Last week my roommate and I headed to the harbor here in Monterey, CA. We were on a mission to find some plankton, and we succeeded!
So much plankton to sift through!

Foldscoping in action. Keeping it classy with the pinky up 🙂
It was my first time using the foldscope on live animals so there was some troubleshooting involved (mainly, figuring out how to avoid crushing the animals on the slide). After I figured that part out, I found this great crustacean – we had no idea what it was! After googling around a bit I think it might be a copepod on its side. Any plankton experts out there? It looked red while it was swimming around in the water, so I was surprised to see how yellow it was up close. Love how detailed all of those appendages are! You can see why it was such a successful swimmer with all those moving parts.

My roommate had pulled up a kelp crab molt in her plankton net and it was covered in one of my favorite invertebrates in the world – the Caprellid, or skeleton shrimp!
Check out all those skeleton shrimp!
They are actually not shrimp but rather a different type of crustacean called an amphipod. They cling to seagrass, kelp, and apparently floating crab molts! I’ve always thought they moved just like those blow-up dancing guys at car dealerships.
A group of skeleton shrimp. Image from marinelife.about.com
The resemblance is uncanny. Image from flickriver.com





So I pulled one off and took a look!
An invert nerd (me) nerding out.
This time I made a bigger platform in order to avoid squishing the guy. And it worked out pretty well!

Having never looked so closely, I was surprised to see the spine on its head. I believe that spine makes it a Caprellid californica. I got a great view of its gnathopods (feeding appendages). Google tells me that the last picture is its gills – I had no idea that’s what I was looking at! I also loved seeing its pigment up close. Next time I’ll spend more time setting up my lighting to get an even better look at the colors. What a neat look at one of my favorite little animals.