Christmas Trees Beneath the Sea

Christmas trees in an all new location. We are going to venture beneath the sea.

Sierra Garcia titled Meet the Christmas Tree Doppelgangers of the Sea. Now, obviously with a title like that, you know I'm going to give the post a second look.

And so I'm constantly thinking about the minimum visual criteria to associate a shape or some kind of sight with an object or a concept that she already has. And one of them now is Christmas trees. And so like, I'm wondering what kind of triangular thing this week, you know, she'll point out is that Christmas tree? And we're sort of playing the same game now, aren't we.

that exist above the water. You're going to find lions of the sea, cows of the sea, and so much more so. Maybe it's not all that off the mark anyway, that there are doppelgangers Christmas tree doppelgangers in the deep, because we have Christmas trees up here, so they must exist in the mirror realm beneath the waves.

details about the making of Avatar. Who was called of plants in film by Tanya Marion in The Botanical Artist twenty fifteen. And so I was talking about when Cameron was setting out to design the world of Avatar, he wanted to achieve some degree of biological plausibility, and the

movie is set on a planet. Actually, I think it's supposed to be a moon called Pandora, which he was originally imagining as a place with low light conditions and a toxic atmosphere, so it would have kind of different different material pressures applying to the biosphere, maybe leading to different forms of life than we have here on Earth. And so in trying to dream up these life forms, he consulted with a plant physiologist from u SE Riverside named Jody Holt to help imagine the botany of the

alien biosphere. It's kind of interesting how the plants they dreamed up in some way resemble life forms that are found not on the surface of Earth, but underneath Earth's oceans. So the movie features in some scenes a type of large ground flora I think within the sort of in universe lore. It's they call it like a zoo botanical or something like that. It's sort of like an animal plant combination. But whatever it is, it basically seems plant formed.

It's a piece of large ground flora with spiral shaped foliage and in the universe of the movie it's called helicoradium spirally And in the movie we see that this plant has an unusual reaction to activity in its environment. When it is physically disturbed. These fan out, corkscrew shaped leaves rapidly recoil and fold up into almost nothingness. So you can be standing in the middle of a little grove of these things and suddenly they all fold up

and you can see everything around you. It's a touch me not reflex.

I want to talk about for a minute here. So first of all, your mind, if it works like mine, might be looking in the wrong direction here, because when I hear Christmas tree worm, for some reason, to me, it sounds like the name of a pest animal that is named after the crop that it is most notorious for infesting and consuming, So like the tobacco hornworm or

the potato tuber worm. These are in reality both moth species that in their larval stages feed on night shade plants like the ones in their names, and other night shade plants as well. But you know, humans kind of have a sometimes a kind of economic agricultural mindset in interfacing with wildlife, so they can sort of name animals after the crop that that animal is causing them problems with.

Though I will qualify that, and my qualification is that it's not so much that they resemble the actual species of evergreens, which are usually fir trees that we use as Christmas decorations. The only way in which I'd say they actually evoke the trees themselves is in general shape. So like Christmas trees, the part of these worms you can see is a cone which is widest at the base and the narrows towards the top, and it does sort of have branches branches radiating for my central trunk

or spine. They're also sort of needly needly branches, which you could compare to evergreen pine needle texture, but it's not exactly a perfect match when you look at it. Instead, I think the main way that they remind me and remind other people of Christmas trees is that they mimic a popular style of Christmas tree decoration, especially from years past, which is that you would have a string of lights or a brightly colored garland wrapped around the tree in

a spiral pattern. I've got a couple of examples for you to look at here, Rob. I don't really know that much about historical patterns of Christmas tree decoration, but this reads to me as a more old style way of decorating a Christmas tree. I associate it with like the nineteen thirties or forties.

the same coloration. Now, each pair has a different coloration from the other ones around it, but within the pair, the two little trees next to each other that are growing in a V shape split at the base, those will be the same color usually. And one important thing to emphasize is that the Christmas trees that you're seeing

are not the whole of the organism. Each pair of Christmas trees represents the two crowns, or feeding and breathing appendages of a worm, the main cylindrical body of which is hidden in a tube in the coral right beneath where the trees emerge. And whether or not you think they look like Christmas trees, these things are beautiful. I know they're especially popular as a site for like scuba divers and snorkelers.

