The Amazing Colors of Deep Sea Slugs

Written by tonyleather
From: http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/

Photo: Doug Deep

This spectacular looking creature is not an alien lifeform, but one of 3,000 varieties of sea slugs that live on ocean floors around the world. They are among the most visually stunning animals that you could ever hope to see, and while the name sea slug is somewhat yucky, the alternative, nudibranch, sounds rather sophisticated. These amazing mobile works of art can really make you gasp - they look that good!

Photo: Doug Deep

The word "nudibranch" comes from the Latin nudus, naked, and the Greek brankhia, hence 'naked gills'. The name comes from the flower-like gills found on the back of many types. They use the gills to breathe. Nudibranches are soft-bodied molluscs and are related to snails and slugs, so are commonly called sea slugs. They do not have shells.

Photo: Doug Deep

Their means of defence are camouflage, toxic secretions and stinging cells. The rainbow of bright colours that many wear is a warning to predators.

Photo: Doug Deep

They have very small eyes that only sense light and dark so they are basically blind. However that is not a problem because of their horn-like protrusions called rhinophores. They use them to taste, smell and feel the ocean around them. They detect chemicals that tell the sea-slug everything it needs to know, like where food is and where other nudibranchs are.

Photo: Doug Deep

They are carnivores and many are able to eat what other sea creatures can't. Sea creatures that contain stinging toxins, like the anemone or soft corals, are eaten by the sea-slugs which then convert or use the toxins for their own defences.

Photo: Parent Gery

Some varieties contain a type of algae in their transparent bodies, which, when exposed to sunlight, produce nutrients which they use for energy! They come in an incredible variety of colours and patterns. Blue with yellow dots, green and black, red and purple, white with yellow accents, the list goes on and on. Suffice it to say that if you can imagine it, there's probably a nudibranch to fit the bill.

Photo: Nick Hobgood

Many secrete chemicals when they are threatened. The chemicals may either make them very distasteful or even toxic. That's why they are not good for the aquarium! The chemicals they release may cause other animals to be very stressed, or even die! Some are also able to store the stinging cells of the hydroids or other cnidarians they feed on in their cerata. Many are brightly coloured to warn the predators not to eat them, and also to match their surrounding, which allow them to camouflage themselves from the predators.

Photo: Chriswan Sungkono

Nudibranchs are simultaneous hermaphrodites, meaning each slug has both male and female reproductive organs at the same time. They practice internal fertilisation, and do it side-by-side, facing opposite directions. Sometimes, one will act as the male partner and the other as the female. At other times, they may fertilise each other. After mating, they go their separate ways and each lays its egg mass. They usually die after laying their eggs.

Photo: Jens Patersen

In some cases, the eggs are laid on or near a food source and the young hatch fully developed and commence feeding. In other cases, the young hatch and are carried away in the current. They eventually settle onto a food source and continue developing into adults. The juveniles usually have shells, but lose them as adults. There is no doubt whatever that these incredible creatures are a living rainbow of such beauty that the sight of them makes you smile. Some things in nature are almost beyond belief in their glorious appearance, and sea-slugs certainly rate amongst those.

Photo: Nick Hobgood

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4

Rob Lammle Cast Away: 5 Amazing Stories of Messages in Bottles

by Rob Lammle

Whenever a message in a bottle is discovered on a beach or floating in the ocean, it feels like something out of a fairy tale. The idea that two people have made a connection that mathematics would say is virtually impossible gives us hope that life is more than a series of random events. Here are five stories of the almost unbelievable connections these messages have brought about.

1. A Ticket to Freedom

During a 1979 cruise to Hawaii, Dorothy and John Peckham passed the time by writing notes and throwing them overboard inside empty champagne bottles. They asked anyone who found one of their bottles to write them back, and even went so far as to include a $1 bill to cover the postage.

On March 4, 1983, John’s 70th birthday, the couple received a letter from Hoa Van Nguyen. Nguyen, a former soldier in the Vietnamese Army, said he and his younger brother had found one of the Peckhams’ bottles as the two men were floating 15 kilometers from the shore of Songkhla Province in Thailand. They were braving the waters of the Pacific in a small, shallow riverboat in order to escape the Communist regime in Vietnam. When they saw the bottle, they felt as though a prayer had been answered, giving them the strength to carry on. After reading the letter, the Peckhams looked for Songkhla on a map and were shocked to find that the bottle had traveled 9,000 miles from Hawaii.

