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Monkey Tales - Learning About Stress

Dr. Biology: 0:00

This is Ask A Biologist, a program about the living world, and I'm Dr Biology. Imagine if you had your own private tropical island. It's not too big, about 37 acres, which is enough room to explore if you're one of the few people allowed to visit. As you might expect, the island has many trees and other plants. It's really a lush tropical island and, as you look around, it seems to be well. It seems to be a bit of paradise Well, monkey paradise, because the island we're going to talk about today is Cayo Santiago, also called the Island of the Monkeys, a place where scientists have been able to study a colony of rhesus macaques brought to the island in 1938. 

But the story of this island, like all good tales, maybe in this case a monkey tale has a twist. It happened in 2017 when Hurricane Maria and its destructive storm hit the island. You might remember that nearby Puerto Rico was also devastated by Maria. It was so bad it took days before scientists could get back to Cayo Santiago to find out that almost all the lush trees had been destroyed. They were just gone. This meant no food and little shade from the hot tropical sun for the monkey residents. So what happened to the 1700 or so monkeys that called Cayo Santiago home? 

Today's guest has the answer. Well, maybe we should say part of the answer and a new science mystery to solve, or several mysteries. Noah Snyder-Mackler is a faculty member and scientist in the School of Life Sciences and the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University. Noah studies how social behavior impacts health and survival, which is really important for all of us. This means he looks at how social relationships can protect us from stressful events like, say, your entire world being wiped out by a hurricane. 

For this episode, we will see how our primate friends are doing and what we're learning from them about coping with stressful events, and perhaps, if we have time and you're willing to listen to a little bit longer episode, we can journey high into the Ethiopian mountains to learn about another group of primates who deal with a different kind of environmental stress. To start us off, Noah, welcome to Ask A Biologist.

Noah: 3:02

Thanks for having me, Dr Biology.

Dr. Biology: 3:04

All right, for those that may not know about, let's start at the beginning. Let's go back to 1938. Why are these rhesus macaques? Why are they actually on an island just off the coast of Puerto Rico?

Noah: 3:18

Well, before we get to that, I think we have to know a little bit about what are rhesus macaques.

Dr. Biology: 3:23

Ah, even better.

Noah: 3:24

Yeah, so rhesus macaques are a really widespread non-human primate, so a monkey close relatives of humans, and they have the broadest geographic distribution of any non-human primate. So humans, we live pretty much everywhere in the world, right? Rhesus macaques are spread throughout Asia and they live up at high altitude and down at low altitude, and in forests and in cities. They're pretty much everywhere. They're adaptable, they're versatile and they've actually been one of the most commonly used animal models for different sorts of research projects, including biomedical research. 

And so one of the two main reasons why these monkeys were brought to Cayo Santiago all the way from their homes in India was because the US wanted a population of rhesus macaques nearby for research purposes, and the guy who brought these over, a primatologist, Clarence Ray Carpenter, wanted to have a place where he could do some naturalistic, behavioral and environmental and ecological studies and observations of the rhesus macaque in a semi-natural environment, without having to take a ship all the way over to India.

Dr. Biology: 4:41

Brought them close to home.  Do people live on the island?

Noah: 4:47

People do not live on the island of Cayo Santiago. It’s about one kilometer, just short of a mile, half mile or so off the coast of Puerto Rico. So, you have to take a little boat out there and the only people who are allowed out there are the primate center staff who help feed and provision water for the monkeys and the researchers you can't visit, okay?

Dr. Biology: 5:04

No touristy stuff. It is truly an exclusive island for macaques. 

Noah: 5:19

Yeah.

Dr. Biology: 5:20

All right, so we have this island. It's up until 2017, a lush island.

Noah: 5:21

A very lush island, lots of palm trees, many species of mangrove, out on the edge of the island. It's a nice little paradise out there. 

Dr. Biology: 5:25

Then Hurricane Maria hits. 

Noah: 5:27  

Yeah, and it's not like. This is the first hurricane to come through the Caribbean and to hit Puerto Rico and to hit this island, and there's been strong hurricanes did this island before, but Mario is pretty much unprecedented in its devastation. It was coming in and hit as a category four hurricane just barely below a category five the highest category, there is and it just took a direct hit right onto the southeast coast of Puerto Rico, which is where Cayo Santiago is, and then continued on to just devastate the mainland of Puerto Rico. And what happened was combination of the wind and then the storm surge, which is just this like rise in the water level around, really, knocked down a bunch of the trees and then, with all the salt water, over time eroded and killed many of the other trees that remained and that survived the hurricane.

Dr. Biology: 6:18

Wow. So at the beginning of the show I said it took weeks to get to the island. Is that correct?

Noah: 6:26

Not quite. It took us weeks to sort of get a really full assessment of what was happening on the island. But the Caribbean Primate Research Center staff. So, the primate center, the staff that maintain and Provide food and water for the monkeys on the island, because, again, it's a small island with a lot of monkeys and they need food. There's not a lot of food for them on that island. They were able to, despite the devastation of their homes, get out to the island with food within just a couple of days, with food and water, and if they didn't do that heroic act to take care of the animals, they wouldn't have survived much longer.

Dr. Biology: 7:01

That’s food and water, but the hurricane and I'll have to check what the wind speeds are a hurricane, category four are just short of five, but well over a hundred miles well over a hundred miles

Noah: 7:14

Well over a hundred miles an hour. 

Dr. Biology: 7:15

And for even a human to survive, that would be tough.

Noah: 7:20

Very tough.

Dr. Biology: 7:21

We're talking around 1,700 Monkeys. 

Noah: 7:24

So, you're gonna ask me the question that everyone asked me is what do you think they were doing?

Dr. Biology: 7:28

Well no, I'm gonna ask you how many made it?

Noah: 7:31

You want to ask how many made it? Yeah well, much like human society, animals die on a regular basis old animals, sick animals, things like that. That happens. It's a very natural colony and this is a population that we study, where there's natural births and deaths. We call that natural mortality, and so on any given month out of the 1,700 monkeys will have about 1% that'll die. Actually, a little bit less than that in general, but that is an average and some months there's 2% and some months there's 0.1%. After the hurricane, actually it ended up being about 2%, which is a little bit higher than usual, but well within the range and not out of the expected range that we see on a monthly basis.

Dr. Biology: 8:14

Right.

Noah: 8:15

Miraculously, they survived. 

Dr. Biology: 8:18

And we'll probably never know how they did it, because that's the thing it just amazes me. It's not like they have the kind of shelter and the kind of things that we do. We'll never know what they …

Noah: 8:30

Will never know, and I think the fact that there were 1,700 monkeys on this small island and with the storm surge the island got smaller because there was water all around. Means that they had to get really close to one another and they had to find a place that was protected from the extreme winds and rain that was coming from the hurricane. So only a few places they could have gone. And we know they had to all get really really close together. And these are monkeys that don't always like each other. They've got their close friends, their close social groups, but they don't necessarily mix well with the other social groups. They have their groups territories, but for this they actually had to survive, they had to tolerate one another.

Dr. Biology: 9:11

So, we're getting into your area. 

Noah: 9:13

Yeah exactly. 

Dr. Biology: 9:15

Sounds very stressful to me 

Noah: 9:16

Very stressful. 

Dr. Biology: 9:18    

All right, it's been six years. What are we learning from it? What are they teaching us how to deal with stress? 

Noah: 9:26

Yeah, so one of the really wonderful things about studying Cayo Santiago is that we have this really beautiful hybrid or Goldilocks system between the wild and a very captive lab environment. So it allows us to combine really natural behaviors and environmental complexity, this rich social complexity, with some of the tools that we can use in the lab, like we control blood samples from these animals every year and release them back and they go back to their group and go about their days, and this allows us to pair really rich environmental data and social data with biological inferences on their health.

Dr. Biology: 10:09

Right. So how do you measure stress? Humans you can kind of see it. I suspect you can probably even see stress outwardly from the primates.

Noah: 10:19

Yeah, so they exhibit many of the same behaviors that we exhibit when we are feeling uncomfortable or stressed or in an unpredictable situation. We'll get a little bit anxious, we'll engage in what we call self-directed behavior, like itching or scratching and things like that. So, these monkeys will do that when they're anxious, and we can see them doing that in their regular day interactions with each other. They have families, they have friends, they have social hierarchies, and those who are lower down on the social hierarchy, lower down on the social ladder, might have less access to resources, might have less predictability in their environment, and I think what all of us crave and what all of us need to not be stressed out is to know what's coming next predictability.

Dr. Biology: 11:03

Right. So, we can do this through observations, but there's also physiological things we can do to see when, and this is true for us too, when we have stress. 

Noah: 11:14

Yeah. So, there's lots that we can do and so even before Hurricane Maria, we were measuring some of these physiological factors that capture different aspects of your immune system or of your stress response pathway or growth and things like that. There are some things where we can measure their stress hormone levels. Called cortisol, generally is the human analog, but we don't need to get into the details of that. But that is something that is elevated when you are stressed. It's sort of your fight or flight response, right? 

So, we're able to measure that over time in these animals. And also when your stress levels are elevated that negatively affects your immune function, your ability to sense and respond to some pathogen or infection in the environment, and so we measure these two things among others. You know your stress response pathway and your immune system in these monkeys and we were doing that for years before Hurricane Maria came. Then Hurricane Maria hit and in its sort of devastation there was actually this sliver of opportunity where we could examine how does such an extreme stressor, extreme natural disaster event affect immune function, affect the stress response pathway and affect health and survival in a population that can't escape that devastation or anything in the fallout of that. In humans we see that after Hurricane Katrina, those who are more well off were able to leave the destruction. They could afford to do that, those who weren't had to stick around and often bore the brunt of the negative consequences of that disaster, which means that we can't really pull apart how the hurricane was affecting health versus how other components of human lifestyle and environment were affecting health. 

And so, with the nonhuman primates, these macaques on Cayo Santiago, we're actually able to control for some of these in science we call them confounds, but these extra little nuances or nuisance, extra things that muddy up analyses and make it difficult for us to identify what's actually happening. But we can do that on Cayo Santiago, we can get rid of some of these and we can actually ask what's the direct effect of this hurricane on the immune function of these monkeys, which was the focus of probably one of our first studies coming out of there.

Dr. Biology: 13:36

When we think about stress and when you mentioned that the immune system one of the things that people have been taught or you learn is that if you're not watching your diet, if you're not getting enough sleep, there are things that you do that makes your body more prone to get sick, and this fits into this issue of stressors as well.

Noah: 14:01

It's actually similar to something that happens to our bodies as we get older. Same sort of thing wear and tear on your body, and then your immune system's not as up to the task.

Dr. Biology: 14:34

Right, as you get older, we use this term homeostasis. There's this nice balance. Everything has to be in sync and as you get older, it becomes more and more challenging because it needs to maintain that homeostasis. Much tighter than when you were younger, you're able to recover and do those all-nighters and study and still get a good score. [Laughter]

Noah: 15:01

Yeah.

Dr. Biology: 14:39

As a matter of fact, I don't know that I ever did an all-nighter and did really well the next day. 

Noah: 14:42

No, I don't think that's possible. We call that window of homeostatic range that you can be in. We call that your reserve, your physiological reserve right, and your reserve gets smaller as you get older, so you have less wiggle room to really get pushed out of bounds.

Dr. Biology: 14:57

So, we've been looking at this opportunity, which is interesting. So, it's devastation, but in this case we really are trying to make lemonade out of lemons here.

Noah: 15:08

Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Biology: 15:11

Six years later.

Noah: 15:12

Yep 

Dr. Biology: 15:14

What's the big story for you?

Noah: 15:16

What's the big story? So, we have two sort of main stories that are intertwined and we're still trying to really really link them together. The first is link to what I was mentioning about they had to become more tolerant of one another to get through that storm. Well, after the storm, all the trees were destroyed, almost 90% of the vegetation, something like that the vast majority right? Puerto Rico, it gets really hot during the day. Shade is an important resource and now a very limited resource, and what we noticed is that all these monkeys became much more tolerant of one another. They increased their social networks a little bit and this meant that they were okay with other monkeys being closer to them that weren't necessarily close to them before. And what we saw is that those animals that were the most isolated before the storm, so at the fewest friends or were furthest away from everyone, actually increased their close number of partners or friends much more than others. So, we see that there's this strong effect on the social networks.

Dr. Biology: 16:14

Misery loves company.

Noah: 16:16

Yeah, exactly right. But there is a functional component to this. There is a fitness consequence in terms of natural selection, Darwinian fitness, and we have a paper that under review right now that hopefully will be coming out in the next six months, ideally sooner, showing that actually those who increased their social affiliation the most after the storm actually were less likely to die in the six years after the storm. So, increasing, responding to this event, and increasing your social support network, let's say, has a protective effect on your ability to survive. And what we found is that actually it was not just that overall effect. It was actually that your friendships or your time spent with other individuals during the hottest parts of the day because we can break that down when you're spending time with people Actually have the strongest effect on your survival. So, it's not that early in the morning you need to be really close to one other, but it's actually that you need to be close to others later in the day when it's really hot and shade is limited. So, there's that social buffering aspect of this, where social connections can help protect you from many other unexpected things and hopefully help improve your health into a lifespan which we see in humans. 

The other aspect of the story that again we're connecting to is down to those immune measures that we could look at. So we could take blood samples from these monkeys before the hurricane and we could look at how well their immune systems functioning. We use transcriptomics for this approach, which means we're measuring every single gene that's being expressed, the RNA, that’s being expressed in every single one of those cells that we've collected in your immune system, and using that we could sort of come up with this joint measure, this one measure of like how old does this monkeys immune system look? And we can do that pretty well, we can predict it pretty well. And what we found that before the hurricane, if you're an eight-year-old monkey, your immune system looks like you're an eight-year-old monkey. After the hurricane we could do these same measures on some of the same monkeys also, some new monkeys that we didn't sample before, and we could run the same prediction draw the blood, measure the transcriptome, those RNAs that are being expressed, and come up with an estimate of how old their immune systems look. 

Take a different eight-year-old monkey, sampled after the hurricane, so lived through this hurricane, and on average their immune system looks like that of a ten-year-old monkey, so looks like experience of the hurricane living through this traumatic and stressful event had accelerated the age of their immune system by about two monkey years. And if you're familiar with dog years and human years, that rough translation right. Those animals have much shorter lifespan. So, we can think that one dog year is roughly seven human years. We can do that same math with these monkeys and one monkey year is about three to four human years. So, you can think about this two-year acceleration in their age as being six to eight years in human life, which is a really big deal, and especially later in life that can really substantially impact your health negatively. 

But I told you about these two stories and I think the natural question is well, how are these social relationships impacting whether or not you do age, your immune system or not? That's what we're really looking into here the most. That's sort of what we're trying to tie together. It's gonna take a little bit more time, but I said on average there was a two-year age acceleration after the hurricane but that was on average. There's a big distribution some monkeys aged four years after the hurricane that added four years to their lives, others none at all. Others are a real monkeys that looked at immune systems of eight-year-old monkeys. Why? That's what we're trying to figure out here and we think that social connection, social environment, really plays a part here. 

Dr. Biology: 20:00 

Right and the other question is - those that their immune system age more rapidly. Since it's been six years since then, has there been any recovery? Is it lost forever?

Noah: 20:11

Yeah, hopefully not right. Hopefully you can come back. Your immune system is a couple years older than you and then eventually it comes back and you're matching, a few years later maybe. So that's the longitudinal repeated sampling that we've been doing on these monkeys and we're just generating those data right now. We got some federal funding, so some grant funding, to support that work just last year, and we have some wonderful researchers who are working on that with us here at ASU and elsewhere who are coming through those data to address that exact question, right? So do you come back to normal and if so, when? How long? If not, why? And what's the difference between those that do come back to Normal and those that don't?

Dr. Biology: 20:50 

Right and with all the behavioral studies you're doing along with this. It's critical. Why is one monkey doing better than the other? Is it purely physiological? Or is it because their social capabilities, the way they socialize. We've talked about when you get older, homeostasis becomes more challenging. Yeah, your reserves right? 

Noah: 21:11

Reserve is smaller. Yeah, resilience is weaker.

Dr. Biology: 21:14 

So, it's the same thing with age, it seems like for humans You're seeing the same sort of thing going along, that as you get older it's really important to have that friendship.

Noah: 21:23

Yeah, I think it's really important. Actually, we've published some really cool work actually looking at what happens to your social networks as you get older and people you know, as we get older, our social networks constrict, they narrow, they get smaller. It's not because they're less important. It's not because social connections don't matter for us as we get older and into our lives. Actually they might matter much, much more. It's just that we have limited time and those strong social connections are the ones that matter the most. So it's not that we're less interested. We're actually just like focusing on the relationships that we think matter and that are most important to us. Maybe it takes time to figure that out. And in these monkeys we actually see the same exact thing, which is really cool. 

