Jack and squat is known about free-living flatworms form the deep sea. Their fragile bodies are unlikely to be collected successfully in dredges and trawls. This means that outside of ‘potential platyhelminth’ from a wood fall and deep record of another species little else is known.

A new study adds to our limited knowledge of these beasties. Flatworm egg capsules were retrieved from rocks found approximately 6200 meters deep in a trench in the northwestern Pacific. Despite each capsule being a diminutive 3mm in size, they housed anywhere from 3 to 7 individuals. Through the application of genetic tools, the researchers identified a new species within a group previously only observed in shallow waters.

Kakui, Keiichi, and Aoi Tsuyuki. “Flatworm cocoons in the abyss: same plan under pressure.” Biology Letters 20.1 (2024): 20230506.

The post Flatworm cocoons in the abyss first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The above photo is of Apolemia lanosa a type of siphonophore belonging to phylum Cnidaria that also includes corals and jellies.  It’s basically the ocean’s way of celebrating Christmas all year long.  Like many other Cnidarians, siphonophores bud new individuals—exact clones themselves.  In a manner similar to Christmas elves although this is not proven by science. In the case of some Cnidarians, the clones never leave home so family never has to travel for the holidays.  

In some Cnidarians, clones in the colony will specialize but among siphonophores the specialization is unrivaled. Clones will specialize for feeding, defense, locomotion or reproduction. The feeding clones catch food by tentacles equipped with cells that shoot out poisonous harpoons stinging and stunning their prey.  In the most popular of all siphonophores, the Portuguese man o’ war, with a large gas filled buoyant bladder adapted for catching the wind and sailing.  Interestingly, all the clones are attached via a single digestive and circulatory system.  Research is still needed on which clones are adapted for drinking eggnog, singing carols, and wrapping gifts.

 The species of Apolemiidae may be record holders for the longest animals on earth. Fragments of specimens of this family with a length of over 30 meters have been reported from the French Mediterranean coast in the bay of Villefranche-sur-Mer. In most physonect siphonophores clones are arranged along a central stem, it itself the founding clone developed from a single egg.  At the front end, is a group of clones that are propulsion clones. Basically, Santa’s reindeer if Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen were all budded from and identical to Santa.  In the larger and remaining region of a physonect siphonophore, one can find the clones for engaging in the spirit of Christmas, eating and…  New clones are formed in special growth regions of the siphonophore.  As new clones are formed the old clones get pushed down the line. But Apolemia species are special.  In addition to other clones Apolemia can also add new feeding clones along the entire length of the stem. This fact might be the reason why members of this particular family of siphonophores can grow to such tremendous length.

The post The Ocean’s Gelantinous Christmas Tinsel first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Lisa Noelle Cooper, an associate professor of mammalian anatomy and neurobiology at the Northeast Ohio Medical University, agreed that the dolphin’s defect is likely rooted in its genes. “Given that the defect is in both the left and right flippers, it is probably the result of an altered genetic program that sculpts the flipper during development as a calf.” Unlike in humans, whose fingers are fused into paddle-shaped hands in the womb with cells that die off before we are born, cells accumulate around dolphins’ forelimb bones to form flippers, Cooper said. “Normally, dolphins develop their fingers within the flipper and no cells between the fingers die off,” she said. But [this] dolphin appears to be missing fingers and some of the tissue that would usually encase them. “It looks to me like the cells that normally would have formed the equivalent of our index and middle fingers died off in a strange event when the flipper was forming while the calf was still in the womb,” Cooper said.

https://www.livescience.com/animals/dolphins/extremely-rare-dolphin-with-thumbs-photographed-in-greek-gulf

Given their “frisky” antics, significant intellect, and newfound thumbs, it’s safe to say that mischief is definitely on the horizon.

The post This is how the dolph-pocalypse starts first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I was just listening to a podcast about how sea sponges use the pores all over their body to “bring in food and release wastes” and I’m pretty sure that’s a scientific way of saying the holes in sponges are all just mouths and buttholes so does that mean that when I’m using a sponge in the shower I’m cleaning my body with mouths and buttholes? Someone get me a marine biologist. And a loofah. And maybe some bleach.  -The Bloggess

All around you are animals with a single hole serving as both a mouth and anus.  These mono-orifice animals have an incomplete digestive system.  In contrast, those animals blessed with two holes, a tubular digestive system with an in and out hole, possess a complete digestive system.

