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Post by Robert Nordsieck on Dec 18, 2010 21:01:56 GMT
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Post by ness on Dec 28, 2010 19:02:42 GMT
Wheeeeeeeeeee!! I'm in heaven! Fantastic, and so many links. This must have taken you ages. Thank you thank you thank you! I'm only part of the way through and will type some more once I've finished reading  Photosynthetic gastropods, slug-like bivalves, lion-headed/hooded nudibranch... so much information, so many things I did not know. I would love to see some of these creatures. |
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Post by muddydragon on Dec 28, 2010 22:31:54 GMT
yourwebpages are great robert! ness: photosynthetic animals are very cool and suprisingly common (usually via symbiosis rather than aquiring chloroplasts and doing a spot of gene swapping) they're fantastic! sponges, corals, anenomes, hydra, jellyfish, flatworms, seaslugs, clams, seasquirts even (to an extent) the embroys of spotted salamanders : www.nature.com/news/2010/100730/full/news.2010.384.htmlcool huh? some pigmented sponges even have little fibre optic skeletal systems going on to get light down to their symbionts! it's very cool |
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Post by Robert Nordsieck on Jan 2, 2011 20:54:41 GMT
Hi there, ness: Very glad you like the pages! When you asked for a nudibranch page I was not aware at all how many extremely interesting animals are in the opisthobranch group. There is poison, eating and be eaten, the colours and forms outside of imagination. This group appears to be a good mirror of all snails with this diversity. As to seeing those animals, I embedded some youtube videos on the pages (also a novum on the site). There is a oceanographic museum in Stralsund on the eastern end of the German Baltic Sea Coast - I hope they also have sea slugs. There is nothing of the sort near here I am afraid. There appear to be many interesting sea life centres and aquariums in Britain, possibly there you could see some sea slugs? The hooded nudibranch chapter was the consequence of a phone call with my Berlin friend Mica, who likes those very much. And indeed I found them very interesting: How they feed, how they swim and how they use pheromones to attract mates and deter enemies, similar pheromones are used by plants against herbivory (Mica wrote a paper on that subject). muddydragon: I agree, symbiontic algae are also very interesting, also in that sea slugs acquire them by feeding on other organisms that have them (such as sponges, jellyfrish and so on). Also, they acquire many of their poisons that way, such as the tetrodoxin (puffer fish poison) of the side-gill slug (killed dogs in New Zealand). Anyway: An extremely interesting chapter which I was very happy to deal with the first time in 10 years of homepage history... I would simply LOVE to make an exhibition with them in a museum  Kind regards Robert |
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Post by ness on Jan 5, 2011 19:21:55 GMT
It's interesting that the use of poison ingested from plants and animals have indipendantly evolved several times - sea-slugs, poison dart frogs, certain caterpillars..... It's really very clever. Evolution - either by chance or by design (depending upon what you believe) is a fantastic thing.I will check out the SeaLufe links, thank you. I have visited several Sea Life centres around Britain and have not seen Sea-Slugs. I hear though that they are very difficult to keep in captivity due to having such select diets. They are among my favourite sea creatures, but are probably best left in the wild. Having said that, you never know, you may be the one who figures out how to keep some of these well I hope to go to the Great Barrier Reef in two years, I will be sure to be on the look-out for them |
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Post by ness on Jan 5, 2011 19:26:44 GMT
yourwebpages are great robert! ness: photosynthetic animals are very cool and suprisingly common (usually via symbiosis rather than aquiring chloroplasts and doing a spot of gene swapping) they're fantastic! sponges, corals, anenomes, hydra, jellyfish, flatworms, seaslugs, clams, seasquirts even (to an extent) the embroys of spotted salamanders : www.nature.com/news/2010/100730/full/news.2010.384.htmlcool huh? some pigmented sponges even have little fibre optic skeletal systems going on to get light down to their symbionts! it's very cool I knew about some of those but not the Salamanders, and certainly didn't know about the sea slugs It certainly is wonderful |
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