00:01
Here we're looking at why nidarians are such strong predators.
00:04
There's three main reasons.
00:07
There are more, but these are the three biggest reasons why nidarians are so good at capturing prey.
00:12
First of all, if we were to zoom in on the tentacles of a nidarian, this is an anemone, but we could also look at the tentacles of a jellyfish or a coral, and we'd see pretty much the same thing.
00:27
We zoom in and we would see what's called the nidocite.
00:41
And this nidocyte, which is the characteristic feature that gives nidarians their name, has something called a nematicist.
00:51
Here's the barb coming out of the nematocyst.
01:00
And this harpoon is coiled around on this long thread -like filament.
01:06
And there's a trigger that when brus, by a predator or a potential prey item, that nematicist will harpoon out of the nitocyte and inject into the prey.
01:23
Okay, now, just having that feature is going to help nidarians be better at predator capture, or prey capture, because that harpoon is going to stick into the flesh of whatever they're trying to feed on...