The sea angel (who was part of our 12 Plankton of Christmas story) is starting to hunt for its prey, the sea butterfly. The angels are actually baby sea slugs and have closely matched their metabolism to their prey.
This little horror may be a very common shrimp in the White Sea but he sure doesn’t look friendly! It is actually a skeleton shrimp and doesn’t have a shell. The best description of what it is like we found on Wiki: “They resemble an inchworm while “walking”, a stick while sitting still and a praying mantis while catching prey.” They are so thin they blend in perfectly with swaying sea grasses.
This sexy little creature has been nicknamed iSlug by the photographer and we can see why. It is another one of the common sea slugs but has brilliant red coloring from its food.Alexander Semenov hopes to raise awareness about marine biology and invertebrate zoology around the world. As we can see from just this small collection, there are a lot of wonderful and unique animals that most of us have never seen before.
These incredible little animals look like elephant embryos or little bears but are adult Limapontia. Very little is known about them; they are generally brown in color but some are lighter as we see here.
Alexander Semenov takes us into the secret and mysterious world under Russia’s White Sea. Alexander is a biologist at the White Sea Biological Station, where he works as chief of the dive team and in the lab. He loves taking macro shots of the almost invisible tiny creatures in the sea that most of us never get to see.
The Lepidonotus squamatus have 12 scales, and Alexander Semenov has done an incredible job of catching the fluorescence in them, shooting the photo under UV light with an orange filter. The males are pale when sexually mature because of the sperm within them while the females are green or gray.
Nerei Pellagica is also known as the sandworm and is huge. It can grow up to 40 cm long and be as big around as your thumb. The little growths on its sides are called parapodia and are used rather like gills, for breathing, and to move with – like little feet.
This is one of the prettiest sea slugs in the White Sea. The color of its papillas – the colored parts – depends on what it eats. It is one of the most common creatures in the sea
This monstrous face is nasty! It isn’t above trying to give you a bite with those two teeth either if it can’t run away. Behind its mouth is an enormous pharynx, which connects the mouth to the esophagus and which can be a 1/4 of the length of his body with two sharp jaws. When it catches prey it can push it out of his mouth at blazing speed, and as the photographer says, “It’s not a good show before sleeping or eating,” as you can see in the very first image.
This is the head of an unidentified amphipoda. Amphipoda are shell-less crustaceans, and in the White Sea there are 230 species, most of which are only encountered once or twice. Their name means “different footed” because unlike an isopod (see here) their legs are not all the same.
The prey of sea angels, this diminutive animal has black wings that are actually lobes of its “feet”, which it beats to move through the water. Sea butterflies are about the size of a lentil.
This translucent sea slug has a green digestive system which we can readily see. It is extremely rare – and the photographer has only seen them twice – but its golden brown cousin is common (you see one below).
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