What are sea cucumbers?
Sea cucumbers are animals and NOT vegetables as their common name suggests. Often mistaken for worms, sea cucumbers are related to sea stars and belong to Phylum Echinodermata. Class Holothuroidea has about 1,200 known species. Some are colourful and easily seen, others are well camouflaged or hidden under stones or in the sand. Sea cucumbers can be round as balls, long and worm-like, or even U-shaped. They are found almost everywhere from shallow areas to the deep sea, from tropical to the Arctic and the Antarctic. Wormy Echinoderms: Sea cucumbers look quite different from their echinoderm cousins such as sea stars. Sea cucumbers don’t have arms, obvious spines or a hard skeleton. They are instead soft and worm-like. But like other echinoderms, they are symmetrical along five axes. Instead of lying on their mouths like sea stars, brittle stars, sand dollars and sea urchins, sea cucumbers lie on their sides with their mouths on one end and backsides on the other. Sometimes mistaken for
