My most recent batch of sea urchin larvae continues to do well, having gotten through the dreaded Day 24. I haven’t written about them lately because they’re not doing very differently from the group that I followed last winter/spring. However, I’ve been taking photos of the larvae twice a week and it seems a shame to…
Tag: larvae
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…
Boy meets girl, urchin style
Having obtained decent-ish amounts of gametes from sea urchins, the next step is to get eggs and sperm together. The first thing I did was examine the spawned eggs to make sure they were round and all the same size. Lumpy eggs or a variety of sizes of eggs indicates that they are probably not…
Playing matchmaker
We are finally heading into the time of the year that our local intertidal sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, spawns. Usually I would wait until December or January to try to spawn urchins in the lab, but next week my students will be dissecting urchins in lab and I thought I might as well evaluate gonad development…
A star is born!
I’m sorry. I had to go there. You didn’t really expect me not to, did you? The reason, of course, is that today we got our first settled and metamorphosed Pisaster stars! We were doing our normal Monday water change when I noticed a teensy orange speck on the bottom of one of the jars….
All in the family
Earlier this week an acquaintance asked me about the development of sand dollars, specifically if it is anything like that of sea urchins. It just so happens that sea urchins and sand dollars, while not in the same taxonomic family, are in the same class, the Echinoidea. As close kin, they share a similar larval form,…
Constellations
I did a quick search, and there doesn’t seem to be a collective noun for sea stars. I’m going to remedy that by declaring “constellation” to be the official term for a group of sea stars. And by “official” I mean that’s the term I’m going to use. Who knows, maybe it’ll take. In any…
A thousand words
You know how the saying goes. I just wanted to share how beautiful this larva is. I have nothing to add. More on Friday, probably.
17 days old
What a difference a week makes! The Pisaster larvae have grown and developed quite a bit since I looked at them a week ago. Here they are as little space ships again. Since they are getting so big, Scott and I decided to redistribute the larvae from four jars into six. This will give them…
Growing fast
Today my Pisaster ochraceus larvae are 10 days old. Although they seemed to be developing slowly, compared to the urchins that I’m more used to, in the past several days they have changed quite a bit. They’ve also been growing quickly, which makes me think that they’re off to a strong start. Of course, there’s…