Meeting Abstract
The Canary Islands, located 100-400 km off the coast of northwest Africa, sit astride a geological hotspot amid a temperate/subtropical convergence zone. Across the archipelago, coastal waters vary in the amount of upwelled nutrients, primary productivity, and temperature, providing a unique natural experiment for examining the effects of environmental change on marine organisms. Diadema africanum is a newly described sea urchin species that had been considered an eastern Atlantic Ocean population of Diadema antillarum. In the Canaries, D. africanum adults play a major ecological role in the production of urchin barren habitats. In order to determine basic life-history characters for this species, we collected and spawned adults in the laboratory, preserved eggs for biochemical composition analysis, and reared larvae through to metamorphosis. We will discuss the results of egg protein, lipid, and carbohydrate assays and highlight larval developmental features. We will compare our results with similarly obtained data for other Diadematids and consider how the egg and larval characteristics of D. africanum may have evolved to facilitate long-distance oceanic drifting.
