Field notebook
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Taxonomic class
This practical browse label comes from the published animal profiles. Taxonomy changes as evidence improves; individual source records remain the authority.
The sea angel Clione limacina hunts almost nothing but shelled pteropods called sea butterflies, extracting them from their shells with a retractable set of hooked buccal cones rather than a radula alone.
Aplysia californica has around twenty thousand central neurons, some nearly a millimetre across and individually identifiable from animal to animal. That combination made it the organism in which the cellular basis of simple learning was first worked out.
The tiny teeth on a limpet's rasping tongue are reinforced with goethite nanofibres and reach tensile strengths of roughly three to six and a half gigapascals, exceeding spider silk and matching high-performance engineered fibres.
The slug's defensive slime contains compounds that produce a numbing sensation on contact with a mouth, and it is so viscous and adhesive that it is difficult to remove. Both properties discourage animals from finishing the meal.