropod (a snail that swims in the water column its whole life). Right now, I'm leaning towards it being a pteropod, specifically the common Arctic species Limacina helicina, because of the shape of its shell. Most benthic gastropods have shells that spiral to the right, while most pteropods have shells that spiral to the left. This little guy goes left.
The weird thing about the snails is that if they're pteropods, they're way too deep to survive. Pteropods generally live above 1000 m depth (I've even caught L. helicina at the surface before), but I collected my specimens at 2500 m. So what in the world are a bunch of tiny, young swimming snail larvae doing at over twice their parents' maximum depth? I don't know yet, but I have some ideas. First, I need to read up a lot more about pteropod biology, because I'm certainly not an expert in it. Maybe the upper pelagic species reproduce in deep water, and I've just never heard about it. That's possible. But I'm also considering that the larvae I caught might be dead. Maybe they just fell through the water column to a place that they couldn't survive and are now destined to become food for any seafloor species that wants them. Pteropods actually play a key role in export of carbon to the mesopelagic, but I don't know if anyone has ever considered the fates of their larvae before. This could be an interesting development.
The snail larvae are super, duper small. They were actually really hard to find in our dishes, even under the microscope, because they were the same size as the little air bubbles that formed on the sides and bottom of the glass. Kharis and I spent hours zooming in and out, in and out on our microscopes to find the snail larvae. Man, it was a lot of work, but if we can identify a novel process occurring in the Arctic deep sea, it will definitely be worth it!
For years, I've thought it would be fun to bring a sign with me to sea that says "New larvae now." I find invertebrate larval forms so endlessly fascinating that I want to share them with everyone else on board. Shouting down the hallway "I found a pluteus!" or "Come look at this bivalve!" has only ever gotten me weird looks, so maybe visual communication would be the way to go. Or maybe nobody else cares as much as I think they should.
Throughout the expedition, I've been printing off the best specimen photos and hanging them on the wall in our lab. Having photos of the various species up there to refer to is helpful, so that we can tell if we're finding the same thing at different stations. It's also a nice reminder of everything we have caught and accomplished.
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| Three of the little snails |
The weird thing about the snails is that if they're pteropods, they're way too deep to survive. Pteropods generally live above 1000 m depth (I've even caught L. helicina at the surface before), but I collected my specimens at 2500 m. So what in the world are a bunch of tiny, young swimming snail larvae doing at over twice their parents' maximum depth? I don't know yet, but I have some ideas. First, I need to read up a lot more about pteropod biology, because I'm certainly not an expert in it. Maybe the upper pelagic species reproduce in deep water, and I've just never heard about it. That's possible. But I'm also considering that the larvae I caught might be dead. Maybe they just fell through the water column to a place that they couldn't survive and are now destined to become food for any seafloor species that wants them. Pteropods actually play a key role in export of carbon to the mesopelagic, but I don't know if anyone has ever considered the fates of their larvae before. This could be an interesting development.
The snail larvae are super, duper small. They were actually really hard to find in our dishes, even under the microscope, because they were the same size as the little air bubbles that formed on the sides and bottom of the glass. Kharis and I spent hours zooming in and out, in and out on our microscopes to find the snail larvae. Man, it was a lot of work, but if we can identify a novel process occurring in the Arctic deep sea, it will definitely be worth it!
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