Salps
| Salps | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
.jpg)
Salt colony |
||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Thaliacea | ||||||||||||
| Nielsen , 1995 |
Salps (Thaliacea) are free-swimming marine animals with a barrel-shaped appearance that belong to the sub-tribe of tunicates . They feed on plankton . Your body is mostly made up of the gill gut . They live individually or in colonies. Some species grow to be over 8 cm long.
The reproduction of the salps is characterized by a generation change , in which a sexually active, bisexual generation is followed by an asexual one ( metagenesis ).
In 1819, the writer and naturalist Adelbert von Chamisso was the first to publish a treatise on how the two different generations belonged to one and the same taxon .
distribution
The salps are found on the surface in warmer seas and occasionally in summer in temperate marine areas. But they can also be found in the cold deep sea.
Way of life
Salps swim with rhythmic contraction of horseshoe-shaped or ring-shaped muscle bands, some of which are only on one side of the body. The contraction of these ligaments drives the water that has flowed into the gill intestine through the mouth opening out through the rear end of the body, so that the animal moves forward with a kind of jet drive. At the same time, unicellular algae and small animal organisms are filtered out of this water flow in the gill intestine and used as food.
nutrition
The salps compete with smaller fish because they also live on plankton organisms. Larger species even eat small fish. At night, the salps emerge to feed from a depth of up to 800 meters to the sea surface and can harvest a significant proportion of the plant biomass that has arisen during the day. They do not release the absorbed carbon from the plant biomass into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, but excrete it in fecal pellets, which sink to the bottom of the sea at a speed of 1000 meters per day and thus sediment the fixed atmospheric carbon. It is estimated that several thousand tons of carbon are removed from the atmosphere per day in this way. The salps thus play an important role in the earth's carbon cycle .
Reproduction
Salps can live in cooler water, but cannot reproduce there. There are two kinds of reproduction in salps: asexual by budding and sexual in hermaphroditic animals. These two types alternate from generation to generation.
Systematics
-
Salps (Thaliacea)
- Barrel Alps (Doliolida)
- Fire rollers (pyrosomida)
- Salpida
Genus Salpa
There are many tropical and subtropical species of the genus Salpa , which sometimes occur in such large quantities in warm seas that they exclude other planktonic organisms. Two very common species, Salpa fusiformis and Salpa democratica , are caught en masse in plankton nets in cooler waters at certain times . The solitary form of Salpa telesiicostata , which is common south of the California coast, reaches a length of 20 cm, while the sexual form is only 7 cm long.
literature
- Bertelsmann Lexikon-Institut (Ed.): The modern animal lexicon in 12 volumes , Vol. 9, Roh – Seeg . Bertelsmann Publishing Group , Gütersloh 1979–1985, pp. 93–95: Salpen
Web links
- Thaliacea , Integrated Taxonomic Information System
- Thaliacea , World Register of Marine Species
- Krill and Carbon Dioxide: Life in the South Polar Siphon, Part 3: Salpidae: Hope on the Substitute Bank.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jet-powered carbon transporter (Scienceticker.info, July 4, 2006)