A hidden world of tiny creatures
Scientists charting life in the Earth's ocean have documented a hidden world of tiny creatures they say are essential for life on the planet.
Enypniastes sp. (holothurian), a transparent pink sea cucumber discovered in the Celebes Sea may be a new species but until a specialist can take a look at an actual specimen we can't say for sure if it's new. The internal brown tube is its gut.
These pink bubbles are live planktonic foraminifera from the Sargasso Sea, a group of single-celled animals that produce multi-chambered tests to protect their jelly-like bodies. The red line is 200 microns; the forams are about 1/2 millimeter in diameter.Colomban de Vargas, EPPO/SBRoscoff
An earlier stage of the larval tube-anemone, this specimen looks as if it has a smiling face inside. The common types of sea-anemones spend little, if any, time in the plankton, as compared to tube-anemones which spend much longer and appear to feed while there.Cheryl Clarke-Hopcroft/UAF/CMarZ
This is a sample from a salt marsh and shows a collection of bacteria. The darkest ones are Beggiatoa, a colourless sulphur bacterium which accumulates elemental sulphur and this makes the cells opaque or refractile. The large pink ovoid is a cell of Chromatium a purple sulphur bacterium, the green is a cyanobacterium, Lyngbya. The curving structure at about 2 o clock is a bacterium (Nitzschia) but illustrates that one should not assume that all prokaryotes are small. This picture was taken of material from the salt marsh at Little Sippewissett (Massachusetts, USA) in Autumn, 2000 and in Spring and summer, 2001.D. J. Patterson, L. Amaral-Zettler and V. Edgcomb / MBL
Lyngbya is a filamentous blue-green alga (cyanobacterium) that usually has many cells joined together. They are often motile, gliding through the substrate. These algae are probably the oldest recognizable organisms on Earth - traceable back to the earliest fossils, over 3 billion years old.D. J. Patterson, L. Amaral-Zettler and V. Edgcomb / MBL
This larval tube-anemone has already begun fishing for food with the tentacles it will use as an adult. The dark stomach suggests it is already a successful hunter even as it is about a centimeter in size.Cheryl Clarke-Hopcroft/UAF/CMarZ