We looked longitudinally again within individuals over time and saw that they were narrowing their social networks as they got older. And it wasn't that as you get older, no one wants to hang out with you. Right? You're less desirable. It's actually the case that you're equally desirable, if not more, desirable. You're just choosing not to interact with these other monkeys that you don't want to interact with, so you get to pick and choose who your friends are a little bit more. And so they're allowed to sort of narrow and focus their total social effort, or their total amount of time they can invest in their friends, on a few individuals that they really care about 

Dr. Biology: 22:39 

It just seems like every time we open one area of exploration, we get dozens, if not more, questions that come out of it.

Noah: 22:50

I mean that's why I'm in this job, right? It’s why we need more scientists to write them down. Never gonna be done, right? I hope I'm never done. I hope I never just find the answer.

Dr. Biology: 22:58 

Well, it's like the book on the shelf with all the answers doesn't exist. And we keep getting better at finding out where the holes are, fill in those holes and then also digging deeper little details. It's a really good example that the more we know, the more we need to know.

Noah: 23:15

Absolutely. The part we know, the less we thought we know. [laughter]

Dr. Biology: 23:20

Yeah, well, that's true, that's true. We can, we keep refining it, right. So I think you think you had the answer and you realize it's well. It's a little more complex than that right.

All right, what we're learning from our primate cousins as far as dealing with stress on this island is amazing. But not all stressors have to have a hurricane. And you work with another group of monkeys, yep, that have a different kind of stress, and it turns out I actually grew up in Colorado, in Colorado Springs, actually, which is at the foot of Pikes Peak. 

Noah: 23:58

All right, all right.

Dr. Biology: 24:00

And that mountain is fourteen thousand, I think, one hundred and fifteen feet high, so it's got some definite altitude. 

Noah: 24:06

Definitely does. You don't live on top of that.

Dr. Biology: 24:09 

But at the summit, because you can actually drive from the base of the mountain all the way to the summit on a paved road many people end up at that altitude and they have some problems or challenges. This is probably true most of your monkeys as well. So, let's talk about stress and altitude and other group of primates for sure.

Noah: 24:34

So for this part of the story we're gonna move from Puerto Rico all the way to the highlands of Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa. So East Northeast Africa. Ethiopia has this really beautiful landscape that was formed by many, many, many years of erosion and there are these huge clifflike plateaus that are about 3,000 meters above sea level. So I'll translate that back to our system out of metric here. That's about, I would say, where we do our research is about 11,000 feet above sea level, but it ranges from about 8,000 to probably about 14,000, maybe a little bit more than that, maybe close 15,000 at some of the highest points. And we're out there because there's this really cool and unique monkey called the gelata that lives only in Ethiopia and only up at high elevation. And when I say high elevation, we're talking about above 2,000 meters, above 8,000 feet above sea level and up to about 13,000 - 14000 feet above sea levels. Pikes Peak. 

Dr. Biology: 25:41

Right, just living high in the mountains. Besides, the fact that it can be cold, it's one thing, so you definitely have seasons  

Noah: 25:50

Close to the sun. Lots of UV 

Dr. Biology: 25:52

Lots of UV and something that's lacking, something that you get less of the higher you go in altitude, and that's oxygen, that is oxygen. 

Noah: 25:59

And it's actually not specifically that the oxygen itself is lacking in the air up there. There's the same amount of relative oxygen up there. It’s just that as we get higher, sort of the inverse is, as you go down underwater, further underwater is that the pressure changes right. So with lower atmospheric pressure up there, every breath of air that you bring in just as fewer molecules period, which means less oxygen. And we call this hypoxia, this condition where you have less oxygen coming in and your body's got to find a way to make do with less oxygen, because oxygen is what we need to make energy and for our tissues to survive. 

Dr. Biology: 26:43

Okay, I'm guessing this is going to be our stressor. 

Noah: 26:47

Yeah, this is one extreme environmental stressor, for sure, and we're looking at this stressor not over short periods. You know, in humans. You go up there and your body reacts to the stressor by finding ways that it can increase oxygen delivery to your body, to your lungs, to your brain. To do that it does a couple things. One you increase your breathing rate. You start going hah, hah, hah, a lot. Second thing, and one thing that's really important, is that you increase the amount of red blood cells that you're producing because these oxygen carrying things and that's a good thing in the short term. It's a bad thing in the long term if you were to stay up there and have chronic elevated red blood cell concentration, because that can impact blood pressure, lead to clots and things and be really devastating. So, it's good short term stress response to low oxygen. 

With these monkeys, they've been living up at high elevation here for, you know, let's say, a million and a half years. They aren't doing the short-term response that we're doing. So, we can use them as sort of a model to understand how evolution, natural selection, has pushed them to develop some traits, some phenotype. So, phenotype is a science word for trait, right. Natural selection has pushed them to develop these traits that allow them to survive and thrive at high altitude, in these low oxygen environments. That means we're not talking about sort of short-term responses to going up and down this mountain. We're talking about changes to their DNA sequence, to their development, to their bodies, that allow them to live there without the negative consequences of less oxygen with each breath of air.

Dr. Biology: 28:29

And this is something that's chronic stress.

Noah: 29:32

Yeah.

Dr. Biology: 29:53

So, unlike the one with the hurricane, with the stress that comes and goes. This is living in a stressful environment. What's going on?

Noah: 29:05

Yeah, what's going on? So, because they've been living for so many generations up there, generation after generation, and if you think about it from the same point of evolution, if one monkey develops a little mutation in their DNA sequence that allows them to do a little bit better than the other monkeys, say, a million years ago, and they can get just a little bit more oxygen out of each breath of air, then they're going to do better, they're going to have more offspring and that gene's going to spread in the population and that gene's going to take over. And so incrementally, we see some of these changes can happen, such that most of the monkeys have these and can live and thrive up there. So what we did is we decided to sequence the DNA of a bunch of these monkeys up there, and we can do this a number of ways. 

We can very carefully tranquilize them and draw a blood sample, but we only do that to a few monkeys and they're fine, they get back, they go to their groups. But also we can collect poop samples and we can get lots of monkey DNA out of those samples as well. And so in doing this, we sequence their DNA and then we look to see what are some of the differences in their DNA compared to their closest primate relatives that don't live at high altitude, which is all of the baboons, the six different species of baboons that live throughout Africa. And so in this work we actually found some really cool DNA sequence differences that are a smoking gun, right. Not the actual adaptation, but something that tells us something's going on here that's allowing them to survive and thrive at high altitude, because many of the DNA sequences changes that we saw were involved, were in or near, genes that encode for proteins that are involved in how we respond to hypoxia.

Dr. Biology: 30:32

So, the mystery is unfolding.

Noah: 30:33

The mystery is unfolding. Right, we're looking at a sequence of letters and comparing that sequence of letters to many other sequences, those same sequences in different species. We’ve done some biology to sequence the DNA and then we're crunching some numbers. We don't know if those differences that we are seeing in those letters actually does help them at high altitude, and so what we have to do is we have to then do a bunch of other tests. We have to take that DNA, take a monkey cell, put it in an incubator and say, if we change the oxygen level in here, does the cell with the gelato-monkey DNA do better than one with the baboon DNA? 

Noah: 31:35

So, we could do some of these really interesting comparisons. We can also compare gelato-monkeys that are living in the zoos at low elevation to those that are living in the wild at high elevation in terms of their blood composition and things like that. There's all sorts of comparisons we can do. We've done a number of studies, published one really cool paper just a couple years ago and we're digging in now and following up on this really interesting question, not only from just a evolutionary biology perspective   but also from the perspective of human health and medicine. Because if we can find new ways in which natural selection has allowed organisms to be okay in low oxygen environment, that might help people find new ways for treating COPD or these diseases where people have a tough time breathing or getting enough oxygen.

Dr. Biology: 32:00 

Right. All this with a theme of stress. 

Noah: 32:02

Yeah.

Dr. Biology: 32:05

Which, by the way, we have an episode of Ask a Biologist called Stressed Out, which, interestingly enough, is one of the more popular episodes, because I think people feel stressed out and they always want to learn if there's something that we're going to teach them about how to be less stressed, it's with Miles Orchinick. 

Speaking of guests. My scientists never get out of here without answering three questions.  

Noah: 32:30 

All right.

Dr. Biology: 32:32

So you're ready.

Noah: 32:32 

I'm ready.

Dr. Biology: 32:33

Okay, when did you first know you wanted to be a scientist?

Noah: 32:38

I think I first knew that I wanted to study animals and to understand and I was curious about biology. The first time I went to the zoo that I can remember, probably with my parents and my grandpa on my mom's side, and I always thought that the only thing I could do to work with animals was to be a veterinarian. I didn't realize until I was in college that there are many opportunities outside of being a veterinarian that allow you to study animals and learn things about evolution and biology and also even maybe apply them to understand. You know human and animal health.

Dr. Biology: 33:12 

So, the zoo.

Noah: 33:13

The zoo. 

Dr. Biology: 33:14

Oh well.

Noah: 33:15

Love the zoo.

Dr. Biology: 33:16

I had a series on the zoo just not long ago and I'm sure those guests would be thrilled to hear that. All right, so now you have your career set and my scientists are always passionate, and I do this next question. It's a bit evil. It's a thought question. 

Noah: 33:35

Yeah.

Dr. Biology: 33:37

First of all, because some of my scientists freak out a little bit because I'm going to take it all away. You don't get to do science anymore. And no more teaching, because I have learned over the years that most of the scientists love to teach. That's part of our DNA.

Noah: 33:49

So you speak right.

Dr. Biology: 33:50

If I take it all away from you. What would you do, or what would you be? 

Noah: 33:55

Oh man, if we were to take it all away, if I couldn't be a professional athlete.

Dr. Biology: 34:10

Well, you can. What sports sport would you want to do?

Noah: 35:03

You know, that's the thing. I don't know if I'm good enough at any of them to be a professional athlete, but I love athletics and playing different sports. I played them through high school, a little bit in college. But I think what I would really like to do and maybe this is too easy of an answer for me actually is wildlife photography. Wildlife photography, wildlife journalism, things like that. I really love taking really great photos of the animals that I'm studying and other animals that are around. It's very calming, relaxing and really fun for me. 

Dr. Biology: 34:16

Yeah, I'm with you, 

Noah: 34:17 

Not stressful.

Dr. Biology: 34:18

It's one of my passions too. Alright, the last question, and a very important one. What advice would you have for a young scientist, or perhaps someone maybe who is an athlete that always wanted to be the scientist? What would be your advice for them?

Noah: 34:54

Stay curious. It's really straightforward, I think. Ask questions, don't be afraid to ask questions and always be wondering what's going on with that and what's happening here. You know, I think, I'm gonna paraphrase Isaac Asimov. He was a famous scientist and science fiction writer. He used to say that it's something like it's not exciting to find what you were looking for, right? So the most exciting phrase in science is not Eureka, I found it. The most exciting phrase in science is hmm, that's funny, yeah. [laughter] So you got to stay curious, right? You have to be able to think about, you know, oh, that's interesting, right? And I've got to pull that thread a little bit more. I really want to understand it, because it's rare that you're gonna find the answer. You're always gonna have more questions and you have to be okay with that and comfortable with that and curious and excited about that discovery.

Dr. Biology: 35:32

Right. Mine was typically. I'm a microscopist so there are a lot of times we're imaging the tiny world.

Noah: 35:38

Yeah.

Dr. Biology: 35:39 

And my phrase was ‘that's not what I expected’.

Noah: 35:44

Same thing, right? I think it's just like huh, what's going on?

Dr. Biology: 35:45

Yeah.

Noah: 36:48

But that's exciting, right, it's not. It's not like oh, I didn't find what I thought, I found.

Dr. Biology: 35:52

Well, with that, Noah, I want to thank you so much for sitting down and visiting with me on Ask a Biologist. 

Noah: 35:58

Thanks so much, Dr Biology.

Dr. Biology: 36:00

You have been listening to Ask A Biologist, and my guest has been Noah Snyder Makler. He's a faculty member in the School of Life Sciences and in the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University. Now, if you'd like to learn more about what Noah's been doing, we will put some links in the show notes, including a link to a 60 Minutes video that Noah was in. It featured the Monkey Island and we will also include a link to a story called Why Some Monkeys Live High in the Mountains that has been published in the Science Journal for Kids, which is another great place to explore science learning. 

The Ask A Biologist podcast has been produced on the campus of Arizona State University and is recorded in the Grassroots Studio housed in the School of Life Sciences, which is an academic unit of The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. And remember, even though our program is not broadcast live, you can still send us your questions about biology using our companion website. The address is askabiologist.asu.edu, or you can just use your favorite search tool and enter the words Ask A   Biologist. As always, I'm Dr Biology and I hope you're staying safe and healthy.

---

Secrets of the Honeybee

Dr. Biology:

00:01

This is Ask A Biologist, a program about the living world, and I'm Dr Biology. In this episode, we're going to talk with a biologist who has spent more than 40 years studying one animal, an animal that has six legs, flies and makes something sweet that most of us love to eat. By now you probably know that I'm talking about the honeybee. What you may not know is, in those 40 years of research, our guest biologist has likely worked with more than a half a billion honeybees. That would be honeybee workers, which are all female. There are also the hundreds of queens and male drones that have been part of the research. 

00:50

So, what has our biologist learned in their 40 years? That is what I hope we'll explore in this show with our special guest, Robert Page, an award-winning entomologist. During his career, he has published over 250 research papers that have been cited, which means they've been included as references in over 18,000 other scientific publications, and, to add some more writing to his resume, he's also published several books about his favorite insect. Now I suspect we will learn a lot about honeybees that we didn't know and a bit about a career in science that has spanned four decades. Welcome to Ask a Biologist, Rob. 

Rob:

01:39

Well, thank you, I'm happy to be here, Dr. Biology. 

Dr. Biology:

01:43

So, when we talk about honeybees, it's one of those things that there are some people that have an aversion to bees, but in general, people love in particular honeybees, because honeybees are only one type of bee that's out there. There's a lot of different kinds of bees. 

Rob:

01:58

Yes. 

Dr. Biology:

02:00

What is it over these 40 years? You've been doing this for 40 years. What is it that has surprised you the most about the honeybee? 

Rob:

02:13

I think the thing that has surprised me the most about the honeybee is that not only have I been studying honeybees for over 40 years, I've been studying one thing about honeybees for over 40 years. My focus has been on how they can evolve to have such a complicated society. Their social system is very similar to ours in a lot of ways, and how did they evolve this social system where there's no one in charge? The queen isn't in charge. The queen bee basically just lays eggs. 

03:00

There's no president of the society or any true king or queen in the sense that we think about kings and queens. Every single individual makes a decision independently of others. Independently in the sense that there's no one who tells anyone what to do. They all decide on the basis of what they themselves can perceive sense in the nest, what the environment is, and then they respond to it. And what you get from that is this incredibly organized, coordinated society. 

03:40

So, I have studied it from that level, looking at the different behavior, looking at how individuals interact with each other and form this society and build these wonderful combs that they build. But also I've been looking at the genetics. There has to be genetic basis for the behavior. What are the genes that are involved in the behavior that glues together this social group, and then how did it change over time as these very complicated societies evolved? So my biggest surprise has been that every time I've answered a question, I've had four brand new ones arise. So I look at where I am today and I have far more questions that are left unanswered than I had in the beginning, when I started doing this research. 

Dr. Biology:

04:40

Right, it's kind of where you start peeling back the layers of the onion right. There's always more going on. 

Rob:

04:47

But the big difference there is that when you peel the layers of an onion it stinks. When you peel the layers of honeybee, behavior, it's just a fascinating, incredible adventure that you start on Right and sweet, and sweet. 

Dr. Biology:

05:03

When you talk about these really amazing societies that the honeybees have, it's female-dominated, which is another thing that a lot of people don't think about. So you have male drones, but they're not around long, are they? 

Rob:

05:17

I would not say that it's female-dominated. I would say that the males and the females have different kinds of things that they do and this has all been part of the social structure, the reproduction that's needed in order to maintain the societies and the lineages. So, there's two kinds of females. There are females that are the worker bees. They have stingers. They go out and forage and they collect pollen on their legs and collect nectar from the flowers that they turn into honey, and they're responsible for the vast majority of the tasks that we observe, the way that they can control the temperature of the nest. They can collect nectar, cure honey, build combs, they do all those things. The other kind of female is a queen, and typically there's one queen in a honeybee colony and anywhere from 10 to maybe 40,000 workers. No one is in charge, no one dominates anything, the workers. They build the comb, they feed the queen protein we call it royal jelly which then she turns that into eggs and she lays eggs and cells only after the workers have prepared the cells. If they don't prepare the cells, she won't lay them and thereby they control her egg laying by how much they feed her and preparing the cells for her to lay in. So she's not in charge of anything. 

07:00

The males, their task in life is to leave the nest, the hive, every day in the early afternoon and go, fly through the air and they locate places where virgin queens, as queens that have not yet mated. They fly there and they encounter males and the males mate with them, which is pretty spectacular. My understanding the mating is an incredible. I call it the song of the Queen. So she will mate with, you know, up to 20 males as she flies through the air, and each of the males, when they mate with her, in the act of mating, they become paralyzed and they fall to the ground and die. 

