Friday, July 1, 2011

Some Pictures

The two mushroom like blobs on the left are Distaplia occidentalis, colonial ascidians. The pink colored blob on the right is a sponge, Haliclona sp.



This is Didemnum vexillum the invasive species that has been spreading around the globe. It is also a colonial ascidian, meaning that this blob is made up of thousands of tiny individuals called zooids.




This is from my first day of collecting data! I took this picture of a Botrylloides settler who has just metamorphosed from a free swimming larva to a settled organism. The little sun burst like arms are called ampullae. The main "body" where most of the dark pigment is, is the first zooid (individual) to settle down and is called the oozooid. The oozooid then begins asexual reproduction by budding off new copies of itself, called blastozooids. You can see that this specimen is just starting to make blastozooids- they are the transparent blobs coming off of the top and bottom of the oozoid.

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