A Sea Cucumber Made Me Do It!

Working as a naturalist/environmental educator one question I get asked a lot is “How did you get into doing this?” Well, the truthful answer is: a sea cucumber made me do it.

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-a228929
http://www.sheddaquarium.org/seacucumbers.html
http://www.spc.int/DigitalLibrary/Doc/FAME/InfoBull/BDM/17/BDM17_22_Frankboner.pdf