Serenity- Echinodermata Ecology

 One of our assignments for this course included studying a phylum of invertebrates and creating a presentation on them. My group studied Echinodermata and I covered the ecology of such- how they interact within and with their environment. I figured I’d share some of the things I learned on this blogpost!

As a general rule, echinodermata are sessile, deposit-feeders, and have a vascular system that allows them to suction onto more solid objects. (there are several other identifying factors, but those are a few that directly affect the environments they choose to live in).



Ecology covers interspecies community interactions, and I loved learning about the doubly positive symbiotic  relationships sea anemones (an echinoderm) share with hermit crabs. Being sessile, it is hard for anemones to quickly escape predators, so sometimes they will attach themselves to a hermit crab shell. They feed off the deposits of organic matter in the water low to the ground as the crab moves along, and the anemone helps to protect the crab and camouflage it. The crab moving around creates constant opportunity for new nutrients for the anemone. The anemone’s suction feet it uses with its unique vascular system helps it to stay suctioned to the crab as it moves. Understanding the biology of each creature helps us understand the ecology of why they choose to interact with one another and form the habits they do. This, in turn, gives us potential opportunities to predict future behavior, which could be critical when trying to save a dying species or in other research scenarios.

Ecology is applied biology. It goes further than the facts and answers the why. This book I found in CEDO’s library went so far into depth on the subject and I greatly appreciated the time and effort the author took to share what methods would yield best results and how to extract details and answers to questions from chemical data. This course has given me a lot of exposure to marine sciences and it is so exciting to me to know that so much research still needs to be done.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The End of a Great Trip

Image
  Our week in Puerto Penasco has come to an end, but what a week it was! We started the week with some surveys of intertidal habitats and tidepools, with each habitat having a unique community. We found a myriad of organisms at the sandy shore with rocky reef behind CEDO, including octopus, crabs, fish, sea urchins, sea stars, snails, and lots of sea hares. The rocky shore behind Vina del Mar also had a high abundance of organisms, including apricot sea slugs, nudibranchs, brittle stars, snapping shrimp, octopus, sea cucumbers, and crabs. The students enjoyed all of the habitats we visited, but I have a feeling the Cholla Bay mud/sandflat may have been their favorite. It had considerably less hard substrate, but the animals took advantage of the hiding places that were there. We found a lot of crabs, octopus, clams, and hermit crabs, and even some penaeid shrimp, gorgonians, and a flounder.  The sandy shore and rocky reef habitat behind CEDO.  Students tidepooling at the rocky shore ha
Read more

Serenity- FYI

Image
  For Your   Information Or Fireworms Yare super Inot the move This is a PSA that I feel strongly about! If you go tide-pooling at any beach, watch out for these guys (pictured in red worm). Sometimes called a bristleworm, these friends will shoot out little bristles like a porcupine mixed with a desert tarantula’s leg hair mixed with a worm. They look soft, but those white marks on the edge are razor sharp and will lodge themself in the flesh of whoever winds up being their unlucky victim. Then, the excess of the “hair” breaks off, leaving the residue in the skin. The skin generally becomes extremely irritated, in some cases developing a rash. Because the hairs are small and clear, it’s difficult to pull them out with tweezers, and unsanitary to pull them out with tape. The best thing to do is to wear gloves and water shoes and stay away. The second best thing to clean the area well, rinse in hot water for 15 minutes, wash in vinegar, and to wait.  Fortunately, there’s some hares in t
Read more

Muddy Flats (Maribel)

Image
  On our fourth day here we went down to Choya Bay. I really enjoyed this exploration and the zone was by far my favorite environment to explore. It was still an intertidal zone, but the difference here was that much of the land was muddy. There many water and air sockets scattered alongside the terrain. Essentially we were exploring the bay at low tide, which was a large vast exposed area of muddy intertidal zones. It was very surprising to see the amount of life, and how they are able to survive under extreme conditions. We found a lot of snails, octopus, crustaceans, and my favorite, sand dollars. The challenges of many intertidal area are desiccation, or water loss, which causes many organism to station in small tide polls if available until the tide is high again. The temperature changes can be extreme, the salinity changes, there is interrupted feeding, limited space, and oxygen availability and build up of CO2 is limited at low tide. Regardless, the organisms of this terrain hav
Read more