Picture book
A "typical" foraminiferan, Cibicides wuellerstorfi , photographed under a dissecting microscope. "Here, try looking through this," my advisor, Lauren, instructed me, as she handed me a large gray book. I read the cover: Foraminiferal genera and their classification . Sounds promising, I thought. I've been trying to identify some of the organisms on my recruitment panels that I collected from the Arctic deep sea last summer . Most of the animal taxa I was able to identify myself ( sponges and sea lilies and the like), but there is a whole other group of organisms on the panels that I'm not so good at identifying: the foraminiferans. The name is a mouthful, so you can just call them forams. They're single-celled organisms that are more common than you think. They live in the water column and on the seafloor, and their shells form important geological structures. Have you ever seen the star-shaped sand on the beaches of Okinawa, Japan? Those sand