Salps

[Melissa]

Recent studies at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have focused on a barrel-shaped sea creature that may remind you of a streamlined jellyfish. This creature is the salp, a small gelatinous invertebrate that moves through the water using jet-like water propulsion while it filter feeds on plankton and other tiny organsims.


Salps have long been recognized as efficient filter-feeders, but scientists had assumed that the salp diet consisted primarily of larger food particles and that smaller particles would slip through the filtration system. New studies indicate that salps may be filtering particles "spanning four orders of magnitude in size. This is like eating everything from a mouse to a horse," says Larry Madin, WHOI Director of Research.

And why, you ask is this so interesting? Because of several reasons. Salps, which may exist alone, or in larger communiites, can survive in areas of the open ocean where the supply of larger food particles is low, and where other grazers may not survive. Furthermore, the range of particles that salps consume enhances their role in carbon cycling. They essentially consume the entire flora of microbes and excrete it in densely packed carbon-containing fecal pellets. These pellets sink to the ocean floor, removing carbon from the surface waters of the ocean, leaving more space for the upper ocean to accumulate more carbon. This in turn limits the amount of CO2 that rises into the atmosphere.

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Small ocean creatures, the salps. But they perform a big function in our oceans.

[Marieke]

wow! i have never heard of salps before! i haven't finished The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One so i don't know if she discusses these or not. i'm about to start Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean so i'll be sure to watch out for salps.

i love the pictures, too, melissa!

oh, and this is great:
"This is like eating everything from a mouse to a horse..."

[Melissa]

Makes you hungry right?

[Marieke]

Haha! Yes! I'm actually headed to the kitchen to see what's for dinner...
:D