I see a bigger fish, it's it's neat. But I often spend my time with looking around for those little details, things that are you know, curling about inside the reefs and the rocks and and and you know, I think that's one of the things that makes something like a Christmas tree worm special. Now, in terms of whether they look like Christmas trees, I don't know. Obviously, It's one of those things where I knew what they were called, but as they were pointed out to me, so I

couldn't help but bring Christmas tree into the scenario. But the ones I remember looking at I tended to think more of like bristle cleaner for straws and tubes.

you know, in somebody's showcase of underwater photography. But yeah, they still they do have a lot of character, you know, there's something sneaky and whimsical about them. A lot of the things in the water don't want to be seen and will do what they can passively or actively to avoid a clumsy human and a mask and a snorkel from seeing them. But Christmas tree worms tend to feel just a little extra cheeky in the way they hide from us.

And so I think there might be some patience involved in trying to get up close and see them or to take a good photo of them, to kind of wait for them to come back out after you have spooked them the first time. But then another thing I saw in one of the sources I was reading was that how skittish they are might well depend on their surroundings.

Like the ones that are in shallower, more turbulent waters, I think tend to be a little less skittish than the ones that are in deeper, more calm and stable waters, which sort of makes sense. Yeah, but anyway, Okay, so

what's the biological rundown on the Christmas tree worm. It is a relative small polychete worm that lives the entirety of its adult life with the majority of its body hidden inside a calcareous tube that it makes initially on the surface of a rock or more often a coral reef, and then the tube can kind of become subsumed within the coral as the coral grows, and then the worm and its tube grows up along with the coral, so it begins life in a short planktonic larval phase, floating around,

after which it lands somewhere on the reef secretes a tube made of mucus, which it lives in for a bit, and over time that mucous tube becomes cemented with solid minerals, and then within that tube, the Christmas tree worm metamorphoses and grows into its adult form, where it will live the rest of its life, growing with the structure of the reef, safe and secure and covered inside its tube by a nice lubricating blanket of mucus. I've seen different

estimates on size range. According to a post by the NOAA, on average, these worms are less than four centimeters long, but according to marine biologists Eugene Kaplan in his book A Field Guide to Coral Reefs from nineteen ninety nine. Their body length can reach up to twelve centimeters or about five inches either way. They are small, but they're easy to spot because they're very colorful, and in some cases because of rapid changes that you can observe with them,

most often them disappearing suddenly. So the exposed parts the two Christmas trees are two tentacles or crowns, and I've also seen them called gill plumes, arranged in a spiral or whirl pattern, which themselves contain what's called a bipinnate arrangement of hair like or needle like protrusions called radioles. And then those little needle protrusions are themselves perpendicularly covered in other smaller protrusions called pinules or cilia. So you

can imagine a kind of fern shape. You know, you have the main stalk going out, and then you have branches going out from that stalk, and then out from the branches you got the little leaves projecting at a ninety degree angle. So these radioles covered in the cilia, the worm fans them out in this spiral pattern and then beats them in the water to catch floating phytoplankton and other bits of biological particle matter that will become

the worm's food. The little pins sort of they catch hold of bits of organic stuff suspended in the water, and then they sort of transport those particles in a stream in little ridges along the surface of the worlds down to the worm's mouth. Delicious. So imagine kind of a spiral Christmas tree that gradually sucks in all of its ornaments, sucks the ornaments down the branches and then down the trunk and eats them.

the door behind it. It has a flat body structure, sometimes capped with some sort of horny surface called an operculum, which it can slam shut over the opening of its tube. And we've talked about this adaptation the operculum in other species, such as snails. Snails sometimes have an operculum that they can use to cover the opening of their shell. Serves the same purpose, but of course, in the case of

a snail, the shell is mobile. Here we'd be talking about a stationary tube on a substrate for a sedentary organism. We also talked about it in our episodes on hermit crabs, because in some cases the hermit crab will have one claw that is so made that it functions as an operculum at the opening of the shell.

the worm benefits. The worm benefits from the coral skeleton structure, which of course provides it, you know, rigid protection against against predators, and you know, the tube it can live in, but also as it grows, it lifts it up into the water where it can have access to better waters

for filter feeding. But the coral itself may also benefit from having Christmas tree worms all over it, because apparently the Christmas tree worms can provide a kind of protection for the coral against one of the coral's major predators. And that predator is the crown of thorns starfish aka Acanthaster plantsy or plunky p l A n c I. But I'll just say crown of thorns starfish because boy is the the epicness of that name appropriate. So imagine kind of a cross between a giant sunflower and an

