Marine microbes exhibit highly varied, often non-spherical shapes that have functional significance for essential processes, including nutrient acquisition and sinking rates. There is a surprising absence of data, however, on how cell shape affects grazing, which is crucial for predicting the fate of oceanic carbon. We used synthetic spherical and...
Mucous-mesh grazers (pelagic tunicates and thecosome pteropods) are common in oceanic waters and efficiently capture, consume and repackage particles many orders of magnitude smaller than themselves. They feed using an adhesive mucous mesh to capture prey particles from ambient seawater. Historically, their grazing process has been characterized as non-selective, depending...
The particle capture mechanisms of biological filters determine the particle spectrum that is ingested by filter-feeding animals. Although ascidian feeding has been extensively investigated, the organismal-scale fluid dynamics and mesh-scale particle-filter interactions are not fully characterized. Fluorescein dye visualization of flow through the branchial sac of the ascidian Ciona intestinalis...
Appendicularians are ubiquitous marine grazers that use tangential filtration to collect micron and submicron prey. The food-concentrating filter (FCF) is the primary determinant of appendicularian prey selectivity, but the precise means by which it concentrates and conveys particles to the pharyngeal filter remain poorly understood. We used high-speed videography to...