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Clione antarctica is a pelagic, swimming snail with a long, larval body.
The body has the shape of a cylinder, which tapers to a point at one end and emerges at the other end in two wing-like parapodia.
Beneath the parapodia, the head protrudes like a small gemstone, with two crescent-shaped lobes that act as mouth tentacles.
The body is transparent white, in which the internal organs are visible. The pointed end of the body has an outer red pigmentation that forms a strong red tip.
Clione is colloquially known as a sea butterfly, and the English term "sea angel" fits its appearance perfectly.
Despite its angelic appearance, the snail is a predator that feeds on other shell-bearing sea butterflies (Thecosomata), such as Limacina antarctica.
It catches its prey with sticky, cone-shaped mouth tentacles.
These serve to grasp the prey, mainly Limacina antarctica, and bring it into the correct position. Then three pairs of hook-bearing sacs are squeezed out of the pharynx and the winged snail is sucked out of its shell.
The genus name "Clione" comes from Greek mythology and is named after "Cleio", the protector of historiography, she is the daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine muses.
The species name "antarctica " comes from Latin and refers to the species' area of distribution, the Antarctic.
Clione antarctica plays an important role in the pelagic ecosystem of the polar regions. It is a predator for other sea butterflies, an important link in the food chain between planktonic algae and zooplankton and an important prey for marine mammals and fish.
A special feature:
The amphipod Hyperiella dilatata "abducts" chemically protected, shell-less pteropods from the water column and carries them on its dorsal side, holding them between its pereopods (McClintock & Janssen, 1990).
The pteropod Clione antarctica produces a predator-deterrent substance called pteroenone (Bryan et al., 1995).
Tandem pairs of pteropods and amphipods were captured much less frequently than single Hyperiella individuals, so that this behavior in the crystal-clear shelf waters around the continent represents a very efficient protection against visually hunting icefish (McClintock & Janssen, 1990), whereas this behavior has not been documented in the open ocean.
Literature reference:
Verhaegen G, Cimoli E, Lindsay D (2021)
Life beneath the ice: jellyfish and ctenophores from the Ross Sea, Antarctica, with an image-based training set for machine learning.
Biodiversity Data Journal 9: e69374. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.9.e69374
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
The body has the shape of a cylinder, which tapers to a point at one end and emerges at the other end in two wing-like parapodia.
Beneath the parapodia, the head protrudes like a small gemstone, with two crescent-shaped lobes that act as mouth tentacles.
The body is transparent white, in which the internal organs are visible. The pointed end of the body has an outer red pigmentation that forms a strong red tip.
Clione is colloquially known as a sea butterfly, and the English term "sea angel" fits its appearance perfectly.
Despite its angelic appearance, the snail is a predator that feeds on other shell-bearing sea butterflies (Thecosomata), such as Limacina antarctica.
It catches its prey with sticky, cone-shaped mouth tentacles.
These serve to grasp the prey, mainly Limacina antarctica, and bring it into the correct position. Then three pairs of hook-bearing sacs are squeezed out of the pharynx and the winged snail is sucked out of its shell.
The genus name "Clione" comes from Greek mythology and is named after "Cleio", the protector of historiography, she is the daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine muses.
The species name "antarctica " comes from Latin and refers to the species' area of distribution, the Antarctic.
Clione antarctica plays an important role in the pelagic ecosystem of the polar regions. It is a predator for other sea butterflies, an important link in the food chain between planktonic algae and zooplankton and an important prey for marine mammals and fish.
A special feature:
The amphipod Hyperiella dilatata "abducts" chemically protected, shell-less pteropods from the water column and carries them on its dorsal side, holding them between its pereopods (McClintock & Janssen, 1990).
The pteropod Clione antarctica produces a predator-deterrent substance called pteroenone (Bryan et al., 1995).
Tandem pairs of pteropods and amphipods were captured much less frequently than single Hyperiella individuals, so that this behavior in the crystal-clear shelf waters around the continent represents a very efficient protection against visually hunting icefish (McClintock & Janssen, 1990), whereas this behavior has not been documented in the open ocean.
Literature reference:
Verhaegen G, Cimoli E, Lindsay D (2021)
Life beneath the ice: jellyfish and ctenophores from the Ross Sea, Antarctica, with an image-based training set for machine learning.
Biodiversity Data Journal 9: e69374. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.9.e69374
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