Sponges are a bit of a unique case as a loose conglomeration of cells in a body full of pores and channels.  None of this really resembles organs or a digestive system with digesting occurring within individual cells.  However, the Cnidarians, including jellyfish, anemones, and corals,  are all uni-aperture.  We can also add the Ctenophores, the comb jellies, into this lone door group of animals.

In the flatworms, the Platyhelminthes, its mixed bag of one, two, and even more bodily gateways.  Most flatworms have no anus, but some particularly long species do possess an anus. In rare cases, flatworms with very complex branch guts can have more than one anus.  By the way, the plural can be either anuses or ani.

Peeping at the underside of a starfish, you might have only noticed a giant mouth.  You may be thinking to yourself, “I’ve never seen another opening.  Do starfishes have an anus?”  Of course, this is one of the great questions of life.  Indeed,  most starfishes have a complete digestive system with the anus being a small opening on the top. However, there is a large order of starfish, the Paxillosida, that lack an anus.  The only other group of Echinoderms to lack an anus, and even an intestine, is the brittle stars.

A solitary black hole may also occur during specific phases of animals life cycle.  An incomplete digestive system is known in some insects including the sap-sucking aphid relatives, the Phylloxera, during their sexual phase.  Some larvae including those of some fish and proboscis worms can be anally deficient.  Certain lifestyles also can lead to solo agujero such as in parasitic species, like parasitic copepods.

It’s important to remember that all animals start development with one hole, the blastopore.  In the ventrally chosen, a second hole forms later.  So the question remains if some animals form only a single hole is it a mouth that used as anus or anus used as a mouth?  The proverbial digestive pore chicken and egg scenario.

As described in this excellent post, 

Blastopore formation is started by a protein called disheveled, which gets stuck at the top of the egg and then activates a specific set of genes. In the same location of jellyfish embryos, however, there are genes strikingly similar to the mouth genes of bilaterians. In the sea urchin, a bilaterian, these same mouth genes are also on the top of the embryo. However, disheveled has moved to the bottom. The blastopore forms at this new site of disheveled accumulation, rather than at the mouth. The mouth genes that remain on top still direct the formation of the mouth there. Martindale and Hejnol posit that moving disheveled from the top to the bottom of the embryo in some animals moved the location of blastopore, but that the mouth stayed put. In some bilaterians, like urchins and humans, the blastopore then became the anus. In this scenario all mouths are homologous to each other, whether the animal has one or two holes.

Evolution can be a truly wonderful thing and then sometimes it can produce an animal with a mouth that still uses its anus to feed.

The post A Tale of One Opening first appeared on Deep Sea News.

So, uh, I just learned that this is what a pufferfish skeleton looks like, and I think you all should know too pic.twitter.com/ecCXN8RTAV

— Liz Weinberg (@eaweinberg) November 30, 2018

So what are you looking at other than some truly sweet evolution?

What you are looking at are the spines of pufferfish composed of nanocrystalline hydroxyapatite,  protein(collagen),  and water, the same materials as scales.  Indeed, these spines are just modified scales.  And like other scales, these spines originate during development from the mesoderm layer of the dermis or the skin.

Dr. Brian Sidlauskas, Associate Professor and Curator of Fishes at Oregon State University,  notes puffers evolved from a group of fish (Porcupines, Molids, Triggerfishes, and filefishs) that all possessed ctenoid scales, denoted by small teeth along their outer edges.  “Filefishes actually feel fuzzy.  So it isn’t perhaps too surprising to imagine those scales expanding and getting more and more spiny.”

As you might expect, these spines evolved as anti-predator defense, similar to the ability of puffers to inflate.  However, it looks like the inflation likely evolved before the spikiness.

Evolution is amazing.

The post You Should Definitely Know about Pufferfish Skeletons first appeared on Deep Sea News.

