Collecting Eudistylia vancouveri

Collecting Eudistylia vancouveri is extremely tricky and the main strategy is PATIENCE!  Numerous mistakes were made and it took a lot of practise before I mastered this skill. Firstly, I do not know if you have ever seen E. vancouveri in its natural environment but these worms essentially glue themselves in a bundle and then glue themselves to some immovable object! Upon that, other organisms, such as: polychaetes, mussels, tunicates, hydroids, algae, anemones, starfish, urchins, crabs, and tons of other larvae develop and subsist around and amongst the tubes of E. vancouveri.

 

On my first couple trials my strategy was to remove on worm at a time. IT WOULD TAKE ME AGES! And, even when pulling the worms off, most of them would get pulled in two and die! The first thing I learnt that was removing the other organisms (also known as defouling) made collecting simpler. The second thing I learnt and recommend to everyone is the wear gloves, because getting an urchin in the hand is not as much fun as it would seem! It is also beneficial because the ocean is very cold, and numb frozen hands are not very efficient for collecting tube worms.

Then, I learnt that removing the whole bundle or part of the bundle of tube worms was easier than one at a time. The strategy for removing the whole bundle was to find their main attachment area and begin tugging extremely gently from there. You can also try to get your fingers under the main area and work them off, much like scraping paint

As soon as you get the whole bundle off you get to deal with the mess of intertwined tubes covered with millions of other organisms. Again, the main strategy is to begin by removing as many of the fouling organisms as possible. Once that is completed you can begin unwinding the mess of tubes. I like to describe this as undoing a mess of knots, like when you are fishing and your line ends up in a ball! Firstly, you want to loosen up the ball as much as possible, pull a little here and there, work some space in, etcetera.

When this is somewhat completed, you start undoing one knot at a time, aka, removing one worm at a time. I like to describe this as peeling apart two things that have been crazy glued together. The best example is your fingers, imagine your fingers are crazy glued together, both things are equally as sensitive and you have to pull them apart without damaging either! Granted, pulling apart worms is a lot simpler then pulling apart super glued fingers. When you have been stressing out the worms this much they will be pulled very far into their tubes, leaving the first half of their tube for you to pull on without the possibility of damaging them.  So you can squeeze this part of the tube between two of your fingers, and the other part of the tube between your other two fingers to pull them apart.

Once I had all the worms pulled apart I finished removing the rest of the fouling organisms so I had nice clean tube worms! Then put them in their new home! I hope with this little tutorial you can master the skill of collecting and separating E. vancouveri! And remember the key is PATIENCE!