Larvaceans’ underwater ‘snot palaces’ boast elaborate plumbing
Underwater laser scans have revealed new details of how sea creatures called giant larvaceans feed themselves by flapping a filmy tail inside a cloud of snot. But what a cloud it is. A giant larvacean produces an elaborate mucus home for itself that bioengineer Kakani Katija of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California on occasion calls a “snot palace.” The mucus marvels rise out of the heads of four species of spineless, roughly tadpole-shaped giant larvaceans living in the twilight depths of the bay. To study such fragile architecture, Katija and colleagues have been working on a robotic laser imaging system called DeepPIV. It detects water flows inside the mucus clouds and lets researchers figure out the palace’s inner 3-D structure. The newest reconstructions of flow suggest how inner ducts, chambers and valves, all made of mucus, help harvest bacteria and other suitable food particles from the normally weak soup of seawater, Katija and colleagues report June 3 in Nature. In this illustration...