Sea Urchins

Hello everyone! Today we are going to talk about sea urchins. We are gonna look deeper into this animal, and at the end hopefully you will know more about it than just it being a ball with pointy things. Lets get started!
Sea urchins can be many colors and sizes. They vary from purple, green, black, brown, white, or red. In size they range from two to four inches in diameter including the spines. Urchins are usually found at the bottom of the ocean, near the rocky shore. They are called "hedgehog of the sea".
Other than the spines on the sea urchin are pedicellariaes which are three-jawed pincers, some having poison glands. Pedicellariaes are used for defense and cleaning the body of the sea urchin. They also have movable spines, some solid or hollow. The hollow usually filled with poison, and used for locomotion and protection. Sea urchins also have tube feet which are hollow and muscular projections. They are very flexible and extend beyond spines. Tube feet are used to grip objects on the ocean floor. The tube feet pick up things like small rocks, bits of shell, and seaweeds for camouflage. The sea urchins arrange the objects around their body to hide from enemies.
Sea urchins also have teeth, they have an undersurface containing the mouth. They use their teeth to bore holes in rocks and use them as hiding spots. Their teeth and spine help make the rocks bigger for the sea urchin to squeeze into it. This means it is a big enough home for them, but it is small for visitors and enemies.
Sea urchins have the longest spine of any echinoderm. They have bony plates below their skin, and when they come together they form a skeleton called test. Not all of them have their spines attached, it sometimes has tiny holes to wiggle their tube feet through. This is a little research I did on sea urchins, I hope you learned something new about them.




I thought this blog helped me learn a lot more about sea urchins. I learned that they actually had teeth or even a mouth. It was amazing to see that there wasn't just one type of spine on the sea urchin. It is much more complex than it seems. Researching this has made me want to learn more about these amazing creatures.



"The Ocean." National Geographic. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 May 2013.
"Animal Planet." Animal Planet. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 May 2013.

Improving Autistic Social Skills

Most kids you see with asperger or high functioning autism usually have issues with things like eye contact, social interactions, trust, and paying attention. These difficulties where temporarily relieved by inhaling oxytocin. Participants in Elissar Andari's experiment improved in their difficulties. Andari gave the oxytocin in a nose spray form. Thirteen autistics and 13 typical children were given saline or oxytocin. No one knew which got which until the end of the experiment. She tested their improvements by using an online game and images. In the game most people return the ball to the person who passed it to them, but autistics pass equally. Those who inhaled the oxytocin engaged with the good players and shunned the bad. It helped the autistic children interpret social cues. In the images it was used to keep track of eye movement. Autistic children looked at them deliberately and relaxed with the oxytocin.

I think this oxytocin would really improve the level of hormones in autistic children. It will help them in trusting people and with their social interactions with them. These children will also feel comfortable and not be so unrelaxed. The online games and images really show their improvement. You can even see it in the chart. Kids go from not being able to look at themselves to relaxing and playing the game almost like typical children.

"Phenomena:." Phenomena Can a Sniff of Oxytocin Improve the Social Skills of Autistic People Comments. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 Apr. 2013.

Scuba Diving

       Scuba divers, some do it for fun and others do it for a living. Some have the best equipment, and some just use whatever they can get. Many ingenious people harvest while scuba diving, catching different types of sea life animals like lobsters. There are divers, Miskitos who dive every chance they get to make a living. Most of the Miskitos don't have the right equipment to dive but still go anyway causing them to affect their health. Sooner or later they all get weak and weary. It is very common for them to get decompression sickness also known as "the bends". It is when someone is exposed to a lot of pressure and depth that the body can't handle. It is even when you stay deep for too long, and when you are going up to the surface too fast. When this happens your body absorbs nitrogen from inhaled air, and when it is dissolved nitrogen in forms bubbles in your blood and tissue. It's like a soda can, it has carbon dioxide bubble inside and when you open it you reduce the pressure. If you spend more time in the depth the nitrogen is likely to give off and not form bubbles. Nitrogen bubbles have many affects on your body. They can restrict blood flow, cause joint pain, and show up in your central nervous system. That cause you to have weakness, numbness, and paralysis. Now researchers today are trying to do anything possible to make diving more safe for these people. They give training in oxygen first aid so that they can help not only themselves but others.
       

I picked this topic because it just amazed me how much damage scuba diving can do if you don't have the right equipment, but then again some people can't get those things. I cannot agree or disagree with anything that was said because this is all new to me. I do think that diver safety will be much more high tech in five to ten years from now. I think there will be more serious care for these ingenious people that can't go out out and get the equipment.