Natures wonders: giant larvacean's 'snot palaces' (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, June 15, 2020, 19:12 (1412 days ago) @ David Turell

Weird sea bottom delicate creatures with food gathering complex mechanism:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/larvaceans-underwater-snot-palaces-boast-elaborate-...

"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.

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"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.

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"In building those homes, larvaceans remind Katija a bit of spiders. Plenty of animals build homes and traps, but larvaceans and spiders are among the few that don’t collect building material or dig and sculpt soil. Instead, they secrete all their architecture.

"And much like a spider weaving a web anew each day, larvaceans are thought to make and remake their mucus houses. A millimeter-sized gob of mucus beads up on a larvacean’s head. Then the blob can inflate into a finished house in 45 minutes.

"When fully inflated, a plump, curved, inner mucus house cradles the larvacean as the animal’s swishing tail pumps seawater through the structure. Encasing all of this plumbing and the animal cuddled against it lies the big floaty envelope of the outer house. A larvacean creates the whole palace, even ribbed walls and intricate chutes, without arms or legs or even a snout that pokes the mucus into shape or nudges parts together.

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"As seawater throbs through this plumbing, the stream of food particles grows more concentrated as it approaches the animal’s mouth. As Katija, a bioengineer interested in taking design inspiration from nature, points out, these animals have evolved an inflatable filtration system."

Comment: Amazing. Not really comparable to spider. They design their own web patterns. These creatures have self-forming mucous it seems. My guess is the mucous contains charged molecules which by attraction form the shapes. A God design? Certainly not by chance.