Chris Mah's Echinoblog is off and running with a wealth of weirdness. Today he features the crinoidea, or crinoids, with some terrific images of open and close-fisted crinoid forms I've never seen before, and frankly, scare the daylights out of me (see the image from Charles Messing at Chris' website).
It's scary enough being in a research submarine, as if you need to worry about scaled urchins and the like. I never realized echinoderms were so... creepy. Now I'm worried.
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Echinoblog made my day!
And gave me all sorts of crochet-ideas....
Bwahahahaha!
right now I am looking through the logs and video from a 2005 voyage to find the one HD shot they really want of 20-30 or so crinoids covering a sponge at around 2500m. Truely a scene of nightmares, especially when they all take to the water and "fly" towards the camera in a scene reminiscent of Hitchcock's The Birds.
The Gulf of Alaska Seamount expedition video at YouTube opens with a beautiful shot of a swimming crinoid. Their means of midwater locomotion is extraordinary.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdrdAt3T8UM