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Filter feeders can play an important role in condensing biomass and removing excess nutrients (such as nitrogen and phosphate) from the local waterbody, and are therefore considered water-cleaning ecosystem engineers. They are also important in bioaccumulation and, as a result, as indicator organisms. Filter feeders can be sessile, planktonic ...
Chaetopterus or the parchment worm or parchment tube worm is a genus of marine polychaete worm that lives in a tube it constructs in sediments or attaches to a rocky or coral reef substrate. [ 1][ 2][ 3] The common name arises from the parchment -like appearance of the tubes that house these worms. [ 3] Parchment tube worms are filter feeders ...
See text. The Chaetopteridae are a family of marine filter-feeding polychaete worms that live in vertical or U-shaped tubes in tunnels buried in the sedimentary or hard substrate of marine environments. The worms are highly adapted to the hard tube they secrete. Inside the tube the animal is segmented and regionally specialized, with highly ...
Cnidaria. Cnidaria (/ nɪˈdɛəriə, naɪ -/ nih-DAIR-ee-ə, NY-) [ 4 ] is a phylum under kingdom Animalia containing over 11,000 species [ 5 ] of aquatic animals found both in fresh water and marine environments (predominantly the latter), including jellyfish, hydroids, sea anemones, corals and some of the smallest marine parasites.
Thelenota ananas, a giant sea cucumber from the Indo-Pacific tropics. Sea cucumbers are echinoderms from the class Holothuroidea (/ ˌhɒləˌθjʊəˈrɔɪdiə, ˌhoʊ -/ HOL-ə-thure-OY-dee-ə, HOHL-). They are marine animals with a leathery skin and an elongated body containing a single, branched gonad. They are found on the sea floor worldwide.
The Scyphozoa are an exclusively marine class of the phylum Cnidaria, [2] referred to as the true jellyfish (or "true jellies"). The class name Scyphozoa comes from the Greek word skyphos (σκύφος), denoting a kind of drinking cup and alluding to the cup shape of the organism. [3] Scyphozoans have existed from the earliest Cambrian to the ...
For feeding and respiration each phoronid has at the top end a lophophore, a "crown" of tentacles with which the animal filter-feeds. In small species the "crown" is a simple circle, in medium-size species it is bent into the shape of a horseshoe with tentacles on the outer and inner sides, and in the largest species the ends of the horseshoe ...
The whale shark (Rhincodon typus) is a slow-moving, filter-feeding carpet shark and the largest known extant fish species. The largest confirmed individual had a length of 18.8 m (61.7 ft). [8] The whale shark holds many records for size in the animal kingdom, most notably being by far the most massive living non-cetacean animal.