Another scientific moment

There are many ways to be cruel. Kicking sand on to your mom's border plants is one way.

Dislodging a sea urchin from its natural habitat, transferring it into a lab, then injecting 2ml of KCl into each of its 5 arms to induce muscle spasms and forced spawning and finally finishing it off by ramming the sharp bit of your sharp-blunt scissors into its ventral side and cutting all around the periphery of its mouth and ripping it away to extract its Aristotle lantern is another way.

Sounds complicated?

That's alright. Here's a step-by-step guide to dissecting your own sea urchin. Comes in handy when you've stepped onto one whilst snorkelling in Redang and just dying to wreck some vengeance as a payback for that excruciating pain flaring up from the soles of your feet.

Yea...take that you little ball of thorns.

What you'll need:



A pair of sharp-blunt dissecting scissors.
A syringe containing approximately 10ml of KCl
A sea-urchin

Step 1:
Flip the sea urchin so that its oral surface is facing up. Inject 2 ml of KCl solution into each arm using a syringe.



Step 2:
Position sea urchin (oral side up) over a beaker of seawater and wait for spawning to begin. Collect the gametes in the beaker as it will exit from the anus.



Step 3:
Remove the sea urchin and still maintaining the oral-side-up position, ram the sharp edge of your sharp-blunt scissors into the urchin and cut along the dotted lines.



Step 4:
Dislodge Aristotle's Lantern from urchin. (n.b. Aristotle's Lantern is part of the urchin involved in maceration of food and mobilisation of muscles around the mouth...highly sought after by marine biologists)



And there you have it. 4 easy steps. Now anyone can dissect a sea urchin.

Some of you may be asking why there's no longer photos of the real dissections this year. Well..let's just say things got messier. And my Olympus may be all-weather...but getting urchin poo etc on it is just not cool.

And yes...i DID feel sorry for the little critter. Actually, stabbing it to death was the more humane choice, because with the KCl injected in to them, they lose control of their muscles and would've died a slow and painfully excruciating death anyway...they can't eat, can't breathe, can't reproduce.

But, there you go. Just in case you ever wondered how to dissect a sea-urchin, it's actually not that hard.

Thank you thank you.

I shall now proceed to be an eternal slave to Plant Physiology and Anatomy.