Angel eggs

2014 including popular series, all-time classics, and modern favorites. 2014 and angel eggs bound to get every reader turning pages.

Sea angels are also sometimes known as “cliones” but this is potentially misleading because the family Clionidae is just one of the families within this clade. Both adaptations suit their free-swimming oceanic lives. This is about twice as fast as their prey, the sea butterfly. It is not yet clear whether the sea angel uses its swimming appendages as ‘rowing paddles’ or as ‘wings’.

Another large polar species of sea angel, Clione antarctica, defends itself from predators by synthesizing a previously unknown molecule, pteroenone. Because of this secretion, predators will not eat the sea angel. A species of amphipod takes advantage of this trait: The amphipod will seize an individual of C. Gymnosomata are carnivorous, feeding only on their fellow pteropods, the Thecosomata. Their lifestyles have coevolved with those of their prey, with their feeding strategy adapting to the morphology and consistency of the thecosome shell. Gymnosomes slowly beat their wing-like parapodia in a rowing motion to propel their “perfectly streamlined” bodies through the upper 20 m of the water column. Like many gastropods, sea angels are simultaneous hermaphrodites with internal fertilization.

A fertilized animal later releases a gelatinous egg mass, and the eggs float freely until hatching. Their embryonic shells are lost within the first few days after hatching. The gymnosomes, like other shell-less opisthobranchs, discard their shells at metamorphosis, with the retractor muscles being severed and the shell lost. The group does not truly, therefore, lack a shell. Note that the use of Pteropoda as the containing clade is traditional, but contested. Others would omit Pteropoda and use its containing clade Euopisthobranchia or subclass Heterobranchia.