My oldest baby urchins have been actual sea urchins for eight days now. Their total age, counting from the time they were zygotes, is 58 days. When an animal undergoes a life history event as drastic as this metamorphosis, it can be tricky deciding how to determine its age. Do you count from when egg and sperm formed the new zygote, or from when the juvenile (and eventually adult) body form was achieved? For the sake of this discussion I’m going to count from the date of fertilization, simply because I know exactly when that date was and it’s the same for all of these larvae, larveniles, and juveniles. This just makes sense to me.
So, at the grand old age of 58 days, which is five days post-metamorphosis for the oldest individuals, the baby urchins have grown a lot more tube feet, spines, and pedicellariae. However, they haven’t gotten any bigger. This is because they aren’t eating yet. I’ll explain why in a bit. The individual in the picture below measures about 490 µm in test diameter–that’s the opaque part in the center of the animal. The spines make the apparent size much larger.
©Allison J. Gong
In this short video clip you can see how many more tube feet this animal has, compared to the original five it started with. The movements are now much more coordinated, too, and these animals can walk with what appears to be purposeful direction. You can also see the texturing of the spines and the little pincher-like pedicellariae.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kObh6f2_szw
To see the surface details of the animal when it’s this opaque, I needed to use a different kind of lighting. Instead of using the transmitted light that shines through the object on the stage of the microscope, giving a brightfield view, I used my fiber optic light to create a darkfield effect that shows the surface details of the animal. Then I shot another video clip with this epi-illumination and focused up and down on the oral surface to see what was going on there. Fortunately the baby urchin isn’t yet able to right itself very quickly, and it stayed oral-side-up for as long as I needed to take the photos and video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9oYphSXh3A
What this video clip of the urchin’s oral surface shows very clearly is that the animal doesn’t have a mouth yet. The pinkish star-shaped structure in the center is actually the negative space between the five triangle-shaped white teeth which all point to the middle. Soon, I expect in the next handful of days or so, that thin membrane covering the mouth will rupture, and the teeth will be exposed for the first time to the outside environment. At that point the urchin will begin feeding.
You may well be wondering, How the heck are they living if they haven’t eaten in over a week? They’re babies, after all, and don’t babies have to eat all the time? Well, yes, they are babies. But before they were baby urchins they were larvae, and as larvae were kept well fed by yours truly for their entire larval life. Part of becoming competent as a larva is sequestering enough energy stores to power the process of metamorphosis and keep the juvenile going until it has a mouth and can feed itself. Remember, this new animal has to do everything–locomote, eat, avoid predators–with body parts that it didn’t have when it was a larva. Building whole new body parts and learning how to use them takes time. So these newly metamorphosed juveniles have about 10-12 days to fast until their mouths break through and they can begin eating. Any individual that didn’t store enough energy to make it through the fast, will die.
I’ll check on them again tomorrow (day 59) and see if it’s time to transfer the juveniles to their food source, which will be algal scuzz that I’ve been cultivating on glass slides for a few weeks. They’ll grow quickly once they’re eating. I hope I have enough scuzz to keep up with them!