AAAAHHHHH, my area of expertise!! Okay, so these little guys are called foraminifera, or forams for short. Foraminifera is their order name, for anyone interested. (Remember Kingdom-Phylum-Class- and all that fun stuff?) Foraminifera translates from Latin meaning ‘hole bearers.’ Keep that in mind, we’ll get back to it a bit later.
Forams are super cool because they are a single-celled organism that creates a calcareous shell around themselves as protection. A calcareous shell is kind of similar to the calcium in your teeth in a way. Forams take calcium out of the water that they live in to create their shells.
So why is this neat, you may be asking? Because there are something like 4,000 living species of forams in present day and many many more throughout geologic history. Forams also are a fantastic indicator species, so an organism that likes to live in very particular environments depending on the species. For example, some only live in the deep, deep ocean. Other species love the warm waters of the Bahamas or other tropical environments. Certain species also can indicate things like salinity levels in the ocean, calcium levels, and oxygen levels. Basically, by IDing the forams we find on the ocean bottom, in oceanic sediment cores, and fossilized into rocks, they give us a fantastic look back in time to help identify previous oceanic conditions thousands or even millions of years ago.
Also, forams do create the ‘star sand’ that you can find along certain beaches of Japan but they’re so much cooler up close!
See those little holes in their shells? That’s how the foram feeds itself. It sidles up to a food source (usually a diatom, bacteria, algae, or any detritus smaller than it on the ocean floor), then it extends these sticky tenticle-like things called pseudopods from its single-celled body through the holes in the shell and absorbs the food source. There’s a fascinating video showing this if you go to YouTube and search for ‘Orbulina feeding on Artemia’. These holes are also how the foram moves around underwater. It can extend these pseudopods to slowly pull itself along.
The star sand forams are neat but are far from the most beautiful forams, in my opinion. Most forams create a spiraled or multi-chambered shell like a few of my favorites below. (These are forams from the Bahamas if you were curious)
This one here is called Archaias Angulatus. It starts life out as a small, roundish shell like in the top row of diagrams, then creates this flat, galaxy-shaped edge to it as it grows bigger. Again, you can see the holes in the shell used for feeding and maneuvering.
This is a poor picture but this guy is called Discorbis Rosea. Rosea meaning pink after the color. There are some beaches in the world that look pink because of the shells that have washed up from dead forams like these. You can see the holes in the shell on this one too, as well as a really great example of how the foram builds more chambers as it grows bigger kind of like a snail’s shell.
This concludes my Ted-talk for the evening, please do send me questions or messages if you want to know more! I did my undergrad research on foraminifera and it’s always so exciting to tell people more about them! Think of how many forams there might be at the beach the next time that you are there - right underneath your feet and you wouldn’t even know it…
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