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How do large gastropods right themselves? Click play to find out!

Mr. Leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) visited Grenada last week… discovering the sights and scenes of the island. He also visited the beach where is his ladies come up to nest - Levera.

By far the most exciting part of his day was thanking the kids from River Salee for helping clean one of the beaches (Bathway), making him safer from dangerous plastics which he sometimes mistakes for his favourite food - jellyfish. He also met kids from Rose Hill and they had a blast seeing him in their community.
He took photos with the kind people at Fisheries, girls from AHS in St.George’s where he also did a TV interview for the local media! Before River Sallee and Levera Mr. Leatherback saw Grand Etang and hung out at a local Grenadian rum shop, meeting the local folks.

Mr. Leatherback has his own homepage and is the brainchild of the wonderful folks at Conservation International. They’re also involved in putting together the State of the Worlds Sea Turtles (SWOT) reports which make for some fascinating, fun reading!

Jaws or 400 million years of beautiful evolution? Sharks are often ortrayed as menacing creatures, these wonderful beasties are vulnerable in many places…

Lauren Smith brings you a refreshing shark website that is all about… well sharks! Visit The Sharkiologist webpage to learn more!

Ever walk a beach late at night and spot a tiny but bright blue iridescent glow that fades and brighten real slowly (near the water line on moist sand)?

If you have and you’ve picked it up, you see nothing more than a bright blue spot. Turn on a light and it really looks like a little blurry whitish blob! What could it be, so tiny, yet so bright?!
Under a microscope the mysterious little blue spot looks like something from a sci-fi horror film, about to spawn out of an egg-case. It looks like a crustacean in a molluscan bubble shell, which is the best way I can describe it.

What the little deep blue spot from the deep blue is, is a bioluminescent marine ostracod! Here are some neat images of ostracods from Australian waters from Museum Victoria.

Below is an image of a biolouminesce marine ostracod from Levera beach, Grenada, West Indies (18-April-2008).

What a life… tiny little barnacle larvae floating around the ocean finding their way onto the body of the largest species of sea turtle in a vast, open ocean! Going with the current is what the larvae of Platylepas coriacea do once they’re stuck onto the leatherback (Dermochelys coriaca).

I found eight of these barnacles earlier this month at Levera beach, Grenada and John Zardus at the Citadel in South Carolina, USA was kind enough to identify the exact species.Some of the barnacles decided to spawn in the sampling bottle of seawater that I placed them overnight to their trip to a nice little comfy aquarium in the lab.

How do these tiny larvae of these leatherback-specific barnacles find their host in such a vast open ocean? What cues do they use to find their host surface and make their choice to settle? How is the leatherback’s conservations status going to affect the fate of these little creatures?

Platylepas coriacea under a dissecting microscope (adult, alive)

Platylepas coriacea early nauplii larvae at about 106 hours post-spawning (x100 magnification)