Learning to walk

Imagine spending your entire life up in the water column as a creature of the plankton. You use cilia to swim but are more or less blown about by the currents, never (hopefully!) encountering a hard surface, and feeding on phytoplankton and other particulate matter suspended in the water. Then, several weeks into your life’s adventure, you fall out of the plankton, dismantle your body while simultaneously building a new one, and about a day later have to begin walking using anatomical structures that you didn’t have 24 hours earlier. Not only that, but the food that you’ve been eating your entire life is no longer available to you, for you no longer possess the apparatus that can capture it. And, finally, your body symmetry makes a wholescale change from bilateral to pentaradial–just think of what that means in terms of how your body is oriented and moves through three-dimensional space. That’s what metamorphosis is like for sea urchins and many other echinoderms.

The objects of my complete and utter obsession for the past month and a half have started metamorphosing from small larvae into tiny urchins. When I did my daily check yesterday I had two that had completed metamorphosis since the previous day. One of them still had a bit of puffiness on the aboral surface, which I think may be the very last remnants of the larval body. This little guy has only its first five tube feet, from the juvenile rudiment of the competent larva.

Its companion in metamorphosis was a bit farther along in terms of development; while it still had only the first five tube feet, it has more spines:

But just having feet doesn’t mean you automatically know how to walk with them, and it’s no easier for these guys than it is for humans. It’s probably more difficult, actually, because the urchins have to coordinate movement of five appendages simultaneously. They typically pick up one or two tube feet from the same side of the body and wave them around until one of them randomly sticks to something. Then they remain stretched out until the tube feet on the opposite side of the body let go. Well, you can watch for yourself; this is the same individual that is in the top photo above:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IrqNWwaSLA

Being a bit farther along in the developmental process means having more spines, but not necessarily any more coordination. I watched the second urchin for several minutes, and while it repeatedly detached and re-attached tube feet, it didn’t actually go anywhere. Here’s a short clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z21o9H6UDgQ

It’s amazing how quickly they learn, though. When I go to the lab to look at them tomorrow, they’ll be running around as though they’ve been ambulatory their entire lives. Which, in a peculiar sense, depending on when you start counting, maybe they have.