If you said, "Wow, that's cool seeing how chitons change rocks into mud!", you might enjoy learning more about how life breaks down hard stuff (🪨🐚🪵🦴) in my book 'Life Sculpted' (2023, @uchicagopress.bsky.social). press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo... 🧪📚 #ichnology #bioerosion
Close-up view of a chiton on a gray limestone; chiton is a mollusk with seven overlapping plates that have brown and white stripes, which are surrounded by a fleshy gray-black-white speckled fleshy girdle. Directly behind the chiton are tiny 6-7 light-gray pellets, which are its poop, composed of calcium carbonate mud, which is matched by a pile of 11-12 pellets below. A black bar in the lower left is a scale 1 centimeter long.
For #MolluscMonday, a West Indian fuzzy chiton (Acanthopleura granulata) caught in the act of turning a coastal limestone into mud, which it does by scraping algae off the limestone surface & pooping mud pellets (arrows). Photo taken on San Salvador Island, The Bahamas; scale = 1 cm. 🧪 #bioerosion
CORAL REEF NEWS: Too much of a good thing: Coral reefs can’t survive rising sea urchin numbers
www.earth.com/news/coral-r...
#coralreefs #seaurchins #herbivores #algae #grazers #bioerosion #coral #coralreefecology #marineecology #hawaii #habitatloss #marinebiology
Five clam shells on the surface of a wooden board with early morning light (lending high contrast and bright colors) with various borings in them, some linear (made by polychaete worms), some circular (drill holes from predatory moon snails), and some consisting of densely spaced small holes (from a sponge), all examples of bioerosion. Shells were from a nearby beach on Sapelo Island, Georgia (USA).
Feeling a little bored? So are these shells on a #MolluscMonday. Linear boring (lower left) is from a polychaete worm, circular borings are drill holes of predatory moon snails, & densely spaced small holes are from a sponge, all types of #bioerosion: Sapelo Island, Georgia (USA). 🧪🐚🪱 #ichnology
Wrote a chapter about bone-eroding worms (Osedax) in deep-sea environments for my book LIFE SCULPTED, titled "Bone Eaters of the Deep." Here's an article that explains the genetic basis for these worms to form their chetae (bristles), key adaptations for their bone-eroding lives. #bioerosion
Irregular (eroded) surface of gray-ochre Cretaceous limestone (~100 million years old) with meandering gutters and holes made by Miocene (~20 million years ago) sea urchins, clams, and sponges; surface is on a rocky modern shoreline in southern Portugal.
Round holes in gray-ochre Cretaceous (~100 million years old) limestone with bits of marine clams; holes are borings made by Miocene (~20 million years ago) clams, in a rocky shoreline on the southern coast of Portugal.
For #FossilFriday, a paleontologically complex surface of a Cretaceous (~100 mya) limestone with marine body fossils that was much later (~20 mya) bioeroded by sea urchins, sponges, & clams: the not-so-boring Oura Megasurface of southern Portugal. #ichnology #bioerosion