07:46

And so for them, that's the one thing that they're designed to do, and they're designed very well to do it, because they have very special features. They have large eyes that have more of the individual eyes. If you look at an insect eye, you'll see that it has lots of smaller eyes that are called eye facets but they have more than the workers, which gives them a better ability to detect movement when they're flying through the air, so they can locate Queens. And they also have antennae that have Receptors for sensing the odors of the Queen. The Queen produces these odors called pheromones, so they fly through the air and they're just really designed just to fly through the air and detect a queen and mate with her. 

Dr. Biology:

08:36

So they have a very important function, but it's not the same function that the workers have, and the Queen's function is not the same as the workers you know I did some reading and I think I have this right that the average honeybee colony has as many neurons as a human brain, and If that's true, that seems like a lot of brain power. So how are Honeybees using their collective brain different from humans? 

Rob:

09:02

Well, that's an interesting question and I think you're pretty close to being right with respect to the number of total neurons in a hive and I think about those things sometimes. I think about what is the brain of an insect colony. What does it have? If you take each and every single one of those, let's just say, 40,000 workers in a colony, each one of them has a very different set of experiences. Every one of them has a memory, and they do have memory and they do learn. We can test it. We have ways of knowing what they learn. We have ways of teaching them things and then asking them questions back about what they learned. So, we know they learn. Every one of them has learned something different. 

09:50

So, if you went inside of the nest and you were looking at the organization of the nest, the things that need to be done, you have this collected memory in there of the things that need to be taken care of and the things that have already been done, just as we have in our own brains. 

10:07

We know what we've done and we know what needs to be done, and we know what the inside of our house looks like and where to get things, and they do too, but they do it as a collective and then if you look where they forage, every individual can be foraging out Up to five miles in different directions and they come back and they perform dances that inform the other Individuals as to where these resources are located, the direction and the distance. 

10:33

They have individual memories about the landmarks that are out there, that associated with the Location of the nest, as well as the location of the resources. So, if you put that all together, you have an incredible map of the environment and they do communicate to some extent with each other, to where they can transfer that information around, very much like In our own brains how we assemble information and act on it. Colonies of honeybees can forage as a collective unit optimally, as if they have information that's global, meaning that all individuals share the same information about everything that's out there in the environment. Even though they don't, there are mechanisms that they have whereby colony can, as a foraging unit, change over the course of a day from foraging on resource flowers that are less profitable to them, has less sugar in them to bring back and shift over to forage for those that are more profitable. They can do that as a collective unit, though no one individual has all that information herself. 

Dr. Biology:

11:54

Wow, you know you mentioned the bee dance, the waggle dance, and I just want to put a little plug in that we have a really cool game called the waggle dance game on Ask A Biologist. So, if someone wants to learn how bees communicate between themselves, that's the way to get started and, quite honestly, once you've played that game enough, you Actually will understand what they're saying, which is pretty cool. Yes, so you know you talk about this "collectiveness" and one of the things I realized is an advantage of the bees is I can only go one direction and come back right. Wow, as if you have 40,000 bees now. Not all of them are going out foraging, but of all those foragers are going out. As you mentioned, they can go in all directions, and so they get this collective information much faster than if I had to go out to all those different locations as an individual. Are there other insects that do that? 

Rob:

12:51

Well, of course, there are other social bees, and there are also social wasps. So in order to be doing that, you'd have to be living in a social group. 

Dr. Biology:

13:01

That's some ants. 

Rob:

13:03

Yes, ants as well ants, bees and wasps and what they're doing is what we call central place foraging. They're foraging from a central place and for that to happen, you have to have a nest. So you think about you have a nest, you have Resources scattered all around the environment, all around Central place foragers then forage out from their nest, they find resources, they bring them back in, and it's a huge amount of collective information. If you were to be able to collect all the information that every individual has, again, be it an ant, be it a wasp, or a termite, termites do the same thing. They form very large social groups. 

Dr. Biology:

13:46

Hmm, all right, so you told me that one of the things that has always impressed you with the honey bees is that every time you find an answer, it seems to open up multiple new questions for you. Is there Something that you recall in that 40 years that really surprised you? I mean, because we have a tendency to think we know how certain animals will behave and what they will do, and then the really fun thing about science is find out that we were really all wrong. So is there something that comes to mind that you were just like wow, this is really, really surprised me. 

Rob:

14:30

There is one thing, but I have to also say that I tell my students that science is a self-correcting process. You have hypotheses. Most of your hypotheses are demonstrated to be wrong, so you have to be willing to accept that you were wrong. And again, any scientist that tells you they were always right, nothing went wrong while they were on their path to discovery, well, they're not telling you the truth. I've been wrong much more than I've been right. But the one time that I was right that was really the most exciting part was I was studying the reproductive system of the worker honeybees. Workers have ovaries. They don't normally lay eggs. They're what we call facultatively sterile. That means they can be sterile or they're not necessarily sterile, under certain conditions, but normally they don't lay eggs but they do still have ovaries. 

And I was studying the ovaries of some bees that we had done some artificial selection for. We selected for bees that collect a lot of pollen and bees that collect a lot less pollen, and it was a selectable trait. So I had some colonies that had bees that were high pollen collectors and some colonies that had bees that were low pollen collectors. We were trying to figure out all the different things that were different between them, to try to figure out maybe a mechanism associated with forging decisions of bees to forge for pollen or nectar. And we were looking at the ovaries of workers. 

I can't remember exactly why, but I had an undergraduate working in my lab and she was a sophomore, I believe, undergraduate and she came to this other person I was working with a postdoc who was in my lab at the time and she said you know what? Those bees that collect more pollen, they have bigger ovaries. And so then, all of a sudden, we started thinking about it. We hadn't noticed that. It was her discovery that we found it. So, we started thinking could it possibly be that worker bees that have larger ovaries are also going to be more likely to be the pollen collectors of a colony? And we subsequently did studies and found out that that was the case. What we called reproductive status of an individual and their forging behavior, and you could think about it in the context of how behavior changes with reproductive cycles and reproductive state. 

17:15

The one I like to use is look at a mosquito. Mosquitoes, when they first emerge as adults, when they first come out of the water and they emerge as an adult, the first thing they do is they fly around and they find flowers and they take in nectar. They suck nectar because they need carbohydrate, they need the sugar resources to give them energy. Their ovaries are not yet developed, they're still in a developing stage. After they feed on sugar, then their ovaries start maturing. 

17:49

They start maturing, they start developing, they get bigger and then their behavior changes. Instead of flying around searching for flowers and nectar, they start flying around searching for blood meals. Like you and me, they become sensitive to carbon dioxide, they become sensitive to body temperature and then they will alight on you and they will suck up a blood meal. They'll fill up with blood. Their stomach fills up with blood After that. Now they're full, they're satiated, their ovaries are still enlarged. They're ready now to make eggs. 

18:28

Then their behavior changes again. Now they start looking for a cool, dark place on a vertical substrate where they will then just sit and make eggs. In your own house, one of the places they like to sit is just right behind your toilet, in your bathroom, because it's humid, it's dark, they're full, they process, they make eggs, then, after the eggs are fully developed, now they're getting signals that change their behavior again. Now they fly around looking for surfaces of water to lay their eggs on. Once they lay their eggs, their behavior changes again. Now their ovaries are shrunken again, and now they become nectar foragers again because they need to get more sugar in order to start the cycle again. So, basically, what we found was that pollen foragers are like the blood meals seeking mosquitoes with larger ovaries, and the nectar foragers are like those with the smaller ovaries that are searching for carbohydrates. 

Dr. Biology:

19:25

You know, I wasn't even thinking about that, and of course there are other animals out there that have a similar cycle. 

Rob:

 19:32

Yet, like humans and turtles, it's actually called a gonotropic cycle, gonotropic having to do with reproductive organs. 

Dr. Biology:

19:42

Now as a scientist, you've been an educator. You've taught. You're also a writer. You've written several books. One is the Spirit of the Hive and the other one is the Art of the Bee. There are others you have, but these are the most recent ones. If someone wanted to learn about the honeybee and they had to pick one of those books, which one would you recommend? 

Rob:

20:12

I'd recommend the Art of the Bee. 

Dr. Biology:

20:14

Okay, and why? 

Rob:

20:18

Well, I wrote the Art of the Bee to be a basic honeybee biology textbook, but not in a traditional textbook. Traditional textbooks present you with information that is in what I call organizational chunks, so you might learn about taxonomy of bees. To start with, that would just be being able to identify bees. Then you might learn something about their biogeography, that is, where they're distributed around the world and what do you find them in tropical areas or on islands, so you'd study their biogeographical distribution. Then you might start studying something about their anatomy, about their physiology, and then you maybe learned a little bit about their neurobiology and then their behavior. Then, at the end, you'd learn something about how all this stuff leads to social behavior. I wanted to have a book that was focused more on interesting questions about bees and that then brought in all of those different levels of organization into the same chapters, into the same paragraphs, instead of presenting it in layers, present it together, kind of as a case-solving system where you get everything and you solve a problem using all the different tools. 

Dr. Biology:

21:48

Right, kind of like just-in-time learning right? You have a question and you need to find the answer for that particular question, and it might require a few different pieces to solve it. Yes, out of the millions of bees that you've observed, have you ever had any that were somewhat unique? I mean the workers that just behaved differently than others, that actually stood out. 

Rob:

22:13

As individuals, not their behavior as colonies. Yes, I had one case where I had a colony of bees that we give them combs the frames where they've constructed the comb. We'd give them a comb and they would chew all the wax up and spit it out the front of the entrance. You'd walk around and you'd see piles of wax sitting out front where they would strip all of it down to what we call the mid-rib of the comb, the very center part of the comb. The comb's constructed on both sides and it goes out in two directions, but in the very base of those two sides there's what we call the mid-rib and they'd strip everything down to the mid-rib. Then I found out that there were a couple of other colonies in the apiary doing the same thing. So then I went and I'd look back at our mating records and breeding records and found out that the queens in those were sisters of each other. So that told me hey, you know, we probably have a genetic trait here for destroying this comb. 

23:20

It just popped up in a breeding experiment we were doing and so I told my technician at the time. I said I want to save that. That's a really interesting mutation. So let's try to save it, but we couldn't. How are you going to save something that breaks its comb down? There was a pathological trait that popped up. There was a mutation somewhere along the way that affected their sensory system, probably to where they over-responded. They normally do respond to certain signals and tear wax down, but they had an over-response to it to where they just tore everything down and we lost it. We called it a line of bees because it was one family that did this, but that was the most striking single thing. 

Dr. Biology:

24:04

Right, and so by tearing down all that wax and everything they basically they had no way to raise a new colony. 

Rob:

24:12

They could not raise new bees because they wouldn't accept any comb to raise them. 

Dr. Biology:

24:18

Wow, self-destructing colonies.

Rob:

24:20

It was definitely pathological.

Dr. Biology:

24:05

Wow, that is an interesting one Now, rob on, ask a Biologist. My scientists don't get to leave before I ask them three questions. The same three questions. So are you ready? 

Rob:

24:10

Yes. 

Dr. Biology:

24:17

The first question is when did you first know you wanted to be a scientist? 

Rob:

24:21

I wanted to be a biologist since I can remember. I believe when I was about five or six years old I wanted to be a biologist. I organized a little biology club in my neighborhood. One of the children on my block had a little clubhouse that his parents had built him and so we turned it into a biological laboratory. So that was what I wanted to do since I can remember. But I didn't really get into working with honeybees until about 1973. I took a course when I was in college and I was a biology major. I took a course in apiculture just as an elective course and that then really excited me. It excited me about bees and it excited me about insects. So, I took other insect courses that were being offered and every insect course I took I liked and I took another and another and before I knew it I had all the courses I needed to graduate with a bachelor's degree in entomology. 

Dr. Biology:

25:51

Ah yes, the study of insects. Okay, Not to be confused with etymology. 

Rob:

25:58

That's correct which is the study of words. 

Dr. Biology:

25:45

Right, okay, so 1973. Did you go just straight from high school into college? 

Rob:

25:49

No, I graduated from high school, and I went away to college in Los Angeles for one year, and then, when that year was up, there were circumstances where I could not go back for another year, and so I worked, and this was during the Vietnam War. So, I was working and I lost what they called a student deferment. Back when we had a draft which only drafted males at the time, men. You had to either have a deferment or you were classified as one a one a meant that they could draft you into the army at any time. A student had what was called a two s deferment. I lost my two s deferment because it was no longer in school, and I became a one a and I ended up in the army. 

27:00

When I went into the army, since I still had an interest in biology, I wanted to go into what they call the medical service corps, so that's what I asked for, and they sent me to be trained as a combat medic. That wasn't exactly what I had in mind, being a combat medic, and so I then decided that I would go to officer candidate school. So, I put in the paperwork and they accepted me into officers candidate school. I was only 19 years old at the time and I said that I wanted to get a commission in the army, in the medical service corps, which they also had. I did not get that as an enlisted man, I thought maybe as an officer. So that was my first choice and my second choice was engineering. 

28:02

They have an engineering branch of the army. That is very important, and my third choice was the signal corps, that's for communications. They sent me to infantry, where I stayed in the army and additional three years. So, I spent four years all together, and the last three years I was stationed in Germany in an infantry unit. I got out of the army in late 1972. And that was when the Vietnam War was starting to come to an end, and so they let people get out more easily and earlier, and so I asked for that and I went back to the university. I went to San Jose State University and I picked up my biology interests and had a biology degree program that I then changed to entomology. 

Dr. Biology:

28:55

All right, you have this passion for insects in general. When was it that you figured out that honeybees were your favorite insect? I mean, did they speak to you? 

Rob:

29:11

Well, they talk to you. You can listen to them if you understand their dance language. It's almost like Dr. Doolittle, he could talk to them as well, but you can't talk to the bees, but you can listen to them. But my interest focused on bees shortly after I went to graduate school. 

29:30

When I finished my bachelor's degree in entomology, I still had money left on my GI bill. The GI bill was something that was really beneficial for being in the armed services, because when you got out they gave you three full years of paying all of your college costs. So I still had some time left on my GI bill and I went to graduate school at University of California Davis and while I was there I found out that they had a program in apiculture that is, the culturing of bees, and so I took another course and I decided that that's really what I wanted to work on, and I had some wonderful mentors who helped me along. I had three professors who took an interest in me, because I took an interest in them and they really helped guide me and direct me to establish a research project that involved honeybee behavior and genetics, and that's what I've done ever since. 

Dr. Biology:

30:25

The second question is where I'm a little bit evil because I take it all away. Because we know, for 40 years you've been passionate about this, you've been doing it for a very, very long time, but in this thought experiment, I'm taking that away. I'm taking away your teaching and taking away your writing. And if you could do anything else, if those things aren't something you're going to be able to do, what would you do or what would you be? 

Rob:

30:40

The only other thing I ever wanted to be something that you, Dr. Biology are superb at and I'm not. I wanted to be a photographer. That's where I really would have gone and I toyed with it. At one point in time, when I got out of the army, I was actually thinking about going and learning more about photography and trying to make a career of it. That's really my other passion. 

31:58

But I have to say that over the last couple of weeks, I have been looking at thousands of pictures that I have taken over the years. It's something that you do when you get older. You find out that you collected all these things. You never looked at them. You took the pictures, you had them printed. You threw them in a drawer. Well, I have bins full of them that I now want to start cutting down on how much storage I'm using. So I have been going through these pictures and the one thing that I have discovered is I made the right choice. Going into science, going into biology, was the right way to go, because I have a lot of really bad pictures that I've taken over a lot of years, and I look at you and you're laughing, and you are a superb photographer. I am very impressed with the work that you do for Ask a Biologist, as well as your other things that you're engaged in. 

Dr. Biology:

32:57

Well, I thank you. I think you're my first guest that has actually picked something that I actually do in my life. I actually do a lot of, and I appreciate the fact that you enjoy my photography. The last question now. This is something that you probably have done more than a hundred times, probably thousands of times, but this is one of those questions that young scientists and actually those that have careers that didn't make that switch to the science, but really wish they had and might want to do it later on. So the question is what advice do you have for a young scientist or perhaps someone who always wanted to go into science as a career? 

Rob:

33:43

I think that there are two things that you have to deal with If you really want to get into science. You have to be tenacious, you have to be willing to make mistakes and bump your head against the wall and do it again and again, and you have to have passion. Passion is the driver more than anything else. You have to have a passion for discovery and then you have to have the tenacity to work through the failure. 

Dr. Biology:

34:15

I couldn't agree more. I also had one more thing, I say easily amused, in other words, the smallest things that you notice and observe, you can revel in, because sometimes it's those small things that make the big difference. 

