Some ins and outs of raising larvae

Today my most recent batches of urchin larvae are six days old. Yesterday being Monday, I changed their water and looked at them under the scopes. I was pleased to be able to split each batch into two jars, as the larvae have already grown quite a bit; I now have a total of four jars to take care of. This makes me inordinately happy. Having only two jars is risky, as it wouldn’t take much for both of them to crash, but for some reason I feel more confident of success with four jars. It’s probably one of those all-your-eggs-in-one-basket things.

In any case, this is what they look like now:

These larvae are perfectly formed. At this point they are shaped essentially like squared-off goblets, with four arms sticking up at the corners of the goblet. They will continue to grow arms in pairs until they have a total of eight (four pairs). The stomachs (the round-ish pale red structures in the middle of the body) are big and round; the color of the stomachs is due to the food that the larvae are eating. And can you see the skeletal rods extending into each of the arms? Each of the eventual larval arms will be supported by one of these rods, and additional rods will serve as cross-braces going horizontally across the body.

Ever wondered what these animals eat? In the wild they would be feeding on whatever phytoplankton they can catch. In the lab we have several types of phytoplankton growing in pure culture, but trial and error has taught us that urchin larvae do best on a diet of the cryptophyte Rhodomonas sp.

The red color of the cultures is due to the color of the cells. When the larvae eat this food their stomachs turn pinkish. Rhodomonas cells are about 25 µm long and have two flagella that they use to zip around. Here’s a short video of a drop of Rhodomonas culture on a slide:

They sort of look like sperms, but the cells are much larger than sperms, the flagella are much shorter than the single flagellum of a sperm, and their swimming isn’t quite right to be sperms, either.

The larvae themselves live in glass jars in one of the seawater tables that I converted into a paddle table. The larvae are negatively buoyant and would sink to the bottoms of the jars if left unstirred, and the gentle back-and-forth motion of the paddles keeps them, and their food, suspended in the water column.

See my four jars? They are a sign of short-term success. There’s still a lot of time for things to go south with these larvae, and I certainly don’t take for granted that I’ll be able to keep them alive for the duration. But today, as my students were dissecting urchins in lab, I was able to show them the offspring of said urchins. I hope to keep the larvae alive through the end of the semester, to show the students as much as I can of larval development in one of my favorite animals.