STARS IN THE WATER: This celestial-looking creature is a living marine protozoan known as a planktonic foraminifera. The species, Orbulina universa, secretes a calcium carbonate shell, which can reveal details about its living environment thousands of years later. With his laboratory experiments on living foraminifera, Howard Spero, associate professor of geology, may be changing the interpretation of climate change and oceanographic conditions during the last Ice Age. Spero took this picture through a camera attached to an inverted light microscope.