Scores of tiny shrimplike crustaceans make a nightly pilgrimage from underwater caves out to feed in the open sea. Bellies full, they find their way back, homing in on their specific cave over vast distances. (Vast for a shrimp.) How these millions of miniscule mysids find their way back home has been largely a mystery — until now. Mysid shrimp (Hemimysis margalefi), nicknamed possum shrimp because the females carry their larvae in pouches, are about the size of an aspirin tablet and live in caves along the Mediterranean coast. Researchers found they use specialized receptors on their bodies to “smell” their back to their home caves at night. The way mysids “smell” is different from the way humans experience odor through our noses. Instead, the shrimp sense a mix of chemicals dissolved in the water. This “chemical seascape” is made of compounds released by other creatures living in the home cave, especially sponges. “We show for the first time that mysids can tell the water-borne odor bouquet — its so-called chemical seascape characteristic of their home cave apart from that of nearby caves,” lead researcher Thierry Pérez from the Mediterranean Institute of Biodiversity and Marine and Continental Ecology (IMBE) in Marseille, France, said in a statement. Their findings were published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. Entrance of one of the caves where mysids live in Calanques National Park, southern France. Sponges make up a large part of the sessile community in the cave and emit chemicals that help…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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South Africa Today – Environment
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