Giant kraken-like octopuses that used powerful beaks to crunch through bones of prey were among the most formidable predators of the Cretaceous oceans. Some ancient octopus species reached up to 19 metres in length, meaning they would have rivalled and possibly even preyed upon apex predators such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs.
These reefs are living, breathing snapshots of a watery world that you can peek into: refreshing oases where the noise of the land falls away; in its place, an intricate and utterly at-ease slice of life that you're lucky enough to witness.
Each nudibranch in this archive is three inches long, grown-up size, as the artist puts it, and each one is a faithful replica of a real species. The cerata, those finger-like projections on a nudibranch's back that serve as gills and defensive organs, are recreated individually in wool, each in the right shape and color for its species.
I was surrounded by 200 marine biologists and students living and working together on a small island. That summer changed everything. It was there that I first learned about nudibranchs-these impossibly colorful sea slugs with shapes and patterns that looked like they came from another planet.
But as he swept his flashlight through the dark waters, something unexpected emerged. Inching through the beam of light, an alien creature crawled across the surface of the sand, resembling an inch-long cluster of ghostly leaves fringed with silvery filigree and capped with a pair of antennae-like stalks. It immediately caught my eye, said Gosliner, Invertebrate Zoology Curator for the California Academy of Sciences. I've been diving there for 30 years and this one immediately struck me as different.
Dr. Hugh Carter hopes the preserved Antarctic urchins collected over a century ago will illuminate how modern environmental changes are impacting marine life.
A decade after the onset of a sea star wasting disease epidemic, researchers have identified Vibrio pectenicida as the microbial culprit responsible for the decline of sunflower sea stars.