Krapanj (VI)

The sea water / sea sand samples from the croatian island Krapanj did contain Florarctus sp. tardigrades which have been shown in the previous issues of our magazine. Furthermore we found marine tardigrades of the genus Halechiniscus :

Halechiniscus from the Krapanj island. Body length close to 0.2 mm.

As with Florarctus we can perceive the usual eight legs, each with four claws - but the bizarre "rain coat" of Florarctus is missing.

Halechiniscus from the Krapanj island. Head region

And, of course, there is the buccal system with the stylets. Furthermore we can see two globules reminding of eyes. These are sometimes interpreted as lipoid droplets in literature, who knows?

Two power individuals, in male macho communcation misbehaviour?

Of course this interpretation of the image above is just a funny joke. In fact there is a live tardigrade (right side), which has finished moulting. It has left back its old cuticula (on the left side of the image). As already mentioned previosuly this is an ideal chance to leave back some digestion products in the cuticula (brown spots). The overall not-too-good image quality stems from the fact that we made this photograph in situ, at the Krapanj island.

© Text, images and video clips by  Martin Mach  (webmaster@baertierchen.de).
The Water Bear web base is a licensed and revised version of the German language monthly magazine  Bärtierchen-Journal . Style and grammar amendments by native speakers are warmly welcomed.

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