Heron Island debrief

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).

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.

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.