bone-eating snot-flower

image of Osedax mucofloris, a new species of deepsea wormThat's roughly what Osedax mucofloris means. It's a new species of "zombie worm" that feeds on whale-fall (which may be the most self-explanatory piece of bioscience jargon ever). O. mucofloris was discovered on a "planted" whale carcass in the shallow North Atlantic, near Sweden, by a collaborative research team from the Natural History Museum, Tjärnö Marine Biological Laboratory and the University of Hawaii. Its only known relatives hail from whale carcasses in the deep (1500–3000m) northeast Pacific, but O. mucofloris can be grown in aquaria.

I swiped the image from BBC News, which has several more pictures; I got there via the AIR blog. Although, sadly, the research article isn't open access, that page contains the abstract and a neat video (direct link to .mov file).

But really, I just like saying "bone-eating snot-flower".

kritters | sennoma | 22 Oct, 2005 |

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