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You’ve got to see them to melibe-lieve! With a foot for a belly, wing-like appendages, and Venus flytraps for faces, Melibe leonina nudibranch sea slugs are some of the most unusual inhabitants of the kelp forest!

Swaying on kelp blades, they catch passing plankton in their large hoods and lay tulip-shaped egg masses throughout the forest, ready to hatch out the next generation of these extraordinary—and watermelon-scented (!)—super slugs. 

You can experience their mysterious molluscan majesty in our Enchanted Kelp Forest display—we guarantee you’ll be melibe-liebers!

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Sine Waves #coralmorphologic “Sine Waves #coralmorphologic #timelapse”

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Blood Rush Hour

A colored scanning electron micrograph, courtesy of Steve Gschmeissner, of red and white blood cells inside a small blood vessel. The sample was created by freeze fracturing – rapidly freezing the sample with liquid nitrogen so that the tissue is instantly preserved. When the sample is subsequently broken, internal structures are revealed.

The image provides clues to how red blood cells can move so abundantly (you’ve got 20-30 trillion of them at any given moment) and quickly – a single cell will make the full circuit of your body in every two to three minutes – through the tiniest capillaries. First, they easily nestle in neat, snaking lines. Second, the cells are quite flexible and will shape-shift to squeeze through narrow passages.

The image above was part of a 2013 exhibition by the Royal Photographic Society.

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did You know: some spores have special structures so they could hug each other when the weather gets damp? horsetails love to live in groups.

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just fern things.. Dryopteris filix-mas

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The head of an insect from the order lepidoptera - commonly known as the butterflies.

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The beautiful Gyrosigma. (ph. Ochrophyta, cl. Bacillariophyceae, ordo Naviculales)

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a something that looks to me like a species from the class Eustigmatophyceae

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some (probably) Hypotrichida (polyhymenophorea) on an unknown algae 

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Fucus vesiculosus (phylum Ochrophyta, classis Phaeophyceae, ordo Fucales). What looks like an eggsack is actually an air container, so the algae would point upwards. 

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The shells (theca) of Peridinium (phylum Dinophyta, classis Dinophyceae, ordo Peridiniales)

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An adult (top pictures) and cysts (bottom pictures) of Ceratium hirundinella (phylum Dinophyta, classis Dinophyceae, ordo Peridiniales)

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i believe this is an individual from the subclassis copepoda (animalia;arthropoda;crustacea). any other versions? 

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Trachelomonas (phylum Euglenophyta, claasis Euglenophyceae, ordo Euglenales)

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Phacus (phylum Euglenophyta, classis Euglenophyceae, ordo Euglenales)