Tag: sea stars

From zero to cleavage in. . . nine hours

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

A recent college graduate and fellow marine lab denizen (Scott) and I are collaborating on a project to quantify growth rates in juvenile Pisaster orchraceus stars. This is one of the intertidal species whose populations in the field and in the lab were decimated by the most recent outbreak of sea star wasting syndrome (SSWS). We are interested in seeing how quickly the stars grow once they metamorphose and recruit to the benthos, and hope that the information will help researchers guesstimate the age of the little stars that are now being seen in the field. This would in turn tell us whether the little stars are survivors of SSWS or post-plague recruits. I keep seeing people refer to them as “babies,” but they could very well be several years old. We just don’t know, hence this study.

Large, healthy specimen of Pisaster ochraceus at Davenport Landing. 20 May 2015. © Allison J. Gong
Large, healthy specimen of Pisaster ochraceus at Davenport Landing
20 May 2015
© Allison J. Gong

But before we get to measure juvenile growth we have to get through larval development, which is perfectly fine by me because I’m always up for observing marine invertebrate larvae. Two weeks ago Scott and I ventured into the field in search of prospective parents. We brought back eight individuals from two different sites, making sure to leave many more in place than we took away. It was actually rather gratifying to see how many hand-sized-or-larger P. ochraceus there were. This morning we met at 07:30 to shoot up the stars with magic juice and then wait for them to spawn.

We have injected the stars (Pisaster ochraceus) and are waiting for them to spawn. 2 June 2015 © Allison J. Gong
We have injected the stars (Pisaster ochraceus) and are waiting for them to spawn
2 June 2015
© Allison J. Gong

It has been a while since I tried to induce spawning in Pisaster, and I had forgotten how much longer everything takes compared to the urchins. For one thing, the magic juice itself isn’t the same stuff that we use on the urchins, and works by an entirely different mechanism. The stars’ response to the magic juice takes 1.5-2 hours, whereas if the urchins aren’t doing anything 30 minutes after getting shot up they either need another injection or simply don’t have gametes to share.

However, despite my misgivings the animals spawned. Two large females gave us enormous quantities of eggs, and three more donated trivial amounts that we didn’t end up using.

This purple individual is the one we designated Female 1. See the huge piles of salmon-pink eggs?

Large purple female Pisaster ochraceus, spawning. 2 June 2015 © Allison J. Gong
Large purple female Pisaster ochraceus, spawning
2 June 2015
© Allison J. Gong

and

Large orange female Pisaster ochraceus, spawning. 2 June 2015 © Allison J. Gong
Female 2, a large Pisaster ochraceus, spawning
2 June 2015
© Allison J. Gong

Although we had to wait for a male to spawn, we finally did get some sperm and fertilized the eggs at about 12:30. Another thing I had forgotten was that Pisaster eggs, when shed, are lumpy and strange. I was used to the urchin eggs, which are usually almost all beautifully spherical and small. The stars’ eggs are about twice as big, at ~160 µm in diameter. The lumpiness doesn’t seem to hamper the fertilization process, as you can see below.

Fertilized eggs of Pisaster ochraceus, 2 June 2015 © Allison J. Gong
Fertilized eggs of Pisaster ochraceus
2 June 2015
© Allison J. Gong

In this photo you can see the fertilization envelope surrounding most of the eggs. In stars the perivitelline space (the space between the egg surface and the fertilization envelope) is very narrow, which makes it difficult to see the envelope; in urchins the space is much larger, and as a result the envelope quite conspicuous. The rising of the fertilization envelope off the surface of the egg is referred to as the slow block to polyspermy, a mechanical barrier that keeps multiple sperms from penetrating any individual egg. There’s also a fast block to polyspermy, but it happens on a molecular level milliseconds after a sperm makes contact with the egg surface; you can’t see it happen in real time.

Cleavage in stars proceeds much more slowly than it does in urchins, too. In embryological terms, “cleavage” refers to the first several divisions of the zygote, during which the cell number increases as the cell size decreases. This inverse relationship between cell size and number logically has to occur because the embryo can’t get any larger until it has a mouth and begins to feed, which won’t happen for at least a couple of days. It took our zygotes about four hours to undergo the first cleavage division.

2-cell embryo of Pisaster ochraceus, 2 June 2015 © Allison J. Gong
2-cell embryo of Pisaster ochraceus
2 June 2015
© Allison J. Gong

I left the slide on the microscope to warm up and speed development a bit, and about 45 minutes later was rewarded with this mishmash of embryos at different stages. Nine hours after we started this whole process, there were 2-cell, 4-cell, and 8-cell embryos, as well as eggs that had not divided yet.

