noun
definition
Sea cucumber (of the class Holothuroidea)
Examples of holothurians in a Sentence
Eulima, foot well developed, with an operculum, animal usually free, but some live in the digestive cavity of Holothurians.
Entocolax, mouth at free extremity, animal fixed by aboral orifice of pseudopallium, Pacific. Entoconcha, body elongated and tubular, animal fixed by the oral extremity, protandric hermaphrodite, parasitic in testes of Holothurians causing their abortion.
Eschscholtz at the Marshall Islands in 1825, Balanoglossus was described as a worm-like animal belonging to the Echinoderm order of Holothurians or sea-cucumbers.
There was also sufficient comprehension of the differences between the main classes of Echinoderms - the sea-urchins or Echinoidea, the starfish or Asteroidea, the brittle-stars and their allies known as Ophiuroidea, the worm-like Holothurians, the feather-stars and sea-lilies called Crinoidea, with their extinct relatives the sac-like Cystidea, the bud-formed Blastoidea, and the flattened Edrioasteroideawhile within the larger of these classes, such as Echinoidea and Crinoidea, fair working classifications had been established.
The theory was that all the plates just described, and more particularly those of the cup, which were termed "the calycinal system," could be traced, not merely in all crinoids, but in all Echinoderms, whether fixed forms such as cystids and blastoids, or free forms such as ophiuroids and echinoids, even - with the eye of faith - in holothurians.
The theory has been vigorously opposed, notably by Semon (op. cit.), who saw in the holothurians a nearer approach to the ancestral form than was furnished by any calyculate echinoderm, and by the Sarasins, who derived the echinoids from the holothurians through forms with flexible tests (Echinothuridae, which, however, are now known to be specialized in this respect).
There have always been many zoologists prepared to ascribe an ancestral character to the holothurians.
Semon called this stage the Pentactula, and supposed that, in its early history, the class had passed through a similar stage, which he called the Pentactaea, and regarded as the ancestor of all Echinoderms. It has since been proved that the five tentacles with their canals are interradial, so that one can scarcely look on the Pentactula as a primitive stage, while the apparent simplicity of the Synaptidae, at least as compared with other holothurians, is now believed to be the result of regressive vlu.
Thus the elements of the Pelmatozoan ventral groove are now detected in so different a structure as the echinoid ambulacrum, while an aboral nervous system, the diminished representative of that in crinoids, has been traced in all Eleutherozoa except Holothurians.
Which of the coelomic cavities this last is connected with is uncertain, for there is considerable doubt as to the origin of the genital glands in the embryonic development of recent echinoderms. It seems clear, however, that there was but a single duct and a single bunch of reproductive cells, as in the holothurians, though perhaps bifurcate, as in some of those animals.