Rob:

34:30

I study societies of 40,000 individuals that occupy a fairly large space. There are people who study teeny, teeny, tiny things, where they look at them under the microscope, and they're just as excited about what they do as I am about what I do. 

Dr. Biology:

34:50

Well, Rob, I want to thank you again for being on Ask a Biologist. 

Rob:

34:52

Well, thank you for having me. 

Dr. Biology:

34:29

You have been listening to Ask A Biologist, and my guest has been Robert Page. His research with Honeybees has spanned over four decades. To learn more about these amazing insects, be sure to look at the episode notes and chapter links. And for those who would like to dig deeper into Honeybees, Rob also has an online course based on his book Art of the Bee. You can take that course from just about anywhere, including home, or if you don't have time for a formal course. The videos are also on YouTube. 

35:05

The Ask A Biologist podcast is produced on the campus of Arizona State University and is recorded in the Grassroots Studio housed in the School of Life Sciences, which is an academic unit of The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. And remember, even though our program is not broadcast live, you can still send us your questions about biology using our companion website. The address is askabiologist.asu.edu, or you can just use your favorite search tool and enter the words Ask A Biologist. As always, I'm Dr Biology and I hope you're staying safe and healthy.

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Guardian of the Wild - A Veterinarian's Story

Dr. Biology:

00:01

This is Ask A Biologist, a program about the living world, and I'm Dr Biology. We recently had Dr. Gary West on this podcast. It was the first time we had a veterinarian on the show, and he was a special type of veterinarian because he's the one that takes care of thousands of animals at the Phoenix Zoo. But when most of us think of veterinarians, we think of the local pet veterinarian. We have one for a pet cat, you might have one for your dog, pet bird, or maybe some type of reptile. It turns out that there are many types of veterinarians. There are vets for livestock, which could be cows, pigs, sheep, or goats. You might also find veterinarians that specialize in horses. 

00:51

Today we have a guest who is yet a different type of veterinarian, one who spends her time working with wildlife animals, large and small. Our guest today is Sara Wyckoff, a wildlife veterinarian at Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. She's also an alumna of Arizona State University. That's where she got her bachelor's degree in biological sciences, followed by veterinarian school at Midwestern University. That led to her getting her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. Today we get to sit down with her and learn about the role of a wildlife veterinarian and the animals she works with and the challenges she faces. 

Welcome to Ask A Biologist and welcome back to ASU Sara. 

Sara::

01:45

Yes, thank you. I know back to my old stomping grounds from, gosh, it seems like forever ago now. 

Dr. Biology:

01:51

Yeah, did the campus look different to you? 

Sara:

01:53

It does. It looks different. But then I see some of these buildings I'm like, oh, I remember I took plant sciences there. I remember the lab was in here and so very nostalgic at the same time. 

Dr. Biology:

02:03

I guess we could start with an overview because I talk about veterinarians and I think, like a lot of people, you have one stereotypical veterinarian in your mind and what I've learned from the time that I spent in this space is that there are a lot of different kinds of veterinarians and a lot of different roles that they can play. Can we talk a little bit about a wildlife veterinarian, just like the thousand-foot view? 

Sara:

02:31

Yeah, so a wildlife veterinarian. What that means is that any wildlife veterinarian deals specifically with wild animals. So, we're not going to have any domestic animals, pets, anything like that, under our care. We work strictly with wildlife, so the things you see outside and it's kind of split into a few different areas of interest so you can have your wildlife veterinarians that work at a wildlife hospital where maybe you found an injured animal, you looked up a rehab center in your area and you brought that animal into a wildlife hospital. That's an example of a wildlife veterinarian that works on the individual animal to get them healthy and get back in the wild. But then there's also wildlife veterinarians that kind of work at a more macro level when it comes to managing free-ranging populations, so whole herds versus an individual animal. Or maybe there are some types of wildlife veterinarians that focus a lot on disease and epidemiology or basically how diseases are moving between populations and how we can stop them from getting into other animals or even going to people. 

Dr. Biology:

03:41

Right, right, actually, that's something I want to talk to you about in this podcast. So, there are many areas. One of them, I think, is also conservation, and you've been involved with some conservation projects, right? 

Sara::

03:55

Yes. 

Dr. Biology:

03:56

What's your favorite one you've had lately? 

Sara::

03:58

Oh gosh, actually, right now, one of my favorite animals that I've been working with are the big horn sheep, which we have some here in Arizona but then out in West Texas. We also have some herds out there, and so they are all across North America, though kind of a threatened species. A lot of that is for you know, there's some habitat fragmentation, so just not enough land like there used to be for them to get food on. But also disease is a big issue for big horn sheep. That's affecting their conservation. 

Dr. Biology:

04:30

Right. So, when you talk about diseases, you know in the human population you have an outbreak of, let's just say, the flu, right? And so the doctors get an influx of it and they have certain kinds of vaccines they can use certain kind of treatments they can do. How do you do it with wildlife? That's really a challenge. It's not like they're going to come in and check in with the doctor right? 

Sara::

04:51

Exactly so. Veterinarians the patients already don't talk to us. Now you have patients that want absolutely nothing to do with you and they're out in the wild. You know where do you start. So, a lot of that is really a collaborative effort, with not only wildlife veterinarians but biologists and researchers. Where you plan, for example, we call it a capture project, where we will go out in the field and we will say, okay, we need 30 big horn sheep, and so we will work with that team that I just mentioned, but then also a helicopter crew, for example. They will go capture sheep, bring them to us and then we can get our disease samples, you know, collect blood, do an overall health exam on them, just like you would in a normal vet. 

05:38

But these animals, of course, we do everything we can to make it as comfortable as possible for them. So, that's also something you have to consider is you know your cat, your dog. He likes people most of the time. Some of those cats maybe not much, but these animals they're basically being kind of alien, abducted right, and then they have to come to us. So, we do everything we can to make that a very low-stress and fast situation for them. So, we get what we need and then they're back out in the wild and back to normal. 

Dr. Biology:

06:11

Ah, okay, that makes a little more sense. Now let me ask you there are other people that we may not think of, interested in keeping wild animals healthy, and that turns out to be hunters. Have you been working with hunters also, because they're the ones that are out there a lot. I don't happen to be a hunter, but there are a lot of people that like to go out hunting. It seems like they would come in contact with animals that may not be healthy. 

Sara::

06:44

Exactly You're right. Hunters are an excellent resource when it comes to wildlife conservation and I remember, you know, growing up I didn't really understand the role of hunters when it came to conservation of wildlife. But as I've gone into the wildlife field exactly what you're saying there are almost the front lines out there for us, because I can't be everywhere every day. So, if we get hunters out there and they say, hey, I noticed these animals acting weird or I noticed that maybe there was a couple more dead animals that I'm used to seeing, they're really our first set of eyes out there and they work with us to let us know. Okay, we need to go and investigate this situation and see what's going on, because in the end, we're all trying to be stewards of wildlife. 

Dr. Biology 

07:27

Right now with the Bighorn sheep. That's a large animal and I mentioned that you work with animals large and small. Can you tell me about, maybe, a favorite tiny animal that you're working on? 

Sara::

07:43

Oh gosh, probably the tiniest animals that I've worked on recently, I would say, to come to mind immediately the Texas horned lizard. We actually have a breeding project where we work with some zoos in Texas to get some of those little guys bred in captivity. And then this year, for example, it was a great year we released over 200 little individuals into the wild. And these little guys, they're the size of a quarter. They're so small, it's incredible, and just to see them run around on the landscape after you release them is just an amazing feeling. 

Dr. Biology:

08:19

That is, and it's also an interesting thing because we don't often think about zoos being involved with conservation. But on an earlier podcast, the one I had with Dr Gary West and several other people from the Phoenix Zoo, turns out that's a big role for maybe not all zoos, but certainly for the major zoos. That's really important to them. 

Sara:

08:40

Exactly Wildlife agencies like Arizona Game and Fish, for example, where I work, Texas Parks and Wildlife. We couldn't do it by ourselves. The conservation of animals, especially wildlife, it really is a full effort from everyone who's willing to help. 

Dr. Biology:

08:58

All right. So, we've learned about large animals, big horn sheep. We've learned about small animals which are your tiny - what Texas horned lizard? 

Sara:

09:10

Lizards Texas horned lizards, mm-hmm. 

Dr. Biology:

09:12

How about an animal that might have been a little more, maybe, challenging? 

Sara:

09:21

Yes. So, first of all, I didn't know alligators existed in Texas until I had accepted the job. Oh, okay, well, we're going to learn about alligators. So, one of the coolest experiences that I've been able to do since I've been in Texas is actually help our alligator program attach transmitters onto alligators so we can essentially follow their movements with these transmitters. 

09:48

But what is really special about alligators is we have to go out at night and catch them. So, we're on an airboat, it's pitch black and all you have is your light looking for the glow of alligator eyes. Then, okay, how do you get the alligator to you, right? So then you have to actually catch them in the water using kind of a snare system and then, very carefully, just like the crocodile hunter, you got to kind of jump on them. You got to tape up the mouth, tape up the feet, and then, okay, your gator is secure. 

10:20

But now, what is special about reptiles? So they're cold-blooded, right, they have to warm up their blood differently than we do. So, that means that I actually can't use the same medicine that I would in a mammal in this alligator, because it will essentially take too long for him to get the medicine in a system, but then also it will take too long for him to exit it out. So, what we actually have to do is everything happens while the gator is still awake, and so all I'm doing is essentially sitting on the back of this gator. I have a little local block, which just means I numb the area that I'm working and then I'm doing it all there. 

11:01

So this thing it's awake. He could try to flip me off, he could try to, you know, make a run for it, and so that was very nerve-wracking, because we're still outside right, I'm not in a building with nice bright lights, I am in a marsh, 300 mosquitoes are biting me, sitting on this alligator with my headlamp, trying to attach this little transmitter. So, that was definitely super fun, learning experience and kind of my full circle crocodile hunter moment, which I felt really excited for. And we've been able to get really good data from all of the alligators we've put those transmitters on. So, that's super rewarding. 

Dr. Biology:

11:41

Right. And that actually brings up another area for the wildlife veterinarian and that's research, right. So, you're getting really good data. What are you learning? 

Sara:

11:50

Yeah. So, for example, with these alligators. Not a lot is known about East Texas alligators, especially when it gets cold in the winter, because they are moving to areas but we don't know where, we don't know where. They're kind of essentially brumating, so not hibernating, where they're fully asleep, but they're very slowed down in what they do. But no one's ever been able to find where they do this. So that's part one. But then we're also seeing if females are returning to the same nest sites every year with that data as well, and so far they have been. 

Dr. Biology:

12:26

Oh, so you are getting some data back. Have you published anything? 

Sara:

12:30

Not yet. This is actually just year one, so we still have at least one, maybe two more years left on that project. 

Dr. Biology:

12:37

Well, once you publish it, let us know and make sure we add it into the notes on this. 

Sara:

12:42

Oh, definitely. 

Dr. Biology:

12:44

Yeah, wrangling alligators. You ever worry about another alligator trying to get you while you're working with one alligator, or do you have people watching over you? 

Sara:

12:55

Right? Oh, that's definitely a concern, and alligators are a lot faster than you think they are. They look so big and lumbering but they're quick. So yeah, we typically have three or four people in the airboat two people wrangling and then the other two are basically spotters and making sure that no trouble is going to come up and any curious alligators out there. 

Dr. Biology:

13:18

Right, Okay, got it. Okay, I feel a little better. I'm just imagining dark, all these things going on and then other alligators saying oh, oh, oh, oh, yes. 

Sara:

13:29

And sometimes, when we're trying to get them close to the boat safely so we can, we first always tie the mouth. Sometimes they try to get in the boat. We're like no, no, no, no, please, no, no please. 

Dr. Biology:

13:42

They're a little too anxious. 

Sara:

13:43

Exactly Right. 

Dr. Biology:

13:45

When we talk about the animals, we've talked about the challenges of getting your patients into the office, so to speak, and your office actually is outside yeah, so that's kind of an interesting realm in that sense. So that means you probably have to take your stuff with you, your little black bag. It's probably not little, exactly. 

Sara:

14:03

Yes, always on the road, myself and another veterinarian for the whole state of Texas and Texas, you know, it's a big state, so we are constantly on the road and it keeps it exciting, though there's all sorts of different habitats we get to experience that way. 

Dr. Biology:

14:19

Now you talked a bit in particular about diseases, and you have a real interest in wildlife diseases. Let's talk a little bit about that, because you've done several things in that space and you mentioned about the fact that it's important to know about interest species, including humans. So, let's talk a little bit about your interest in wildlife diseases. 

Sara:

14:47

Yeah. So, what's really interesting to me and that I enjoy about wildlife is kind of how I was saying, hunters are the first set of eyes for maybe a sick animal. Well, wildlife in itself is kind of a first set of eyes for us. I think, especially, you know, over the past few years with everything that's happened as far as disease and people, we're really learning how much wildlife can tell us from a disease standpoint of what's going on. 

15:13

And so, for example, right now, the avian influenza, so bird flu, that has been a kind of global pandemic. So, all different continents have bird flu out there and that is a disease where not only does it affect our domestic birds, but then it also affects our wild birds, and then there are some types of bird flu that can actually infect us. So, we're all connected, even though we are different species and we have different roles in the world. And so by taking care of wildlife and making sure that they're healthy, it creates this kind of full circle effect where we can also protect our food, like our chickens and our turkeys, or even our pet flocks in the back, but then we're also protecting us and other people around us. So, when wildlife is healthy, we can also be healthy. 

Dr. Biology:

16:05

And you, along with other people, are interested in this, and I think it's tied into what it's One Health Initiative. 

Sara:

16:16

Yes, yeah. 

Dr. Biology:

16:17

I think it's about One Health Initiative. 

Sara:

16:19

Yeah. So, one health initiative is basically saying we're all on this earth together. We all have to work together to make everything healthy. So, I, as a vet, am working to make wildlife populations healthy, but at the same time, that's trickling down, that's also keeping agriculture your beef cattle, your chickens, they're staying healthy. And then people are staying healthy, and not only are we doing that from like a wildlife veterinarian standpoint, but also human doctors and human researchers. They are now being able to look at wildlife and say, oh okay, I know this is happening out there. This is what we need to do for our human populations to protect them. I feel people are working together more than they ever have for this kind of global one health initiative, and that's fantastic. 

Dr. Biology:

17:13

Right, and we'll be sure. There's actually a website for one health and we'll make sure we include that because I was doing a little bit of research. I always like to read up about my guests and that was one area that I was not aware of and it makes perfect sense and I'm glad there's a group out there working on it. So, when you graduated from Arizona State University, were you planning on being a veterinarian? 

Sara:

17:40

Actually, no, I had all these hopes and dreams of being a wildlife biologist. Actually, I grew up watching Steve Irwin and Jeff Corwin you know they were my core heroes and inspiration. And I said I want to do that, I want to work for the conservation of wildlife. But when I graduated in 2011, there was just really not a lot of jobs that were available. I was having a very hard time kind of breaking into the field, which is a common issue that happens in wildlife, and so I just said, okay, well, until I figure it out, I'm going to start volunteering at a wildlife center. 

18:16

And that is actually where I first met a wildlife veterinarian. I said, whoa, this is exactly kind of a mix of the best of both worlds. I always thought medicine was interesting, but I didn't know you could do that with wildlife. And then I met our state vet for Arizona, game and Fish Dr and Justice Allen, and my mind just kind of went whoa, this is it, this is what I'm meant to do. And ever since then I had said, okay, got to go to vet school. Didn't think I would even get in, but I was very fortunate. I got in for my first year and I walked into my interview and I said you're going to tell me that I shouldn't be a wildlife vet because it's too hard. But that's what I'm here for and that's what I'm going to do. 

Dr. Biology:

19:01

Wow, and what'd they say? 

Sara:

19:02

They said, okay, you know, sure, sure. But yeah, just head down and just on that path. Ever since and it's been long, it's been about 10 years between four years of undergrad, four years of vet school and with vet school, they don't teach you how to be a wildlife vet. They teach you how to do cats and dogs and, like you said, maybe farm animals or horses. So, you really have to kind of build your own program and get your own experiences in and outside of vet school. And so that's what I did. I kept volunteering with wild animals at Wildlife Rescues. I basically annoyed every single biologist that I knew saying do you need help, can I shadow a project with you? And then I did two internships. So, basically extra education outside of vet school to give me more experience. 

Dr. Biology:

19:58

So what were those internships for - examples? 

Sara:

20:00

One of them was in Massachusetts and it was a wildlife-only veterinary internship. So, I had graduated, I was a veterinarian technically but I was an intern in the sense that I was still under a mentor program and learning how to do more advanced techniques or procedures on wildlife. So, for example, for any of you that have maybe found an injured bird, if that bird had a broken wing, something the internship taught me was how I could surgically fix that wing, just like a surgeon fixes your leg those kind of techniques. But then also understanding natural history is so important as well, even just knowing what medications work for some animals and what don't. What we might not realize is something that you can give your cat or dog we can't give to a cow or a wild animal, because then it could cause a problem if we later ate that animal. 

