Post by Krii on Oct 31, 2010 9:13:34 GMT -5
Nereis Malosa
Basic Details[/font]
Common Name: Sea Cucumber
Average Length: Range from 30 centimetres to a couple of metres.
Average Weight: Depends on length, tend to be quite heavy and dense due to water support.
Usual Segment Colour: Brown or dark green, camouflaged against the sea bed.
General Appearance: Sea cucumbers are polychaete annelids which are segmented and have a complex jaw system along with two stalked eyes and sensitive chemoreceptors on their skin. A sea cucumber's epidermis is also dotted randomly with various slime glands.
Once out of the water, their skin swells up forming bulbous outgrowths at irregular intervals which would be full of the slime trapped under the skin's epidermis.
Ecological Details
Habits:
Sea Cucumbers excrete a slimy substance around their body which allows them to adhere to the substratum underneath them and thus preventing them from being carried to the surface by water currents.
They are very vulnerable to attacks but they make up for this by rapid asexual reproduction through budding. A single Cucumber may give rise to a colony of ten in a day and the population keeps on multiplying as long as there is enough food available.
Diet: Sea cucumbers are Herbivores and Detritivores. They eat; Plankton, scraps of algal vegetation and underwater plants, Fecal matter of other organisims and decomposing organic matter.
Predators: Most of the other marine animals, Humans and mutants.
Niche: Marine and fresh-water ecosystems, along with some stagnant ponds.
By Products: The slime forms a resinous impermeable substance once dried up- thus it is sometimes applied wet on a wound then allowed to dry and thus clot it and stop the bleeding. For this reason they are sometimes kept alive in jars at clinics and fed human faeces.
Sea cucumbers are also a source of food to some people. They are caught by 'panning' which is simply putting a pan of poop in the water, leaving it there for some time then retrieving it and digging through the wet poop to find the cucumbers. They are practically worthless due to being so easy to obtain and so fast to breed.
Created by: Krii