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/