Glamour magazine

This week, my dear friend Orbulina universa, the planktonic foraminifera, was featured on the cover of this magazine called Science.

Ain't you glad you're a High Fashion Queen?

This is actually a pretty big deal. The photo is of a living O. universa, and looks just like the ones that we collect by hand while scuba diving in the San Pedro Channel off Catalina Island. The spines are each a single crystal of calcite, and you can see the thousands of dinoflagellate symbionts, which show up as the tiny gold dots producing the halo effect. The big ball is the adult, spherical shell, and you can see the dark cytoplasm blob in the juvenile shell inside.

All this from just one cell.

Most people work on fossil Orbulina universa, which look like tiny white ping pong balls, and are thus much less interesting. This is the view we actually get when hunting them in the water column, minus the fancy lighting. The photo was taken by my advisor 20 years ago, and reproduced here with permission. Unfortunately, although the article is about foraminifera, the research doesn't directly pertain to studying living forams.