For more updates on my research, follow along at jellybiologist.com, or on twitter @RebeccaRHelm

As a scientist, I love jellyfish, and I suffer for it. Up until a few years ago, I had no way of knowing exactly where or when the jellyfish I study would appear. So I traveled to Washington and France and Florida looking for them, and more often than not, came up empty handed. The most frustrating part of all this travel was that I had all the species I needed right at home, but couldn’t use them. That’s because jellyfish, like butterflies, are the last stage in a complicated life cycle. Jellyfish have a stage that’s analogous to a caterpillar, termed a ‘polyp’, which lives happily in the lab. So imagine studying butterflies, and having all the caterpillar you need, expect none of them will metamorphose. No matter how hard you try to convince them, they just sit there eating leaves, and so you travel all around the world to find and study the actual butterflies. That is the exact position researchers and aquarists have been in with jellyfish.

This is why I’m so excited to share with you a paper I just published in PLOS ONE on a simple method for triggering metamorphosis in a huge variety of jellyfish species. Now, rather than traveling halfway around the globe, scientists can add a couple drops of a special compound to their polyp tank, and have jellyfish to study in under a week! I hope this work will be helpful to many different kinds of jelly-lovers, form biologists to aquarists and beyond.

This research started out of frustration. I’d been traveling for over two years looking for the best species to study, and was consistently coming up short. I wanted to better understand the process of metamorphosis, called ‘strobilation’, but I needed to find a species that would easily strobilate in captivity. No luck. And so one day, rather than going out to look for jellies,  I decided it was time to spend a couple months indoors, to test out a hair-brained idea that was all together different.

Throughout the decades, a handful of scientist have recorded that this-or-that chemical, when added to water with this-or-that polyps species, will trigger strobilation. Most of these papers stretch back to the 70’s and earlier, and most have been largely forgotten. But I decided it was time to revisit those old studies, and test out different chemicals. The experiments were messy and quirky–I had a bunch of chemicals, jars, and polyps all soaking in different substances for different lengths of time–but I remember the exact moment when I got my first breakthrough.

I carried a small dish of polyps, which had been soaking in a type of chemical called an ‘indole’, to the microscope. I was working alone in the lab, and I was feeling pretty discouraged. It’d been two weeks of stirring up different chemical solutions, doling them out in precise proportions, and checking every single day for signs that the little polyps had begun metamorphosis. Nothing. But when I looked down at the polyps soaking in indoles…well, I think my lab notebook can express it better than I can (there was, um…some language):

Each polyp had formed a small ring below the tentacles. This ring was the first sign of metamorphosis. Each ring would eventually grow to be a tiny jellyfish (the pictures at the top of this post are the same animals I saw that day!) This species is the Pacific sea nettle, but the same compound also worked for species from the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Almost every species I tried would dutifully metamorphose into a tiny jellyfish.

Not only did this open up a whole new research avenue for me, it has become the foundation for my career. Now we can have tiny jellyfish of almost any species in under a week. Even box jellies!

But here’s a result that’s got me head scratching: one type of polyp, from a crown jellyfish, didn’t strobilate with the indoles. I tried all sorts of different combinations of conditions, nothing worked. But there are a couple really cool things about crown jellies that may explain why they didn’t respond. First, the polyp lives in a small tube, unlike any other species. So it’s possible the compound didn’t work because the polyp is mostly tucked away behind a barrier. But the second cool thing about this species is that it’s a very distant cousin of most of the species that I studied. So it is possible that over evolutionary time it evolved a slightly different biochemistry, which makes it insensitive to indoles. Similar to the way catnip gets cats high, but doesn’t have the same impact on people. Indoles works well on many related species of jellies, but not so well on a distant relative.

I’m now working on figuring out the reason why indoles works so well for some species. What genes might this compound help turn on and off? By studying metamorphosis in jellyfish, I hope to better understand how metamorphosis evolved over long time scales. For example, are there genetic similarities of metamorphosis between frogs, butterflies, and jellies?

Those results are still pending. For now, I’m enjoying all the new jellies we have growing in the lab. And I hope these results can be helpful to all those seeking to learn more about jellyfish in this coming new year!

Paper:

Rebecca R. Helm & Casey W. Dunn (2017). Indoles induce metamorphosis in a broad diversity of jellyfish, but not in a crown jelly (Coronatae). PLOS ONE 12(12): e0188601. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0188601

The post New Research Reveals How to Easily Grow Jellyfish In Captivity first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Imagine you are a Janthina snail, living on the surface of the open ocean, clinging to the edge of a raft. Miles of emptiness all around. In the day, rays of sunlight spear through the water, coming to a point so far below you can no longer see where they end. At night everything is black, you can almost feel the emptiness like a pressure, tingling on your skin. You cling to your raft as if your life depended on it, and it does. You don’t know how to swim.

