plankton
A restoration of the tiny trilobite Ctenopyge ceciliae. From Schoenemann et al, 2010.
The first time I can remember seeing a trilobite, it wasn't in a museum case or a book about prehistoric animals. It was on card 39 of the gratuitously gory Dinosaurs Attack! card series, a horrific vignette depicting four of the invertebrates crawling over the bloodied face of their hapless victim. (No indication was given as to how the "flesh-eating worms", as the card identified them, had subdued the man.) The card was entirely fiction, of course, but it still fit in with the image of trilobites as mud…
tags: Bait Ball Feast, natural history, animal behavior, plankton, herring, seabird, humpback whale, television, BBC, streaming video
In late summer, the plankton bloom is at its height. Vast shoals of herring gather to feed on it, diving birds round the fish up into a bait ball.
Worm larva
Dr Richard Kirkby, a Royal Society Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth in the UK, took these stunning up-close photos of plankton. He will be revealing the photos of at an exhibition at Blue Reef, Blue Planet and Deep Sea World aquariums in England throughout 2009.
Spider crab larva
Metroid villain
Many more below the fold...
Doliolid - Has the makings of a primitive backbone.
Swimming crab larva
Sardine eggs
Thumbnail crab larva
Spongebob villain
Copepod on the eye of a needle
Algal blooms
Echinoderm Ludia sarsii
These were too cool not to share here. We are like the Robin Hood of scientific imagery... sort of
Larval crab
Copepod
Diatoms
To make matters worse... we can't find the original article these came from... it's over at National Geographic in some article about plankton or something...