Description: We collected a small handful of sand from a few inches below the water line at low tide off Bird Shoal (Beaufort, NC). In our first glance under the microscope we found this extremely active marine tardigrade. It's about 115 µm long. It gripped strongly to the sand grains, and could move them around quite a bit. Curiously, when we managed to separate it from the sand grains (so it could only run on the glass slide in seawater), it seemed to get more and more gunked up with small particles over time (a couple of hours). Does it need to move between sand grains to clean itself off?
The video below was taken with bright-field microscopy using an Olympus BX41 compound microscope with a 40x objective lens. The condenser was stopped down to reveal the tardigrade's long toes.
Page creator's name: Mickey and Yasmin von Dassow
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biology locomotion marine marine-invertebrates tardigrades
Created: 09 Jun 2014 06:33
Updated: 06 Jan 2015 21:35
Comments: 23 May 2016 14:43
#Comments: 2
Marine tardigrades look a lot like annelid (perhaps Nereis) larvae!
I think the same Daniel, even I confuse the tardigrades with larvae polychaetos