Warren Currie 🦠🦐Sunday #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
Another #paleooceanography #zooplankton are the beautiful #Pteropoda sea butterflies & sea angels, holoplanktonic mollusks with modified parapodia swimming foot. They live in surface waters of every ocean, and are vital to the #CarbonCycle. Their delicate calcium carbonate shells dissolve away quickly, so fossils only really found in the shallow tropics sediments. Fun fact: can be so dense as to create false bottom signals in echosounders.
https://twilightzone.whoi.edu/explore-the-otz/creature-features/pteropod/
Another #paleooceanography #zooplankton are the beautiful #Pteropoda sea butterflies & sea angels, holoplanktonic mollusks with modified parapodia swimming foot. They live in surface waters of every ocean, and are vital to the #CarbonCycle. Their delicate calcium carbonate shells dissolve away quickly, so fossils only really found in the shallow tropics sediments. Fun fact: can be so dense as to create false bottom signals in echosounders.
https://twilightzone.whoi.edu/explore-the-otz/creature-features/pteropod/
Creature feature: Pteropod
In the weird and wonderful menagerie of the twilight zone, the pteropod stands out for its delicate grace. Fluttering through the water column on translucent “wings,” the more abundant shelled variety (Thecosomata group) are known as “sea butterflies,” while the shell-less adult Gymnosomata are known as “sea angels.”