Population AP1

After learning about the ways of set theory and the rules of the taxonomic tree in our STEAM Populations class, we were assigned to create a project off of an animal of our choosing and make a culmination of math, science, and art into our final project.

Sea bunnies or in scientific terms the Jorunna parva are the fluffy looking creatures that have been crawling through our seas for, well we don’t really know how long. Sea bunnies have only been discovered recently in 2015. Originating off the coasts of Japan, this sea slug is only around two to three centimeters in length making it really hard to see if you were looking for it in the ocean. These salt water dwelling creatures have the appearance of a polka-dotted bunny; characteristics including a leaf-like tail, seemingly fluffy coat, and two sensory organs that look like ears. These sensory organs make it easy for the sea bunny to detect food as well as current changes in the water while also taking on the role of gills. It’s coat, while looking fluffy, is actually the same kind of jelly-like substance that jellyfish are made of, and the “fur” you see on it is just tiny sensory rods called caryophyllidae, bunched up around the bigger black rods that are holding them together to help the sea bunny navigate its way through the water. Its leafy tail also taking on the role of gills.

GIF:

DN. Sea Bunny GIF. 2020. Link the photo in the name

Jorunna parva being one of 16 species of different kinds of sea bunnies that live in oceans throughout the world. Its behaviors are quite fluid, moving slowly along the ocean floor looking for food, having almost the same relative speed to a common land snail.

Taxonomy:

Sea bunny Taxonomy	Taxonomy reasoning
Kingdom: Animalia	Animalia means consisting of multiple cells
Phylum: Mollusca	Mollusks have soft unsegmented bodies
Class: Gastropoda	Gastropoda is belonging to all slugs and snails
Order: Opisthobranchia	Meaning to have gills that stand out from the body
Family: Nudibranchia	Nudibranchia meaning to have feathery gills
Genus: Elysia	A group of sea slugs that consume algae
Species: Nudibranch	Sea slugs that have rhinophores on the tops of their heads

 

Because of its diet mostly consisting of sea sponge, it ingests toxins that make it poisonous to most predators. While also having a trick up their sleeve, sea bunnies, when they detect danger, give off a sting from its cells when touched just like a jellyfish. But while they do have no predators to hunt them down they are very rare and do only end up living for around a year. They have the reproductive organs of both male and female making them hermaphrodites.

Set Theory statements: 

- U= {sea bunny}

(The element of the universal set is sea bunnies.)

-Sea bunny ∈Hermaphrodites

(Sea bunnies are an element of Hermaphrodites.)

-Sea bunny ∈Mollusks

(Sea bunnies are an element of Mollusks.)

-Sea bunny predators = {∅}

(Sea bunny predators is a null set.)

-Carnivores= {sea bunny}

(Carnivores is a set containing sea bunnies.)

While the project is meant to focus on our animals in particular, most of our time in class was spent, whether mathematically or scientifically, showing how most things are connected to each other and the different ways to show that. My classmates were also tasked with the same project but different animals. This diagram focuses on some of the traits, shared and different, between some of my classes’ other animals.

Venn Diagram:

This project was very interesting to complete. There were many aspects and ideas being shared through such simple phrases and images that helped build itself up into one cohesive completed assignment. Some requirements were harder to meet than others; collecting enough data to blend the project together and to make each part smoothly transition to the next was pretty tedious. Although it was pretty interesting to learn so much about such a small creature.