Welcome to Horton's Hints

This is a sea gooseberry (Phylum Ctenophora). If you are from the Pacific Northwest, I am certain that you have run into these at some point whether you noticed or not. They can be found all over the place, I have seen most of mine at the end of the pier in White Rock, BC. They are quite amazing little creatures. The lines along their body are cilia organized into combs for movement, while the two long tentacle looking projections are for capturing prey, usually rotifers or copepods. They are bioluminescent just like many cnidarians (jellyfish) and so can be seen glowing in the fall in the waters of the Pacific Northwest.

From the same family as sea horses, the leafy sea dragon is a rare but beautiful creature. It preys on shrimp and small fish but oddly enough has no teeth. Only found around the south half of Australia, efforts have been made to have them in public aquariums but with little success. They are very unstable outside of their habitat and have never been bred successfully in captivity. Consequently very few aquariums have them, Monterey Bay Aquarium is one of a handful. While looking at it you see the clear resemblance to seahorses, they are actually quite different. Their skin is rigid and so they cannot curl up their tail like seahorse and also move more like a submarine, mostly stationary using the fins along the side of its head to steer.

In light of Halloween being just behind us. I thought it intriguing that I should discover an article about spiders that come back from “death”.  Scientists studying the time it takes to kill a spider by drowning. After the spiders had “drown” (some being left in the water for over 40 hours) the researchers removed them from the water and then left them out to dry in order to determine their dry weight. A few hours later they began to twitch and get back up on their feet and move around. It seems as though they put themselves into a type of comatose state, reducing metabolic process down to those necessary for survival and not requiring air. It’s an amazing discovery but could you imagine being the one to discover it. They had to have been thinking, “okay who is the joker who moved the spiders” or ” who switched the dead one for the live one”.  I’m glad I wasn’t in the lab that day.