Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Email address Thank you! By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. Many organisms often set up their homes on sea turtles. Known as epibionts, the most noticeable passengers are usually the algae and barnacles clinging to the marine reptile’s protective shell. Other epibionts include tiny crabs in the Planes genus who frequently hitch rides inside the crevices between a turtle’s shell and body. Biologists at the Florida Museum of Natural History recently confirmed a surprising addition to crustaceans’ roster of ocean taxis, however. After examining dozens of specimens collected during surveys off Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast, researchers now know that some small crabs will occasionally climb aboard sea snakes. But these aren’t the Planes crabs the biologists expected. As they describe in a study published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, the clawed invertebrates instead belong to three species related to Planes within the same family. University of Florida (UF) marine herpetologist Joseph Pfaller first noticed one of the suspicious crabs...

Bacteria contend with a wide range of antagonistic interactions from neighboring microbes. One widespread but poorly understood threat is posed by Patescibacteria, which proliferate by colonizing host...

Cetacean epibionts offer noninvasive insights into host health, physiology, and spatial ecology, yet quantitative assessments in wild populations remain scarce. Although vessel-based observations may...

Deep-sea anemones (Cnidaria: Anthozoa) are regarded as sessile organisms, living in fine sediments, attached to hard substrates, or living as epibionts on other organisms. Motility in Actiniaria is no...

Discovery and exploitation of natural competence in Patescibacteria enables visualization of the bacterial epibiont lifecycle and dissection of its genetic underpinnings.

There is a growing awareness of the role that indirect interactions play in influencing food webs and ecosystem structure. In this study, the hypothesis that crustose algal epibionts provide gastropo....

The northern Gulf of Mexico contains productive soft bottom environments with numerous oil rigs that contain epibionts and reef associated fishes. Sou…

An image from the study illustrating how plastic bottles reach Latin American Pacific coasts. Illustration: Garcés-Ordóñez et al. (2025) (CC BY 4.0) The scientists found that, like other marine debris, the bottles and caps they retrieved were sometimes colonized by immobile organisms called epibionts, which live on the surface of other organisms or materials. The team found items with bryozoans, barnacles, and mollusks attached, with the presence of these correlating with the age of the plastic.