Dr. Biology:

20:57

Oh yeah, good point. You got to think downstream. Where are you going to end up? Okay, so on your journey, 10 years to some seems like a long time, and maybe it seems like a long time to you, but I suspect it went by quicker than if someone says 10 years. 

Sara: 

21:18

Right, it really does, and I think I consider myself very fortunate that I was able to get into my position with that kind of timeframe, because although it sounds long, it actually is shorter A lot of times, because wildlife veterinarian positions are so few and far in between, you know, there's maybe one per state. Some states don't even have them. They can be very difficult to get into, and so the fact that I was able to, very kind of fresh and early in my career, have that job is a blessing. 

Dr. Biology:

21:55

So in the state, it could be challenging Globally. What's it like? 

Sara:

21:59

So globally it's kind of like how it is in the United States different countries or regions. They do also have their wildlife vets and that is something that, overall, has really been increasing, though on a global level. Really before, wildlife vets weren't a thing, especially for state agencies. But with one health and realizing, oh, we actually need to know everything that's going on, more and more positions have been appearing for wildlife veterinarians to come in and assist. So, positions back maybe 20 years ago you probably had only a handful in the United States that could be wildlife veterinarians. But now we're seeing people are understanding our value, which is nice. 

 Dr. Biology:

22:44

It is and critical, and we can even be selfish, Right? You know, it's all about us humans, right? So, in the end we end up healthier. That's great. Let me shift just a bit because all my guests, all my biologists have to answer three questions. 

Sara:

23:03

Uh-oh okay. 

Dr. Biology:

23:06

So the first question is actually going to be interesting to me, because I'm curious about when did you know that you wanted to be a biologist? 

Sara:

23:18

I actually love this question, so you know I watched you, vermin Jeff Corwin. I basically, as a child, taught myself to read with wildlife books. It's always been that. But then specifically, I can picture it in my head. I was in sixth grade. We were looking at the science textbook. There's a praying mantis and a chimpanzee on that page, like that's how clearly I remember it and I just said this is what I'm here for. This is what I meant to do is science and conservation, and it was just the purest moment, I think, that I've experienced, and it's been nothing else since then. 

Dr. Biology:

23:57

It's interesting because I had a similar experience. It was in sixth grade and I was reading a thing called the Weekly Reader and there was this black-and-white photograph of a scientist in a white lab coat in front of this giant, giant instrument that it turned out to be an electron microscope, and that sounded so amazing to me and then I stopped thinking about it. I went on to other things and, lo and behold, where do I end up? I end up being a microscopist. So, my world is around really, really tiny things, and I still remember that just as clearly as you remember yours. Wow, OK, so we know when you wanted to become a biologist and you had this long road a little bit windy, but you get there. Now I'm going to take it all away. 

Sara:

24:53

OK. 

 Dr. Biology:

24:54

Now, this is a thought question, so I don't ever like my guests who get too stressed out because I'm going to take everything away. You cannot be a biologist. I'm going to take away working with animals, and what I want you to do is think about what would you do or what would you be if you could do anything else. While I'm taking things away from you, I'm going to let you have any talent that you maybe didn't have but you just didn't do it because you didn't have that talent. What would you be? 

Sara:

25:21

Oh, my gosh, that is such a hard question because I joke with my friends all the time. I have no skills or talents. This is it. So, if I didn't have animals, I wouldn't know what to do. Gosh, honestly, I would still try to do something natural Resource-wise, conservation-wise. I love science and I believe in it so wholeheartedly. My guess, really, if you're taking my animals away, then I would do infectious disease research. I'm going to meet you in the middle there because I just think diseases are fascinating and I remember in vet school, just like whoa, there is so much out there and we don't even know, and it just blew my mind all the different viruses and bacteria that we're constantly trying to fight. So, I think I would do that. 

Dr. Biology:

26:11

All right, I'll meet you in the middle. The last question, and this one will be really important because we get a significant number of questions from young scientists that say they love animals and they want to work with animals when they grow up. So, what advice would you have for that young scientist that says what do I do? 

Sara:

26:40

Yeah, great question. I would say for sure, start as early and as soon as you can. That's going to be really important because these jobs are still competitive. It's getting better, but the sooner that you can start building the foundation, the better it's going to be for you in the long term. And another thing, too, that I really like to stress to students is extracurricular activities are so important. 

27:07

When these jobs are looking for what you've done, they see the things you have to do in school, you have to do for work, but they want to know what are you willing to do in your spare time. Are you willing to spend a four hour shift a week helping at a rescue? Are you doing some type of education and outreach? How passionate you are can be shown by some of those extracurricular activities. And I guess, really the third thing I would say is, just like you mentioned earlier, sometimes the path isn't linear. If you want it and that passion is there, just keep working for it. Everything is a stepping stone, even if it doesn't seem like it in a moment, and you will get there. Just believe in yourself for it. 

 Dr. Biology:

27:52

So, when you're in vet school, was there anything that was the most challenging thing that you? What was the most challenging thing for you? 

Sara:

28:02

The most challenging thing in vet school - it's a good question. Honestly, it was probably just making sure to get all of those wildlife experiences, especially since the school that I went to Midwestern I was a part of the very first class, so it was a brand-new vet school, so really I didn't have any upperclassmen to ask questions about. A lot of programs hadn't even been set up yet. I was able to utilize that position. But then also, being an Arizona resident where I could say, oh, I know this wildlife place, oh I know people at the Phoenix Zoo, and I was able to build a program not only for me but for future people who are interested in wildlife medicine, and so that at first was kind of a difficult hurdle to get over, but now it's really has established itself in that vet school and that's something that I'm really proud of helping create. 

 Dr. Biology:

28:59

Right, so you're helping other future veterinarians there, yeah, okay, well, I think that's great.

Sara. thank you so much for taking time out to visit with me and sharing your experiences as a wildlife veterinarian. 

Sara:

29:14

Thank you again. This was awesome, and I hope there's some inspired wildlife veterinarians out there now. 

Dr. Biology:

29:20

I'm sure there will be. You have been listening to Ask A Biologist and my guest has been Sara Wyckoff, a wildlife veterinarian at Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. She's also an alumna of Arizona State University. If you liked this episode and want to learn more about the life of a wildlife vet, we have included some links in the podcast. The Ask a Biologist podcast is produced on the campus of Arizona State University and is recorded in the Grassroots Studio housed in the School of Life Sciences, which is an academic unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. And remember, even though our program is not broadcast live, you can still send us your questions about biology using our companion website. The address is askabiologist.asu.edu, or you can just use your favorite search engine and enter the words Ask A Biologist. As always, I'm Dr. Biology and I hope you're staying safe and healthy.

---

The Big Leap

Dr. Biology:

00:00

This is Ask A Biologist, a program about the living world, and I'm Dr Biology. For our show today we're going to do some time traveling, or at least use our minds to travel back not thousands, not millions, but billions of years. Back, to when life was just beginning on Earth and there were some single-cell forms of life, but nothing more. 

00:21

It's an interesting time, and one that scientists are exploring in their own laboratories today, with a series of experiments where they're learning how single cells evolve over time and see how cells might have made their big leap from a single-cell to a multi-cell organism. One of those scientists is William Radcliffe, an evolutionary biologist and also an astrobiologist. He's an associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. He's here at ASU giving a talk titled How to Make Multicellular Life from Scratch a 5,000 generation (and counting) directed evolution experiment. Today we're getting a snapshot of Will's work, as well as an idea of what Earth might have been like a few billion years ago. Welcome, Will, and thank you for taking time to sit down and talk about this simple task of evolving from a single cell to a multi-cell organism and then complex forms of life like we see today. 

Will:

01:23

Thank you, Dr. Biology. It's a pleasure to be here and I'll just say that any step that appears to be complex when you break it down into enough small steps, each single one, can be quite simple but very important ones. I guess that's right.

Dr. Biology:

01:36

Okay, let's do what we talked about. Let's go back a few billion years and describe what Earth was like, and I'm going to give you a little jump start.

Will:

01:48

Sure.

Dr. Biology:

01:46

We're going to already have single-cell organisms.

Will:

01:49

So, going back to Earth a couple billion years ago is like walking into an alien planet. The evolution of multicellular life so we're talking organisms that are big enough that you can see them with the naked eye and have complex features that single cells don't have has fundamentally transformed life on our planet. Let me give you an example. So, close your eyes and think of a pristine natural forest. [sounds of a forest in the background] Right, there's light filtering through the trees. It's dancing on your face. You hear buzzing of insects maybe they're chirping of birds. [buzzing insect and birds flapping sound] Get rid of the trees. [crashing sound] Those are multi-cellular organisms. You hear a rain of insects as they fall down. [rain sound] A flapping of birds, maybe a thud as a monkey falls onto the forest floor. [thud sound] Sorry, monkey, those are all multi-cellular animals. 

02:36

Get rid of those. What's left? Probably a bunch of mushrooms, Likely toxic. Don't eat those. Let's get rid of them. [disappearing sound] And we also have to get rid of the lichen. [disappearing sound] What are we left with on Earth? Not much. In the oceans you have some seaweeds, we can get rid of those. But my point is, if you get rid of multi-cellular organisms, life as we know it changes, Both because the organisms themselves are much more complex than their single-cell ancestors and we don't have that available to us anymore, but also because multi-cellular life has created its own ecosystems. In fact, they're so familiar to us that we call them by the name of the dominant multi-cellular organism. A forest, a grassland, a coral reef, those are the names of the multi-cellular organism that has created that niche. And in the absence of multi-cellularity, we don't have those environments either.

Dr. Biology

03:23

Let's talk a little bit about this single cell. There are some parts.

Will:

03:26

That's right.

Dr. Biology

03:28

So, let's talk about some of the parts that we already have. Because that was a lot of work, just as you said, maybe a lot of little steps that were simple, but what a billion and a half years.

Will:

03:41

To go from the origin of Earth to the origin of life. 

03:44

That's a time that we have trouble pinning down, and part of that is that we just don't have really good evidence. We don't have rocks that go back past three and a half billion years, and so what we see is this sort of sudden emergence of microfossils that look like cells, and we can actually tell that they have carbon in it that came through life pathways, because carbon that came from the air and went into cells gets treated a little bit differently than carbon that's just messed around with by normal non-living chemistry. So, we're pretty sure that by three and a half billion years ago we already had cells that pretty much are the same as modern bacteria.

Dr. Biology:

04:18

Okay, so I know this is one of those things that also because we don't really have any fossil evidence, but what were the steps, do you think, to making that first single cell?

Will:

04:35

Yeah, in fact, these are some of the biggest steps in biology. You need some way of encoding information and having the sort of instruction manual for a cell. So that's a genome. You may have heard that word. There's DNA and that's the chemical which stores information, and you need some way of taking that information and reading it out and using it. And so, there's this thing that happens where you'd make a copy of a gene and that copy then gets turned into a protein, and the protein is sort of like the functional building block made of sticky Legos that goes around inside the cell and makes things happen. And so, you need some way of having DNA, copies of it, that can go off and do stuff, and that's not a trivial thing to sort of put together. 

05:15

It turns out that all living things, from bacteria to plants to humans, we all actually share the same exact genetic code, which in some ways is like a language. It's a sort of arbitrary way of taking chemical information like letters and turning them into words that, combined together into sentences, make biological sense and can put together functional building block proteins that can go and do specific tasks inside the cell. And the fact that all living things share the exact same, with just a few tiny modifications. Genetic code is one of these just gold-standard pieces of evidence that all life on earth shares a common ancestor. It all came from the same source.

Dr. Biology:

05:57

Now, when you're talking about these letters and genes, we're talking about DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid and the nucleotides that it's made from. Just so everybody knows, there's adenine A, cytosine C, guanine G, and thymine T. So, we have our instructions, but how do cells get work done? They must also need some energy.

Will:

06:25

Yeah, life fits into the niches where there are energetic gradients and dissipates that energy itself. Life is a catalyst to dissipate energy and by doing the dissipation of the energy it is able to sort of do biological work. Let me give you an example here. So, we have a planet which has a liquid water surface, we have oceans, and we have a sun, and that sun is actually a gigantic battery. It's throwing all these photons at the planet. Now let's say that we don't have photosynthetic life yet. We don't have life that can actually use that life for energy directly. We still have water molecules, and those water molecules can be blasted apart by ultraviolet radiation. 

07:02

If you know water molecules, H2O right, you knock it apart into H2 and O, and the hydrogen, the H2, it's so small, it's the smallest element in the periodic table and it's very light and it can actually escape out into space and as a result, you end up getting a relatively small but meaningful amount of oxygen. 

07:21

Now that oxygen it wants to do chemical work. Oxygen can oxidize and what you end up having in the planet is a core. We haven't talked about this yet, but the center of the planet is made out of metal, iron, and if you know iron, you know what happens when it gets wet in the presence of oxygen it rusts. That actually releases a huge amount of energy. And so,  what you have is a planet that acts like a battery, because you have in the oceans hydrothermal vents. They're like underwater volcanoes, a connection between the core and the surface, and you have rusting of that core, iron engaging with the oxygen of the atmosphere and, as a result, you have a flow of electrons from the center of the planet up through the surface and out into space, and that continues for essentially billions of years and provides a modest but steady source of energy that, if you're a little precellular critter living at that interface, in these hydrothermal vents, there's just a steady source of energy that's pretty similar to what you see inside one of your cells.

Dr. Biology:

08:21

Let's step back. We've got energy, we've got parts of our cell, we built our cell, but it's just a single cell.

Will:

08:25

That's right.

Dr. Biology:

08:27

How long does it take and what does it take to make that leap to multicellular life?

Will:

08:40

So, that’s a good question, and it turns out that it's not something which has happened just once or twice. Multi-cellularity this way in which you build a body for multiple cells and that body begins to gain its own adaptations and traits that make it capable of doing things that single cells can't do anymore that transition has happened many times in the history of life, at least 50 times separately. The very oldest ones go back almost to the origin of cellular life itself. Cyanobacteria pond scum, if you will, became multicellular about 3 billion years ago and then, much more recently, you've had things like the brown algae, a big clade of seaweed that you'll see if you go to the beach and you find these big brown kelp washing up. Those are some of the new kids on the block. They've only evolved multi-cellularity roughly 200 million years ago.

Dr. Biology:

09:27

Okay, it took millions of years to go from a single cell to a multicell organism. You’re running an experiment with single cells to see what happens as they keep going through this process. How are you going to compress billions of years?

Will:

09:44

Yeah, great question. So, I think there's a bit of a bias towards looking back in time and assuming that just because something arose a long time ago, it necessarily took a very long time to get there. So, we have this thing called the Cambrian explosion and you can't see me, but I'm doing air quotes right now, because whenever a geologist tells you something happened fast, you need to like critically think about what they think fast is. But if you look in the rock record, you'll see a world in which there aren't really that many large animal-like things. Roughly 530 million years ago, and within the span of 5, 10, 15 million years, the oceans are just populated by all of these very cool looking animals and, geological terms, 10 million years is so fast. It's an explosion. In human terms, that's still pretty slow. 

10:31

But that being said, I don't think that we are setting our sites quite as high as building something as complicated as a fish or something with a spinal cord or something with eyes. That's a very high bar and indeed those types of traits probably do take quite a long time to evolve. What we're looking at are the earliest steps in going from a single-celled organism to a small group of cells that stay together to form sort of a clumpy thing. And then, over generations, we're going to watch the cells in that clumpy thing begin to take on different roles and different behaviors and watch the groups themselves begin to gain multi-cellular adaptations, which means traits of the group which don't really have a single cell analog. They're different from the cells in the same way that your ability to run faster, jump high, depends on the muscles in your legs, but it's different from the shape or strength of a muscle. It's an emergent property of having these cells interact together. And so, we're watching those same dynamics play out, but on a much smaller, much simpler scale.

Dr. Biology:

11:31

So, what is your favorite organism?

Will:

11:36

Snowflake  yeast yes, no, no, no. My children, my children.

Dr. Biology:

11:38

Yes, so here we are working with yeast. Some people probably use yeast on a regular day.

Will:

11:46

I think many of us do. You enjoy bread, beer, wine or other fermented foods. Yeast are a critical part of that and the yeast that we use certainly are formerly domesticated by humans because of their ability to make alcohol and to leaven doughs.

Dr. Biology:

12:01

Yes, and I have to say I do love my bread. Now, as far as the experiment you're, let's see here 5000 generations and counting.

Will:

12:08

We're actually around 8,000 generations by now.

Dr. Biology:

12:12

8,000?

Will:

12:13

The title to my talk says 5,000, and that's the data that I'm showing. But we're actually racing ahead of that in terms of our experiments. But it takes a long time to analyze the data that we're collecting, and so we tend to sort of get a nice round number, stop there and spend years analyzing the data that got up to that point, but the experiment continues every single day.

Dr. Biology:

12:36

Will, let's talk about some of the evolution that's going on with your yeast.

