Gold sea squirt
| Gold sea squirt | ||||||||||||
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Gold Sea Squirt ( Polycarpa aurata ) |
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Polycarpa aurata | ||||||||||||
| ( Quoy & Gaimard , 1834) |
The gold sea squirt ( Polycarpa aurata ) is a sessile tunicate (tunicates), which in the tropical Indo-Pacific from Sri Lanka and the Maldives to the Philippines , Micronesia , the Solomon Islands and the Great Barrier Reef exists. It is one of the most common species in the Indo-Pacific.
features
The gold sea squirt lives solitary, so it does not form animal hives from many individual individuals like many other sea squirts. Your body becomes about ten centimeters high, is bean-shaped and slightly flattened on the sides. On the underside, it is grown onto a hard substrate using a short, finger-thick stem. As a location, it prefers well-flowed reef regions at depths of 3 to 30 meters. Their color is whitish to cream with purple lines, occasionally yellow-brown or orange spots. The outer skin of the coat is criss-crossed by furrows, leather-like and coarse and resists the growth of other sessile animals or algae. Gold sea squirts are hermaphroditic, can only reproduce sexually and feed as filter feeders . The inlet and outlet openings are colored golden yellow on the inside and gave the animal its German name and the specific epithet aurata . The inflow opening is at the tip of the body, the outflow opening on the concave side of the body approximately in the middle.
The gold sea squirt is eaten by various nudibranch snails .
literature
- Erhardt / Moosleitner: Mergus Sea Water Atlas Volume 3 , Mergus-Verlag, Melle, 1997, ISBN 3-88244-103-8
- Erhardt / Baensch: Mergus Sea Water Atlas Volume 4 , Mergus-Verlag, Melle, 1998, ISBN 3-88244-023-6
- SA Fossa, AJ Nilsen: Coral reef aquarium. Volume 6, Schmettkamp Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-928819-18-6
Web links
- World Register of Marine Species: Polycarpa aurata (Quoy & Gaimard, 1834)