#Neuston

[cracklewink]

Science-themed Mermay Day 4: Neustonic

Blue dragon sea slug + Velella velella, aka ''By-the-wind-sailors"

[smellybitterbean]

The mysterious ecosystem at the ocean’s surface

by Rebecca R. Helm https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001046

[tokay-blog]

4- Neustonic

It's a bit of a shame that there are no amphibious creatures in the game at all, except as cut content

Nevertheless, when the reefbacks emerge, the organisms living on their backs become vulnerable, something predators would have successfully exploited.

[bogleech]

regarding your common mind-blowing facts post, and Plankton classification in specific, do Portuguese man-of-war qualify as plankton?

If it floats on the surface of the ocean, it gets called a "neuston" or "neustonic!" I only learned that myself very recently.

[dan-asd]

Free advertisement for Sagan4!!!

Sagan4 is an collaborative spec evo project, and i think the oldest project of its kind! Here is the draft for an species i am making for the project, the Buoy wavegrass!

Buoy Wavegrass Creator: Dan_ASD Ancestor: Drinking Cloudgrass Size: 4 meters wide bubble Habitat: Ladym tropical ocean, Mnid tropical ocean, Jujubee tropical ocean, Fly tropical coast, Hydro tropical coast, Jlindy tropical coast, Javen tropical coast, Ofan tropical coast Support: Cell Wall (Cellulose), Flotation Sac (Hydrogen) Diet: Photosynthesis, Oceanic Planktivore (<60 cm), Respiration: Passive (stomata) Thermoregulation: Ectotherm Reproduction: Sexual (Spores), Asexual (Macroscopic Binary Fission) The buoy wavegrass is an neotenic descendant of the drinking cloudgrass, and has adapted to an neustonic lifestyle. It's bubble has doubled in size, at 4 meters of diameter at peak adult size. The sponge tissue has evolved to fill all of the bubble interior again, as it no longer needs to float in the sky. The buoy wavegrass has evolved an new tissue type under its outer dermis, many filaments of cells with thick cell walls that form an structure similar to an cactus' skeleton. This Wavegrass Wood allows the bubble and its interior spongy tissue to maintain its shape even after being punctured. It provides protection to the buoy wavegrass' soft insides that would be easy food for most aquatic creatures. Their diet is varied, and they have adapted their tendrils into many different forms for all of their different food sources. -Fronds Their top-most tendrils are still used as leaves, adapted to the strong winds that the seas have, they have become highly frilled to avoid catching the wind and ripping off or tumbling the buoy wavegrass over. Cloudbubbles can only breathe air, so the Buoy Wavegrass have adapted their fronds to have an higher concentration of stomata, due to half of their bodies being submerged in water. -Underwater tendrils Their bottom tendrils that were used for drinking and filtering water have adapted into two morphologies- Flypaper tendrils and Fine tendrils. -Flypaper skirt The flypaper tendrils surround the fine tendrils, they are flat and broad, with many mucous glands. When an small creature touches these, the flypaper tendrils will quickly pull and curl around the creature. The tendril will ooze acidic mucus and digest the prey within a few days. -Fine tendrils The fine tendrils are adapted to absorbing water and filtering plankton, they come in hundreds and have a length of roughly 4-5 meters. As with with the flypaper tendrils, they have evolved the ability to quickly retract towards the body, but in this case they haven't evolved to predate, but to avoid predation. Animals often will try to nibble on the fine tendrils to get an quick meal, which may be beneficial to the buoy wavegrass if they bump into the flypaper tendrils. Buoy wavegrass individuals reproduce sexually by dumping hundreds of millions of spores into the water, which will develop as an sort of phytoplankton in the water, until they mature and float into the water surface. In these early stages, many will be predated on by other buoy wavegrasses and drinking cloudgrasses. They also are capable of binary fission and around their adult stage, will start producing an small colony of 6-12 members, which are attached like the parasitic floats. These colonies attract symbiotic animals that get protection from the tendrils and protect the buoy wavegrasses from parasites and predators.

[seabeauties]

Animal of the week #2

Physalia physalis

Portuguese man o'war

This cnidaria is found in Atlantic and Indian ocean. It belongs in a group of organisms that live in an interface between water and air, called neuston. It moves passively, driven by winds, currents and tides.

It is not a singular organism but a colonial one. It's made from many smaller units called zooids that hang in clusters under a large, gas-filled structure called the pneumatophore. Pneumathopore is made from one individual zooid and it's used as floating device and as a sail.

It is highly toxic. Its tentacles contain numerous microscopic venomous cnidocytes that deliver a painful sting that is powerful enough to kill fish and, in some cases, even humans. It can sting even when washed ashore.

[shades4dogs]

excuse the random ask but i feel like you would like to see this thread about marine life being found in the pacific garbage patch- there is an entire ecosystem established in the boundary!

wow, this is really fascinating, thank you for the link!

for anyone interested, it details the discovery of an entire ecosystem abundant in neuston in the pacific garbage patch, a really understudied form of ecosystem that has existed for millions of years.

it forms on the floating islands of plastic as the species present travel through water in the same way plastic does, with buoyancy and catching currents. examples of species found include blue sea dragons, several species of jelly (sailor and blue button), and violet snails :-)

this thriving ecosystem is capitalised on by a variety of predators, leading to an increased risk of these creatures ingesting litter:

it emphasises that this means the best approach to tackling litter in our oceans is not to remove it but instead to stop it from being introduced in the first place, cut it off at the source. focussing on removal of litter from the sea can prevent what the thread describes as "bulldozing a meadow", especially as the life present in the five major garbage patches is so understudied!!!

this is so sick thank you for sharing it with me :-D

[stories-from-peter]

One In A Thousand

One Saturday morning my mother got a phone call from the principal of my high school. I was not in trouble, he just had a question. He wanted to know if I would give up a Saturday morning to represent the school. I would be writing a test that didn’t count for any of my marks. I agreed since I was representing the school and it would cost me nothing even if I performed poorly. A week later my mother had another call from the principal. The following Saturday I was to travel to another school, go to the lunch room, and get further instructions.

