Creative Nonfiction – July 2019

32 SUMMERS OF URCHINS AND LOVE | ANNE VISSER NEY

viii. larvae

David and I spawned the urchins a few days

later. I slid the hypodermic into each animal and

injected potassium chloride. Immediately, each

one oozed a blood-red or white emulsion—gam-

etes. When the oozing stopped, I swirled all of

the eggs and sperm into a large beaker filled with

clean seawater—a fertilization chamber—until

that tiny artificial ocean was pink and fraught

with possibility.

I pipetted a sample onto a slide, added a

cover slip, and staged fertilization under the

microscope. I brought the sample into focus and

showed it to David. He stood on a chair and

gazed through the oculars while I explained the

facts of life in terms of squiggling sperm, pink

eggs, and ballooning membranes.

I watched him watch genesis. I thought about

sex, love, and David, and wondered if God had

watched as one of my husband’s millions of sperm

breached my egg’s zona pellucida and thus shut

out all other possibilities. Our genes became

David’s, for better or worse.

Within three days, the fertilized urchin eggs,

now zygotes, were proceeding through urchin

larval development: prism, then two-, four-,

six-, and eight-armed pluteus stages, each step

wondrous.

A microscopic prism looks like a disembodied

hand cupping a shimmer of quivering cilia. As it

develops, each prism elongates into a parabola-

shaped two-armed pluteus with slender, delicate,

cilia-banded arms that beat microscopic algae to-

ward an embryonic mouth at the parabola’s base.

Eight-armed plutei are large enough to be seen

without magnification. Within weeks, the mature

pluteus loses its arms, becomes misshapen, twists

onto its side, and falls to the bottom to settle.

David and I tended the larvae as they grew,

comparing their ability to swim vertically at