WOW! This alga does a great impression of a seahorse, it even has eyes and fins and… oh whoa. If you ever thought the seaweed was talking back, perhaps a ribboned pipehorse was to blame.
Today we learned that conches, the sea-dwelling mollusks who live inside those big, beautiful conch seashells in warm tropical waters, peer out at the world with cartoonish eyes on tiny eyestalks. They see you. They see everything. And what’s more, they can regenerate their peepers should they happen to lose one or both of them.
“One 1976 paper dug into the specific behind these animals’ alien eyestalks. Sitting at the tips of long stalks, they contain retinas with both sensory cells and colored pigment cells. But the story gets weirder because obviously, it gets weirder. After amputating the conchs’ eyes, a fully-formed replacement took its place 14 days later. Humans, we really are losing this evolutionary game.”
But wait, that’s hardly the only surprising set of eyes under the sea. Scallops have eyes too, LOTS of them:
PPM’s are remnants of fetal iris vasculature that normally dissolve before adulthood. They don’t usually cause any problems and are just a cool incidental finding.
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 