Sea Snail Eggs – Hopkins Marine Station pt. 2

Jul 18, 2018 • 12:05 PM UTC

Pacific Grove, CA 93950, USA

140x Magnification

Animals

RebeccaKonte

Scientific artist, using art as a tool for scientific storytelling. http://www.rebeccakonte.com/

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Hello everyone!
I’ve been meaning to follow up on my Hopkins Marine Station post, so I’ll limit the words and get right to some videos that I’m excited about, focusing on sea snail eggs.

many snail egg casings clustered together, nudibranch on right.

3 isolated egg casings
Here’s a look at the sample. The left image is of many snail egg casings clustered together (also note the gorgeous nudibranch to the right meandering across them). The right image is of 3 of the casings isolated, note the furthest one on the right appears to be breaking into many smaller parts.
All the videos below were taken from a single slide, which was prepared by mounting one casing onto a glass slide, then a coverslip was placed overtop. The coverslip had some clay dabbed onto its corners so that it did not crush the sample.

And here’s a fun look from the macro sample directly into the foldscope…

Initially, I guessed that the casing would be a sort of membrane shell that held a single snail egg. Not at all!!! That second sample image I showed earlier hinted toward the secret that I missed, the casing is made up of many tiny individuals. Just fascinating.
From here, I want to look more into the anatomy/developmental stages of sea snails… I found the eggs delightfully reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. 🙂
Until next time,
Rebecca