Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Marine Science => Topic started by: chris on 18/01/2012 19:58:06
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What do nautili eat, and when do they dine, and where?
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Plankton? Smaller animals that are small enough to fit in the beak.
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Nautilus is fairly deep sea dweller, usually found at depths of around 300m - 500m. Their habitat will be the steep slopes of coral reefs such as the Great Barrier Reef. Feeding is a night time affair, when the Nautilus will rise to somewhere nearer to 100m depth to feed on the nightly migration of shrimp which also rise to more shallow depths to feed. They will also feed on small fish and crabs and other crustaceans and will take carrion. As their eyesight is rather poor, food is located by their keen sense of smell and captured in the tentacles, which can number up to 90.
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90 tentacles; wow. For some reason I had assumed that they would be like squid and have 10 or so arms.
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in the 90 or more tentacles.
Sounds like a load of ba*** [:-X]
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Sounds like a load of ba*** [:-X]
Not sure Nutilus has any ba***, but it sure has a lot of tentacles! They are quite small though, nothing like the long tentacles of a squid or even cuttlefish. Two of the tentacles are modified to 'taste' the water and the number of tentacles will be dependant upon the species. 90 would be the maximum, not the minimum, as previously posted.