Will:

12:40

Right. The first step that I'll tell you about is we use this system to understand how a group of cells can be something which is able to undergo the process of Darwinian evolution, which is actually something we can't take for granted. We know that cells can because cells reproduce. That's a critical step. They get mutations which can change their traits. It can make them grow faster or do something which makes them survive better, and they can pass those traits on to their offspring and, as a result, those traits can persist in the population, and that's what we call evolution. But the evolution of multicellularity requires those properties reproduction, heredity to be properties of the group, and that's something which, in organisms like you, me and plants, is very different from what their single-celled ancestors would have done. And so there's this sort of gulf. How does a group of cells which doesn't already have a mechanism of coordinating reproduction, a mechanism of coordinating development which can be passed on to offspring. How do they nonetheless gain the ability to evolve at the group level? So, we spent many years decoding this with our yeast model system, and it turns out that they get the ability to evolve as a group totally for free. 

13:47

We thought you had to get it through biological solutions, but you get it totally for free as a side effect of physics. So, imagine if you have a cell and it starts making offspring and those offspring stick to it and you're getting a clump. It's sort of like you're building a little tree on your desk with ping pong balls right, and every time the ping pong ball divides you add another one. Pretty soon you have this cool little tree like a group and it's going to get densely packed on the inside. And if you keep trying to jam ping pong balls in there, pretty soon you're going to break it. In our yeast that's exactly what happens. The cells divide and they eventually break. And when they break they break off a little branch. And that little branch it's a baby snowflake. It looks like it's parents, it has the same shape, it's just a lot smaller and it's no longer very densely packed. So, it grows back up to its parent's size and it begins doing the same thing, breaking, growing, breaking, growing. And if I take one snowflake, put it into a test tube and come back the next day, there will be a million and they all look just the same as their parent. So, we have a life cycle of reproduction. 

14:48

We don't yet have heritability, like how can we get new multicellular traits? We don't have any development yet. 

14:56

Turns out that physics also lends us a helping hand here, because if you can get mutations at the single-cell level which change the behavior of the cells. You change their shape. You change the angle at which they bud. You change the strength of a cell-cell connection. Those change the way that the group as a whole looks and behaves. It's not directed, it's not controlled in the way that development in an organism like us is controlled by these very sophisticated processes in your cell. It's all happening in a way that's completely emergent, that is, it's not directed, it just happens in the way that if you pile sand up on a table, eventually it's going to spill down, right, you're not telling it to, it just happens because of physics. So, it turns out that we can get multicellular traits arising as an emergent property and natural selection sees them and can act upon them. And we get this process of open-ended multicellular adaptation where our groups are essentially getting better and better at growing as a multicellular organism. Because through this process of natural selection acting on emergent physical properties of groups.

Dr. Biology:

15:58

And by doing that when they get bigger, they get heavier.

Will:

16:00

They do. They do yes.

Dr. Biology:

16:01

Which is part of the key.

Will:

16:02

That's part of the key. So, the way we do our selection experiment is very simple, because I've learned the hard way that if you make a fancy selection experiment you're going to mess it up. You have to remember we have to do our selection on our yeast every single day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Yeast don't know that Christmas exists, they don't take holidays, and so sometimes you're tired, sometimes you've been out late celebrating an academic achievement, and maybe you've had a few too many yeast drinks that leave you feeling pretty bad in the morning. And if you have a complicated experiment, you're going to mess it up. So, our experiment is very simple. We take our yeast, and they grow in an incubator, where the incubator is spinning, and at this point all that matters is how quickly they grow and that they make a little multicellular babies. Then, at the end of the day, they go through a race to the bottom of the test tube and the biggest, fastest-sinking ones, they win the race and they go on to the next day's media and everything else is poured down the drain. Sorry for them, but that's the end of the road for them. 

17:01

And so, we're selecting on bigger, tougher, multicellular groups. We're also selecting on the ability to deal with the fact that once you get big, diffusion begins to be a problem. There's a lot of food in the media outside, but the inside doesn't have it right. The inside of that group is starving. You have a circulatory system that's solved the problem of diffusion in your body. Our yeast don't have that, but we want to incentivize them to come up with some way of solving these problems. 

17:28

And so, we're pushing on size. We're making them try and figure out ways to get physically stronger, to get bigger, and we're also making them deal with the fact that they're growing slower. And maybe they can figure out ways around that, and they do. They figured out things that took human physicists hundreds of years and they figured out in a matter of months. One of the things that they do is that they evolve to get about 20,000 times bigger than their ancestor.

Dr. Biology:

17:50

20,000 times,

Will:

17:51

20,000 times bigger. They start out forming groups of about 100 cells and after 600 rounds of this selection, which is about 3,000 generations for our yeast, they are now roughly half a million cells per group Way bigger and they're also correspondingly much, much stronger as a material. The technical term for this is toughness. It turns out that toughness in material science is how much energy it takes to break something but taking its size out of the equation. So, the toughness of a toothpick and a 2x4 are the same. 2x4s just take more energy to break because there's more material there. Our things become 10,000 times more tough as a material. In fact, they go from being 100 times weaker than gelatin to being as strong and tough as wood, and they do it through some really cool physics.

Dr. Biology:

18:44

Alright, so now we've talked about shape, we've talked about oh, size, how do you get that much bigger?

Will:

18:54

Yeah, so snowflake yeast start out growing like a tree with cells at branch. And like a tree, if you break a cell-cell bond like cutting a branch off that tree that branch just falls right off. But to get stronger and bigger they need to figure out some way that they're not one cell fracture, away from breaking the whole group. What happens is they actually make their cell-cell connections stronger and their cells longer, and they can actually stay together long enough that the cells begin to wrap around one another like vines. And when they do that, the whole group becomes like a group of Velcro, right In the physical sense entangled. And now to break a branch off, you're not breaking one bond. You have to break the bonds of every cell to every other cell and you're ripping them all apart and you have to break tens of thousands of cellular bonds and that makes the whole thing tens of thousands of times stronger and larger.

Dr. Biology:

19:48

Right, because you have to remember that you've got them in these incubators that are constantly moving. They're shaking right.

Will:

19:53

That's right.

Dr. Biology:

Host

19:53

If you can't figure that out, you're not going to be able to grow bigger and stronger. There is a fundamental limit.

Will:

19:58

Exactly, there is a complete cap in the absence of that. 

Dr. Biology:

20:01

So, the cells, then these cool newer cells that have figured this out. They're longer, they're elongated and they're twisted. Ahh.

Will:

20:08

Yep. They actually stay fairly straight. But what happens is the group stays together long enough that the cell makes sort of like a horseshoe shape. When it does that, it grows over another branch, and if every branch is making a horseshoe shape around one another, you can think of like a Velcro when you're a sneaker and the cells are kind of doing that thing where they're wrapped around one another, and it makes them as strong as a little ball of wood.

Dr. Biology:

20:33

Huh yeah, very cool.

Will:

20:34

Yeah.

Dr. Biology:

20:35

So, we've grown but you also mentioned diffusion as being a problem.

Will:

20:40

Oh yes, oh yes.

Dr. Biology:

Host

20:42

Just getting big in any shape isn't going to work.

Will:

20:46

It could work, but it's not ideal. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Biology:

Host

20:49

Because, how do you get that food, the media, if it's a big ball.

Will:

20:53

And that's what they are. They're a big ball, exactly.

Dr. Biology:

20:55

So how do you change your shape to still be big? But 

Will:

21:57

So, there's two general solutions here. You can either change your shape so that every cell is near the surface, which is something like what a fern leaf would look like. Right, it's big, it's flat and there's a lot of surface area there. Everything's in close contact with the environment. The other way to do it is something like what an animal would do, which is to move the environment through you. If you move the environment through you, then you don't have this problem of diffusion limitation. 

21:25

This was very surprising to us, and this paper everything else I've told you about is published research and you can read about it on the internet. You can go to my website, Ratcliff Lab, but this is actually unpublished work, but I'll tell you about it anyway, because we're going to be submitting it soon and we've talked about it at conferences and I'm talking about it tomorrow. So, it turns out that have you ever seen a sea sponge? Sea sponge looks sort of like a peanut and the cells inside a sea sponge have little like lassos and they're moving the water through their bodies and they're filtering out bacteria. If you looked at a sea sponge from the side, it would be shooting water out the top like a little volcano. 

22:03

It turns out that our yeast they don't have any way of directly moving water. They don't have these things called the flagellum, which acts like a little lasso to move water, and yet when we look at them, they are flowing water through their bodies extremely quickly, like faster than many organisms with these specialized water-moving devices, and, as a result, the cells on the inside have perfect access to food and don't starve at all. We can actually grow them under controlled conditions and get them to be the size of a marble, and they're still growing just as fast, as if they were the size of a period on the page.

Dr. Biology:

22:40

Wow.

Will:

22:41

Yeah,

Dr. Biology:

22:42

We've talked about and you've described the structure changes and what's been happening. What about those genes?

Will:

22:45

Ah, good question. Are we getting cells specializing in dividing labor, which is one of these hallmarks of multicellularity? And, to be honest, I think it's one of the things that makes multicellularity exciting. If multicellularity was just big blobs of cells that were all the same as one another, I don't think we'd care about it. That would be more along the lines of a really impressive pond scum, which is cool. Don’t get me wrong. That's cool, but it's not the same as an organism with parts that work together towards a group-level goal. That's something that the single cells couldn't have done, and that's the superpower of multicellularity, and so this is also work that's in progress. This is unpublished research. 

23:28

We've used a very cool technique called single-celled RNA sequencing. What we can do is we can look at a readout of what genes are being turned on in individual cells, and we can do this in a pretty high throughput way. So, in the ancestor line, in a 1,000-generation line, in a 2,000-generation line, we do this all the way up to 5,000 generations. We take the organisms, we break them down into single cells and we do a little readout of what genes those cells are expressing and turning on. In the ancestor they're all the same, as would be expected, because it's basically only one generation away from being a single-celled organism, it's just forming a group, and by a thousand generations, we actually have two distinct cell types. We have the normal ancestor-like cells, and we have a cell type that looks quite different on a graph of gene expression. It's in its own distinct place and those cells are mostly over-expressing cell wall material. So, we have some cells that are hitting the gym. They're getting really strong, but it's only a subset. Right 10, 15% of the cells are doing this, and if we stain cell walls we actually see that they're not randomly localized throughout the groups. These are the oldest cells in the groups, the cells that have the biggest number of branches coming off of them, the ones that are actually under a lot of physical strain, and when our groups break, that's where they tend to break. So, it seems like there may be a bit of a sort of simple intelligent strengthening of critical cells which allows them to get stronger as an organism and that cell type persists all the way up to 5,000 generations. Around 3,000 generations we get a third cell type and actually, there's something interesting happening here. 

25:05

Between 2,000 and 3,000 generations is when our yeast become really big. It's when they go from being a few hundred cells to being a few hundred thousand cells, right, much, much bigger. And it turns out that getting really big comes with a serious cost. It's not a growth rate cost, like we discussed earlier because they're moving fluid through their bodies and they're not really growth-limited. But there's another cost in our experiment, which is that our groups have to reproduce and make offspring, because every day we only transfer about 1 in 32 of the groups that were in our population as a whole, and if a group just grows indefinitely and doesn't make babies, then it just gets thrown away eventually and it and all of its cells are gone. So, in fact, every day if a group wants to persist it has to have at least 32 offspring. Otherwise, every day there's a smaller and smaller number of them, and that's a very important thing in our experiment. And to get strong and build big groups, they do this by sacrificing the way that they reproduced, which is this physical strain building up and breaking branches. 

26:11

When they get so strong that they don't break branches anymore, that's kind of a problem. They win in the race to the bottom of the test tube, but they lose in that they don't make babies very well anymore and it looks like this third cell type is something where cells actually commit suicide. About 20 to 25% of the cells in the group turn on genes that cause them to die and this starts to break little, tiny branches that are not part of the strong interior, entangled part of the cluster which those things can't really leave anymore, but cells that are on the edge now separate, and so you have these groups now that are turning on all these cell death genes which cause cells to die. Instead of breaking off giant chunks of maybe 10,000 cells to reproduce, they are shedding two, three, four, five cell babies and shedding many, many of them, and that's the way in which they engineer reproduction. So, they're kind of getting a new life cycle by using a simple form of cellular differentiation.

Dr. Biology:

27:07

Very cool.

Will:

27:08

I love that.

Dr. Biology:

Host

27:09

Yes.

Will:

27:09

Very cool. I will say that one. We have yet to functionally validate that result, so that's a hypothesis. This is what we think is happening. It sure seems that way, but I want to just say that it's something which we need to do a little bit more research before I'm 100% convinced of that result.

Dr. Biology:

27:25

Now, this is part of the scientific process.

Will:

27:27

Exactly that's how science works.

Dr. Biology:

27:29

Okay, so where do you think you're going to be? And let's go ahead six years.

Will:

27:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Biology:

27:38

And you'll be at what 16,000 generations in the experiment.

Will:

27:42

Probably yeah.

Dr. Biology:

27:44

What do you want to see?

Will:

27:45

I'd love to see something more complex than just a blob of cells. I'd like to see multi-cellular development, coordinated growth, getting a shape that is a little more interesting than just something which looks like an asteroid, which is kind of what they look like. 

27:57

When I'm looking at it under microscope, they look kind of like asteroids and we're actually getting tantalizing evidence. This is just the very beginnings, but if we let them grow, where they have these strong flows, where they're actually pushing water through their bodies, they actually begin to grow in a different way and form a hole in the center and looks sort of like a doughnut, which is actually a very interesting shape in developmental biology. Going from a clump to a doughnut is actually a pretty big deal,

Dr. Biology:

28:22

Yeah it'd be a huge deal.

Will:

28:24

Yeah, I'm interested in understanding better the way in which cell specialization evolves in different parallel-evolving populations. Right now we've only looked at one population, but we have five that are evolving in parallel. They have the same starting point but independent evolutionary trajectory.

Dr. Biology:

28:43

Let's see what happens.

Will:

28:44

Right, yeah, is it the same thing? Does it do? 

Dr. Biology:

28:46

Does it do exactly the same thing.

Will:

28:47

Is it different?

Dr. Biology:

28:48

There's all sorts of possibilities there Exactly. So, what we'll do is we'll have to have you back in six more years.

Will:

28:55

Sounds great. I'm going to do this until I retire or die, so I have plenty of time.

Dr. Biology:

29:00

All right. Well, we'll go for retirement.

Will:

29:02

Sounds good, all right.

Dr. Biology:

29:04

Well before my scientists get to leave. Ask A biologist. I always ask three questions. Right, so are you ready?

Will:

29:11

Sure.

Dr. Biology:

29:12

Okay, when did you first know you wanted to be a scientist? Or, in this case, did you know you wanted to be an evolutionary biologist, slash astrobiologist? What happened?

Will:

29:26

So, I knew I wanted to be a scientist when I was a kid, because I just loved learning about science. Like I couldn't get enough, we had a once-a-week science teacher that would come and tell us about science in my grade school and I would just like be so excited on those days. I had home kits and books and I would do those and honestly, I loved spending time in nature and just looking at organisms and if you think about it, all of the drama that you see that humans have with respect to the way that we interact, the highs of success, the lows of failure, those things happen, but on an even greater scale in living systems where the stakes are often life or death. So, as soon as you start to sort of notice the world around you, you realize that it's just this never-ending fascinating tapestry of interactions. And I think I knew I wanted to be a biologist when I started to connect those interactions and understanding how living things fit together in their environment with the way that they got there in the first place, and thinking about the history and how those things in fact got to be the way they are. 

30:27

How did that beetle get those jaws and become a predator, ripping apart other insects, while it's close relative is a pollinator and completely, completely gentle. You know, those are great questions. So, I think I knew at a young age, but I don't think I knew I wanted to be a scientist until the end of college when I was like what am I going to do?

Dr. Biology:

30:45

You just didn't know you wanted to be a scientist or didn't know. You wanted to be a biologist.

Will:

30:49

I didn't know. I wanted to be a research biologist. I did a plant biology undergraduate degree again for my love of nature, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do after college and I sort of lucked into our research lab, my favorite professor. I went and talked to him like what should I do? And he was like I just got a grant, why don't you start working in my lab? Okay, and then the rest was sort of history. But it wasn't something which I was planning to do for a long time, even though the interest was always there.

Dr. Biology:

31:16

Well, with all your enthusiasm, I really hate to introduce this next question because I'm going to take it all away.

Will:

31:21

Oh no.

Dr. Biology:

31:23

Now, this is just a thought question, right? If I took this away from you and I'm going? To take away teaching, because every scientist I've had on loves doing the teaching. So, you're not going to be a scientist, you're not going to be teaching. What would you be or what would you do If you could do anything? I'm going to give you some abilities that you may not have.