The Peckhams corresponded with Hoa for years, sharing in his joy when they received a photo from his wedding, then again nine months later when they saw his newborn son. But most of all, they empathized with Hoa’s desire to give his family the best life he could. So when Hoa asked if the Peckhams could help his family move to the U.S., they didn’t hesitate. After months of working with U.S. Immigration, the two families finally did meet in 1985, when a plane from Thailand landed in Los Angeles—the Nguyens’ new home.

[Image courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.]

2. Love in a Bottle

Ake Viking was a lonely Swedish sailor who decided to place his search for love in the hands of fate. He wrote a simple letter “To Someone Beautiful and Far Away,” corked it inside a bottle, and tossed it overboard in the hopes that it might help him find a young woman to marry.

Two years later, in 1958, he was surprised to receive a letter from a Sicilian girl, Paolina, who said, “I am not beautiful, but it seems so miraculous that this little bottle should have traveled so far and long to reach me that I must send you an answer…” The two began writing one another and, three years after he threw a bottle into the sea, Ake moved to Sicily to marry his very long-distance love.

3. A Soldier To Watch Over Them

When Josh Baker was 10 years old, he dumped an entire bottle of his mother’s vanilla extract down the sink. He then wrote a quick note that said, “My name is Josh Baker. I’m 10. If you find this, put it on the news. The date is April 16, 1995.” He stuffed the note inside the empty extract bottle and threw it into Wisconsin’s White Lake.

Life went on and, after high school, Josh signed up for the Marines. During his tour of duty in Iraq, he survived the dangers of fighting door-to-door in Fallujah and made it back home to the U.S. safe and sound. Tragically, shortly after his homecoming, Josh was killed in a car accident, leaving his family and friends devastated and asking the obvious question, “Why?” A few months later, Steve Lieder and Robert Duncan, friends of Josh’s, were walking on the banks of White Lake, when they saw something glimmer on the water. After fishing it out, they realized it was a vanilla extract bottle with a piece of paper inside.

To friends and family, the message from 10-year old Josh appeared when they needed it most. It felt as though he was reaching out, letting them know that he was watching, and trying to help them move on. This message of hope is currently displayed in the Bakers’ home as a constant reminder that their son is still with them, even though he’s gone.

[Image courtesy of CBS.]

4. The Right Fisherman

In 1999, Steve Gowan spotted something clinging to his fishing nets. It was a very old bottle containing two letters written by Private Thomas Hughes, dated September 9, 1914. The first message asked the person that found the bottle to forward the second message to Hughes’ wife, Elizabeth. The note for Elizabeth was a nice, simple love letter, showing that his wife was in his thoughts as he made his way to France to fight in the early days of World War I.

After reading the letters, Gowan felt a great personal responsibility to see that they found their way home, even though he assumed Mrs. Hughes had died long ago. He began searching for her descendants and soon learned that Thomas and Elizabeth Hughes’ daughter was still alive in Auckland, New Zealand.

Sadly, Hughes died in battle shortly after he wrote the letters, so he never got to see Elizabeth, nor his two-year old daughter, Emily, ever again. Due to her young age at the time of his death, Emily never knew her father, though she grew up listening to stories about him from her mother and cherishing his posthumously award medals. So when The New Zealand Post offered to send Gowan to Auckland to hand deliver the bottle to Emily, he jumped at the chance to help her connect to this lost piece of her past.

For Emily, the bottle was a great source of joy and comfort. She said her father’s message couldn’t come home “until the right boat came along at the right time with the right fisherman.”

5. Laura Buxton, meet Laura Buxton

(Technically this isn’t a “message in a bottle” story, but it’s the same concept—and the story is simply too good not to mention it.)

In June 2001, Laura Buxton (almost 10) released a red balloon into the air over her hometown of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England. On one side of the balloon, she had written “Please return to Laura Buxton,” and on the other side, her home address. A few weeks later, a man 140 miles away in Milton Lilbourne found the balloon stuck in the hedge that separated his farm from the next-door neighbors. He noticed Laura Buxton’s name and address and immediately took the balloon to the neighbors’ house, showing it to the 10-year-old girl who lived there…whose name was also Laura Buxton.

Laura Buxton from Milton Lilbourne wrote Laura Buxton from Stoke-on-Trent to let her know that she had found the balloon. Thinking this coincidence was simply too amazing to be true, they decided they had to meet in person. And that’s when things got really weird.

On the day of the meeting, the two girls wore the same outfit – a pink sweater and jeans. The girls were the same height, which was unusual because they were both tall for their age. They both had brown hair and wore it in the same style. They both had three-year old black Labrador Retrievers at home, as well as gray pet rabbits. They both brought their guinea pigs, which were the same color and even had the same orange markings on their hindquarters. It was almost as though these two Laura Buxtons were the same person.

