Berghia Nudibranch Development

[zeroinverse]

Day 6 - 04-16-2013

Day 6 - 04-16-2013

Colin's equipment is SOO awesome! It's what's letting us document this series...

Here are some more pictures.

A few notes: even though I only collected about a dime-sized amount of water along with the egg sacs initially, there was enough "other plankton" organisms/eggs/larvae/nauplii, that Colin is noticing. One of my adult berghia tank may have "contamination".

I am hoping these will not eat the berghia babies. We will try to suck out any contaminant organisms as we see them in the next few weeks.


Notice how the outer egg strand protective layer is starting to breakdown and disintegrate. This probably helps with dessimination of the baby egg sacs into the water column when they are almost ready to break out of their sacs. Excited!!!

You can see some "protrusions" in the egg sacs. Now it looks like Mickey Mouse.

And here is today's YouTube video.
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[cbrennan4]

It's so cool how in the 80x picture you can see the cilia(the small hair-like projections) they use for locomotion while inside of the egg capsule.

 

[woodnaquanut]

Middle of middle pic...

This is some evil science experiment! You are raising Mickey Mouse heads!!!



Great pics, Colin. Nice scope.

 

[Grant W]

I've been following along and all I can say is Great Job! Guys. Keep us posted.

 

[zeroinverse]

Day 6 - 04-14-2013

Day 6 - 04-14-2013

Oops, I realized I messed up the dates for DAY 5. SHould have read Day 5 04-13-2013.

Anyways, here are pictures of Day 6. You can see the outer egg strand material has separated and released the eggs into the water column to "fend for themselves".

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[zeroinverse]

Day 9 - 04-16-2013

Day 9 - 04-16-2013

Ok, here are updated pictures.

We may post a video later today. TBD.

 

[AMAYEU]

So does Colin have 1 growing culture and takes the picture daily?

 

[zeroinverse]

Mike (Amayeu) He has one at the office that he is trying to "culture". Hopefully it works and things survive. We don't know yet, first time trying it this way.

 

[cbrennan4]

The microorganinisms you can see moving very fast around the eggs in the eggs are a Marine Paramecium. They are a single celled organism and I'm unsure if they are good(a cleaner of detritus?) or are bad and feeding on the baby berghai. I'm going to try and capture some tomorrow to put under my office's inverted scope. This is one bad a** scope too haha!

 

[zeroinverse]

Today's video.

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[Reef Bass]

Paramecium eat through a process called phagocytosis, where they surround and engulf their food particles. Sheer size difference alone would prohibit the paramecium in the video above from doing anything to the berghia embryos.

 

[cbrennan4]

@ Reef Bass- I think you might be thinking of an ameoba/white blood cell/bacteria? From what I recall , paramecium don't engulf prey items. They use their cillia to guide food particules into a "mouth cavity" where I believe digestion takes place in a food vacuole.

I've observed the dead embryos covered in the paramecium compared to the living ones, where only a few are present. This leads me to think they are a detritivore(cleaner?) rather than preying on the embryos. But, I have noticed more and more dead embryos. hopefully this is part of the process and not a microorganism preying on them.

There there are a few Cycloid copepods and an interesting cilliate that is about 3-4 times the size of the paramecium that I still need to get a picture of.

 

[zeroinverse]

So awesome! I am learning do much in this process of raising berghia!

Thanks contributors and volunteers!

 

[cbrennan4]

Here are some pictures of the other microorganisms that I have been seeing

Flatworm

Copepod

Copepod Nauplii w/ dead embryos and paramecuim

Aptasia

Unknown cilliate at 115x magnification

 

[Reef Bass]

They use their cillia to guide food particules into a "mouth cavity" where I believe digestion takes place in a food vacuole.

I stand corrected. Thank you.

 

[zeroinverse]

Those copepods look big enough to eat the eggs, since they are at 25X and the eggs are similar sized at 50X.

Guess I will have to isolate water better.

 

[cbrennan4]

My bad, on that photo I cropped it so it would be easier to see. They are def smaller than the eggs. Maybe about a 1/4 to 1/5 the size.

 

[zeroinverse]

Oh, that makes sense, since there is no absolute length scale. I got thrown off. Ok, good to know they are not a problem.

I don't do microscopes, so forgot/mistaken the magnification for actual size.

 

[zeroinverse]

Day 10 - 04-17-2013

Day 10 - 04-17-2013

Berghias are developing eyes or antennae or something... ^_^

==================
Some comments from Colin's observation?

It's looks like there are some eye spots forming or they may be melanophores(pigment bundles). But there are noticeably less live embryos than a few days ago. I did notice one that was out of its egg and 'swimming' around though.
==================

One thought as to why there are less live embryos is water quality. Seems some aiptasia we put into the culture dish may have died and fouled the water. This may have let to some embryo die-off.

 

[Cymaster007]

this is an amazing thread, thanks for sharing!
I wouldnt be too worried about the contamination in the berghia tank, if you have 100% survival of all of the offspring you are going to quickly run out of aiptasia to keep them fed!