The next Saturday I took the bus to John Oliver High School and found myself in a crowd of students around the same age as me. The lunch tables had a small pile of paper face down at each seat. We were instructed to take a seat and at exactly 8 AM we were to turn over the papers, write our name on the first page, and start answering the questions. We had 3 hours to complete the test.

The questions were a mix of everything. Some questions were like the ones you see on an IQ test, others were math problems, and some were just general knowledge. The pile of papers was quite thick so I thought I should not waste any time. If I had trouble with a question I decided to let it wait until I answered all the others and then go back to it.

I managed to answer all the questions without too much difficulty. Many of the questions were on subjects I was interested in, especially science. I looked up at the clock to see that less than an hour of the allotted time had passed. I didn’t want to be the first one to hand in my test so I started checking all my answers to be sure there were none wrong. That took about 35 minutes so there was much more than an hour to go and I was still too shy to be the first. At last, another student walked up to the front and handed his test to the supervisor. One other student was heading in that direction as I took my turn.

A couple of weeks later my mother had another call from my school. I was invited to be part of a group of science and math students who would take part in a series of seminars over the next two years. The test was given to the top 3% of all the science and math students in Vancouver and only the top 25 were invited to be part of the group. There were 850 kids who wrote the test so that meant the top 25 were chosen from a group of about 28000. We were instructed to go to Kitsilano High School on a Thursday evening a couple of weeks later.

On the designated Thursday evening we entered a classroom overflowing with students and their parents. Dr. E.N. Ellis explained that the project was funded by the Joe Berg Society and that seminars would be given by local university professors on a variety of subjects. We were entertained by an exhibition of scientific glass blowing before we learned more details of the group. Before we left we were given a problem to solve related to the first seminar which was to happen a few weeks later. This was a regular feature of the seminars. Each seminar ended with a problem to solve for the next one. The seminars were fascinating and many covered subjects which none of us had heard of. Each subject was the work of the professor giving the seminar. One seminar on radio astronomy was given by Bernard Lovell, director of the Jodrell Bank observatory. He happened to be visiting UBC for a series of lectures and someone convinced him to do a seminar for us high school students. Some other seminars I remember well were on genetics, gem stones, human physiology, and neustonic fungi. Neustonic fungi live in the thin layer of surface tension on top of the ocean. How’s that for a specialized habitat?

We took a field trip to UBC to see the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance lab. The lab was filled with huge blocks of beeswax to capture stray neutrons. That prevented the lab workers from getting fried at work. There were also large tanks of liquid nitrogen used to cool the apparatus. The discovery of superconductivity and our knowledge of NMR eventually led to MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) which has become famous for giving us images inside bodies without the damaging effect of X-rays.

I had to move to Ottawa at the end of Grade 11 but I was able to go back to Vancouver for my final year of high school. One more year of Berg Seminars was a big reason for me finding a way to get back to the city I loved.

[3lue-dragon]

"Im a member of the neuston, and serve as a crucial ecological link in the ocean's food web, dwelling gracefully upon the marine surface." 😉

[biodiversidadenaccion]

La limpieza oceánica enfrenta un nuevo desafío: proteger el neuston, vida marina que habita entre plásticos flotantes. La misión es limpiar los océanos sin dañar estos ecosistemas emergentes. ¿Cómo equilibrar ambos objetivos? #ConservaciónMarina #RetoPlástico

[man-and-atom]

“Nobody actually knows.”

Simplified as far as possible, that’s the message of this paper. Everyone mostly assumes that plastic garbage in the oceans is bad for marine life, and given that it’s a new element, disturbing the existing equilibria, that seems to be a safe assumption. Everyone mostly assumes that removing it from the ocean would be good for marine life, and although this is in fact a distinct question, again, the assumption seems to be a safe one. But the information needed to confirm those safe-seeming assumptions does not exist.

By contrast, the effects on human health and the natural world of radioactivity, atomic energy facilities, and uranium mining have been studied with far greater thoroughness than practically any other “environmental” question. The information necessary for judgement is available, and it is remarkably unambiguous. Supplying power and heat from fission has such small associated harms that building fission plants to replace other kinds of energy facilities has large associated net benefits, and civilization can use many times as much energy from this source as any other, without overburdening the ecological cycles on which life depends.

So why is it that people are very hesitant, if not outright opposed, to making a transition to nuclear energy, but broadly enthusiastic about going ahead with “ocean cleanup” projects which may for all we know do more harm than good?

[eyesopod]

i studied for marine bio late last night and woke up thinking abt the difference between pleuston and neuston

[toptopic4u]

Neuston: Living Among Plastic Debris in the Open Ocean

Researchers now estimate that roughly 11 million metric tons of plastic waste enters the world’s oceans each year, including everything from bottle caps and buckets to discarded fishing nets. The race is on to devise innovative methods for recovering this waste, but efforts such as The Ocean Cleanup contend with how to retrieve debris without harming the so-called neuston—the animals and other…