About two and a half months ago, the ongoing disaster of sea star wasting syndrome raised its ugly head again when one of my bat stars (Patiria miniata) developed lesions on its aboral surface. Here’s what it looked like then: and here’s a close-up of the lesion, taken the following day: See how the lesion…
Marine invertebrates
Some ins and outs of raising larvae
Today my most recent batches of urchin larvae are six days old. Yesterday being Monday, I changed their water and looked at them under the scopes. I was pleased to be able to split each batch into two jars, as the larvae have already grown quite a bit; I now have a total of four jars to take…
Boy meets girl, urchin style
Having obtained decent-ish amounts of gametes from sea urchins, the next step is to get eggs and sperm together. The first thing I did was examine the spawned eggs to make sure they were round and all the same size. Lumpy eggs or a variety of sizes of eggs indicates that they are probably not…
Playing matchmaker
We are finally heading into the time of the year that our local intertidal sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, spawns. Usually I would wait until December or January to try to spawn urchins in the lab, but next week my students will be dissecting urchins in lab and I thought I might as well evaluate gonad development…
You are what you eat, part the fourth
The juvenile sea urchins I’ve been raising this year are now nine months old. Back in June I put them on three different macroalgal diets and have been measuring their test diameters monthly. I do the measuring in the first week of every month, and today was the day for November. Over the past few weeks I…
Happiness is . . .
. . . taking a small group of highly motivated students into the field! My invertebrate zoology class this semester has only 10 students, which allows me a lot more freedom to improvise on the fly and actually participate in the course instead of having to stand back and supervise 30 of them at the…
Feeding the ‘droids
So, those bits of Ectopleura crocea that I grabbed from the harbor on Monday are voracious eaters. I didn’t feed them yesterday because I didn’t have time and the students spent the afternoon looking at them in lab, and I hoped that they’d be alive today. Some of the stalks had dropped their hydranths (the distal…
These ARE the droids I’m looking for
Tomorrow my students will be examining cnidarian diversity in lab, so early this morning I went to the harbor to collect hydroids. Or ‘droids, as I refer to them. These are not the droids of Star Wars fame, such as C-3PO and R2D2, but rather colonial cnidarians. As such, they are made up of many…
Off with the old, Case B
ORGANISM OF THE MONTH: Pugettia producta, the kelp crab For a few months now, I’ve had a pet kelp crab running around in one of my seawater tables. I don’t remember where I collected it, or even whether or not I collected it at all; quite often crabs and other animals arrive as hitch-hikers on…
All good things. . .
. . . must come to an end, so they say. And Scott’s and my little experiment growing Pisaster ochraceus came to its end when the last of our teensy stars gave up the ghost a week ago. We aren’t entirely surprised, as nobody before us had succeeded in growing these guys in the post-larval…