something reassuringly disgusting…

This post's title comes from Something Fishy where, talking about sea cucumbers, Illya wrote "But there's something else they can do. Something reassuringly disgusting. Something totally Sea Cucumber." I was mildly let down to find he was talking about bioluminescence, & not self-evisceration.

Yes, that's right. When threatened (or repeatedly prodded by some uncouth human in a wetsuit), some types of sea cucumber can forcibly expel part of their gut (& other organs) through the body wall – not the cloaca, but various points on the body wall. I knew that the self-evisceration happened, but not how it happened. For that, I went to the most excellent echinoblog, and you should too, for not only is there an excellent explanation but there are pictures. 

And so I have learned that holothurians have got this really weird connective tissue that they can soften very quickly indeed, so that the gut's normal connections to other internal bits & pieces is weakened, fast. At the same time regions of the body wall also weaken, and then strong muscle contractions expel parts of the body that would normally never see the light. 

The adaptive significance of all this? (You might regard the practice as a fast track to evolutionary oblivion, but these extraordinary animals are able to regenerate the missing bits.) The 'standard' explanation has been that it's a defence against predators, but echinoblog offers another option: that it's a means of getting rid of excretory byproducts that would otherwise build up to harmful levels in the body. This is borne out by the observation that some sea cucumbers expel their innards – & regenerate them – on an annual basis.

There's the potential to learn a lot from these unusual creatures.