iron maiden turned inside out. These things are are absolutely from the hell razor universe, extremely wicked. They might. They're large, they might be roughly a foot and a half in diameter on average, coated in spikes, and what they do is they crawl over the surface of the coral reef just mowing. There's mowing the lawn, eating everything they can. According to that Nova segment, these giant starfish are in part responsible for the major decline of living coral within

the Great Barrier reef. There are other factors at work as well, but when these things get going, a sort of explosion in the population of these coral predators can clean out a reef of living corals. And so the whole ventral surface, the underside of the starfish you can kind of think of as a vast digestive organ complex containing tube feet and this inverted stomach inside out stomach system. So it's just the underside of it is foreat it

is just going to devour the coral underneath. And it turns out there's some evidence that if it comes to a part of a coral reef where there are Christmas tree worms, the Christmas tree worms can protect the corals directly underneath them because they get in the way of the starfish feeding and in fact they irritate the starfish's

feeding organs. I looked up a paper, so I was trying to find the paper that was the source of this observation, and I found one published in the Marine Ecology Progress Series from nineteen eighty six by Devantier at All called does spiro Bronchus gigantius protect host porities from predation by acinhaster planky predator pressure as a mechanism of coevolution? And I was looking for the part of the paper

that describes exactly how this works. I found it in their results section where they say, quote preliminary field experiments indicate that for certain worms, contact by acinhaster planky induces retraction followed by almost immediate reappearance with the operculum and bronchial crown pushing against the tube, feet and arms of the starfish. This caused the predator to move quickly away. So something about what these worms like poking it at

their tube feed and the averted stomach. The starfish do not like the worms messing with them, and so this can have the effect of protecting the corals that are

situated right around where the worms are. And so it's not going to protect the reef totally from being mowed by the starfish, but what it can do is make sure that some corals are left alive on the reef, and that those corals left alive around the worms, protected by the worms, can reseed the rest of the reef structure with living coral once again.

what is a black coral? Like, what does this even mean? Okay, well, you know a reminder that generally, you know, corals, of course, are animals, like we've been discussing, and if you've gotten out into the water, you're probably mostly familiar with the vibrant corals, and you know sometimes the bleached corals and

shallow coastal environments. But what are black corals? Well? As the NAA article Black Corals of Hawaii by Anthony Montgomery points out black corals or thorn corals, which are officially known as antipatharia, are found all over the world and at varying depths, so you don't have to go into the deep waters to find them, but they're often noted for their presence in deep sea environments. Despite their name,

they are rarely actually black. I'll get to why we still call them black corals in spite of this, But they can be various even bright colors, and their shapes also vary wildly. A key difference, however, between black corals and the stony corals that I think more people are familiar with, is that black corals have a skeleton made of protein and kitan. This skeleton is black, no matter what color the outer layers are, and that's the reason

they end up with this name. So they have black skeletons, but they may have any number of colors on top of that skeleton. I see now, Montgomery and that NA article stresses that black corals do not have symbiotic algae associated with them, and they don't require light, thus their ability to survive at greater depths. And they are apparently something like two hundred known species of black coral. Now the Christmas tree black coral in question here is a

particular species Antipathus Dindo christos in nomine patre. That's not part of it, but it sounds very Catholic, doesn't it.

Marine Ecology Progress Series twenty thirteen. The Christmas tree coral is an uncommon, long lived colonial coral that typically supports a diverse population of marine life forms. This, of course, is one of the reasons that there are a number of studies looking at it, because there's a lot more to learn about them and a lot of organisms depend on them. But why do we call it a Christmas

tree coral? What is even remotely Christmasy about it? Well, while your mind may easily turn to an image of a green tree, you know, draped in silver tassels and multicolored lights, the Christmas tree it's named for is actually one of those artificially frosted, you know, white flocked Christmas trees,

you know what I'm talking about. These are the ones where the idea is that the tree is supposed to look like a frost covered tree in the forest, very much in keeping with the movie Jack Frost that we watched for Weird House Cinema, in which Jack Frost essentially like flocks the trees in the forest, covering them with ice.

it doesn't always look like a Christmas tree. But that shows how little I know about the history of flocking Christmas trees or creating, you know, plastic artificial trees, because I easily found an image of like a flocked red Christmas tree where it just is like a bright red imitation fur tree I'm assuming here, And yeah, I mean it does not look unlike an actual photograph of a red Christmas tree black.

theme in mind. It's not about just getting all of your favorite ornaments on there, but like making something that is very fashionable. And so I can imagine a tree where it's like your only two ornaments are two enormous crustaceans crawling about on the tree.

