favourite invertebrate

Favorite Invertebrate:

It's caught up in between Portunus pelagicus, the blue crab, and the barnacle.
 
curioucity: No, its a small, squishy, and brightly colored critter that lives in the ocean and eats jelly fish and anenomes. They then extract the poisons and store them in their own skin for defense.
 
so, what type of phylum the nudibranch is in?
Mollusc?
Coelenterata? (sorry, I have been really away from Biology for a year, so if the name is wrong, forgive me......)
or what?
 
They would also give you the worst sting if you were dumb enough to touch one. It would be better to pet a man-of-war. Bright colors in the natural world usually equate with a biohazard or radiation symbol.
 
oh, speaking about man-o-war, I remembered this odd shaped jellyfish that has a body floating on the sea-surface, while right underneath it, hordes of very long tentacles are ready to catch a fish.....
Do you know the name?
 
I bet yes..... the last thing I remembered bout that thing is that the name has something to do with the word 'portugese'
 
Those things are monsters. You should see the rashes they can dish out to the unwary and impetuous.

Speaking of outlandish jellyfish, you might also be enthralled by the vast numbers of them that strand themselves in bayous and inlets and simple coasts every season, eventually to end their unusual little invertebrate lives swept up by the uncaring tide on an indeterminate shore.
 
I guess that's the problem with eyeless creature....
Wait a second..... how do jellyfish sense their prey? Infrared detector? 'Drones'?
 
They actually have rudimentary eyes, called ocelli. Box jellyfish even have complex eyes.
 
Where are the eyes located? Tip of tentacles?
Also, how do the rudimentary eyes work? do they only see things as blurry?

One more thing about man-o-war: What creatures compose man-o-war? I particularly ask about the phylums.... for some reasons I doubt that man-o-war consists of merely small coelenteratas...
 
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Originally posted by NenarTronian
Forgive me if i sound dumb, but i am fond of Caecillians. I am not sure if they have a spine... they are amphibians.. look like translucent worms..big white worms with hairs.. :D

That's Sicillians big hairy people that live in Sicily, spineless but still vertebrates. (This is just a joke for all you mafiosoes out there.)
 
some cool ones

in Hawaii, there's a sea anenome that secretes a shell on it's base for hermit crabs to occupy (anenomes benefit from mobility and picking up bits of food from hemit crab meals). This shell looks indistinguishable from mollusc shells, and, in fact, was given a genus and species name based solely on the shell before an organism was ever described. Stupid taxonomists!

There lives on Cetacea, ectoparasitic (however the parasitic nature of this organism is in question) crustaceans (Family Cyamidae). All the species in this family only live on Cetacea (no free living forms) and most species live only on single species of cetacean (obligatory species specificity). It was thought that these crustaceans sucked whale blood or at least ate whale skin, however it now appears that they are grazers feeding on diatoms and algae that live on whale skin.

There is a parasitic barnacle (Rhizocephalan: a crustacean) that lives on a species of crab that changes its secondary sex characteristics (makes males into females). Apparently parasitic barnacles are prevalent.

In the Indo-West Pacific, lives the blue ring(ed) octopus that has an accessory salivary gland in which it sequesters bacteria which secrete tetrodotoxin. Presumably this tetrodotoxin protects the octopods from predation and would account for their bright warning coloration. Many humans die yearly from blue ringed octopus bites. Interestingly, other animals which sequester this bacteria and, due to the tetrodotoxin, are dangerous to humans are poison arrow frogs and at least one puffer fish species.
 
I just learned about the most interesting spider.
I can't remember its name but it only lives for a year and breeds once, its babies feed off a kind of "baby food" for the first few days of life but moult and then require real food, the mother litterally sacrifices herself and presses her body onto the young ones to encourage them to eat her. Even though her instincts tell her she wants to do this their stings make her itch and she then starts trying to scratch them off, but the thousands of bites eventually overwhelm her and she is liquified by her young and slurped up.

My mother would never do that for me:(
 
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