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Sea Squirt — printable fact sheet
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Sea Squirt
Ascidiacea
Sea squirts, or ascidians, spend adult life as immobile bags filtering seawater through a pharyngeal basket, and their name comes from the jet of water they fire when squeezed. Nothing about that adult suggests kinship with us, but the larva does: it is a tadpole with a notochor…
Did you know?
- Sea squirt larvae possess a backbone-like structure, but lose it as they transform into adults—a key link to the evolutionary origins of vertebrates.
- Sea squirt larvae are chordates with a notochord and dorsal nerve cord, which is why these blobs are our closest invertebrate relatives. They are the only animals known to manufacture cellulose, using genes apparently picked up from bacteria. Some concentrate vanadium in their blood at millions of times seawater levels, and nobody is sure why. Colonial sea squirts can fuse with close relatives and share a circulatory system, but reject strangers, one of the simplest self-versus-nonself recognition systems in the animal kingdom.
What I learned
Draw the sea squirt
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