Picture if you will a small child sitting on a bunch of
rocks in Acadia National Park watching a Park Ranger talk about tide pool
animals. As she talks she hands around a
bunch of critters she collected for us to look at. Here comes the sea cucumber
in all it slimy fun. She warned us not
to squeeze it too hard, easier said than done for something wet and kinda
slimy. Into my five year old hands it is passed, and I squeeze it scared I will
drop it. Suddenly a jet of water spurts
out and hits the back of the guy sitting in front of me, and now it feels like
a shrinking limp piece of spaghetti. A few second latter and maybe one squeeze
too many from me out fly something that looks like guts. Terrified I look at
the park ranger where she smiles and tells me it is ok, ‘he’ll just regrow
those later.” WHAT! My little 5 year old
mind is thinking how do you regrow your guts? What my five yearold self had
just discovered was two ways a sea cucumber will protect itself against
attackers. And thus begain a lifetime of wanting to know if there were other really cool things out there in the wild.
So here is the scoop. Sea cucumbers are an invertebrate
which means they have no bony skeleton like you and I. Their “skeleton” is made
up of water or as scientists like to call it a hydrostatic skeleton. If you
were to pick up a sea cucumber and threaten it, ie sqeeze, it will jet out this
water to make itself smaller in size. A great defense against a predator that
has just seen its meal shrink in size by almost half. If you were to keep squeezing, like I did, a
few things might happen the grossest being the getting rid of some of their
internal organs. Now if you see this happen your first response will be to drop
it and run away screaming, which if you were a predator would be a good thing
for the sea cucumber which gets to live another day. Scientist are still discovering how and why
sea cucumber can regrow their organs and hope that this might be able to help
humans in the future. One scientist’s
research shows that being able to get rid of some organs may help the sea
cucumber get rid of parasites living in their guts.
Want to know more? Check out these resources. http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/sea-cucumber/
http://suite101.com/article/amazing-sea-cucumber-facts-a228929http://www.sheddaquarium.org/seacucumbers.html
http://www.spc.int/DigitalLibrary/Doc/FAME/InfoBull/BDM/17/BDM17_22_Frankboner.pdf
