Venus flower basket sponges have an elaborate, vase-like skeleton pocked with holes that allow water to pass through the organism. A recent numerical study looked at how the sponge’s shape Keep reading
Tag: filter-feeding
Sea Sponge Hydrodynamics
The Venus’s flower basket is a sea sponge that lives at depths of 100-1000 meters. Its intricate latticework skeleton has long fascinated engineers for its structural mechanics, but a new Keep reading
Flamingo Filter-Feeding
Flamingoes are strange and ungainly creatures, but their hooked bills make much more sense when you see them eating underwater. The birds are filter feeders, and they suck water, mud, Keep reading
Freshwater Mussels
Freshwater bivalves like these California floater mussels are critical species for the health of our waters. And although we don’t think of mussels as being very mobile, they’re actually quite Keep reading
Oil Drops and Filter Feeders
Natural oils provide critical nutrients to filter feeders like zooplankton and barnacles. These creatures capture oil droplets on bristle-like appendages such as cilia and setae. But this droplet-catching turns into Keep reading
The Livers of Our Rivers
To the naked eye, mussels and other bivalves don’t appear to be doing much. But these filter feeders are hard at work. The mussel takes in water through its incurrent Keep reading
How Mantas Filter But Never Clog
Manta rays spend much of their time leisurely cruising through the water with their meter-wide mouths open. As they swim, they filter plankton, which makes up most of their diet, Keep reading
Filter-Feeding Mantas
Large filter-feeders like the manta ray face the interesting challenge of obtaining enough small particulates like plankton to sustain an animal the size of a car. They do this through Keep reading