Embryos of Pisaster ochraceus, about four hours post-fertilization. 2 June 2015 © Allison J. Gong
Embryos of Pisaster ochraceus, about four hours post-fertilization
2 June 2015
© Allison J. Gong

This asynchrony in early development is another way that stars differ from urchins, and it takes some getting used to. I expect that development will become more synchronized as the embryos continue to cleave, and that hatching will occur for all of them at about the same time, probably before Thursday. At least it won’t take another 9-hour day to see how far they’ve come.

Wasting leather (star)

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

Until recently I hadn’t closely observed what it looks like when a leather star (Dermasterias imbricata) succumbs to wasting syndrome. When I had the outbreak of plague in my table almost 18 months ago now, my only leather star was fine one day and decomposing the next, so I didn’t get to see what actually happened as it was dying.

(Un)fortunately, one of the leather stars at the marine lab started wasting a bit more than two weeks ago, and this time I was able to catch it at the beginning. This animal wasn’t in my care so I didn’t check on it as frequently as I would if it had been living in one of my tables, but one of the aquarists pointed it out to me when it began getting sick.

The first symptom was a lesion on the aboral surface. I say “lesion” but it’s more of an open wound.

Dermasterias imbricata with aboral lesion, 2 February 2015. ©Allison J. Gong
Dermasterias imbricata with aboral lesion, 2 February 2015.
© Allison J. Gong

You can see that the animal’s insides are exposed to the external environment. In the photo above the whitish milky-looking stuff is gonad (I’m pretty sure this animal was a male) and the beige ribbon bits are pyloric caeca, essentially branches of the stomach that extend into the arms. What typically happens along with the development of lesions like this is an overall deflating of the star as the water vascular system and other coelomic systems become increasingly compromised, and the tendency for the animal to start tearing off its arms.

Which results in this, a week later:

Wasting Dermasterias imbricata, autotomizing its arm, 9 February 2015. ©Allison J. Gong
Wasting Dermasterias imbricata, autotomizing its arm, 9 February 2015.
© Allison J. Gong

This poor animal had torn its arm off, and continued to live for a while. I find it fascinating that the lack of a centralized nervous system means that this animal literally didn’t know it was dead. It was finally declared officially dead two days later. Compared to how quickly wasting syndrome kills the forcipulates that I’ve seen (Pisaster, Pycnopodia, and Orthasterias), the leather stars take a long time to die–several days from start to finish, opposed to a matter of hours as I saw with my stars. The leathers didn’t seem to be hit as hard by the first wave of the disease outbreak, either. Is Dermasterias somehow able to fight off the infection a bit longer? It would be interesting to know, wouldn’t it?

Monsters in the making

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

Yesterday I collected three very small Pycnopodia helianthoides stars. When I brought them back to the marine lab I decided to photograph them because with stars this small I could easily distinguish between the original five arms and the new ones:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Pycnopodia juvenile

These guys began their post-larval life with the typical five arms you’d expect from an asteroid. At this stage they are pretty conspicuous because they are the largest arms. The other arms arise in the inter-radial regions between arms. For years now I’ve been wanting to watch juvenile Pycnopodia stars growing their extra arms, and it looks like I finally have my chance. I noted that these stars are all about the same size, but don’t have the same number of arms. It would be interesting to see if the rate of arm appearance and growth is related to how much food the stars have. Hmmm, that sounds like a study I should do.

And then one of the stars started running. And I mean running. Watch:

You might wonder how in the heck they can run so fast, and it’s a valid question. We can actually examine the animal’s scientific name to get an answer. “Pycnopodia” means “dense foot” and “helianthoides” means “sunflower-like.” So these guys have a lot of tube feet, and they use them to run and feed. Imagine how fast we could run if we had more than two feet and could co-ordinate them this well:

So, when these guys (gals?) grow up, they’ll be at least half a meter in diameter with 20-24 arms. With all those tube feet, they’ll be Speedy Gonzales! In fact, they will be the terror of the intertidal–big, fast, and voracious. Anything that can’t get out of their way will be eaten.

We air-breathing land mammals should be grateful that echinoderms never managed to get out of the sea. Can you imagine this monster chasing you down a dark alley, or climbing through your bedroom window?

