If you tried to build a house, mucus is one of the worst materials you could use. Some ocean-dwellers would disagree, though, with intricate ‘snot palaces’ that help them to eat and not get eaten.
Larvaceans (lar-VAY-shee-ans) are a type of sea creature that look a bit like a tadpole. In only forty-five minutes, they can create an entire ‘house’ of mucus around them, sometimes up to a metre across. This isn’t just a solid blob, though. It contains all sorts of tubes and chambers for water to flow through. Some of these filter food straight to the larvacean’s mouth, while others reduce the speed of waste water so that predators can’t find it.
These structures haven’t been properly studied before now, since they fall apart too easily to hold. This problem was solved by a team from California, who used a 3D scanner to map the slime’s complicated tubing without ever needing to touch it.
Lachlan Writes Science 