Tag: marine invertebrates

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 eat, I saw that some of them had eaten little tracks through the scuzz on the slide.

Here’s an example:

The little urchin still has a test diameter of about 0.5 mm, so it hasn’t really started growing yet. However, see the squiggly dark paths? Those are areas of the slide that have been eaten clean. The scuzz is algal in origin, giving the slide an overall brownish-green color, so the scuzz-free parts of the slide are clear–or dark, actually, given that I took this photograph against a black background–having been munched clean by the urchin’s teeth. And the other bit of evidence that I saw? Poop! Yes, there were fecal pellets on the slide, which proves that the little urchin has a complete functional gut.

And those small round golden objects you see on the slide? Those are big centric diatoms of the genus Coscinodiscus. They are the only local diatoms that I know of that are big enough to be seen with the naked eye.

Lastly, because I just can’t seem to stop myself, here’s a video of the little urchin:

I love the sculpturing of the spines. And do you see that three-pronged structure at about 9:00 on the urchin? That’s a pedicellaria. On adults of the genus Strongylocentrotus there are four types of jawed pedicellariae, three of which, in my experience, are easy to distinguish on a living specimen. But in this young an animal I can’t yet tell how many types of pedicellariae it has. I suppose that the formation of pedicellariae might be the next event for me to follow as these urchins continue to grow and develop.

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 a different kind of oral examination on other creatures.

My oldest urchins are now 17 days post-metamorphosis and I’ve been watching them to see when their mouths break through. It seems to me that 17 days is a long time, but the time is near. Besides, the animal is always right. In the urchin that I examined closely the five teeth of Aristotle’s lantern are very close to breaking through the thin membrane covering the mouth opening. The teeth are also much more active than they were a week earlier, as you can see in this short video clip:

I also checked out another tiny urchin and noticed that this individual has startlingly red buccal tube feet:

Sea urchins have five pairs of large tube feet on the oral surface, surrounding the mouth. As with all tube feet, the buccal tube feet are part of the animal’s water vascular system and are situated in the ambulacral region of the test; they are used to manipulate and grab food. In adults of this species, the buccal tube feet are much larger and more robust than the other tube feet. In this little guy the tube feet are noticeably red, but I can’t yet tell if they’re bigger than the others.

And just for kicks I took another video:

Yesterday I transferred seven urchins onto a glass slide that I’ve had basking in the sun in an outdoor tank to develop a thin film of algae. As the urchins’ mouths become functional they should be able to start munching on the scuzz on the slide. So far they seem happy to be crawling around on the slide but this morning I didn’t see any signs that they’d actually eaten anything.

The waiting continues….

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 adventure, you fall out of the plankton, dismantle your body while simultaneously building a new one, and about a day later have to begin walking using anatomical structures that you didn’t have 24 hours earlier. Not only that, but the food that you’ve been eating your entire life is no longer available to you, for you no longer possess the apparatus that can capture it. And, finally, your body symmetry makes a wholescale change from bilateral to pentaradial–just think of what that means in terms of how your body is oriented and moves through three-dimensional space. That’s what metamorphosis is like for sea urchins and many other echinoderms.

The objects of my complete and utter obsession for the past month and a half have started metamorphosing from small larvae into tiny urchins. When I did my daily check yesterday I had two that had completed metamorphosis since the previous day. One of them still had a bit of puffiness on the aboral surface, which I think may be the very last remnants of the larval body. This little guy has only its first five tube feet, from the juvenile rudiment of the competent larva.

Its companion in metamorphosis was a bit farther along in terms of development; while it still had only the first five tube feet, it has more spines:

But just having feet doesn’t mean you automatically know how to walk with them, and it’s no easier for these guys than it is for humans. It’s probably more difficult, actually, because the urchins have to coordinate movement of five appendages simultaneously. They typically pick up one or two tube feet from the same side of the body and wave them around until one of them randomly sticks to something. Then they remain stretched out until the tube feet on the opposite side of the body let go. Well, you can watch for yourself; this is the same individual that is in the top photo above:

Being a bit farther along in the developmental process means having more spines, but not necessarily any more coordination. I watched the second urchin for several minutes, and while it repeatedly detached and re-attached tube feet, it didn’t actually go anywhere. Here’s a short clip:

It’s amazing how quickly they learn, though. When I go to the lab to look at them tomorrow, they’ll be running around as though they’ve been ambulatory their entire lives. Which, in a peculiar sense, depending on when you start counting, maybe they have.

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 good. In any case, I’ve spent much of the last five days or so watching and photographing the larvae to document the progress of metamorphosis as it occurs. While I was unable to follow any individual larva through the entire process of metamorphosis, I did manage to put together a series of photographs that document the sequence of events.

To recap: A competent larva is anatomically and physiologically prepared to undergo metamorphosis. This batch of larvae reached competence at the age of about 45 days. The larva below is very dense and opaque in the main body. It can still swim, but has become “sticky” and tends to sit on the bottom of the dish.

Sometimes the first tube feet emerge from the larva while it is still planktonic. Other times the larva falls to the benthos and lands on its (usually) left side, where the rudiment is located.

This larva is lying on its right side, so the tube feet are sticking straight up out of the plane of view. You can clearly see two of them, though.

Just for kicks, here’s the same larva, photographed with dark-field lighting. This kind of light illuminates the surface of the object being viewed, which is very helpful when the subject is opaque, making it possible to see four tube feet in this picture.

As the tube feet are emerging from the juvenile rudiment, the larval body contracts and gets denser. The arms shrink and the internal skeletal rods that supported them are discarded. At this stage the larval juvenile (larvenile? juvenal?) begins to crawl around on the bottom. The ciliated band that used to propel it through the water and create the feeding current may still be beating, but eventually will stop, as the larvenile will no longer need it. This is usually the time that I see the first spines waving around; it’s interesting to note that tube feet, which originate from the inside of the animal, come first, then are followed by spines. Then again, the spines are part of the animal’s endoskeleton, so maybe it’s not so noteworthy after all.

So they’re getting close to becoming real urchins! Next up: Learning to walk.

Did you notice that I invented a new word? I’m going to start using it regularly.