Current Events > Sea Creature, Tiny but Nevertheless Mindblowing

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/9/9/AACsDqAAE3Wj.jpg

When Ryo Minemizu, a professional underwater photographer, posted photos of an elegant ladybug-size flittering creature off Okinawa, Japan, in 2018, biologists were baffled. It wasnt a worm, a mollusk, or a crustacean. What was it? No one knew.
One of those intrigued was Igor Adameyko, a developmental neurobiologist at the Medical University of Vienna. (A fellow enthusiast of marine biology, he spotted the pictures on Instagram, where he has his own account dedicated to marine zooplankton.) Adameyko asked Minemizu whether he had taken a specimen, and, if so, whether he might share it. Not long after, a package arrived at the Karolinska Institute, where Adameyko also works.
Inside was a vial containing the specimen, no bigger than a pea. As Adameyko carefully dissected it, he noticed billowy outer parts, which Minemizus footage captured propelling the strange creature, attached to the flat side of a brown hemisphere. They were like snake hair on the Gorgons head, Adameyko and colleagues report today in undefined posted...

https://www.science.org/content/article/mind-boggling-sea-creature-spotted-japan-has-finally-been-identified

and

Whats interesting about this new digenean parasite is that the larvae cooperate using two different forms. The DNA confirmed that both the sailors and tiny passengers inside the hemisphere belong to the same species. These passengers, it seems, act as the infectious agents, waiting to infiltrate the gills or intestines of a fish that swallows them. The sailors, meanwhile, do the hard work of moving the blob through the waterbut in sacrifice their own opportunities to reproduce.

I'm pretty sure that thing fought Godzilla once.

That final paragraph is mildly disturbing

Thanks, i'm gonna read into this, love this kind of stuff. If you are looking into doing a weird ocean critter deep dive, nudibranches are fascinating critters.

CobraGT posted...

Whats interesting about this new digenean parasite is that the larvae cooperate using two different forms. The DNA confirmed that both the sailors and tiny passengers inside the hemisphere belong to the same species. These passengers, it seems, act as the infectious agents, waiting to infiltrate the gills or intestines of a fish that swallows them. The sailors, meanwhile, do the hard work of moving the blob through the waterbut in sacrifice their own opportunities to reproduce.

macro-scale virus?

It is so cool that someone has the energy to do this at night and that his boss lets him.

We should all have jobs like this.