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Salp

Salp
Salp
Salp
Salp
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54920
Madin, Laurence P.
Salp
Still Image
12/06/2004
graphics/dd_Lmadin-animals/DSC_0843.jpg
Salps are transparent animals that eat phytoplankton by filtering it from the water with a mucus net inside their barrel-shaped bodies. They can be single animals, called solitaries, or live in chains called aggregates. Dive and Discover Expedition 10.
Used in Oceanus magazine, Vol. 48, No. 2, Pg. 4 and 5 as story header image.
Caption from Oceanus magazine, Vol. 46, No. 1, Pg. 27:
SAVED BY THE SALPS–Another proposed scheme to reduce CO2 levels would promote swarms of transparent animals called salps, whose heavy fecal pellets sink fast, ferrying carbon to the depths.
Image of The Day caption:
Salps--transparent organism that range from 0.5 to five inches long--are the subject of MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Kelly Rakow Sutherland's PhD dissertation. Observing them in their habitat off the Pacific Coast of Panama, she focused on how the creatures balance their food-energy resources, which they use to propel themselves. Salps swim and eat by rhythmic pulses. Each pulse draws seawater in through a siphon opening at the front end of the animal. Then the salp contracts muscle bands, and the water shoots out another siphon at its rear end, producing a jet that propels the animal forward. In the process, food particles in the water (mostly tiny plankton) are caught on a mesh of mucus strands inside the salp's mostly hollow body. There are about 40 species of salps with a widely diverse body shapes. Rakow Sutherland posits that some species may be good at filtering seawater through their feeding mesh at the expense of being good swimmers, and vice versa.
Dive and Discover, Expedition 10, Antarctica.
Photo by Larry Madin
© Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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