You created the life raft you cling to—a collection of bubbles that keep you afloat. Your thin purple shell is heavy, and your body stout, if you let go you will will sink: first through the warm surface waters, and then the ocean will grow rapidly cold, light will fade and the pressure grow, it will take over two hours for your corps to hit the seafloor with a soft thud and a puff of muddy water. And so you hold on, and you build.

Your snail body is especially equipped to handle this strange world your ancestors somehow found themselves floating into. When you can, and when there’s need, you dip your head and upper body into the air. You curl your slimy underbelly into a ball, trapping a bubble and wrapping it in a layer of thick mucous. Carefully, you uncurl and stick this new bubble to your raft. Your snail slime hardens to a stiff rubbery texture, not easily popped. Sometimes your raft bumps into your prey— blue button jellies or Portuguese man-of-war— but you can’t steer or choose your direction out here in the open ocean, so much of the time, you simply wait. But you did not always live this way.

When you were young you lived below the surface, in the gentle embrace of the sea. You were free to move and hunt as you pleased. Your body was different, tender and round with a miniscule cup-shaped shell that covered your frame, and two small ‘wings’ that you used to swim. But it didn’t last. First, your vision went dim. Then you eyes began to break down, and blindness overtook you. Next, your ability to sense direction faltered, up and down became indistinguishable. No one knows quite how you made it to the surface. Some say you made a parachute of mucous that you used to sail slowly upwards. In the most poetic telling, you built yourself a minute bouquet of bubbles, clustered together at the end of a long string, like a handful of balloons. Blind and disoriented, you floated up into the unknown.

And then you hit something. The first boundary you’d ever felt—the soft rolling surface of the sea. Here you would complete your transformation into a young violet snail. Floating, unable to steer, you would have no need for eyes, no need for a sense of direction. This is where you would spend the rest of your life: at the mercy of the elements, suspended above the abyss.

Reading about the violet snail on that dark winter night, its life felt so precarious, so sad. But my friend Steve Haddock proposed another way of looking at things: one completely flipped around, literally. What if Janthina isn’t hanging over the abyss at all? There’s this scene in Pirates of the Caribbean where the ship flips upside down, and instead of sailing on the ocean, the ship sails on the sky. Perhaps to Janthina, the world is just like this. Instead of clinging to a raft, one mistake away from sinking, Janthina has a different view. Maybe to this snail, so perfectly adapted to life on the water’s surface, it’s not hanging upside down over the abyss, but instead resting right-side up on the top of the sky

Bibliography
Dan Laursen (1953) The Genus Ianthina: A Monograph.

Carol M. Lalli, Ronald W. Gilmer (1989). Pelagic Snails: The Biology of Holoplanktonic Gastropod Mollusks.

The post The harrowing life of the violet snail first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The 18 species of Histioteuthid squids, the biggest no larger than a football, are often strawberry colored, with dark photophores resembling black seeds adding to the sweet fruit-like appearance.   All the species live in the mesopelagic, that region in the ocean between 200 and 1000 meters that goes from dimly lit to a full on dark habitat.  Light comes from above in the form of attenuated sunlight and below in the form of bioluminescence.  Given the drastic changes in light with depth, the mesopelagic is filled with a cornea-copia of truly amazing, dare I say monstrous, visual adaptations.  The Histioteuthid squids are no expectation.  The left eye can be twice the diameter of the right eye, a trait only acquired with adulthood.  The left eye can gain such proportions it actually pushes the head out of alignment with the squid’s body in some species.

New work by Kate Thomas and colleagues reveals why these strawberry squid’s different eyes have made such a spectacle of themselves.  The group found that the squids oriented the enlarged left eye upward and the smaller right eye slightly downward.   The squids often held a slanted angle with their body so the eye looking upward was near 45˚ and the downward near 120˚.  Given the field of view of the eyes, the large eye would receive light from directly above to 90˚ horizontal on the left side.  The small eye from 43-198˚ or from directly below to horizontally on the right side.

To keep these eyes aimed in the right area, the strawberry squids also demonstrate a peculiar behavior.  Squids would ratchet themselves, turning the body while the head maintain the same orientation.  The head would, at a precise stopping point, suddenly snap around to match the body orientation. “This may allow histioteuthids to compensate for the unbalanced fields of view created by [different sized] eyes and rapidly change which direction each eye is facing, or to scan their environment.”

