Merry Christmas! The Twelfth Dredge of Biomass

 

The Twelfth Dredge of Biomass

by Raymond K. Nakamura

For these taxing times, I tried a taxonomic take on an old favourite. Here is an annotated list of animal phyla, chosen for matching the number of syllables in the gifts mentioned in the song The Twelve Days of Christmas.

On the twelfth dredge of biomass, my true love gave to me —

This is supposing that you and your true love are fans of invertebrate zoology.

12 Annelida

Annelids are segmented worms, which include earthworms, as well as some marine ones called Christmas tree worms.

 

11 Platyhelminthes

Platyhelminthes are flatworms such as planarians, known for their ability to regenerate after being cut in half. 

10 Loricifera

Loricifera are relatively new in their discovery (1983). They would make fancy ornaments if they weren’t so tiny.

 

9 Cnidarians

Cnidarians include jellyfish, sea anemones, and coral, not to be confused with A Christmas Carol (a Charles Dickens story that can be read here on Project Gutenberg, a website sharing stories too old for copyright, or you can read about it on Wikipedia).

8 Nematoda

Nematoda are mostly tiny worms found in so many places that American nematodologist Nathan Cobb said in 1915,

 “If all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable ... we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes."

 

7 Arthropoda

Arthropoda include all the insects and all the crustaceans. I studied barnacles, which are arthropods, and so did Charles Darwin so they must be cool.

 

6 Priapulids

Priapulids are unsegmented marine worms also sometimes call “penis worms” for their approximate similarity in shape and sometimes size. Perhaps not appropriate for a true love to send.

 

5 Chordata

Chordata are the phylum to which all the gifts in the original 12 Days of Christmas song included, except for the pear tree. 

4 Chaetognaths

Chaetognaths are tiny creatures that would look like nice ornaments or awesome dragons if they were bigger.

 

3 Molluscs

Molluscs are a diverse group that include clams, mussels, oysters, escargot, calamari and other items that go well with garlic butter. The creature I drew is a Nautilus, Greek for sailor, and the name of Captain Nemo’s submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (a Jules Verne book you can read at Project Gutenberg).

 

2 Tardigrades

Tardigrades are tiny creatures also known as “water bears.” They are remarkably resilience creatures capable of living in many places. They were even spilled on the moon, although we don’t know if they survived that.

 

1 Echinodermata

Echinodermata include sea stars, sea urchins, sand dollars, sea cucumbers, brittle stars, and feather stars. I got interested in marine biology because of sea urchin gonads and ended up doing a doctorate on of the hydrodynamics sand dollars. Please don’t use them as tree ornaments no matter how perfect they seem for the task.

Whatever your inclination, I hope you have a maritime merry time this winter solstice, trying out these alternatives for all the verses and putting the “sea” back in Season’s Greetings.

Diving into an Alien World

By Claire Eamer

In a couple of months, I'll be touring schools and libraries in Ontario, talking about some of the marvellous and strange animals in my book, Lizards in the Sky: Animals Where You Least Expect Them. So I've been thinking about critters and presentations and cool pictures and things like that... and, well, one thing led to another, and I found a whole raft of new, cool, and utterly weird critters in one of my favourite habitats, the deep ocean.

The ROV Hercules operates deep in the Atlantic Ocean.
Photo credit: Mountains in the Sea Research Team;
the IFE Crew; and NOAA/OAR/OER

We're talking deep, here--really deep. So deep and so strange that exploring the deep ocean is like exploring an alien planet. In fact, you need the equivalent of a space ship to go to the deep ocean, something that can see in the absolute dark and survive pressures that would crush the toughest submarine.

But, oh, the wonders when you get there!

How about this? Five full kilometres below the sunny surface of the Caribbean Sea is the Cayman Trough. It's utterly dark and very cold down there, but not everywhere. Just last month, scientists released video taken by a remotely operated undersea vehicle. It shows mineral chimneys at tall as four-storey buildings, belching smoky black water as hot as 400 degrees Celsius, four times the boiling point of water.

Even more astounding were the creatures lurking around those vents: fireworms that look like woolly caterpillars and delicate, almost-colourless shrimp with special organs for detecting hot water.

Super-heated water and rocks billow up from an undersea
volcano in the Pacific Ocean near New Zealand.
Photo credit: Submarine ROF 2006, NOAA Vents Program.

Over in the Pacific Ocean, there's an even deeper spot--Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, on the west side of the Pacific. At about 12.5 kilometres, it's the deepest spot in all Earth's oceans. And even there, where the pressure is 1000 times the pressure we experience at Earth's surface--even there, you'll find life. A lot of it! Tiny life, to be sure--bacteria. But they swarm there far more densely than in the shallower water at the edge of the Trench.

You don't even have to go super-deep to find the super-weird. Over the last couple of years, scientists have been finding some spectacularly strange creatures in the ocean surrounding Antarctica. National Geographic compiled a list of the five weirdest Antarctic species, including a transparent fish and sea spiders that breathe through holes in their bodies.

This feather-pen-like coral lives almost 2.5 kilometres 

below the ocean surface at Davidson Seamount, California.

Photo credit: NOAA/Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Not to be outdone, the biologist who writes one of my favourite science blogs, The Echinoblog, compiled a list of the ten weirdest Antarctic invertebrates. His list includes a 30-centimetre worm with serious teeth!

Me, I'm waiting eagerly for the next list--maybe longer and even weirder.

In the meantime, I guess I had better get back to what started all this, preparing some presentations about my own favourite weird beasties. Seeya!