more than a century of conditions are favorable. A two thousand and seven Bulletin of Marine Science paper from love at all found that basically, in this paper they discuss how they found a dead two point one meter or six point eight feet tall Christmas tree black coral collected from one hundred and six meter depth or three hundred and forty eight feet depth off off the coast southern California. And this one they found to be to have been about one hundred and forty years old when it died,

and its skeleton was heavily colonized by invertebrates. According to this paper and this particular specimen, two five and fifty four species living there.

to thrive. And of course, black corals, like other corals, are you know, generally threatened by a climate change and related human industrial level activities, so you know, it's any threat to them is of course not only a threat to this particular species, but then there's also all these cascading effects that can occur with all of the species that are then dependent upon it.

in there as well. In other areas, though black corals, along with other forms of coral, are completely protected, and to be clear, there is some level of protection in Hawaii based on what I was reading, it's just I think there is some allowance for harvesting. So again, Christmas tree black corals named named for the Christmas tree, and you know, I think it's not unreasonable to say, yes, they do kind of look like Christmas trees.

the opposite of deep sea. That's the desert. So I was beginning to think there wasn't going to be something, But then I started finding some differences from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and that led me to a particular genus of Sciphonophor that we're going to talk about here, and that genus is forced Kalia, and this genus I believe is unofficially referred to as as containing at least one

variety of Christmas tree siphonophoor. Okay, So what is a siphonophor or Sciphonophora is an order of colonial free swimming or floating marine hydrazooins, such as the Portuguese Man of War that's probably the most well known member of this group. And they're mostly delicate, transparent, various colors in play, and they are composed of zooids, zooids that possess special functions

such as feeding or locomotion. They're very strange. A Good Wizard recently discussed a Man of Wars on Automalias Stupendium, an occasional Wednesday episode that we do, and in that we went into some of the details of what Asopopona four actually is. It is a colonial organism made up of genetically identical but highly specialized polyps. So what you might mistake for a single organism's reproductive system, you know, or a digestive system, grasping arms or the flotation bladder,

are in fact individual zooids. And I have a way that I make sense of all this, and I'm going to adapt what is in that Animalias stupendium episode for the holiday theme here. Okay, So imagine your Santa Claus and you need a reindeer to pull your sleigh this year. It's a common problem. Unfortunately, all but one of your reindeer were killed last year by the bear spirit Tombach. So what are you gonna do? You just got one one can't pull the sleigh right. Fortunately, you're Santa Claus.

You have access to advanced cloning technology. So what can you do? Well, you could simply clone Blitzen a dozen times to produce a host of genetically identical reindeer to pull your sleigh. That would work, But your Santa Claus, what if you aimed higher? What have you? Instead? Formed each Blitzen clone into a giant organ or organ system you know, or tissue or part of some sort of

a greater organism, you know. One Blitzen becomes the digestive system, another they're reproductive system, another the skeletal and so forth, until you have a single uber Blitzen, a colonial super deer organism composed of genetically identical individuals. Those individuals do not look like a deer. They look like parts of the greater thing that you associate as a single entity.

Forskalia formosa, first recorded by Keverstein and Elers in eighteen sixty. Now, I am personally not certain if anyone other than the Monterey Bay Aquarium and perhaps their web team are calling this species the Christmas tree siphonofour But even if they're the only ones, that's good enough for me, because a they're a world class institution, and b we needed one more Christmas tree to round out podcasts.

a similar fashion. Here, I would say that it's not so much that this looks like a Christmas tree, is that it's roughly tree shaped, and then it has these little white shining or glowing bits in the video you've seen, which makes me think of like the lights that we put on a Christmas tree. So again, it's kind of a decorating convention that I think really seals the esthetic comparison.

If you have ever decorated your Christmas tree to align with actual marine organisms named for Christmas trees or associated with Christmas trees, obviously we want to know about it. Oh yes, I mean it's not impossible. It's not impossible, but I guess it's more likely there may be people with Christmas trees out there that have some sort of a science theme or even a marine biology or underwater

oceanic theme. I would settle for that. I'm always gamed to look at the pictures of somebody's Christmas tree, so by all means, send them in, please do All right, I think we're going to go ahead it and wrap this episode up, But hopefully this was a fun and surprisingly different holiday episode from us here. You know, in the past, we've done again, you know, Christmas inventions, things that tie into like psychological or even philosophical ideas that

are associated with the holidays. This time we went a little deeper in the oceanic sense.

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