INVERTEBRATE BIOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY

Sponge defense system. So what do you do if you are a fairly large animal with no nervous system? How do you defend yourself? Here's the astonishing way in which some glass sponges have evolved a nervous system without nerves:
From Nature news service, April 1999.
New anti-fungal compounds found in sponges. Press release, October 2000. Sponges live by passing water right through their tissues, so they essentially invite bacteria and fungi to attack them. Accordingly, sponges have wonderful antibiotic adaptations. Drug companies are beginning to realize the possibilities.
New bacteria-sponge link investigated. Press release, July 4, 2001.

Midwater medusae (jellyfish), a site from Kevin Raskoff at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. [But go to the aquarium and see them if you can!]
What keeps Australians out of the water? Certainly not sharks.... The answer is "stingers", small floating jellyfish. Story from New Scientist, November 1999.
Stinging Seas: a feature about marine venoms, many of them from cnidarians. California Wild, Fall 2000.
Corals produce a natural weedkiller. Story from New Scientist, February 5, 2000.
Gorgonians (cnidarians, "sea fans"). From Pacific Discovery, now called California Wild, the magazine of the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, Summer 1996.

Cephalopods
- The rarest (living) nautilus, from Asian Diver magazine.
- The nose of the nautilus. From Nature news service, April 2000.
- Research on living nautiloids. An article from Discover, by Peter Ward.
- The octopus. From the New York Times, August 1998.
- Trying to catch a giant squid: an interview with Clyde Roper in New Scientist. [No luck so far.]
- Squid sex. If you think that sexual relations among humans are complex and confusing and often difficult, take comfort from the complexities of squid sex.
- Why would cuttlefish be able to see polarized light?. From Woods Hole Marine Laboratory.
- Young squid learn fast: one of Lee Dye's columns from ABC News Online. April 2000.
- Long and fascinating article from BioScience about the way that baby squid find the bacterial partners that give them their luminescence. April 1998 report on research in progress.
Gastropods (snails)
- The evolution of the poisons of the cone shell, from Nature's news updates, June 1999.
- How about a marine snail that navigates by magnetic field?. Nature news update.
Bivalves
- How a mussel glues itself to a rock (and how can we make a dollar from that?) Story from the DyeHard column, ABC News OnLine, December 1999.

Trilobites that had symbiotic bacteria, allowing them to live without eating much direct food. This is a brilliant idea by Richard Fortey of the Natural History Museum in London. I find it utterly convincing: it explains the bizarre anatomy and strange paleoecology of olenid trilobites with one startling but clever idea. Brief news story from Discovery.com, June 6, 2000. Reference: Fortey, R. 2000. Olenid trilobites: The oldest known chemoautotrophic symbionts? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97: 6574-6578.
A trilobite with huge eyes. Discover news site, October 27, 2003. Great photo. The paper itself was a quick sloppy job. (I know this because they distorted what I had written about such eyes!). I also think that Niles Eldredge described a similar eye in a trilobite from Bolivia years ago, but I have to go and burrow in the library to check that. And these trilobites were certainly NOT generally thought to have been nocturnal: you can't use a camera at night without flash... Ken Campbell inferred years ago that they lived in bright light.

The sounds that lobsters make.

The secret weapon of planktonic copepods. From Nature news updates, April 1999.

How barnacles have sex. From California Wild, Summer 2001.

November 13, 2003. A Carboniferous "spider" has structures on its body that might be related to web spinning. (If so, it would be the earliest web spinner.)
- BBC News OnLine
- Press release from Ohio State

Page last updated November 17, 2004.