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May 21 2012 - 11:16am
Fitting nine of anything on two fingers is impressive. These mollusks and echinoderms are a teeny-tiny sample of the ocean's biodiversity. The Census of Marine Life estimates that there are at least one million species of plants and animals in the sea -- and most have not been...
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Nov 15 2012 - 10:58am
The feathery strands at the back of this nudibranch’s (Chromodoris willani) body are no mere adornment: they’re its gills!
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Aug 9 2012 - 10:27am
Where ocean currents were strong, ancient rudist “recliners” lay unattached on the seabed. Notice the pink tentacles, which were used to filter feed. Learn more about ocean life throughout deep time in our Ocean Over Time interactive or an image gallery.
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Nov 29 2012 - 11:11am
Over a 10-year period NOAA scientists have collected 72,000 seawater samples, and their data show that the ocean is becoming more acidic because of climate change-caused warming. That small shift is enough to dissolve the shells of animals like this pteropod in the lab—or even in the ocean. Because...
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Jul 5 2011 - 5:03pm
During the summer of 1998, scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science made a series of disturbing discoveries in the Chesapeake Bay. In June, they collected an unusual specimen: a single marine snail that looked similar to some of the bay's native inhabitants but clearly had different...
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Sep 28 2012 - 12:12pm
A longshoreman stands in front of a large pile of oyster shells on waterfront pier in Atlantic City in 1910. Back then, oysters were incredibly abundant. In the late 1800s, fishermen pulled in 10 million bushels of oysters each year but, by the mid-1900s, the catch had dropped to 1 or 2 million...
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Nov 8 2011 - 2:24pm
“It is strange to think of a sea turtle as an ecosystem,” says Amanda Feuerstein, program coordinator and research assistant at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, “but they are…they have all of these other animals living on their skin and shells.”
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Dec 4 2009 - 3:27pm
About 100 million years ago, during the heyday of the dinosaurs, reefs were built by mollusks called rudist clams. Like modern clams, rudists were bivalves, with two shells (or valves) joined at a hinge. But they sure didn’t look like modern clams!
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Apr 25 2013 - 3:04pm
A chambered nautilus shell.
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Oct 12 2011 - 4:56pm
In the spring of 2011, a research crew from Oceana spent two months in the brackish Baltic Sea. The Baltic faces challenges from pollution, algae blooms, over fishing, and invasive species. Oceana researchers gathered data, samples, photographs, and videos with the goal of proposing an...
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Nov 8 2011 - 4:34pm
Amanda Feuerstein with a nesting olive ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea). Feuerstein is a co-author of a study that surveyed algae, crustaceans, mollusks, and other epibionts that live on olive ridley and green sea turtles in the Pacific Ocean. You can read about the study on the Ocean Portal blog.
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May 1 2013 - 9:48am
These "elevator" rudists, an ancient bivalve, used one long heavy valve to anchor themselves in the sediment. They used their tentacles (shown here in pink) to filter food from the sea water. Discover more about the ancient ocean at our feature Ocean Over Time.
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Dec 20 2010 - 11:44am
Yolanda Villacampa is a museum specialist in the invertebrate zoology department of Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. She is standing surrounded by the invertebrate zoology collection.
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Sep 29 2011 - 2:26pm
This bivalve mollusk is native to the Caspian Sea, lagoons of the Black Sea, and their inflowing rivers. It lives in fresh and brackish water and cannot tolerate full seawater. In the 18th and 19th centuries, zebra mussels spread through European canals, reaching the Baltic Sea and many European...
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Jan 12 2012 - 4:01pm
Ari Daniel Shapiro is joined for this episode of One Species at a Time by serious beachcombers along the high-tide line of Sanibel Island, Florida. These “shellers” come in search of beautiful sea shells, sometimes no bigger than a grain of rice, that are the remains of marine snails, bivalves, and...
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Aug 3 2010 - 9:54am
This beautiful spider conch (Lambis chiragra) was collected by Census of Marine Life scientists conducting research near China.
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Dec 17 2012 - 9:26am
The jingle shell (Anomia simplex) is a common bivalve found on the Atlantic coast of North America, amongst the more commonly known clams and oysters. As with oysters, the lower shell is glued to a hard surface. Even after the mollusk is dead, the shell keeps its beautiful and shiny exterior....
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Jan 4 2013 - 9:03am
A colony of 100 million flame shells (Limaria hians) was discovered in Scotland in 2012, and is thought to be the biggest in the world. Flame shells are bivalve mollusks that are shaped a bit like scallops—but they have bright orange tentacles exuding from their shells. Despite their bright color...
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Nov 5 2010 - 1:08pm
The Great Barrier Reef site in Australia was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1981. The site is the world’s most extensive stretch of coral reef with probably the richest animal diversity anywhere. There are over 1,500 species of fish, about 400 types of coral, 4,000 types of mollusk (...
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Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am
These Pacific cephalopods illustrate the wide diversity among this group of mollusks. You can learn about a relative, the giant squid (Architeuthis dux), in our Giant Squid section.
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Nov 8 2011 - 5:39pm
These baby olive ridleys (Lepidochelys olivacea) will eventually provide a home to crustaceans, mollusks, and other epibionts. That's according to a survey of epibionts living on mature, nesting olive ridleys and green sea turtles in Jalisco, Mexico. The related study was published in the October...
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May 2 2013 - 10:48am
Editor's note: This is an excerpt from Daniel Botkin's new book The Moon in the Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered. He will be in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, May 8th for a lecture and book signing through the Smithsonian Associates.
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Dec 4 2009 - 3:21pm
This illustration shows the edge of a warm inland sea during the Cretaceous Period, heyday of the dinosaurs. Constantly shifting sediment supported new groups of organisms, including rudist clams—major molluscan reef builders. Various organisms have taken a turn as the dominant tropical reef...
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Feb 15 2013 - 10:56am
This pair of sea butterflies (Limacina helicina) flutter not far from the ocean's surface in the Arctic. Sea butterflies are a type of sea snail, but instead of dragging themselves around the seafloor with a muscular foot, they flap their adapted feet like butterfly wings! They are very small—...
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