I’ve shown you how sea urchin eggs are fertilized in the lab, and you’ve watched the fertilization membrane develop in real-time.
One day a few years ago, my colleague, Betsy, and I set up shop to spawn urchins. We do this just about every year because it is super fun and we both enjoy watching larval development; plus, if all goes well we end up with a cohort of urchins whose genetic lineage is known to do growth experiments.
Anyway, after we shot up the urchins and they began spawning we took a sample of eggs to check on their shape. They should be uniformly round and about 80 microns in diameter. The first slide that we set up looked like this:
See that egg in the center, with the fertilization membrane? Somehow that egg got fertilized. This sample of eggs had not been in contact with sperm or any tools that might have been in contact with sperm, so how did this single egg get fertilized? None of the other eggs on the slide had been fertilized, nor was there any visible sperm swimming around.
Betsy and I never did figure out what was going on here. We decided it was one of the Mysteries of Life, and continue to marvel at all the complexities of life that we don’t understand. That’s what makes being a biologist so cool–it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if we already understood everything.
In my next post I’ll show you pictures of sea urchin larval development.