Biology Things: Get in The Water

Here, I wax on about Marine protected Areas (MPAs) and their importance in saving the oceans, the planet, and ourselves. I have waxed on about conservation issues in past blogs and will do so again. It’s important. This one is a little more of a ramble, associated with the state of my mind at the moment I suspect.                    Figure 1. Dark blue areas mark areas of the world ocean that are designated as protected areas. In the US, there are more than 1700 area designated Marine Protected Areas, which are marine regions with some level of protection. The largest is Papahanaumokuakea at 1,515,714 square km. The amount of area protected above may cause you to think that much of the ocean is protected. It is not. The addition of Papahanaumokuakea in 2006, and additions of other protected areas since, bring the percentage of the ocean under some kind of protected category to about 8% (some estimate lower, but I’ll try to be optimi...

Aristotle may have known about the teeth within the mouth of snails, but if so, his writings on it were limited. The radula is a toothed tongue or dental ribbon snails use to scrape algae off rocks or aid in drilling a hole in other mollusk shells to try to eat them. This structure is sometimes called the odontophore, but that term refers to the cartilaginous base, the structure on which the teeth sit. Though Aristotle might have observed this ribbon, it was officially discovered by Swammerdam in a work published after his 1680 death. By the mid-1700s, the ribbon was described in several species: rows and rows of tiny teeth pointing toward the stomach. The first drawing appears in a work by Poli in 1791.                  Figure 1. Radula Drawing. In Poli 1791.                                      Figure 2. Radula Drawing col...