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Description
(3/3) The waterflicks (aconticorans) were featured in my previous post, which covered details on their morphology, locomotion, and evolution. For a short review, aconticora is a very large group of neotenic-fly-larva-descended holoplanktonic zooplankton which move via jet propulsion and (excluding some groups) possess 3 pairs of feeding tendrils for catching smaller plankton. These organisms are for my seed-world project MESW, with this group being prevalent for most of the project’s ~700 million year duration.

Something not covered in the previous post was the waterflick lifecycle. Being holoplanktonic, aconticorans spend their entire lives drifting in the currents. From birth to death, some groups simply increase in size yet change little in morphology while other groups may look fairly different when young, though young will still typically behave similarly to adults. Only a few groups have young which feed dramatically differently than adults by incorporating phytoplankton into their bodies to generate part of their energy through photosynthesis.

This final post of the series displays the group asterostoma, which is remarkable for its vague radial positioning of the tendrils around its mouth, and the group amplexicimica, which have reduced most to all of their tendrils in favor of adapting the tendril-raking structures derived from their ancestral mandibles as "arms".

Description
(3/3) The waterflicks (aconticorans) were featured in my previous post, which covered details on their morphology, locomotion, and evolution. For a short review, aconticora is a very large group of neotenic-fly-larva-descended holoplanktonic zooplankton which move via jet propulsion and (excluding some groups) possess 3 pairs of feeding tendrils for catching smaller plankton. These organisms are for my seed-world project MESW, with this group being prevalent for most of the project’s ~700 million year duration.

Something not covered in the previous post was the waterflick lifecycle. Being holoplanktonic, aconticorans spend their entire lives drifting in the currents. From birth to death, some groups simply increase in size yet change little in morphology while other groups may look fairly different when young, though young will still typically behave similarly to adults. Only a few groups have young which feed dramatically differently than adults by incorporating phytoplankton into their bodies to generate part of their energy through photosynthesis.

This final post of the series displays the group asterostoma, which is remarkable for its vague radial positioning of the tendrils around its mouth, and the group amplexicimica, which have reduced most to all of their tendrils in favor of adapting the tendril-raking structures derived from their ancestral mandibles as "arms".