So I'm playing with purple sea urchins this summer, which I'm pretty excited about although I probably won't go into sea urchin immunity right now. But sea urchins! Like many models of development like Drosophila or C. elegans, there are minimal ethics with regard to what one can do to them, unlike traditional immunology animal models like mice. At any rate, "ethics" are wooly in my opinion because the ultimate reason it seems for why chordates get special consideration is morphological similarity. Doubtlessly many people have had metaphysical discussions about "ethics" and their anthropocentric derivation, so I won't belabour the point. However, one of the ethical considerations when working with sea urchins is that one must promise not to eat them.
Yeah, I laughed too when I heard that, mainly because I was secretly thinking about it. In all likelihood, they'd be just as delicious as those found in culinary establishments because we get our sea urchins fresh from the Pacific (no one raises them because they're dead easy to harvest, with the added plus of removing kelp forest predation). However, the ones we get are pretty small (biggest are about two inches diameter not including the spikes), and when you take in account that only the gonads are edible, they're not much of a meal. Furthermore, the lab I'm working in works a lot with sea urchin larvae, the formation of which apparently depletes sea urchin gonads and results in their shrinking (sea urchins that spawn get to see the inside of a -20 degrees Celsius freezer unfortunately because no one knows how to make them spawn again and it's too easy to harvest fresh ones). And the best reason why I won't be eating sea urchins this summer is because they're actually pretty cute with their tube feet (one thing that I didn't know sea urchins had until recently).
Anyway, I have this neat blog post to thank for getting me interested in sea urchin immunity: http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2007/09/01/42/
