A Golden Snitch?

19/02/2019

By: Colville Harbour Care

This is a small translucent golden ball. When disturbed a small "foot" with a fan on it waves around outside of the golden ball. This is the second one of these we have found. I susspect it is a barnical in some part of its life cycle. Any ideas?

Sally Carson commented:

Hi There....I like the golden snitch idea cool......but I think it's some sort of giant ostracod (seed shrimp) such as Gigantocypris. These are deep water open ocean animals but they do sometimes get washed inshore. Not a barnacle lifecycle stage the Cyprid looks somewhat like this but is usually more teardrop shaped.

Great find!

About Us

The Marine Metre Squared website, mm2.net.nz, is a citizen-science project and is owned and managed by the NZ Marine Studies Centre, University of Otago. Content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial–ShareAlike license, unless otherwise stated.