Tiny springy things in the water

I photographed these little springy dudes being eaten by a skeleton shrimp in Lembata, Indonesia. Anyone know what they are?

Coiled cyanobacteria. Nice catch!

This stuff is all over my photos from Lembeh! So cool to finally know what it is!

Thanks, Lesley! Here's a higher-res version.

Finally! I had a bunch of those in images I took a while back of some pygmy seahorses in the Philippines and wondered what they were.

S.

Hey guys, you should be posting those WTF images! With all the UW experience around here it's rare that someone doesn't know the answer.

I have always put them down as diatom chains, rather than cyanobacteria.

Good point. It might be diatoms or it could be both. I did a quick web search which brought up a few diatoms in helical colonies but the majority of coiled chain images were of cyanobacteria. We won't know for sure without putting some of this stuff under a microscope.