Did I ever tell you about the time I resurrected some sea anemones?
It all started with a bad dream.
It was the last semester of my senior year. Only a few more months and I’d be bashing about the world with a Bachelor’s of Science in Ecology and soon after, on to grad school. But until then, I was immersed in completing my senior research project.
My project was a series of experiments on sea anemones. More specifically, I was conducting pheromone trials on Anthropleura elegantissima, the aggregate sea anemone, to see how stress triggered physical responses. In other words, I’d squirt stress pheromones at anemones and watch them do crazy body contortions, recording and measuring my findings to be presented in the prestigious undergraduate Erickson Conference.
I was very proud to have access to the secret cold room in the upstairs lab of the science building. Only students with special permission were granted use of the room. I loved my anemones; they were “my pets.” But there was one aspect of the project I didn’t love.
Every so often, I’d have to drop my anemone pets into a Fruit Ninja blender and make a smoothie. This was part of the process to extract the stress pheromone that I needed for the experiment. Necessary as it was, the moment that my finger hit the blender’s “on” button was fairly gut-wrenching. (Figuratively so for me, far more literally for the anemones.) After blending up the pasty green smoothie, I’d filter it for the pheromone and dispose of the chunky remains in a trash bin, being careful to rinse and wipe everything down afterwards.
It was the morning after a day of experimental trials that I awoke in terror… I’d had a nightmare that there were zombified anemones crawling out of the sink in the cold room. Coming for me.
It was one of those scary dreams I couldn’t shake. All throughout classes that day, images of ragged, corpsified anemones plagued my thoughts. I finally decided to settle things with a cold, refreshing reality check: I’d go to the cold room and see for myself that there were no zombies.
I went to the cold room.
I glanced at the sink.
There was nothing there, I reassured myself.
But… wait. No, there was something.
It was a firm yet soft grey fleck, stuck to the sidewall of the sink.
I touched the something with my finger.
It looked vaguely similar to the central disc of an anemone— the hard spine-like nugget of the invertebrate’s body, over and around which the rest of its organs grow. The longer I studied the something and the rest of the sink, I began to notice other grey flecked somethings. On the walls. On the base. Around the drain.
The realization hit me. They looked like central discs because they were central discs! When washing out the blender, little leftover anemone bits had gotten stuck in the sink— too tiny at the time to be noticeable in the dim light of the cold room. And then… They had zombified back into being, slowly regrowing their bodies in the desolate environment! Cold, dark, dimly lit. How was this possible?!
Anxious and wracked with guilt, I scraped the zombies out of the sink into a container of water. Any fear I had felt was replaced with pity for these poor little creatures that had worked so hard to come back to life. The experience taught me firsthand that sea anemones— like sea stars and various other invertebrate sea creatures— have regenerative abilities. If part of their central disc is intact, they will zombify, regenerating themselves back into being.
And thus ends the story of how I accidentally resurrected some sea anemones.
Rachel G. Jordan | Christian Marine Biologist 
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