There is a genus of ribbon worms, called Carcinonemertes, that lives on crabs and eats their eggs. This type of worm is known to occur on species such as Dungeness crabs, an economically important species since they are fished for human consumption. This week, some female striped shore crabs came into our possession and we saw that they were brooding (carrying eggs on their bodies) so we decided to check the eggs for Carcinonemertes. Previously, Carcinonemertes has not been shown to occur on striped shore crabs, so we weren’t sure if we would find any. As I was pulling the eggs off the crab, I found a Carcinonemertes nestled among them. What is even more exciting is that the worm had eggs in it that she eventually released into the bowl in an egg mass (however, we probably won’t get baby worms from them since they weren’t fertilized). If our preliminary identification of the worm is confirmed by DNA barcoding (which we are currently working on), we will be able to say that Carcinonemertes occurs on striped shore crabs and improve our understanding of the role Carcinonemertes plays in the ecosystem and what crab species the genus interacts with. We never planned to sample crabs for worms while making our identification guide, but this was an opportunistic find that ended up being very exciting for us. We finished photographing and extracting DNA from the last of our worms this week. I feel immensely more comfortable with the entire process of documenting worms and using a variety of chemicals to extract DNA from them, when compared to my confidence levels during my first week here. It was very bittersweet to realize we will not be doing this again before the REU program ends. However, I also noticed how far I have come in the relatively short time I have been here, which will give me momentum as I continue pursuing a career in science. On a more random note, I fertilized some sea star eggs my first week here at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology. I decided to check on them this week and saw that one of the larvae has finally settled (moved out of the planktonic stage that swims around in the water and attached itself to the bowl it is in while looking like a sea star)!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI am Jacob and am from Rancho Cucamonga, CA. I am a rising Junior at Pomona College in Claremont, CA who has never studied marine biology in school before but has always been interested in it. I am incredibly excited to spend the next two months working in Svetlana Maslakova’s lab studying Nemertean (ribbon worm) biodiversity through genetic analysis. Archives
August 2021
Categories |
Proudly powered by Weebly