Marine invertebrates

Overview

Queensland Museum holds important collections of marine invertebrates at Queensland Museum Kurilpa, Collections and Research Centre, Hendra, and at Queensland Museum Tropics, Townsville.

Queensland Museum marine invertebrate collection includes a large number of specimens from Queensland’s tropical and temperate marine environments including Queensland’s three marine bioregions; the iconic Great Barrier Reef, Coral Sea and Temperate East, as well as specimens from around the world.

Invertebrates are animals without backbones. These ‘spineless’ animals include all animals other than vertebrates within the phylum Chordata. Consequently, invertebrates make up the vast majority of all animal life on Earth. Invertebrates that inhabit in marine environments are called marine invertebrates.

Common examples of marine invertebrates include molluscs (such as clams, snails and octopus), crustaceans (like crabs, prawns and barnacles), echinoderms (such as sea urchins, sea stars [starfish] and sea cucumbers), sponges, worms and corals.

Images

Collection highlights

The Queensland Museum collection contains approximately 258,000 marine invertebrates, including notable collections of sponges, crustaceans, marine parasites, molluscs and bryozoans.

The biodiversity team at Queensland Museum Tropics, Townsville specialise in tropical marine invertebrate biodiversity collections, particularly collections from the Great Barrier Reef. These collections include collections across the Great Barrier Reef continental shelf, deep sea collections and bioresources archives. Queensland Museum Tropics holds over 100,000 marine invertebrate specimens including one of the largest coral collections in the world.

Research overview

Queensland Museum conducts research on the taxonomy, systematics, biogeography, evolution, ecology, physiology, behaviour and effects of environmental change on marine invertebrates.

Marine invertebrates are often sensitive to changes in their environment, such as increasing seawater temperature and ocean acidification caused by global climate change.

Marine invertebrates are ectotherms, which means they are ‘cold-blooded’. The temperature of their surrounding seawater is critical for their physiological processes. Increasing seawater temperature caused by global warming causes a range of lethal and sub-lethal affects in marine invertebrates, including loss of symbiotic algae (known as ‘bleaching’) in invertebrates that have symbiotic associations with algae such as corals and giant clams.

The oceans absorb about 30-50% of the carbon dioxide humans have released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, and this causes ‘ocean acidification’ in seawater. Ocean acidification makes it harder for marine invertebrates to make and maintain their calcium carbonate (limestone) shells and skeletons, which can make them more vulnerable to breakage. Ocean acidification also alters marine invertebrate behaviour, with potential flow on effects to other animals in the marine food web.

Projects

• Effects of global climate change on marine invertebrates
• Project DIG: Taxonomy and ecology of central Queensland’s hidden reefs

Publications

• The Great Barrier Reef, A Queensland Museum Discovery Guide
• Wildlife of Tropical North Queensland, Queensland Museum book