Sea Urchin video (Guest post from a kid)

This video about deep sea life is very informative. It tells you the story of a sea urchin and about its parents' sex. It also talks about other babies, their parents and their sex. It talks about how the sea urchin metamorphosed from a tiny cell into a sea urchin. I like it because it's scientific and it uses words that are recognizable to me. I also like the descriptive language, which they use a lot in this video.

Sasha Harmon Matthews, 7, is fond of sea urchins.

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http://twitter.com/Bodminzer Kieran Manners

Have you ever seen a Sea-Urchins shell, Sasha?
- Sinead Dowding
  
  My mum used to collect them.It was the coolest
Glen Able

Nice. But what I can’t figure out about sea urchins is how they grow.

Insects, for example, grow in stages by shedding their old exoskeleton, puffing themselves up a bit and then hardening up again. Other things like snails continually add new shell at the opening, and grow in a spiral. But how do urchins make their hard shell bigger, while managing to stay roughly spherical?
- Lyle Hopwood
  
  They are analogous to five-armed starfish with the arms sewn together. The area between the “arms” is actually called the “sutural line”. There’s flexible collagen at this line and as the urchin eats, the collagen expands slightly, then the calcite grows into the expanded collagen forming a larger bony plate. Then the urchin eats again, etc.
  
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1690893/pdf/11839189.pdf(PDF)
  - Glen Able
    
    Thanks, it’s good to know the general idea, although I have trouble visualising in detail how the very curved plate of a tiny urchin becomes part of a bigger less curvy plate (perhaps it thickens?)
    
    I wish those lazy urchin scientists would make me a timelapse.
wandermarket

Cool video…thanks for sharing…
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=120800023 Ashley Reid

What a neat video! Thanks for posting this!
http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/QQ3L4BVQU7LMV7FHKZPV6652JM MichaelO

This video was actually pretty good. It had a lot of facts.The pictures were pretty.
Genevieve O’Connell – Hawaii