Marine Life | Blogs
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Do Sea Urchins Have Eyes?
Have you ever see a sea urchin? The word sea urchin comes from the Old English word that means spiny hedgehog -- that is a pretty good description! It looks like a plant, but it's not one. It is an animal, specifically an invertibrate, that lives in salt water. An invertibrate is an animal without a backbone. If you look closely, you will see that it does not have any eyes. So how does it see?
Image from University of Gothenburg
Scientists have found that sea urchins have light-senstive receptor cells that act like retinas. These cells are found in sea urchins feet and among their 1,400 spines. Essentially, the sea urchin itself acts...
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Plankton -- Why Is It So Important?
Plankton are tiny living creatures that we never think about, yet they are extremely important to our Earth as a source of almost 50% of our oxygen and a major source of food for sealife. Plankton are tiny plants and animals in oceans and lakes. Sometimes they are so small, you cannot see them with your naked eye. When they mass together, they can make oceans look green or cause dark spots in the water when seen from above. There are two main categories of plankton: phytoplankton and zooplankton.
Phytoplankton is extremely important to all life on Earth. Phytoplankton are tiny plants that live in water and do not have roots or leaves. The...
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Anthias: The Fish That Can Change Gender
We were at the Shedd Aquarium and came across a tank of beautifully colored fish called anthias and were intrigued by the caption that said "...these colorful fish have the ability to change sex". We were determined to learn more!
Anthias are rather small fish (1 1/2 to 5 inches long) that sport a wide range of colors including orange, pink, purple and green. They live in tropical oceans and seas around coral reefs. Anthias eat zooplankton, microscopic animals that float in the water. Anthias were named by Carl Linneaus back in 1758. Linneaus was an important person in the history of science as he was the Swedish botanist known...
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
What is this fish?
We were at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and encountered a really interesting fish: the paddlefish. Paddlefish are aptly named as they have a long, paddle-shapped snout. The snout is about one-quarter of the paddlefish's total length of five feet.
When you look at a paddlefish, its snout looks like it would be used to dig in the riverbed for food. Actually, paddlefish use their snouts (technical term is rostrum) as antena. They have around 70,000 electroreceptor cells in their rostrum and the skin of their heads that they use to detect weak electrical fields in the water. This is used to to detect zooplankton, communicate, and navigate....
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Have You Ever Seen A Pink Dolphin?
Not all dolphins are gray and live in salt water! River Dolphins range in various shades of pink, blue and brown and live in fresh water. There are four species of River Dolphins:
• Ganges River Dolphins live in the Ganges River in India and Nepal
• Indus River Dolphins live in the Indus River in India, Nepal and Pakistan
• Amazon River Dolphins live in the Amazon River in South America
• Franciscana River Dolphins live in La Plata River in South America
River Dolphins are different from dolphins that live in oceans in a several ways. River Dolphins are not typically gray; in fact, the Amazon River Dolphins are pink....
Monday, March 21, 2011
The Blue Blubbers
“Blue Blubbers” has to be one of the best names I have heard in a long time. Blue Blubbers are sea jellies (when I was a kid they were called jellyfish). Although cute, they can be quite annoying when they sting surfers and swimmers. Most Blue Blubbers can be found in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Australia near Sydney. You can see on the photograph below that the Blue Blubbers do not have tentacles. Instead, Blue Blubbers have eight “oral arms” meaning that they have a mouth at the end of their arms. The food travels through each of the eight mouths, along the arm tube up to the stomach in the center for...
