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: marine invertebrates
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…
You are what you eat, part the fourth
The juvenile sea urchins I’ve been raising this year are now nine months old. Back in June I put them on three different macroalgal diets and have been measuring their test diameters monthly. I do the measuring in the first week of every month, and today was the day for November. Over the past few weeks I…
Feeding the ‘droids
So, those bits of Ectopleura crocea that I grabbed from the harbor on Monday are voracious eaters. I didn’t feed them yesterday because I didn’t have time and the students spent the afternoon looking at them in lab, and I hoped that they’d be alive today. Some of the stalks had dropped their hydranths (the distal…
These ARE the droids I’m looking for
Tomorrow my students will be examining cnidarian diversity in lab, so early this morning I went to the harbor to collect hydroids. Or ‘droids, as I refer to them. These are not the droids of Star Wars fame, such as C-3PO and R2D2, but rather colonial cnidarians. As such, they are made up of many…
Off with the old, Case B
ORGANISM OF THE MONTH: Pugettia producta, the kelp crab For a few months now, I’ve had a pet kelp crab running around in one of my seawater tables. I don’t remember where I collected it, or even whether or not I collected it at all; quite often crabs and other animals arrive as hitch-hikers on…
Cuteness strikes again!
That cute little Melibe I found last week is still alive, and still super cute. It lost one of the two large cerata on its back the second day I had it, and I wasn’t sure it would be able to survive long without it, but it has hung in there and started growing a replacement….
Cuteness warning: High alert!
This morning I was doing some routine cleaning of animal-containing dishes at the marine lab when I noticed a little blob of snot on the outside of the bowl I was working on. Normally I just wipe off blobs like that, but something about this one caught my attention in a different way and I…
Happy as a . . .
. . . clam, right? Yes, except in this case the bivalve is not a clam, but a scallop. I was out at the harbor with Brenna again this morning, looking for molluscs for tomorrow’s molluscan diversity lab. Brenna was hunting for slugs, of course, and had drawn up a rope that had been hanging…
Off with the old, into the new
The Seymour Marine Discovery Center, where I spend some time hanging out several days a week, has a spiny lobster (Panulirus interruptus) on exhibit. While the lobster doesn’t have an official name, for obvious reasons the aquarists call it Fluffy. We don’t know if Fluffy is male or female, but for convenience sake we’ve been referring…