The strange events surrounding their meeting have helped the girls form a strong bond, and they remain friends eight years later. Both feel the circumstances that brought them together are too significant to be written off as mere coincidence.

Pictured: The incredible secret world at the bottom of the sea

In a year-long mission, a BBC team probed a small part of the earth's amazing undersea world. They completed 1000 dives and explored seven different oceans across the globe. What they found was extraordinary...

To most of us, seas and oceans are featureless expanses. On a good day, the vast surfaces stretching endlessly towards the horizon provide a picturesque foil for a sunset.

Yet these glassy waters hide an extraordinary world.

Early sightings of a dugong, or sea cow, were probably responsible for the myth of the mermaids. But their numbers are declining rapidly. The expedition headed to the Bazaruto archipelago, nine miles off the coast of Mozambique, to investigate the very last sustainable population of dugongs - which are related to elephants - in the western Indian Ocean

In fact, we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the deep ocean floors, which is why a team of experts decided to probe a small part of the planet's seas, and film it for an eight-part TV series, to be shown on BBC2 next month.

Headed by Paul Rose, ex-base commander of the British Antarctic Survey and dive trainer to the US navy, the Oceans team includes maritime archaeologist Lucy Blue, marine biologist and oceanographer Tooni Mahto, and conservationist Philippe Cousteau, grandson of the celebrated underwater pioneer Jacques.

One of the team's divers observes a shoal of jacks circling with balletic precision. This behaviour is a source of much debate, but is thought to be a defence mechanism against predators

Over a year, they set up eight expeditions to seven different seas and oceans across the globe - spending more than 700 hours underwater, and completing 1,000 dives.

Their aim was to seek out the hidden secrets of our oceans and, ultimately, to better understand how much we rely on these enigmatic and alien places.

A giant manta ray, known to have the biggest brains of all fish, spotted off the south coast of Mozambique. In the background lurks a shark

Four-fifths of all life on Earth is found beneath the waves, and scientists estimate a million new species are out there waiting to be discovered.

Below the surface of the oceans there are mountains that would dwarf the Himalayas, waterfalls bigger than Niagara and more active volcanoes than anywhere else on the planet.

Paul Rose explores the wreck of the Paraportiani, a cargo ship that sank off the coast of East Africa in 1967

The mid-ocean ridge, a chain of mountains that runs through all the great seas, is 37,300 miles long, with an average height of 3,000 metres.

Together, the oceans make up an unimaginably vast environment wrapped around more than 70 per cent of the surface of the planet.

Despite the size of male sperm whales - which can reach up to 16 metres in length - sightings are rare. But when you see one, it's worth the wait

It is no surprise, then, that a new species was discovered by the team during almost every deepsea dive.

But there was more to find, including underwater caves that preserved the remains of lost civilisations and wrecks that spoke of ancient battles.

Sea coral grows in abundance on the sheer, underwater cliffs of the reef at the island of Pemba, 50 miles off the coast of East Africa and one of the three islands off Tanzania, along with Zanzibar and Mafia island

They saw rare and endangered creatures and dived in alien marine environments: pitch-black waters turned purple by toxic bacteria, and eerie tannin-stained waters housing bizarre creatures.

They even dived into a throng of sharks to test out a new repellent - and were relieved to find it worked.

Huge sunfish are indigenous to the Sea of Cortez, a strip between the Baja California peninsula and mainland Mexico, 60-130 miles wide and 995 miles long. These giants can grow up to six metres long

Unfortunately, they also found found evidence of the changes wrought by mankind - warming seas destroying unique ecosystems and overfishing decimating entire species.

But there were also signs of hope: coral that harbour a special heat-resistant algae that could also protect the other reefs of the world, and marine creatures with amazing abilities to adapt to their changing world.

None of the dive team had ever seen a weedy sea dragon, found only in kelp forests. But Philippe Cousteau and Tooni Mahto struck lucky at Fortescue Bay, on the east coast of Tasmania

And, in the Arctic, they discovered a potentially new species of amphipod - a great find, as these tiny creatures provide a crucial link in the entire Arctic Ocean food chain.

There were numerous other highlights, including a rare encounter with a green-eyed six-gill shark, a dive alongside Seri Indians, and swimming in the presence of the terrifying Humboldt squid.

Here, they exclusively share with us some of the amazing sights they found under the sea.

• Extracted from Oceans: Exploring The Hidden Depths Of The Underwater World by Paul Rose and Anne Laking, BBC Books, £20. (c) Paul Rose and Anne Laking, 2008. To order a copy at £18 (p&p free), tel: 0845 155 0720. Oceans starts on BBC2 on 12 November.