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/

Sunday #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
Next #zooplankton important to #paleooceanography with a long geological record are #Foramanifera. Like #Radiolaria forams are unicellular amoeboid protozoa, planktonic or benthic with spectacular shaped Tests made of mostly calcium carbonate with pores they exude pseudopodia to capture prey or uptake DOC. Some have symbiotic algae. Known for millenia, but their complicated life cycles, alternating haploid and diploid aren't well documented.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foraminifera

Sunday #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
Next posts are on #zooplankton which form the sediments of the seafloor. Starting with #Radiolaria, single-celled amoeboid protozoa. Non-motile but control buoyancy with gas vacuoles. Known for spectacularly intricate cortical shells made of siliceous opal covered by an extended cytoplasm they use to engulf plankton and detritus. The shells (radiolarian-ooze) cover large swaths of the tropics and are used in the study of #paleooceanography.
https://www.radiolaria.org/what_are_radiolarians.php

.. and be re-energised by the next generation! #paleooceanography #climate