When the most recent epidemic of seastar wasting syndrome (SSWS) began back in 2013, the forcipulate stars were the first to succumb. This group includes conspicuous members of intertidal and subtidal habitats, such as: In the past year or so, I’ve noticed P. ochraceus making a comeback at local intertidal sites. At first I was…
Tag: sea stars
Seeing (wannabe) stars
So. I have a batch of larvae from a spontaneous spawning of the leather star, Dermasterias imbricata, that occurred four weeks ago tonight. Until now I’ve never had an opportunity to work with this species, even though we have quite a few of them at the marine lab. I had my own for several years, until…
Swimming jellybeans
When serendipity strikes, I try to go with the flow and ride it as long as I can. The latest wave is my batch of Dermasterias larvae, which are developing nicely for the first four days of life. And now they look just like jellybeans! They have complete guts now and have already grown a bit,…
Serendipity strikes again
Actually, it was a fortunately placed phone call from an aquarium curator that struck the other night. I was at home, having eaten dinner and reviewed my lecture for the following morning, when my phone rang. It was the curator, saying that he was making his last rounds of the evening and had noticed that some…
All good things. . .
. . . must come to an end, so they say. And Scott’s and my little experiment growing Pisaster ochraceus came to its end when the last of our teensy stars gave up the ghost a week ago. We aren’t entirely surprised, as nobody before us had succeeded in growing these guys in the post-larval…
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…
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…
Slow and steady (I think)
Today the Pisaster larvae that Scott and I are following are a week old. Happy birthday, little dudes! Yesterday we did the twice-weekly water change and looked at them. They’re getting big fast since we started feeding them on Saturday when their mouths finally broke through. At this stage they are sort of jellybean-shaped and extremely flexible–they don’t…
Questions and answers
I’ve been fielding questions about my recent sea star spawning work from people I’ve shared this blog with, which is a lot of fun! To streamline things and make the info available to anybody who might be following, I decided to put together a very brief FAQ-like post to address the most recent questions. Question: Can you…
Strangeness abounds
Wow, they weren’t kidding about “early developmental asynchrony” in sea stars! This morning I looked at the embryos that I had started almost 24 hours earlier, and noticed two things right off the bat: Thing #1: Within the F1 x M1 (Purple female x Purple male) mating , developmental rates among full siblings were all over…