Abstract
Reproduction underpins the life cycles, population dynamics, and ecology of marine organisms which have a wide variety of strategies, including sexual and asexual, gonochorism and hermaphroditism, as well as internal or external fertilization. It is often easy to collect a large quantity of gametes from species with external fertilization. In some species, such as many Echinodermata, female gametes (oocytes and eggs) are semitransparent, which makes it possible to observe changes in intracellular structures during fertilization. For these reasons, gametes from marine organisms have contributed to the general knowledge of biology, e.g., the first observation of sperm penetration into an egg and studies on the motile machinery of flagella (microtubules and dyneins), hormonal regulation of spawning in marine invertebrates, and oocyte maturation and cell cycles. Sexual maturation in marine organisms varies among species and their habitats; however, most Japanese species are seasonal and spawn once a year. For experiments using gametes and their fertilization, it is important to know the time of the spawning or copulation. In this chapter, we focus on the gametes and fertilization of marine species, especially marine invertebrates. Reproduction of marine algae is described in Chap. 12.
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1 Electronic Supplementary Material
Sperm chemotaxis to the tip of capillary filled with sperm attractant in the ascidian C. intestinalis (play at 1.8× speed) (MOV 8556 kb).
Formation of fertilization membrane in the sea urchin Hemicentrotus pulcherrimus (play at 3× speed) (MOV 6482 kb).
Ca2+ oscillation patterns of a fertilized egg of C. intestinalis. Probed with Calcium Green-1. Note that fertilization accompanies the first large Ca2+ increase that cause egg deformation, followed by several spikes of Ca2+ increases (MOV 6535 kb).
Ca2+ oscillation patterns of a fertilized egg of C. intestinalis. Probed with Fura-2 (MOV 3565 kb).
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Inaba, K., Sawada, H., Yoshida, M., Shiba, K., Shirae-Kurabayashi, M. (2020). Gametes and Fertilization. In: Inaba, K., Hall-Spencer, J. (eds) Japanese Marine Life. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1326-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1326-8_9
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