Sea angel and its prey

Several of us puzzled over the appearance of this fellow and a lot of

his friends, plus the littler black winged creatures all around them,

in the sea water just below our house today. One friend is a

biologist and he tells me this evening it is probably a sea angel, an

Arctic pteropod, a "naked" one since it bears no shell. I never knew

they even existed until today. The littler purple-black fellows are

probably their common prey, a related (but shelled) pteropod.



This was taken simply leaning over the water, holding on to wharf decking.