Bill Huff, age 11, of Sarasota, fla., for his question:
What kind of creature is a sea cucumber?
To visit him at home, you might have to dive 1,000 feet. Down there in the blue green water, you might mistake the sea cucumber for an overgrown caterpillar. However, he is not a caterpillar or any other insect. Neither is he a cucumber nor any other member of the plant world.
When you order trepang soup in a Chinese restaurant, you will be served a tasty brew of sea cucumber. This delicate sea food also is eaten in Malaya, Australia and other regions near warm coastal waters where sea cucumbers abound. The creature's name may mislead you, for he is an animal. He is rich in body building proteins and also minerals from the salty sea.
The sea cucumber is a marine animal of the Phylum Echinodermata a scientific term meaning the spiny skinned ones. The phylum is a small group, divided into only five classes. There is a class for the stubby starfishes and another for the leggy sea stars, one for the graceful sea lilies, another for the sea urchins and a class for assorted sea cucumbers.
We expect an animal to have a right and left side, a back and a front. It is hard to imagine a sizeable creature that is not a two sided animal. The echinoderms are a challenge to the imagination for they are five sided animals. This unique feature can be seen in the five arms of the starfish. In other echinoderms, such as the sea cucumber, it is concealed in the basic internal structure.
The spiny skins of the echinoderms are not always apparent either. The spikes on the living sea urchin certainly can be seen and felt. But the sea cucumber appears to be free of prickles. However, the microscope reveals that his thick skin is full of spines shaped like graceful little darts and daggers. The length of the cucumber¬shaped body ranges from a few inches to two feet, depending upon species. The colors may be muddy brown, violet or crimson, and sometimes a sea cucumber seems to be made of tinted glass. His life is spent grubbing on the sea bed, and as a rule, his color blends with his background.
The sea cucumber lives on a diet of marine eggs, small fish and seaweed. His mouth is a small round hole surrounded by a fringe of tentacles. He uses the tentacles as fingers to stuff food into his mouth and often lies almost buried in the silty sand.
Starfishes and certain other echinoderms are scavengers, eager to eat anything living or dead that floats in the sea. For this reason they may not seem suitable for human food. The sea cucumber, as a rule, is more choosy. When famished, he devours sand, hoping it contains digestible scraps of food. But he certainly prefers to live on a fresh diet of live seafood along with helpings of seaweed salad.