Spiritual insanity

Skull of a two-faced bottlenose dolphin prepared by Enault & Auclair-Kraniata osteology.

⭐️SHOP REOPENED⭐️

New goodies added to my shop! A G'raha "sitting" standee, Strategy Board memo pad, and Arcadion stickers 💕

Some stuff-like my enamel pin-is low in stock and won't be reproduced, so please check them out!

Slow your scroll and spend some quality time with this awesome amphipod. 🤩⁠

With a transparent body, the crystal amphipod, Cystisoma magna, is essentially invisible in the dim waters of the ocean’s twilight zone. Most of their cousins grow no bigger than your fingernail, but the crystal amphipod can fill your entire hand. And unlike many other hyperiids who live life hidden as hitchhikers, crystal amphipods swim freely in the open water. Living out in the open with nowhere to hide requires a different kind of stealth. ⁠ With the help of MBARI’s ships and deep-sea robots, our researchers and their collaborators revealed the secret to the crystal amphipod’s invisibility. Their exoskeleton is covered in microscopic shaggy structures or a fine coating of biofilm. Tiny spherical bacteria, only nanometers in diameter, work like the anti-reflective coating on eyeglasses to help Cystisoma camouflage in an environment that is sorely lacking in places to hide from hungry predators.

The crystal amphipod faces a fragile future. As industries look to the deep seafloor for mining precious metals, even animals living far above the bottom are at risk. Mining these metals will release plumes of dirty wastewater into the ocean’s twilight zone, clouding the crystal amphipod’s vision and interfering with their invisible superpower.