nice doggy
Billionaire.
My favorite underwater animal is Elysia viridis.
CW: image of a cute slug
They are one of few animals that are capable of kleptoplasty, meaning when they eat algae they actually make sure the algae’s chloroplasts keep being fully functional, allowing those cute little slugs to actually conduct photosynthesis. As a result, they evolved to look a lot like tree leaves! They are flatter than related slug species to have a bigger surface area and stick to shallow waters so the light can reach them.
I always thought a little slug casually mimicking symbiogenesis, the origin of eukaryotic life, was amazing. But the fact that they end up looking like little underwater leaves because they face similar evolutionary pressure as trees despite being completely different is so cool haha
That’s a really good one*, you are more than right to pick it
hamter in a submarine
Does it count if they’re not always underwater? If so, newts and really just salamanders in general. If they don’t count then I would like to fight about it.
idk salamander lore approximately how long do they spend underwater
It depends! There are some species that never leave the water (axolotls are one of these) and then some stay in the water for mating season from early spring through late summer, usually about 5 months. Some never really enter the water again after their juvenile stage.
Edit: salamanders are neat for a lot of reasons, but one of them is how often they seem to evolve into subspecies. For example, Crater Lake has a subspecies of rough-skinned newts called the Mazama newt.
The neat thing about them is that the rough-skinned has one of the deadliest neurotoxins (tetrodotoxin) and the only predator they have is garter snakes (they are in an evolutionary arms race, garters are immune to the poison). However, garter snakes can’t really fuck with Crater Lake because it’s so cold and the Mazama lost its neurotoxin over time.
The horrible thing is that some colonizers introduced fish and then crawfish to the lake 100 years ago and since they lost the neurotoxin the mazama newts are now endangered! Luckily there is an effort by local zoos and I think a school to keep some in captivity to breed and eventually reintroduce them.
Anyway, special interest info dump is over…for now
Loggerhead sea turtle
I’m gonna go with fish. This one is my favorite fish:
Elasmosaurus
Nautilus easy
Luidia sarsii. It’s a starfish. It undergoes a very strange metamorphosis. The larva continues to live after its next stage, the starfish, has its own existance. It’s like if a butterfly was “born” directly out of a caterpillar and after its “birth” both continued to exist.
The Wiki page really buries the lede.
During metamorphosis the juvenile migrates to the outside and detaches from the swimming larval bipinnaria stage. The larva continues to live separately for several months.
Octopus or cuttlefish
Blue whales
platypus
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the 1784 ruling wasn’t abolished. capybara are still fish in the eyes of God.
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The gar reading this