Will:

31:46

Oh, that's such a cool question. Okay, it's a toss-up between professional beekeeper. I'm a hobby beekeeper. In my backyard, up until this last year, which has been sort of a rough year for me, I had about 30 bee colonies and I make about 1000 pounds of honey a year and I really love bees. They're just such fun organisms to spend time with and they have such alien cognition and I just love seeing the world through their eyes. It's a very fun thing to just immerse yourself in a bee colony Not literally, that would be painful. 

32:21

So yeah, I've thought about it would be fun to scale that up, although I think what I've learned with scaling as a scientist is that you become a manager and not the actual actor, and so I probably wouldn't be able to spend time with bees if I was actually a professional beekeeper. But if that wasn't the case, I would, if I could have any skills. And I'm not a scientist, okay, I would be a - this is going to sound weird, but I think I might want to be an engineer developing frontier artificial intelligence technology. Because I think that's really fun to think about and I like to play around with it as a hobby. I'm not sure that it's the right thing for society, but at a purely intellectual curiosity level, I think it's really fun and interesting to play with.

Dr. Biology:

33:06

Right, I mean, it's something we need to confront.

Will:

33:10

It's coming, it's here. The genie's out of the bottle.

Dr. Biology:

33:14

All right. Last question, what advice would you have for a young scientist, or perhaps someone who's doing something that's not in the sciences but always loves science and they want to get into a science career?

Will:

33:30

I think my advice would be to figure out a way to start a research project. It could be a hobby project; it could be something you do at home. Better if you have someone who understands you know that field, that can act as a mentor. But doing science and learning about science, the way that we teach science, especially the undergraduate or lower levels it's very different from the kind of hands-on experience that you get if you actually do a project. Because a lot of doing science is confronting unknown, is learning things on the fly, is dealing with failure, is iterating. It's a very different experience than getting the distilled version of thousands of hours of work from hundreds of people and saying here is the answer to this question.

Dr. Biology:

34:16

Right, because there is no book on the shelf with all the answers.

Will:

34:21

No, the vast majority of scientific questions are yet to be even posed, and so there is a huge amount of exciting work to be done out there, and I think for me it's really fun and exciting to be able to actually be on the frontier of science and asking questions and, you know, doing that sort of like work that doesn't already have an answer. 

34:40

I think there's a real joy to that, and so, for those who are interested in a scientific career, if you have the opportunity, whether it's through, if you're an undergraduate student working in a lab, if you're just a member of the community, I'm sure there are all sorts of opportunities to get involved. A lot of clubs, like beekeeping clubs, will have scientists that are affiliated and get a certificate and do a project. You could be a master gardener, I mean, there's a lot of ways to do this, and I think when you're doing science, when you're asking questions, posing hypotheses, and testing those hypotheses with a controlled experiment or other means of testing a hypothesis, you are a scientist, even if you don't have formal training. You are a scientist if you do science.

Dr. Biology:

35:18

Absolutely, and along those lines. Do you still have your snowflake yeast kits? I do yes. All right, well, we'll be sure to put the link in so someone can go if they want to. They can play with not necessarily your children, but

Will:

35:28

My yeast children.

Dr. Biology:

35:30

Your yeast children.

Dr. Biology:

35:37

Will, thank you so much for being on Ask a Biologist.

Will:

35:39

It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Biology:

35:41

You have been listening to Ask A Biologist, and my guest has been William Radcliffe, an evolutionary biologist and also an astrobiologist. He's currently an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

And I suspect some of you have more questions that have cropped up during this episode that we may not have answered, so we'll be sure to include some links in the show, including one to Will's lab website so that you can learn more about his work and explore the world of yeast. That's also where we'll put the link to get the yeast kit. The Ask A Biologist podcast is produced on the campus of Arizona State University and is recorded in the Grassroots Studio housed in the School of Life Sciences, which is an academic unit of The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. 

And as a reminder, even though our program is not broadcast live, you can still send us your questions about biology using our companion website. The address is askabiologist.asu.edu, or you can just use your favorite search engine and enter the words Ask A Biologist. As always, I'm Dr Biology and I hope you're staying safe and healthy.

 

---

Zoo Animal Fun, Games, and Wellbeing

Dr. Biology:

00:00

This is Ask a Biologist, a program about the living world, and I'm Dr. Biology. For those who have been following along, we have been visiting the Phoenix Zoo for the past couple of episodes. This will be the third in the series and one where I hope we get to play around or at least learn about play and in particular, how, why, and when animals play because play is important for so many things like skill development, physical fitness, stress relief one of my favorites. It also promotes cognitive development by challenging learners to solve problems, make decisions, and think abstractly. 

And play is not just for humans. Primates, you know, apes and chimpanzees, birds have been known to play. Cetaceans, which are dolphins, and whales all are known to play. There's even research on reptiles and insects that show some play-like behavior. 

01:12

I'm looking forward to the conversation today because our guest is Danielle Wong, the Behavioral Enrichment and Animal Welfare Coordinator at the Phoenix.  If anyone knows about animal play and what it takes to make an engaging and I might even say fun environment for animals, it will be Danielle, and I bet we learn a lot more about what it takes to develop the best enrichment activities and environments for a wide range of animals. Welcome to Ask a Biologist, Danielle. 

Danielle:

 01:45 

Thank you for having me. 

Dr. Biology: 

01:46

It's been such a joy to be at the zoo, just to be able to get out and be with the animals. You know that's not really a job, is it? 

Danielle:

01:55 

Oh no, when people think of a job, they think of something they have to go do. Going to the zoo every day is a good treat, right? 

Dr. Biology:

02:04 

And I started the episode off talking about play as part of animal enrichment. What else is involved with animal enrichment beyond play? 

Danielle:

02:15

When we talk about behavioral enrichment at the zoo, we're talking about purposeful, goal-oriented items which can be to stimulate play and to have them spend their time doing something. But more than that we like to tie into their natural history, and we like to dive into what should they be doing? What behaviors should we be seeing? What aren't we seeing? And then we try to elicit those behaviors. 

Dr. Biology:

02:41 

Ah, interesting. So, if a giraffe isn't acting like a giraffe, there's a problem. 

Danielle:

02:48

Yeah, when people think of animals in the zoo, they automatically think that they're domesticated in some way. But these animals are still wild. They still have all the natural instincts and, in order to promote their most optimal well-being, we want them to exhibit all their natural behaviors that they can and have that capacity to do that, and behavioral enrichment allows them to do that. 

Dr. Biology:

03:12

Hmm, okay, so I promised a little bit about play. So, I do want to get into that part. One of the questions, though, before we dive into all the animals that you know that play at the zoo, are there animals that don't play, do you know? I'm thinking probably not a snake. 

Danielle: 

03:34

Well, you know, it really is going to depend on the individual within a species too. So I'm sure that there probably are some instances of play being seen across all species, but when you take into consideration their age and the individual behavior as well, sometimes we don't see that as much, and so it really just depends. 

Dr. Biology:

04:01 

Okay, so for those that play, let's pick the most playful animal at the zoo now. 

Danielle:

04:10

Well, probably a huge favorite would be Chudi, the greater one-horn rhino. He is one of the most engaging animals that we have, and he spends a lot of time interacting with his environment, interacting with his behavioral enrichment, and even interacting with his keepers, and a lot of that would come across as this aimless play behavior, where he's just playing and he's moving around in his exhibit and it's so much fun to watch. 

Dr. Biology 

04:37

Right. When I look at him and he's in his habitat and enclosure I notice what I would say are toys. So, can we talk about some of the toys, and how did someone come up with the idea that a tire is a good toy? 

Danielle:

04:54

Right, those toys that we're talking about. That's the behavioral enrichment, and so probably the easiest way to relate it to us as humans is to think of it as toys. But if there's one thing we can take away from this, that's so much more than that, and so a lot of the items that he has in his exhibit. They're fun for him to interact with, but they do also serve a purpose. A lot of those items that he gets up and he manipulates, he throws them around, which he has been known to do. He'll get a drainage culvert like a black pipe on his horn and he'll toss it in the air. He'll carry it around. 

05:31 

All of that stuff helps tie into his natural history, where these guys are known to kind of be ecosystem engineers in a way. They go through their environment, and they will route through things, they will move things around, and that will actually help create different architecture in the ecosystem where they're from. And so all of that, while it seems like a lot of fun and it definitely is it really ties into their natural history too, and where we get the ideas for things is somebody just randomly thought, hey, this might be really fun to play with or to provide for him and then go from there, and a lot of that actually comes from the industry. The zoo industry together will rely on one another for their expertise and their experiences in order to help provide the best experience for the animals. 

Dr. Biology: 

06:21 

Very interesting, because I don't usually think about animals as engineers, but yes, there are quite a bit of it Animals that are engineers. Besides the rhino, what are we going to have for engineers at the zoo? 

Danielle:

06:34

Oh goodness. Well, there are, let's see, some Cape porcupines that will naturally dig into the ground in order to excavate burrows and or to find their food. You've got birds as well, that will kind of take items from one location to another, nest-building all of that. So, across the entire animal kingdom, you're going to have engineers everywhere. We might have to think about it a little bit more, to think of it as engineering. 

Dr. Biology:

07:04

Right. What about the primates? 

Danielle:

07:06

Oh, easily. Most primates are so intelligent they can utilize tools, and so you can actually see a lot of that example in the environment that we provide to them and their enclosures. They can move things around. We provide them tools to utilize for puzzle feeders. You'll be able to see their behavioral enrichments really geared towards that tool use as well. 

Dr. Biology:

07:30

Now, in addition to behavioral enrichment, the other area that you're very interested in is well-being, and we had Dr. Gary West on the last episode talking about life as a zoo veterinarian right Beyond their healthcare. You're looking well, you're looking into the well-being of the animals just as much. You just aren't necessarily treating them for any kind of health issues. So, what does that involve? 

Danielle:

08:01

Yeah, when we're talking about well-being, we're talking about the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy, which ultimately is the question that everybody wants to know Is that animal happy? And so that's what we're looking at and what we'll actually do is our keepers know the animals the best and the keepers, on a daily basis, are working with these animals and they might notice some subtle changes and they record everything. They have those conversations if they're starting to see something. So that's always happening on a daily basis where these keepers are keeping an eye on the animals. But we do also have a more formal assessment process and that's our well-being assessments, and for those, we will look at both the inputs or things that we provide to the animals. So, we provide their diet, their enclosure space, their behavioral enrichment, and the trained staff that work with them. 

08:57

But then we also look at their outputs, so what they're giving to us, their health, their weight, behaviorally, how they're responding to us, and we look at all of these assessments and then we go through and see, well, how are we doing? Do we need to have areas of improvement or do we have those areas I should say that we need to improve on, and then we go through and we can have those conversations and make those changes if needed. And that's kind of our way of keeping us in check, making sure that we are doing right by the animals, because that is definitely our top priority, but it is our way to keep us in check on that. And it's a whole process that the keepers get to fill it out. The managers come in, they provide their input, the curators provide their input, then it comes to me and the director of living collections. We get to provide input If there are any concerns. We have an animal welfare committee on board that we go through, we review and then we make those changes as needed. 

Dr. Biology:

09:55

You use the term happy and obviously, that's a challenge, right? 

Danielle:

10:02

With animals saying happy. 

Dr. Biology:

10:04

So, we might say content, or even maybe better, just they're in their natural animal groove. Yes, and you talked about learning about the natural history of a particular animal, and that's the part I am interpreting, that you basically do the research on how an animal should behave in the wild, and if they're not doing something similar in the zoo, then probably something's wrong. 

Danielle:

10:31 

Right, and that's where leaning on our industry as well is so important because we've got decades and decades of experience of people working with these animals and saying, hey, that's not normal or that's exactly what you'd want to see. And, honestly, this whole field is just constantly progressing. We're learning more, we're always trying to improve, and so we talk about animal welfare science. That's the science that we've used to inform our conversations about well-being. So, there's always room for improvement in my mind, and so it's always looking for ways that we can do more. 

Dr. Biology:

11:11 

Right On an earlier episode, we talked about one of the challenges with zoos, because there are some people that don't like zoos, and I do understand they really think of them more as prisons than a resort. 

11:31

They also don't always realize the conservation role that you play when we talk about the animals, and the idea is that we're not trying to domesticate them. That's one thing. Let them be wild, that's important. But the other one is some of the animals that you have at the zoo do get reintroduced into the wild. So, when you're working with those kind of animals, what do you do? That's, if anything different than the ones you do, that probably aren't going to be released into the wild. 

Danielle:

12:05

That's a super great question. Those animals that may be released into the wild definitely have more restrictions on how we typically work with them. A lot of those animals tend to be less human involvement, a little more hands off. You try to not familiarize them with humans and or training them any sort of capacity, because you don't want them to go out into the wild and then be habituated to go right back into a populated area. And so for those animals, when we talk about like behavioral enrichment and things like that, we try to keep it as natural as possible. So, we're definitely more limited there. But it also is geared towards seeing those skills that we would want to see prior to them being released, and I think that's what's really important to know is that it's all again still very goal oriented and purposeful ties right back into that, but for them the intent and the purpose is just a little different. So that's how we offer them just some slightly different things. 

Dr. Biology:

13:11

Right Now, when you're building your habitat and you're thinking about them, and I'm not mistaken, is it the squirrel monkeys? Is it the new home for them? 

Danielle:

13:22

In the Monkey Village.  

Dr. Biology:

13:23

Yeah, Monkey Village. Was Monkey Village basically renovated before we got our new troop of monkeys for Monkey Village? Did we renovate the space beforehand? 

Danielle:

13:36

We actually did make some modifications, namely extending wall height and trimming back limbs on trees because we wouldn't want them to accidentally find their way out of the exhibit and oftentimes it wouldn't be necessarily their intent to find their way out of the exhibit, they would just happen to find their way out through a pathway and then they would be out there, the other animals would be inside and they would be kind of confused like oh, how do I get back in there? 

14:03

So, in order to kind of prevent that confusion on their part and also, it's a new space for them, so really just kind of defining the boundaries of the space for them, making those modifications on trimming back those limbs, increasing the height. We closed down Monkey Village so that they would have time to acclimate to the space themselves. So it wasn't even open to the public for people to go in that way. They had time to get used to their environment. And then, as we started to introduce people back in because it is a walkthrough exhibit when we introduced people back in we started by having the people only go a certain distance, or smaller groups, just slowly getting them used to having people in their space. But they have all sorts of space in there to get away if they want to. They can regulate their distance and they really seem to be enjoying their exhibit and they're really fun to watch in there too. 

Dr. Biology:

14:56 

Right, that's one of the favorite places for me to go and the bird aviary. You know you have several of them that are quite nice, where you can go in and the birds are just wandering around, flying from place to place. That's another place. So, when you're developing a new habitat, how do you do that? And part of that question also is how long does that take to figure out? 

Danielle:

15:22 

Oh yeah, it takes a long time, and it really just depends on how big of a scale we're talking, on how long it takes to go from start to finish. But we really do try to design the exhibits with the animals, natural history in mind. You want to ensure that there's enough one space for them, and so when we look at a space that we could be doing an exhibit, we go through and we say, well, how much space do we have, realistically, what animals can go there? And then we sit there and we then think, well, what are their requirements? What do they need? What do they need for resting, what do they need for locomotion, moving around?  

16:03 

Also, a lot of animals will come in social groups. A lot of animals are social, and so what are their requirements there? And if it is a social group, well then the space needs to be bigger to be able to have them regulate their space from individuals of their species or their social companions, as you will. And so there's a lot of thought on that end. But then furthermore, you then go and look at their natural history. 

16:30

If you build an exhibit for a jaguar, for example, you also want to include not just a lot of space on the ground but a lot of vertical space, because they are an arboreal cat, they'll go up into the trees and they climb, and so you really have to tie all of that in. So, it's a big design process. Of course, we always want to make sure that the space that we provide for them is optimal for their well-being, but we also want to make sure that the guests can really see what space they're in too, and so it takes a while to design and then, once you have a design, then it goes into the construction phase and, like all construction projects, sometimes that gets pushed back, but it's definitely worth the wait once you have those new exhibits open and you have those animals out there and you're seeing how they're in those exhibits and, behaviorally, how they're responding to their new space. 

Dr. Biology:

17:23

You know what I'm waiting for. 

Danielle:

17:25

Predator Passage yes. 

Dr. Biology:

17:29

I think, what the meerkats? Aren't they going to be in there? 

Danielle:

17:31

We're going to have meerkats and hyenas, then we're going to have a leopard, as well as African lions. 

Dr. Biology: 

17:38

Wow. 

Danielle:

17:39 

I know it's going to be amazing once it opens.  

Dr. Biology:

17:42 

And we delay the opening. And why? 

Danielle: 

17:46 

Well, sometimes construction projects might take a little longer. But also, we have to think about where we are. We're in Phoenix. It is so warm here during the summer that when we talk about bringing in animals for these new exhibits or transfers, we also have to consider what is the weather like, and is this the optimal time to bring them in? And for a good part of our year the answer is no. It is way too warm, and so we do have to wait for that perfect window for them to come in when it's a little cooler, so that they can adjust to not only the new space but also the weather.  

