Eat it!
The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it!
-Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
[via:http://www.brainyquote.com]
Sea Squirts
12 interesting points of information from Wikipedia.
Bluebell tunicates
[image via: http://en.wikipedia.org by: Nick Hobgood]
1. Tunicates, also known as urochordates, are members of the subphylum Tunicata or Urochordata, a group of underwater saclike filter feeders with incurrent and excurrent siphons that is classified within the phylum Chordata. While most tunicates live on the ocean floor and are commonly known as sea squirts and sea pork,[1] others – such as salps, doliolids and pyrosomes – live above in the pelagic zone as adults.
2. Tunicates begin life in a mobile larval stage that resembles a tadpole, later developing into a barrel-like and usually sedentary adult form.
3. Tunicates apparently evolved in the early Cambrian period, beginning c 540 million years ago. Despite their simple appearance, tunicates are closely related to vertebrates, which include fish and all land animals with bones.
4. Most tunicates are hermaphrodites. The eggs are kept inside their body until they hatch, while sperm is released into the water where it fertilizes other individuals when brought in with incoming water.
5. The larval stage ends when the tunicate finds a suitable rock to affix to and cements itself in place. The larval form is not capable of feeding, and is only a dispersal mechanism. Many physical changes occur to the tunicate's body, one of the most interesting being the digestion of the cerebral ganglion, which controls movement and is the equivalent of the human brain. From this comes the common saying that the sea squirt "eats its own brain".[2] In some classes, the adults remain pelagic (swimming or drifting in the open sea), although their larvae undergo similar metamorphoses to a higher or lower degree.
6. Tunicates are suspension feeders. They have two openings in their body cavity: an in-current and an ex-current siphon. The in-current siphon is used to intake food and water, and the ex-current siphon expels waste and water. The tunicate's primary food source is plankton. Plankton gets entangled in the mucus secreted from the endostyle. The tunicate's pharynx is covered by miniature hairs called ciliated cells which allow the consumed plankton to pass down through to the esophagus. Their guts are U-shaped, and their anuses empty directly to the outside environment. Tunicates are also the only animals able to create cellulose.
7. Tunicate blood is particularly interesting. It contains high concentrations of the transition metal vanadium and vanadium-associated proteins as well as higher than usual levels of lithium. Some tunicates can concentrate vanadium up to a level one million times that of the surrounding seawater. Specialized cells can concentrate heavy metals, which are then deposited in the tunic.
8. Tunicates are more closely related to craniates (including hagfish, lampreys, and jawed vertebrates) than to lancelets, echinoderms, hemichordates, Xenoturbella or other invertebrates [4][5][6].
9. The Tunicata contains about 3,000 species.
10. Sea squirts have become a testing ground in the controversy about the extent to which cross-species gene transfer and hybridization have influenced animal evolution. In 1990, Donald I. Williamson of the University of Liverpool (U.K.) fertilised sea squirt (Ascidia mentula) eggs with sea urchin (Echinus esculentus) sperm resulting in fertile adults that resembled urchins,[15] but Michael W. Hart of Simon Fraser University failed to find sea-squirt DNA in tissue samples from the supposed hybrids.[16] Williamson claims to have repeated the experiment with sea urchin eggs and sea squirt sperm, producing sea urchin larvae which developed into squirt-like juveniles.[17] Michael Syvanen of the University of California has further suggested that sea squirts are themselves descended from a hybrid between a chordate and an ancestor of sea urchins.[18] Like Williamson's, this idea has not yet gained support from embryologists and invertebrate zoologists.
11. Tunicates contain a host of potentially useful chemical compounds, including:
- Didemnins, effective against various types of cancer, as antivirals and immunosuppressants
- Aplidine, effective against various types of cancer
- Trabectedin, effective against various types of cancer
In the May 2007 issue of The FASEB Journal, researchers from Stanford University showed that tunicates can correct abnormalities over a series of generations, and they suggest that a similar regenerative process may be possible for humans. The mechanisms underlying the phenomenon may lead to insights about the potential of cells and tissues to be reprogrammed and regenerate compromised human organs. Gerald Weissman, editor-in-chief of the journal, said "This study is a landmark in regenerative medicine; the Stanford group has accomplished the biological equivalent of turning a sow's ear into a silk purse and back again."[28]
12. Various Ascidiacea#Culinary species are consumed as food around the world.
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