Beauty and the Beast – a sea cucumber improves its image by picking up some “bling”

In the deep sea, sea cucumbers are dominant in many habitats.  In great depths they usually have gelatinous and fragile bodies and, when they are collected in dredges and trawls, they may look like formless blobs of jello.  In life though, many of these animals are beautiful – their bizarrely-shaped bodies often violet or purplish, and frequently semi-transparent.  One group of about a dozen species, all formerly in the genus Meseres, cover themselves with things they find on the seafloor.  Different species tend to adorn themselves with a particular type of seafloor debris; one species, for example, covers itself with glassy pieces of the skeletons of sponges, another with the tiny white shells of one-celled foraminiferans called Globigerina.

 

Meseres covered with Clio shells. Northern Gulf of Mexico. Image: NOAA.

On a recent cruise made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in their ship Okeanos Explorer, a beautiful and presumably new species of Meseres was photographed at two sites, but not collected. This otherwise ordinary-looking animal adorns itself exclusively with the shells of the swimming pteropod mollusk Clio.  When Clio dies in midwater, its body sinks to the seafloor, and the soft parts rot away to expose the 10 mm-wide triangular shell.  Clio is very common in some regions; its shells can litter the seafloor.

 

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California has been studying deep-sea animals in the northeastern Pacific for many years.  A colleague there sent us a picture of a sea cucumber that looks exactly like our Gulf of Mexico species – covered with Clio shells.  So our animal, like so many deep-sea species, may have a very wide distribution!

Why do these animals cover themselves?  Camouflage?  But it’s dark down there.  Perhaps a more “crunchy” body might deter some predators?   And how do these animals detect the presence in the area of Clio shells, Globigerina shells, sponge skeletons?  Do they add more things as they grow larger? We really don’t have any answers, but we have a lot of questions!

by Dave Puzzled Pawson

Comments

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