But why two different eyes?  Thomas explains, “Eyes are metabolically expensive to grow, maintain, and use, so while larger eyes can improve both sensitivity and resolution, selection probably favors an eye just large enough to perform a necessary visual task but no larger.”  It is actually cheaper, in the total calories needed sense, to have the eyes perform to unique functions and allow one of them to be itty bitty.

And with that, my friends, eye take my leave.

The post The Little Strawberry Squid with the Big Eye first appeared on Deep Sea News.

While this misconception or inaccuracy may seem harmless, it could pose problems for future conservation efforts, as people are more likely to support conservation of cute rather than creepy-looking animals. While the angler fish is easily turned into a scary monster, the similar-sized tiny Pac-Man looking octopus is cute and popular with the public…If images are posted on social media by laypeople in a way that appears sensational and even heartless, and without any accurate information about the animals, then there is no resulting respect for these sea creatures or educational value. Simply viewing these creatures as freaks, ignores the importance of their role in keeping our oceans healthy.

More recently, DSN republished a very tongue-and-cheek rant about the uselessness of ocean sunfish.  This drew criticism in the comments. “We are in no position to dis other species.” “Agree with…other pelagic researchers…molas are awesome, fast, predators that given their numbers and chosen prey must play an integral role in the open ocean ecosystem. Please stop spreading this rant.”  Let’s not also forget the post where we railed against the cute, cuddly view of dolphins and received a backlash of comments.

So first thing is for everybody to take a breath and stop taking yourselves so damn seriously.

Nobody is going to protect and conserve what they do not know or understand.  These pieces use a whimsical and creative writing style and informal tone to draw the audiences in.  Quite simply these posts draw views, far more than other kinds of posts here at DSN.  The reason?  Because we tap into the human curiosity of the natural world and instill a sense of awe. Or maybe because most people have a sense of humor and like science with a helping of laughter. Humor, ick factor, bizarreness, oddities, and challenging the way we think about species allows us to deliver knowledge.  How many people actually knew about ocean sunfish before the viral rant?

More than once over the years DSN has been criticized for being “too informal”, “not being serious enough about science”, and by far my favorite to date “tarting up science.”

This “oh-so-hip” presentation of a very interesting phenomenon is regrettable. I stopped reading halway [sic] through it as I couldn’t take any more. Just present the science. Tarting it up for people to read is pointless. Such readers have no value. Too bad, I would have liked to learn the real scinece [sic] presented here.

I CAN NOT DISAGREE MORE WITH THESE COMMENTERS.  Our “tarting it up” is and will remain a core value for DSN.  We will continue to work diligently to make science accessible, relevant, current, and of course fun.  Now more than ever.  You know what happens to science writing that is not engaging?  Nobody engages with it.   Quite frankly, the old way of dry science communication and being serious about science did not work.  Science communication occurred within echo chamber and we all patted ourselves on the back for a job well done.  Now, look where we are at. We need new methods engaging new audiences—those audiences that some think have no value.  For Pete’s sake, let’s lighten up and get sense of humor.

More than once here at DSN, we have referred to ocean organisms as monsters.  From parasitic crustaceans to colossal squids, we have playfully applied the monster moniker.  Quite frankly, I believe it is completely acceptable to call deep-sea species monsters, freaks, and oddities.  Anything else would not acknowledge how other worldly, bizarre, fascinating, unique, and, indeed, special these deep-sea species actually are.  That otherness reflects a fascinating evolutionary trajectory these organisms to adapt to the environmental extremes of the deep sea.  They are nothing short of beautiful monsters full of adaptive solutions to the most unique place on earth.  If Monster’s Inc., Where the Wild Things Are, and Cookie Monster taught us anything is that monster’s are lovable and beautiful.

By the way did you know the spinal column of M. mola contains fewer vertebrae and is shorter in relation to the body than that of any other fish.  That’s weird.  Why and how did that happen?  Which brings me to my next point.  When we acknowledge oddity, everyone’s natural next questions are why and how? That’s a good thing…opening the door for some amazing science communication.  To borrow from the ever articulate Jamie Vernon, “Curiosity expands our worldview.”   This weirdness inspires awe and instead of harming them may ultimately lead to their protection.