A plague of stars

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

And I don’t mean plague as in “too many stars to know what to do with,” but as in “disastrous sickness that you don’t want to catch.” Some of the stars in my seawater table have been succumbing to some awful disease lately. A week ago today I noticed that many stars had been busy cannibalizing one of their compadres. Sometimes this just happens, and it doesn’t necessarily indicate that things are about to go south. But when I looked more closely I noticed that the victim, instead of just being eaten, had autotomized its arms. Autotomy occurs in most sea stars and other invertebrates, and in fact is used as a method of clonal replication in some stars and many cnidarians. The species of star that is being affected by this plague (Pisaster ochraceus, the common ochre star) isn’t one that readily autotomizes except in response to some external stress, such as a predator pulling on an arm.

So something was going on in this table. On Monday (Labor Day) I popped in for a quick check and although nobody had lost any arms I couldn’t be absolutely sure that everything was okay. Some of the Pisasters were a little squishy and had arms that were a little twisted. On Tuesday morning there was no autotomy but in the afternoon a star had lost an arm, greatly disturbing the student lab assistant who discovered it. On Wednesday the table looked like an asteroid battlefield:

Large Patiria miniata (bat star) scavenging on dead Pisaster ochraceus (ochre star)
Large Patiria miniata (bat star) scavenging on dead Pisaster ochraceus (ochre star).
© 2013 Allison J. Gong

Many of the other Pisasters were also showing signs of sickness: curly arms (visible in the yellow star in the lower right corner of the photo above. Another ominous sign is that some of the apparently sickly stars were kind of squishy, indicating that the water vascular systems were somehow compromised.

Severed arms littered the table. The autotomized arms retain mobility for quite a while after being cast off–they literally don’t know that they’re dead.

Autotomized arm of a sick sea star
Autotomized arm of a sick Pisaster ochraceus. The other, intact, star is Orthasterias koehleri, the rainbow star. © 2013 Allison J. Gong

After removing the corpses and cleaning the table as best I could I was able to take a closer look at the survivors. I noticed that most of the remaining Pisaster stars had twisty or crossed arms, and some showed pretty severe stretching in the interambulacral area (“armpit” between adjacent rays), which I think is the first stage of autotomy.

IMG_2079
Pisaster ochraceus stretched interambulacral area, pulling its own arm off.
© 2013 Allison J. Gong

The disease progresses very rapidly, and within an hour a star in this condition had pulled off one arm and was working on another.

IMG_2083
Pisaster ochraceus that has autotomized an arm. Injury site is visible as a white area in lower edge of central disc. The autotomized arm is located at the top of the photo.
© 2013 Allison J. Gong

Unfortunately, this disease also affects other species. My Orthasterias koehleri (rainbow star) decided to join the fun. When I arrived Wednesday morning it was intact. It dropped an arm. I went away for about 40 minutes to take care of tasks in a different building, and when I returned it had lost two more arms:

IMG_2088
Orthasterias koehleri that dropped three arms in about an hour. The autotomized arms are indicated by yellow arrows. The remaining 2/5 of the star are attached to the outside of my urchin tank.
© 2013 Allison J. Gong

Alas, my one and only Orthasterias succumbed later in the day and was dead on Thursday. Interestingly, the disease does not seem to affect either Patiria miniata (bat stars) or Dermasterias imbricata (leather stars). In fact, the Patiria have been eating pretty well over the past week, scavenging on the carcasses of the plague victims. I don’t know if eating the diseased tissue will cause problems later on.

On Friday I lost two more Pisasters and isolated the Patiria and Dermasterias into tanks. A colleague of mine calls this the Molokai treatment, and I probably should have done it sooner, but I figured that at this point all the stars in the table were exposed to whatever pathogen is causing this disease so at that point why bother? However, I will need to sequester the healthy stars in order to disinfect the table once the disease has run its course, so into tanks they went.

After checking on the stars Saturday morning I am cautiously optimistic that the plague may have run its course. One more Pisaster, that was looking sickly the day before, had died, but my last two appeared healthy. Their arms were not curly, I didn’t see any interambulacral stretching, and they felt nice and hard when I poked at them. All of these are good signs, but I will continue to keep close watch on them. If they make it to Monday we just might be out of the woods.

As of today, one week after I noticed the first severe symptoms, I have lost 80% of my Pisaster collection. To put that in to context, this mortality rate is every bit as bad as some villages that were virtually wiped out by the medieval Black Death.