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Sea Cucumber — printable fact sheet
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Sea Cucumber
Holothuria edulis
Sea cucumbers (class Holothuroidea) are echinoderms, related to sea stars and urchins, and they run on hydraulics rather than muscle in the way vertebrates do. Their body wall is made of mutable collagenous tissue, a material they can chemically stiffen or liquefy on command, le…
Did you know?
- Sea cucumbers have a unique symbiotic relationship with certain fish and shrimp that live inside their cloaca for protection.
- A sea cucumber can eviscerate its own internal organs as a defence and grow them back, a full regeneration that takes only a few weeks in some species. Their body wall can shift from firm to nearly liquid in seconds because the collagen fibres are held together by chemically switchable protein bridges rather than fixed cross-links. Pearlfish live inside a sea cucumber's respiratory tree and reverse in tail-first, and some species then eat their host's gonads. Sea cucumbers have no brain, coordinating everything through a nerve ring around the mouth.
What I learned
Draw the sea cucumber
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