Alien Beast?! Terror from the Deep?!?

Nice picture, not so sure about the subject matter tho' !

When I was about 10 or 12 I had a real phobia of what we call here in NZ "Slaters", AKA wood louse, AKA isopod etc absolutely freaked if I saw one, anyhow we had a class trip to the local Natural History Museum and my incredibly stupid teacher dropped a large (very, I'm sure it was about 8 foot long!!) fossil one in my lap!! The screams were bloodcurdling I'm told! & the museum were nearly short one specimen. I kinda got over it when I started marine science and hauled in a net were the catch was teaming with the things!!

I saw the original specimen not that long ago, but it's been damaged....the blood smeared fangs seem to have vanished and it had shrunk to about 15 cm!

J
 
Hi jean,

maybe you'll feel better if i tell you that slaters are a good 'emergency' food for baby cuttlefish... they seem to last in saltwater for ages and cuttles seem to like them... it was the closest thing to a shrimp i could find when i ran out of them for a few days...

C
 
maybe you'll feel better if i tell you that slaters are a good 'emergency' food for baby cuttlefish... they seem to last in saltwater for ages and cuttles seem to like them... it was the closest thing to a shrimp i could find when i ran out of them for a few days...

Welllllll I s'pose everything has some sort of redeeming feature Colin but they still give me the creeps!!!

Interesting coincidence Just went to a departmental seminar on Bryozoans (lace corals, sea moss, sea mats etc etc) as epibionts on motile substrates! the researcher in question was looking at large isopods & Picnogonids (sea spiders) from Antarctica, Horseshoe crabs, blue crabs and sea snakes but also fossil Trilobites, crabs and "squid" (it had an external shell!) pretty interesting stuff. We suggested he also need to look at Nautilus and Ammonites!! essentially he's trying to compare extant critters with fossils to determine the evolutionary history of the bryozoans, very cool!

J
 
Is the relationship ecto-commensal or parasitic, or both?

Hi John,

Mainly ecto-commensal from what I gather the host appears to suffer very little from the passengers and in some cases may get a slight camouflage benefit (crabs etc). Only exception to this was a trilobite where the bryos had overgrown all of one eye and most of the other! :cyclops:

We're also pretty certain that one of our fish spp has bryo's growing on the skin (fish has no scales) but we need to wait until one dies before we can get our bryo person to examine them. This fish is also known to carry hydroids.

Cheers
J
 
WhiteKiboko said:
Melissa said:
- isn't that just a cockroach by another name? :yuck:

yes but a bit larger than the ordinary ones...walking down the back streets of charleston at night you'll see some rather huge ones...

like an idiot, i forgot one slight detail..... they can fly :roll: was reminded after dispatching two over the past few days.....
 

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