2001.7 - PREDITORY TUNICATE

When I thought about this animal, I was actually going to do the final exam that Bruce asked us to do. I liked the problem that he set for us. It was to make something that showed a transformation. The example he gave was the transformation of wheat to bread. In this case, I was going to take the project seriously because I was intrigued.

A tunicate is the most primitive kind of animal in the phylum, chordata. We consider ourselves to be the most advanced chordates. To be a member of our phylum, an organism must have a notochord, a precursor to a backbone, at one time in its life. Tunicates have notochords when they are swimming embryos, before taking their sedentary adult forms.

Recently however, biologists have sequenced the DNA of tunicates, and found that while they do indeed have chordate DNA, they have echinoderm DNA as well. This means that some time back in geological time, a primitive chordate had a baby with a primitive echinoderm. Echinoderms are the phylum that includes modern starfish and sea urchins. Unlike most hybrids, the resulting offspring from this mating was not sterile. This is sex across phyletic boundaries. Shocking! Puts a different spin on the whole gay marriage issue.

For the purposes of the final project, my transformation was going to be a tunicate into a person. I was going to do this metaphorically by having little clay gingerbread men hang from the opening of the tunicate’s mouth in the manner of the hanging plastic monkeys from the barrel of monkeys toy that was popular when I was a kid.

Unfortunately, Bruce decided that the project was too complex for the class, and changed it to a pitcher. I still made the tunicate, which I raku fired, but without the gingerbread men. Topologically, the tunicate can be seen as similar to a pitcher. At any rate, that was my story. Not my fault.