As a long-time student of invertebrate zoology I have for most of my life appreciated the immense variety and ingenuity of animal body plans. And one of the things I’ve always found the most intriguing is the pentaradial symmetry of echinoderms. I remember thinking, the first time I encountered a live echinoderm (probably a star at the…
Catching a mondo swarm
On Easter Sunday we got a call about a big swarm of bees in our neighborhood. The woman who called has a couple of hives in her backyard, one of which had swarmed three weeks earlier. We caught that swarm and installed it into our Green hive at our house. This time it was her other…
And. . . we have mouths!
Finally! At long last I have evidence that my juvenile urchins have mouths and are feeding. A week ago I put a batch of seven teensy urchins onto a scuzzy glass slide and have been watching them daily ever since. And yesterday, just as I was beginning to worry that they’d never be able to…
What’s wind got to do with it?
Everybody knows that climate change is a hot–pun intended!–topic in both science and politics these days. Here along the northern California coast it seems that sea surface temperature (SST) has been elevated for at least a year now. I remember a time, not too many years ago, when I would put my hands into my…
Old skills
When I was in graduate school I found myself drawn to the “old-fashioned” skills of classical zoology: observation of and experiments with living animals. I had, and still have, very little interest in the new-fangled high-tech methods of studying animals, and part of me strongly resents having to homogenize an animal to know what its…
Long live the queen!
This afternoon we inspected our Purple hive to check on how the queen is doing and see if they need more space for either brood or honey. For the past few weeks I’ve been able to smell that they’re making some very tasty honey (it smells like buttered popcorn) and we want to make sure that…
Oral examination
Anyone who went to graduate school in the sciences remembers what oral exams are like. I remember not having any fun at all in mine, and by the time I was dismissed I wasn’t sure what my own name was. Fortunately, that is all ancient history and now I get to spend my time performing…
Next step: Building a mouth
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…
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…
Taking their sweet time
After much teasing and titillation, my urchin larvae have finally gotten down to the serious business of metamorphosis. It seems that I had jumped the gun on proclaiming them competent about a week ago, or maybe they were indeed competent and just needed to wait for some exogenous cue to commit to leaving the plankton for…