I came of age, in an academic sense, working as a technician in a lab where the research focused on colonial hydroids. The other tech in the lab, Brenda, and I would get sent out to collect hydroids, then spend another day or so picking the predatory nudibranchs off the colonies. The PI of the…
Marine invertebrates
You are what you eat, part the second
Two months ago now I gave my juvenile sea urchins a job. It’s the kind of job they’re perfectly suited for: eating algae. I measured them all and randomly divvied them up into three food treatments. One group remains on the pink coralline alga they’d all been eating once they graduated from a diet of scum,…
A star is born!
I’m sorry. I had to go there. You didn’t really expect me not to, did you? The reason, of course, is that today we got our first settled and metamorphosed Pisaster stars! We were doing our normal Monday water change when I noticed a teensy orange speck on the bottom of one of the jars….
The perfect storm
Although the last thing that any of us marine invertebrate biologists want to see again is a wasted sea star, the syndrome has once again been making its presence felt at the marine lab. It has been almost two years since I documented the initial outbreak, and while nobody is convinced that it has entirely…
All in the family
Earlier this week an acquaintance asked me about the development of sand dollars, specifically if it is anything like that of sea urchins. It just so happens that sea urchins and sand dollars, while not in the same taxonomic family, are in the same class, the Echinoidea. As close kin, they share a similar larval form,…
You are what you eat, part the first
Remember those little urchins I brought into the world back in January? Well, they’re doing well, for the most part. About a month ago I took about 250 of them, measured them, and divided them into three feeding treatments: one group I left on the coralline rocks they all cut their teeth on, one group…
Got ’em!
When I moved to the coast these many years ago and started poking around in the local intertidal, I became entranced with little animals called staurozoans. I can’t claim to have been to every intertidal site in the area, but I’ve been to several of them and I personally know the staurozoans to occur at…
Constellations
I did a quick search, and there doesn’t seem to be a collective noun for sea stars. I’m going to remedy that by declaring “constellation” to be the official term for a group of sea stars. And by “official” I mean that’s the term I’m going to use. Who knows, maybe it’ll take. In any…
So big, so fast!
I am astonished at how quickly my Pisaster larvae are growing and developing. This week saw their 3-week birthday, and today they are all of 24 days old. And look at how much they’ve changed since Monday! This individual measures 1500 µm long, not including the length of those two long brachiolar arms on the…
Some smells linger for days
A few months ago, a former student invited me to participate in an activity with local Girl Scouts. The Scouts have a camp this weekend at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, and this year their theme is “Commotion in the Ocean.” The former student, whose name is Thomas, works for the Squids for Kids program run…