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Salp's feeding net glow green.

Salp's feeding net glow green.
Salp's feeding net glow green.
Salp's feeding net glow green.
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169497
Sutherland, Kelly R.
Salp's feeding net glow green.
Still Image
04/18/2006
mesh2.jpg
Caption from Oceanus magazine, Vol. 48, No. 2, pg. 4:
Inside their transparent gelatinous bodies, salps use mucus to create feeding nets (stained green), which trap food particles. The strands are sticky, and they snare bits of food as tiny as bacteria that would otherwise slip through the holes.
Image of The Day caption:
Intersecting strands of a salp's feeding net glow green, dyed with a fluorescent dye. Salps, jelly-like ocean animals, make nets of mucus and use them to efficiently filter particles from the water. Scientists Kelly Sutherland (a WHOI-MIT Joint Program graduate now at CalTech), Larry Madin,(WHOI) and Roman Stocker (MIT) discovered that salp nets catch some of the ocean's tiniest, most abundant cells?cells so small they should pass through the net's holes. They recently reported their results, calculating that this feat of natural-world bioengineering lets salps be even better at removing carbon from surface water and transporting it to ocean depths, away from the atmosphere.
Photo by Kelly Sutherland
© Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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