海洋水族馆的爱好,特别是practice of keeping and growing corals is all but dominated by photosynthetic corals, but corals of the dark have some really cool surprises. TakeTruncatoflabellum例如,一种深水和浑浊的环境珊瑚,基本上看起来像一个小而清晰的优雅珊瑚。
最近,一些日本研究人员将一小群人放在实验坦克中三年多,只是为了观察和记录他们非常有趣的双重生命周期。
“Six anthocaulus specimens of Truncatoflabellum were collected off Koshiki-jima islands at depths of 50 to 100m in July 2011. The corals were observed for more than 1200 days in a 1000L tank containing filtered seawater at a temperature of 17 to 19 °C. The corals were maintained under dark conditions and fed twice a week with frozen copepods.”
与我们所知道的几乎所有珊瑚不同,息肉有两种不同的息肉Truncatoflabellum, the Anthocaulus and the Anthocyathus. The anthocaulus is the stalked corallite that is attached to some kind of rock and it never moves. The anthocyathus is what actually grows out of the anthocaulus, and eventually self-propagates or ‘breaks off’ from the stalked corallite, and has a free living life style in soft sediments or sand.
There’s a few very bizarre things going on here that is completely different from ‘common knowledge’ about aquarium corals. First of all, nearly all of our corals bud new polyps either from within the polyp, or right on the side of it.Truncatoflabellumpropagates asexually in a very different way in a process called tranverse fission, a fancy way of saying the polyps grow end to end.
The crazy part is that both of these corallites can be the same exact coral genotype, but each polyp lives very different lifestyles. The attached anthocaulus never moves, and it never reproduces sexually – it is limited to popping off new corals asexually for all its life at a rate of about one every three years.
Meanwhile the Anthocyathus is the opposite – it is free living in mud and sediments and it绝不无性繁殖,只有通过产卵才能性。认为同一珊瑚可以在海洋中拥有这种奇怪的二元性,真是太疯狂了。
这个生命周期与许多真菌物种没有什么不同,除了这些珊瑚的Anthocaulus在基础上脱落了任何东西。只有通过机械损害,某些局部局部的骨骼才会在垂死的骨骼上产生许多茎,以产生”真菌树‘这不断产生自由的活着的女儿Corallites。
从附着的Corallite(Anthocaulus)发育的自由生活息肉(Anthocyathus)对原始的Corallite非常损害,从而对骨骼和软组织造成了很大的损害。原始的缠扰冠状石必须在重新生成至关重要的器官之前,必须没有嘴或任何喂食触手的情况。
感谢Tokuda,Haragachi&Ezaki汇总了这项令人兴奋的研究,尤其是他们观看这些珊瑚的耐心![[自然这是给予的