There is also nothing wrong with acknowledging that some animals suck.  Evolution does not create perfect animals.  Evolution creates just good enough animals.  Anything changes—environment, competitors, predators—those species become not so good.  The history of life on Earth is riddled with story of story of species that just could not cut it; over five billion in fact or more than 99% of all species are now extinct.  The Mola mola, or the ocean sunfish, in many regards is a ridiculous animal with some very peculiar behaviors and evolutionarily good enough.  Of course, I love ocean sunfish because of these.  Also take pandas.  They kind of suck at being a species.

Female pandas can expect a solid 16 years of fertility, but they only ovulate once a year, and can only handle one set of offspring every two years. There’s no clearer recipe for extinction.

In 1940, geneticist Richard Goldschmidt suggested that new species may arise not by gradual change but by macromutations.  Of course, these major mutational changes may be disastrous and fatal.  He called these monsters.  But in very rare circumstances, one of these macromutations, by shear dumb luck, may produce a very well adapted animal ready to exploit a completely new way of life.  His term of these?  Hopeful monsters.

I choose to embrace those hopeful monsters for their oddity, their differences, and sometimes even their suckiness.

The post So yeah ocean sunfish are ridiculous, dolphins are @#$@&, and deep-sea anglerfish are monsters first appeared on Deep Sea News.

*alternative titles include “Looking a gift seahorse (genome) in the mouth”, “My kingdom for a seahorse genome”, “Hold your seahorses“, and “The galloping evolution of seahorses“.

Let’s face it, seahorses, pipefishes, and seadragons are messed up. That’s not a subjective opinion but an evolutionary fact.  It’s like all the approximately 300 species in Syngnathidae (the family of fish that contains all these critters) held a meeting and decided unanimously “Nah, screw it, we’ll do things however we damn well please.”  The Syngnathids are revolutionaries of the fish world.  ¡Viva la Evolución Revolución!

Seriously, almost everything in these species is different.  There is the elongated snouts and small mouths and jaws.  The pelvic and caudal fins are often gone.  The scales are replaced with an armor of bony plates.  Let’s not forget about the whole “male pregnancy” thing where the males nourish the developing embryos in a pouch.  Seahorses take it all to a whole other level with the prehensile tail and the vertical body axis.

So ultimately, one is left wondering what’s up with those genes?  Well, thanks to an intrepid group of geneticist, the complete genome of the tiger tail seahorse, Hippocampus comes, is complete.  With the full genome comes great power, the ability to compare this genome to the other sequenced fish.

Part of the story regarding the bizarreness of seahorses is gene loss.   Secretory calcium-binding phosphoprotein (SCPP) genes code for matrix proteins that are important in the formation of bone and teeth.  These genes are completely missing in Hippocampus comes and may explain why seahorses do not have teeth.  Did I forget to mention that?  Yeah seahorses and seadragons are toothless. The tbx4 gene, conserved in jawed vertebrates, acts as a regulator of hindlimb formation.  The gene is completely absent in the seahorse genome and explains the absence of those pesky pelvic fins.

What about that whole “male pregnancy” thing?   The H. comes genome contains six pastn genes, part of a family of genes that regulate the hatching of embryos.  The researchers conducted extra work, like the genome was not enough, suggesting a role for these pastn genes in brood pouch development and/or hatching of embryos within the brood pouch prior to birth.

Seahorses have also apparently lost many conserved noncoding genes (CNEs) that function as enhancers, repressors, and insulators of other genes.  1,612 CNEs have been lost in seahorses.  Compare this to the 281 in the Nile perch.  It is unclear how the loss of the CNEs may be related to some of the oddities of the seahorse, but loss of CNEs is tied to moderate short stature and shortened limbs in humans.

How I imagine the scientists of the study acted once they finished the genome

The awesomeness of this kind of work cannot even be articulated.  The researchers have done an amazing job of unpacking the genome of a seahorse and showing how genome evolution directly leads to all the uniqueness of seahorses.  Admittedly, I am little disappointed in not seeing a discussion of the prehensile tails genes and armored plating discussed. I guess I’ll need to wait a bit to build my army of aquatic minions to take over the world.

The post In the evolution of fishes, this is a one seahorse race* first appeared on Deep Sea News.