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Name the Bug # 50

By Christopher Taylor at 3/07/2011 12:06:00 pm
This may be very easy or it may be very difficult. Can you recognise the subject of the photo below?



Attribution to follow.

Update: Identity now available here. Photo by Patrick Le Mao.

6 comments:

  1. biozcw7 March 2011 at 18:46

    Convoluta sp.? A kind of flat worm that living associate with algae.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Adam Yates7 March 2011 at 21:14

    Yes I think biozcw has it right. It looks like Convoluta. So to grab a point or two. Convoluta isn't just any old flatworm its an acoel, a very ancient branch of eumetazoa that split away long before protostomes and deuterostomes went their separate ways. It lacks a coelom and a gut (the latter probably having been secondarily lost). As a gutless absorber of nutrients from photosynthetic symbionts in its tissues (a type of green alga that gives them their healthy green hue) they are like tiny versions of what some researchers evisage the ediacaran fauna to have been like.
    Convoluta is well-known for forming these aggregates in intertidal sand flats.

    ReplyDelete
  3. jess8 March 2011 at 03:01

    Paramecium bursaria, or sp. ?
    Green Planaria

    ReplyDelete
  4. Neil8 March 2011 at 06:52

    Oh man. I sort of hate to be that guy, again, but points is points. Unless I am mistaken this is Symsagittifera probably S. roscoffensis at least that species seems to have the most photos floating out there. Or is it Simsagittifera? I guess we'll know soon enough.

    Actually it seems only right to name-check the algal symbiont too, Tetraselmis convolutae since that is actually the more visible member here.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Adam Yates8 March 2011 at 13:48

    Damn, pipped again by a name change I was unaware of. Symsagittifera roscoffensis used to be Convoluta roscoffensis.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Christopher Taylor8 March 2011 at 14:37

    I'm giving three points to Neil, two points to Adam, one to biozcw. Unless, of course, someone just dropped a cup of pandan noodles.

    ReplyDelete

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