Letting gravity do the work

This morning I went to Natural Bridges. The tide this morning was the lowest of the season, but early enough that for the most part I had the intertidal to myself for a couple of hours. I always like those mornings best.

I did meet a docent out there, and we chatted for a few minutes. Towards the end of the excursion, when the tide had turned and I realized I had to get to the marine lab for the usual Friday feeding chores, she pointed out something that didn’t make sense to her. She described it as two anemones side-by-side, but one was really stretched out down towards the water. She wondered what could be going on, as the other anemone looked normal.

Looks strange, doesn’t it? What this anemone is doing, I think, is disgorging the remains of its most recent meal. If you look at the oral end, which is indeed stretched down towards the sandy bottom of the pool, you can see two things sticking out. The whitish blob is the internal part of the anemone’s pharynx. It is not at all uncommon for anemones to sort of prolapse the pharynx, especially after a big meal. Remember, anemones have a two way gut with a single opening for both food ingestion and waste expulsion. The other thing sticking out of the mouth is a clump of mussel shells thickly coated with slime.

Here’s a close-up of what’s going on at the mouth of this anemone:

It’s hard to tell whether or not the mussels have been opened and digested by the anemone. It looks like at least some of the acorn barnacles attached to the mussel might still be alive, although smothered in slime. Nor can we see how many mussels are still inside the anemone’s gut. In any case, the anemone is getting rid of this part of the mussel clump. However, this isn’t a phenomenon that can really be watched, unless you can watch in time-lapse. The docent asked, “Doesn’t it use peristalsis, or something like that?” The answer is that no, anemones don’t use peristalsis. They don’t have the type of muscles that can contract in that way. The anemone still has to somehow expel wastes and undigestible matter from its gut, through that single opening that we call a mouth but functions as both mouth and anus.

Our human gut, of course, uses peristalsis to move food along from esophagus to rectum. And while for the most part we don’t like to think about how that works, we have all experienced what happens when things don’t go as planned. I doubt that anybody gets through life without vomiting, so it is probably safe to say we all know that it is a violent way to thoroughly expel food, toxins, and other noxious items from the stomach. Anemones, however, have no peristalsis and cannot vomit. How, then, does an anemone void its gut of something larger than the typical digestive waste?

This particular anemone is ideally situated to let gravity do the work. Hanging down like this and relaxing the simple sphincter muscle around the base of the tentacles will allow the mussel clump to eventually fall out. Without peristalsis to speed things along, it will probably take a while. Would it be finished by the time the tide comes back? I couldn’t stick around to watch, so I can’t say. But it was a very cool thing to see, even though it happens about as fast as paint drying.