Photos of fertile female Discosoma

[Hans-Werner]

Recently I thought it would make interesting pictures of the translucent violet discosomas directly behind the front glas of one of our tanks.

[Hans-Werner]

While taking a closer look at the Polyps I noticed dark granulae in rows inside some of the polyps:

[Hans-Werner]

I think it are the larger female polyps in crowded clonal aggregations with oocyts inside.

[BrianPlankis]

Hans,

Beautiful pictures! I have alerted Eric to this thread.

Brian

[Eric Borneman]

Hans that is brilliant. It adds to our very limited and collective knowledge of reproduction in corallimorphs. Here is another example of presumed gonochorism (and not protandery or protogeny) in putative Rhodactis sp.

The interesting and perhaps worthy of histological exam would be to see if spermaries are present. It would be rather a poor evolutionary strategy for a species that reproduces prolifically be clonal means to have large clonal populations of the same sex.

[Eric Borneman]

Can you extract any of those and get microscopy photos to see the developmental stage?

[Hans-Werner]

Eric, to be honest, I do not like to manipulate the corals or cut it to extract the eggs. I would prefer to just watch the development.
According to this abstract (http://www.jstor.org/pss/3227186)the larger central polyps of a clonal aggregation should be female and the polyps along the edges are male or infertile.

Hans-Werner

[Hans-Werner]

A new photo of the Discosomas. It looks like eggs have changed color.

[Hans-Werner]

The eggs must have been ejected a short time after the last picture above was taken so the green colour may indeed show the ripening of the eggs. Meanwhile the polyps are all completely empty.
In the tank very small Discosomas grow isolated from colonies which may be the result of sexual propagation.

Hans-Werner