Briny Swimmers
Ever seen legs like these? You’re looking at the legs of a brine shrimp, also known as a sea monkey. But these are not just ordinary legs. As brine shrimp rhythmically beat their legs, they are using these appendages to simultaneously move, eat, and breathe.
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DownloadBriny Swimmers
Ever seen legs like these? You’re looking at the legs of a brine shrimp, also known as a sea monkey. But these are not just ordinary legs. As brine shrimp rhythmically beat their legs, they are using these appendages to simultaneously move, eat, and breathe.
What am I looking at?
Each image shows several pairs of appendages, and each of these appendages splits into two branches. The branch on the right of this image (1) is used for movement, and the branch on the left (2) contains gills for breathing. The colors you see are the result of a combination of autofluorescence (colors generated when a laser shines on a sample, which is a key step in confocal microscopy), as well as red and white stains applied to the shell.
Biology in the background
The legs of brine shrimp serve many purposes for these crustaceans. As they rhythmically beat their legs, the gills on their legs extract oxygen from the water and pump excess salt, water, and carbon dioxide out of their bodies. Brine shrimp also use their legs to filter what they eat. They sift out food particles like algae that catch on the inner edges of their legs and transfer them to their mouth. This type of appendage can be found in fossils of trilobites dating back 520 million years.
Each section of the legs you can see here is about 1 millimeter wide, or roughly 13 times the width of a human hair.
Technique
These images were created using confocal microscopy.
Igor Siwanowicz, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Janelia Research Campus