All in all, my time at Heron Island was amazing. That's probably evidenced by the fact that I only actually blogged about twice during the whole time I was there. The biodiversity on the reef was astounding and the meiofauna and communities of animals living on algae were amazing. I spent most of my time snorkeling and flipping over rocks or sitting at the microscope sorting meiofauna or material from "rock washing" or "algae washing." In these samples, I found *one* meiofaunal solenogaster (
Meiomenia) that I will send to
Katharina Jörger for work she and her student Franzi are doing examining the diversity of meiomeniids. Aside from molluscs, I also found heaps of other interesting animals including
Cephalodiscus(!), lots of different species of annelids, benthic chaetognaths, lots of different species of acoels, and a wacky proseriate flatworm with multiple pharynxes (among others).
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| Cephalodiscus sp. that I found on the red alga Amphiroa. Not an aculiferan, I know, but it is almost certainly a new species and it's pretty darn cute so I had to stick this one in. |
I came home with numerous specimens of
Cryptoplax larvaeformis as well as some specimens of
Acanthopleura gemmata and a couple other interesting but as yet unidentified chitons. I was on the lookout for
Schizochiton for
Doug Eernisse,
Dan Speiser, and
Lesley Brooker but unfortunately I didn't find that any. Sorry guys! I was hoping to get the
Acanthopleura and maybe the
Cryptoplax to spawn but it seems that wasn't in the cards. I'm going to try a few experiments back here to see if I can get them in the mood.
Otherwise, I was on the hunt for aplacophorans. I'm now aware of three sighting of
Epimenia (
australis?) around Heron but despite flipping over half of the rocks on the island, I left empty handed when it comes to
Epimenia. I'm now purusing other avenues to obtain specimens of
Epimeina and/or considering other, more reliably accessible species of aplacophorans.
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Epimenia (australis?).
Source: http://www.blueanimalbio.com/ruantidongwu/wuban.htm |
In the coming weeks, I'm going to be doing tests on various methods to decalcify specimens of chitons for histological sectioning followed by laser-capture microdissection (LMD) in order to extract RNA from specific cell types and study the transcriptomes of cells associated with biomineralization.
