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Creative Visions of Nature - Highly Commended

Lawrence Alex Wu Click to enlarge The filter-feeding forest

Lawrence Alex Wu (Canada)

The filter-feeding forest

This is what it looks like inside a sea squirt's 'mouth': a forest of water filters. Surprisingly for this urn-shaped animal, the sea squirt has a very primitive form of spinal cord, the notochord, and is therefore classified as a very distant relative of animals with backbones. This species of sea squirt, photographed in the Philippines, is fairly common in tropical waters. It feeds by pumping in water through its intake and exit holes and trapping food particles in these tree-like filters. Living symbiotically inside the filter forest are microbes (prochlorons) containing green chlorophyll, which photosynthesize like plants and are responsible for the magnificent green coloration. 'I'd had glimpses inside these sea squirts over the years,' says Alex, 'but it took a while before I found an individual with a gape big enough to enable me get such an otherworldly image.'

Olympus C5050Z; 1/200 sec at f8; ISO 64; Ikelite DS125 housing; Inon Z-220 strobes.

This photograph is available to buy as a print.

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