Orange Sea Pen

Hello and welcome back to All Things Marine and today we will be continuing our ocean classification theme and we will be talking about an anthozoan today in the class anthozoa which contains corals and sea anemones and other organisms like the one that we're going to be talking about today. The one that we're going to be talking about today is the orange sea pin also known as the Ptellosarcus gurneyi. It is a colony of small organisms known as polyps and that's what makes an anthozoan an anthozoan. They are made up of several organisms usually and those organisms are each individually a polyp. Each polyp has a different duty than the other from the other polyps. For example with the orange sea pin there are a kind of polyps on it called autozooids feeding polyps that catch plankton and other food sources although they also serve as a means of sexual reproduction or asexual reproduction. So siphonozoids are also present on this organism and they allow the colony to inflate or deflate which is actually the skin tactic that the sea pin uses to run away from predators such as the sea stars and the rays which are also sea slugs. They like to eat what the sea pin does as the sea bird and they can determine how much they can eat and what are really not a predator. They just kind of sit and wait. They're very benthic and what benthic means is benthic means something that is on the ground or crawling and what's kind of interesting about these sea pin is one they look like a pin with with feathers so that's that's pretty cool but they bioluminesce which I found to be very interesting. They emit a bluish greenish light which is there for a defense against predators but if that does not stop predators from attacking them they actually have a very like mild toxin also known as a ptilosarcoma which interestingly enough not much is known about this which is very interesting so if any of you future scientists are out there and looking for something you want to know more about well you could research the toxin of an orange sea pin. They're very slow growing organisms and they reach a maximum size of about only 18 inches in height and they grow only about one inch per year which is really slow when you think about it and they produce several several eggs therefore they're not at risk of like going extinct but thank you guys so much for watching and I hope you guys enjoyed and like comment and subscribe and the next video we are going to be talking about a cubizoan also known as the sea wasp or a kind of box jellyfish so stay tuned for that thank you so much for watching