#Neuston

[quillusquillus]

they're called what

[littledoughty]

The argonaut octopus is pelagic, and unusual in that it lives close to the ocean’s surface and that the females secrete a paper thin protective shell, which is unique to the genus.

[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.

[patheticmosasaur1]

mermay day 10 - neuston

a bunch of little guys!

I'll probably redraw this one on ms paint at some point

[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.

[nelfs]

shitttt I want to study polychaetes and neuston and Cyanobacteria… but that means obtaining a degree in marine biology or ecology. and I feel like EVERYONE wants a marine biology degree. but maybe my edge in the field is that I don’t care about working with dolphins & I just want to collect samples of sediment and look at really fucked up worms. lol.

[myxinidaes]

Hey not to be a huge downer, but there are very real concerns about this machine destroying the delicate ecosystems of floating surface life that also collect in gyres. The ocean's surface is teeming with life! and most of it aren't large animals that can swim out of the way or be spotted by a human piloting the machine.

It's a whole, complex, and beautiful network of life that marine scientists are only just beginning to research! You know those images of strange-looking fish larvae? Have you ever seen a by-the-wind sailor or twelve washed up on a beach? all of those are common in gyres, which collect animals as well as trash. by indiscriminately sweeping the surface for trash, these under-researched organisms are also getting destroyed. A land equivalent would be a polluted forest getting chopped down and everything, from the trash to the trees to the organisms living on the trees and in the soil, getting destroyed. But hey! the deer got out in time!

Rebecca Helm explains it more succinctly than I can on twitter here, and if you're interested in reading her paper on the high densities of floating life in gyres you can read it here. The Ocean Cleanup Project addresses ecologists concerns here- their own paper concludes that more research needs to be done on neuston/pelagic floating life and that neuston bycatch must be carefully monitored in cleanup efforts (paper here). If someone else is able to find something by this company indicating that they're taking measures to reduce the bycatch of neustons, please let me know! I would *love* to be able to be excited for this project.

““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.

Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.

Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.

The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.

GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.

It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life…

Slat estimates ten Jennies could clean half the garbage patch in five years, and if 10 Jennies were deployed to the five major ocean gyres, then 90% of all floating plastic could be removed by 2040.�� -via Good News Network, 10/19/21

[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.

[littledoughty]

The Portuguese man o' war, probably the most well known member of the neuston, and also a siphonophore, a colonial organism made up of zooids.

[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

[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

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this Mother Nature Network article:

We usually think of ecosystems as fairly static, moving over hundreds of years, not days or weeks. But some of Earth's ecosystems are actually defined by constant movement — and so it is with the neuston. This understudied zone is right at the water's surface, both above and below.

It contains bacteria, protozoans, certain species of fish, jellyfish, sea anemones, crabs and velellas (those blue floaties that land on beaches and are also called by-the-wind sailors). They can be found in freshwater ponds and lakes, too — water skeeters or gliders are one of the bugs that's a part of the neuston in that scenario.

In the ocean, the neuston moves passively, following the currents, and can be found thousands of miles from shore. If this sounds familiar to the plastic in the garbage gyres that plague oceans worldwide, that's no coincidence. The neuston territory and the gyre territory overlap completely.

So, if we clean up the plastic — using a method like the Ocean Cleanup project, which involves giant booms essentially sweeping the surface of the ocean — we also clean out the neuston.

And that's a problem. The neuston is an important ecosystem, and its health affects other ocean systems. Like a reef, or the shallow banks of places like the inter-island zones of the Bahamas, the neuston serves as a nursery for some fish, which also makes it an ideal place for other animals like leatherback turtles, octopuses and other fish to hunt for easy food.