Solenogastres

My name is Franziska Bergmeier and I am a postdoctoral researcher from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany. Since my Master’s degree I’ve been studying this group of wonderful critters that most people have never heard of: Solenogastres! They belong to the phylum Mollusca and are related to well-known animals like cephalopods, mussels, snails and slugs. Solenogastres are weird looking molluscs: They are worm-shaped and instead of bearing a shell, they are covered in fine aragonitic scales or needles, giving them a shiny or fuzzy appearance. Most Solenogastres are small and only a few millimetres in size, but a handful of species can grow up to more than 10 cm in size! Even though we can find them in all the world’s oceans, from the tropics to poles and the shallow water to the deep sea, only a little over 300 species have been formally described by researchers over the last 150 years. Finding Solenogastres isn’t that difficult (if you know where to look and have the proper sampling gear), but identifying all the different species of Solenogastres sure is: We need to study the scales and needles covering the body surface and also look at their internal anatomy to differentiate between species (we do this by embedding the animals in plastic, cutting them into very thin slices, and then looking at them under the microscope).

There is so much we do not know about these animals and together with my colleagues from the Kocot Lab at the University of Alabama we are trying to shed more light on some of these unanswered questions. For example, we are trying to uncover the relationships among the different solenogaster species by comparing specific parts of their DNA, so we can begin to understand how these animals evolved. More than a third of all Solenogaster species are found in the waters surrounding Antarctica and being able to search for these animals here is very exciting. I have spent the last days sorting through a lot of Antarctic sediment, trying to find as many Solenogastres as possible – and we have been very successful so far!
​
If I am not sitting in front of my microscope hunting for Solenogastres, I will be outside on deck enjoying the beauty and strangeness of this place that surrounds us. Seeing Antarctica has been a childhood dream of mine, and to actually have the opportunity to be here makes me feel like one of the luckiest persons alive!