Thought we've exhausted the potential for oceanic oddities? Think again:
- Marine biologists may not have been surprised to find a new whale, for jeepers' sake, in the Pacific, but it is certainly a big sign of our ignorance. The first new whale to be identified in 28 years grows up to 12 feet long, Mesoplodon peruvianus is a beaked whale that looks
something like a dolphin -- and a reminder that our ocean planet is largely aqua incognita, as far as biologists are concerned.Illustration ©1991, Pieter Folkens
- The world's only known animal that rolls for a living is a shrimplike critter native to Panam's Pacific beaches. Nannosquilla decernspinosa lives in burrows and may have learned to spin in these cramped quarters. At any rate, when the animal washes ashore, it arcs its body into a ring and rolls back into the water, pushed by the head and tail. No screamer, the little critter can only make about 3.5 centimeters per second. No wonder it's the only known rolly-roller in the animal kingdom (outside of Motocarrus detroitus, that is).
- Attack of the tiger sponges? In case you didn't know why nobody calls Arnold Schwarzenegger a sponge, it's because the primitive multicellular organism was always considered a filter-feeder, able to extract dinner from the water. But now it appears that some sponges in the phlyum Cladorhizidae, living between 17 and 23 meters deep in the Mediterranean, are willing to reach out and touch someone, in this case, their prey. The sponge has filaments that capture plankton and haul them closer for digestion. Gobble up all the facts in "Carnivorous Sponges" in the bibliography.
- A bothersome bacteria that which stretch 3,000 kilometers along the Pacific coasts of Peru and Chile has finally yielded its secrets. Problem: how did nutrients reach the center of the thick mats of slimy bacteria, whose bulk can double every hour, and which grow quickly enough to clog fishing nets? Turns out that the bacteria have vacuoles (defined) that concentrate nitrate chemicals 20,000 times. These vacuoles, in turn, distribute nitrate through the thick mats of bacteria. See "Life at the Sea Floor" in the bibliography.
- Some sea organisms use a drifter's approach. Take rhodoliths, a form of red algae that exists in huge numbers in the Gulf of California. Rhodoliths carpet the coast, looking like a cross between seaweed and rock, in beds that can be a few hundred feet wide and a mile long. Yet until recently only the locals seemed to know about the purple drifters -- proving once again how scant our knowledge of the biosphere truly is. See "Tumbleweeds of the Sea," in the bibliography.
- Then there are the incredible numbers of ancient bacterial relatives -- properly Archaea -- found in the Antarctic. Little-noticed until recently, these critters are a large proportion of the food web (defined) in a place that's cold, remote, and a large source of protein for a hungry world.