Dr. Biology: 

18:22 

All right, I've got to get back to play again. Okay, Because I would like to know if you have at least one and you might have more than one so you can pick one or two favorite experiences with the animals really looking like they're enjoying what they're doing, and something that maybe surprised you. 

Danielle:

18:45 

You know, this to me is probably one of the funniest things I've ever gotten to witness. But we offer a lot of our animals foraging devices, and by foraging devices, I mean items that will extend the amount of time that they take to consume their food, and by that it might take longer for them to get it, and then they have to chew it, eat it, process it, and so these foraging devices are probably the most common behavioral nurturement that you'll see, and they can come in all shapes and sizes, all different materials, and they can be for the smallest of animals to the largest of animals. And there are some devices that are specifically made for animals, like for foraging, like, so people at home could use them for their pets too. And we have in our Harmony Farms, in our Children's Zoo area we have three equines. They are Strawberry the miniature horse, we have Dinky the miniature donkey, and Popeye the mule, and these guys, they were all given the same enrichment item, a pellet ball, and it has a hole in it so that the keepers can put their pelleted diet in it, and then they have to figure out, well, how do I get the pellets out and then I get to eat it. And every single one of them. They're lined up right next to each other on their exhibit. 

20:10

Every single one of them used a different method and I thought that was the most intriguing thing to watch, and any person that would come by all the guests I would excitedly tell them watch them, watch how they do it.  

20:21 

So, it was really funny, because Strawberry would knock it around and would seem to get the most exercise from this. She would knock it around and then she would follow it and she would go all over trying to get the pellets out of this ball. Dinky was a little more reserved, would knock it around but would not go as far, wouldn't knock it as hard and still would get all the pellets out of it. But then you had Popeye, and Popeye would just put his nose on the end of it and he would shake it back and forth with his head, so he wasn't moving an inch, but he was getting all the pellets out of it. And I think that is just the funniest example of how behavioral enrichment it serves a goal. Every animal is going to problem solve differently, every animal is going to utilize it differently, and so they surprised us how they use them.  

Dr. Biology: 

21:10 

Is there an animal that solved a problem that you were a little bit surprised and maybe solved a problem that you didn't want them to solve?  

Danielle:

21:17

Yes, definitely. It probably happens way more than I'd like to admit. But let's see, not too long ago I thought, well, how can we use cardboard boxes differently? Cardboard boxes are probably one of the most common items that we can give our animals, because we always have cardboard boxes, our staff can bring them in and we can use them in a variety of ways. But I thought you know, how can I make this cardboard box a little more challenging? So, I decided to put some obstacles or blockers in it. The keepers would put the food in it so it wouldn't just fall right out. 

21:54

And then I decided to essentially paper mâché the outside of it closed so they couldn't just open the box. There was a hole on top, so they'd have to kind of juggle it around. And I gave that to our orangutan keepers to give to our orangutans. And Wgasa, one of our males, decided I'm not going to lift this up and try and get the food items out of the hole, I'm just gonna rip off the paper mâché and then I'm gonna open it that way and I walked away from that feeling defeated. But you know what? It still achieved the goal of extending the amount of time it took him to eat his food and he definitely problem-solved. He just problem-solved in a way I didn't expect. 

Dr. Biology:

22:33

Yeah, very quick. When we talk about well-being, we talk about play, and these are all going to come together. It's about exercise. So, one of the things I'd like to know is how do you develop these activities that make sure that an animal is getting the right amount of exercise so that they can keep their health up? 

Danielle: 

22:56 

A lot of it relies on experience that the keepers have. Well, you know, I've done this at a different zoo with this animal. Maybe this can work with this animal. It takes a lot about their natural history. Well, how would they naturally move through their environment? How can we encourage that? 

23:11 

It also takes into account safety. Safety is important as well. You can put a ball in an exhibit and get an animal to move that ball around. Predators or things like a tiger would be probably the best example of that because a ball could stimulate their prey drive where they see that movement and they want to chase it. But what if the exhibit has a slope in it? And what if that ball runs down and happens to hit the fence or hit the glass? So you do have to consider safety as well, and so a lot of that just relies on the experience of the keepers, the managers, the vet staff to ensure that the activity chosen is going to play into their natural history, their intended goal and their needs, but also be done in an appropriate and safe manner. 

Dr. Biology:

24:02

So, how do you know if an animal is in shape? 

Danielle: 

24:05

That's a great question.  

24:06 

So, our keepers, they form these great relationships with the animals and in general, there are several categories of behavioral enrichment, one of them being social, and social enrichment can include interacting with humans.  

24:20 

So, we do that through training, and so the keepers are able to train their animals to go on a scale, get their weight. But then also, it's not just about the number on the scale, it's also about how they look, and so that's where we rely on the vet staff and their expertise and their knowledge to come in and get a good look at the animal and say well, they're at a decent weight, but maybe their body condition is not where we need it to be, maybe they need to gain more weight, maybe they need to lose a little weight. They do definitely get all the food they could possibly want, but we like to make sure that they're still healthy. So we look at their weight, we look at their body condition, and then they'll make adjustments from there as needed, and that might include diet decreases, that might include more exercise, providing enrichment that will help increase their exercise and movement, and that's not just for their weight as well, that's also can be for their joint health, things like that, so it really is tailored to the individual.  

Dr. Biology: 

25:23 

It's the same thing that we have to do as we get older. We need to make sure that we continue to exercise for our joints for our bone strength for our muscles. After, I'd say, roughly 40 years of age for humans, you start to lose muscle mass. If you don't use it, you are going to lose it. Well on, ask a Biologist. Before my guests can leave, I always ask three questions All right? So are you ready? I'm ready, all right. When did you first know you wanted to work at a zoo?  

Danielle: 

26:00 

I would say probably when I was young, I was probably around 10, 11 years old and I actually went to SeaWorld, and I was inspired from my experience there. And it wasn't the experience of seeing the shows or seeing all of the animals, my experience was at the end of the night, on the way out of the park. We're heading to our car. We just decided to make one last stop over near where the Orca whales were, and just so happened that one of the trainers was out there talking to this animal wasn't really interacting with their animal and any formal capacity, just talking, and you can really see that bond and that trainer spent time talking to me. All about them. 

26:45 

You know their natural history and this individual, what they like, and from there on I was so inspired on how a person could have that great of a relationship with an animal and from there I just knew I wanted to work with animals and it probably wasn't until I was in college that I just happened to start volunteering at an aquarium in their husbandry department taking care of their animals that I realized this is exactly where I want to be in a zoo or an aquarium doing this job. So, what's your degree in? I have a degree in organismal biology. It used to be zoology, but it got combined with botany and ecology, so overall organismal biology and that's what I studied all throughout college and volunteered at the same time, and it was a lot of fun.  

27:40 

Okay.  

Dr. Biology: 

27:41 

Now, I'm always a little bit mean on the second question, because we learned how you got to where you want to be and almost every guest I haven't. I don't think I've ever had a guest that didn't love what they do, yeah, which is great, but I'm going to take it all away for this thought experiment. You're not going to be able to be at a zoo at all, okay, and I'm going to take away probably teaching, because there's a lot of teaching in your, in what you do. What would you be or what would you do if you could do anything?  

Danielle: 

28:18 

Definitely would still be in the realm of science. I'm a science person. I think that what has always fascinated me and where I've lived, I've always been fascinated by them is storms. For some reason I don't know why Storms are very interesting to me. They make me feel very humble about where I live, and so I think I would want to do something related to whether probably not to go as far as storm chasing, but I think that would be really fun and interesting to learn about.  

Dr. Biology: 

28:53 

Well, you talk about unpredictable animals, but storms are about as unpredictable as it gets Exactly. Wow, hmm. Yeah, I was just gonna say you're gonna be a storm chaser, but you're gonna go a little bit short of being a storm chaser. 

Danielle: 

29:04 

Probably. I don't know if I have the gut for that or something.  

Dr. Biology: 

29:10 

I'm with you. I think I'll watch it from afar. So the last question, because we get a lot of questions from young and old or older people, I should say, that really love animals and actually would like to work at a zoo what advice would you have for someone who wants to have your job?  

Danielle: 

29:35 

Yeah, I started out as a zookeeper, and I think to get into where I'm at now which I absolutely love my job I think that you'd have to start out with having that hands-on experience of working with the animals and truly understanding them and their behavior and how you work with them.  

29:53 

In order to become a zookeeper, though, you definitely need to have both the education.  

29:59 

So you'd want to go to school, you'd want to study something like biology, zoology or even psychology, because, again, behavior is a huge part of it and then from there it's getting hands-on experience. So, for me, I started volunteering while I was in college, and I did that on Fridays and I went to class Monday through Thursday and from there I did internships. So, I would take the summer to try and go get more experience with different animals, and that hands-on experience is the most valuable thing that you can have. The education helps fuel your understanding, but the hands-on experience is really the know-how, and so that's the best way to get into the zoo field, to become a zookeeper, and from there, I guess the best piece of advice for anybody is, when you want to get into the zoo field, be open to the animals you want to work with, because there's not always going to be jobs with the very specific animals that you think you want to work with, and so be open to everything, because they might surprise you.  

Dr. Biology: 

31:06 

Right, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, someone might say I only want to work with the rhinos.  

Danielle: 

31:11 

Right.  

Dr. Biology: 

31:12 

That sounded so much fun, but you actually started out. I'm not mistaken as someone who worked with cats the big cats, right.  

Danielle: 

31:21 

So, my first experience was in a children's zoo with more domestic animals, goats and sheep and chickens, things like that and then I did actually quickly move over into a carnivore department, working with tigers and lions and cheetahs, and I definitely think carnivores are my love. Specifically, otters are a huge favorite of mine. But had I not done the other experience, I wouldn't have gotten to learn about other animals and experience other things, and really surprised by how much I enjoyed working with some of the other species that I've gotten to work with.  

Dr. Biology: 

32:01 

Until you actually live and work with them, you really don't know them, do you?

Danielle: 

31:50

Exactly  

Dr. Biology: 

Well, thank you so much for taking time out from your great group of animals that you could spend some time with us.  

Danielle: 

32:14 

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.  

Dr. Biology: 

32:17 

You have been listening to Ask a Biologist and my guest has been Daniel Wong. The behavioral enrichment and animal welfare coordinator at the Phoenix Zoo. Now, like most of our podcasts, we will be sure to add links and additional information in the show notes, so be sure to check those out. The Ask a Biologist podcast is produced on the campus of Arizona State University and is recorded in the Grass Roots Studio housed in the School of Life Sciences, which is an academic unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. And remember, even though our program is not broadcast live, you can still send us your questions about biology using our companion website. The address is askabiologist.asu.edu, or you can just use one of your favorite search tools and enter the words Ask a Biologist. As always, I'm Dr. Biology and I hope you're staying safe and healthy.

---

Adventures of a Zoo Veterinarian

Dr. Biology

00:02

This is Ask A Biologist a program about the living world, and I'm Dr Biology. If you joined us for the last episode, you know that we are visiting the Phoenix Zoo. Yep, the animals are around, so you might be hearing them in the background during this podcast. Our guest this time is Dr. Gary West, the Senior Vice President of Animal Health and Living Collections at the Arizona Center for Nature Conservation, which is the group that runs the Phoenix Zoo. 

 00:35

 Now, if you listened to our first episode of our Zoo series with Bert Castro, the President, and CEO of the Zoo, you might remember that there are around 3,000 animals that call the zoo their home. He also mentioned they get free health care. That means Gary has about 3,000 furry, feathery, and sometimes scaly patients because he is the veterinarian of the Phoenix Zoo. With all those animals, you can bet he's a busy person and that no two days are the same. Just what is it like to be a doctor for thousands of animal patients? 

 01:13

 And we also learned last time there are over 300 animal species at the zoo. Can you imagine having that many different types of patients? Oh, and, to make things just a bit more challenging, none of them can talk, at least in the language humans understand, so they can't tell Dr West where it hurts or how they feel Now. That makes for a challenging job and one that I'm excited to learn more about. It's also a popular question for us at Ask A Biologist, especially the younger listeners that love animals and wonder how they can work with them. 

01:51

Many of them actually wanting to become veterinarians. So, let's get started. Welcome, Gary, and thank you for joining me on Ask A Biologist.

 Gary:

 02:00

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

 Dr. Biology:

 02:02

You know I was getting ready for the show, and I was writing down questions and then I wrote down another question, and another question. I probably could come up with a thousand and one questions, so we're probably not going to get to all of them, but we are going to get to some of the core things that I think are really interesting for a lot of our listeners. Just to let everybody know, we have a lot of questions that come in from people that want to know about how they can work with animals because they love animals, and, of course, we get a lot of veterinarian type of questions how do you become a veterinarian? And we haven't had one on the show. So, if you're going to do it, go big right? 

[Laughter]

 02:42

 So, here we are. You are a busy person with so many patients and that got me wondering, are you the only veterinarian on staff at the zoo? 

 Gary:

02:51

No, I'm not. There's a team of three veterinarians and three veterinary technicians, and so we all work together, cover the zoo 24 hours, seven days a week, and really help each other out. So, I have a great team over there. 

 Dr. Biology:

 03:04

Right, and you mentioned the veterinarian technician. This is something that a lot of people may not have the time or the money to go and get a degree so that they can be a veterinarian, but there are other ways to help animals in the basically animal healthcare area. So, the technicians, what do they do at the zoo? 

 Gary:

 03:25

 Well, probably my easiest analogy is really they are like nurses and they're really an integral part of our team. As a doctor I'm a little absent-minded, I forget things. They are really the glue that holds the medical center and the veterinary hospital together. So, they remember things that we forget. They remember the equipment. They're really good at the technical skills putting in intravenous catheters, collecting blood, preparing our lab samples, finding where we can get sometimes complicated medications for zoo animals. We might have to get things that a small animal, a dog, and cat veterinarian might not need to get. We get something for an elephant or a rattlesnake and so they are really integral in helping us find equipment or medications for those. Just really can't do our job without them. Often, they handle the animals and they are really good at collecting the samples. Just like you couldn't go to a hospital and be a hospitalized patient without a really great nursing team and nursing care and lab technicians and things like that at a human hospital. 

 Dr. Biology:

 04:24

I am so glad you mentioned nurses. I agree, I am married to a nurse, a nurse that deals with cancer patients, so I am ever so indebted to all the nurses that are out there Now. Your nurses just like you, they've got to work with the animals, and I had to say that's probably one of the most challenging things. Having just household pets, how do you know when an animal isn't feeling well? That's the challenge. 

 Gary:

 04:56

 That's a great question really brings in part of our other really key component to the team is the keepers, the curators, the animal managers. So, I say they are the first line of defense. They are incredibly dedicated individuals, typically have college degrees in biology or zoology, work with those animals on a day-to-day basis, for hours a day and for years at a time, and they really get to know the animals. So, as you mentioned, I can't go around the zoo and check on 3,000 animals every day. 

 05:24

The keepers can. They're feeding them, they're seeing normal bodily functions. Did they pee, did they poop, how are they feeling? How are they taking care of their babies maybe, and that kind of thing. And so, they’re the ones that really communicate to the veterinarians, just like you would as a pet owner. You know something's wrong with your dog or your cat. Your veterinarian might not know that, and so then you call your veterinarian and say there's just something not right here. He didn't come for his treats like he normally does. He's really quiet, he's not behaving normally. So, the keepers are really an essential part of that team at the zoo. 

 Dr. Biology:

 05:59

You brought up the fact that we know when we're at home, when our animals are a little bit off right. There's got to be different challenges, because of one thing you have so many different species and the other one is some species. Let's pick your primates, your monkeys, much easier to try to figure out when they're not feeling well versus. You mentioned rattlesnakes. How do you know when a rattlesnake isn't feeling well? 

 Gary:

 06:29

There's a lot of different things you’ve got to look at. So, a rattlesnake doesn't move around a lot. It may not eat every day but sometimes we see abnormal poop, fecal material. They may regurgitate a meal, vomit. The keepers weigh them on a regular basis. It's hard to just look at them and know sometimes if they've lost significant amounts of weight, if they're a smaller snake, so weights, body condition, did they eat a meal? When was the last meal? Are they? What I say is coiled tight and sort of had that musculature? That might scare you if you see them in the wild when they're coiled up, but that's what they should look like nice tone to them versus sort of laying abnormally. So, all of those sorts of things behavior, food consumption, body weights, and you know you bring up an interesting species there which I love reptiles. 

 07:16

But a huge challenge for us. Somebody can't just walk into the room with a rattlesnake and here you go, Dr West, like take a look at it. That snake's probably not gonna be too friendly to me and it's not gonna want me examining it, touching it, poking it, prodding it. So, that's where we use some specialized equipment. We have these clear plastic acrylic tubes. We have very experienced handlers. They're trained with venomous animals. 

 07:39

We have things on ground to mitigate risk, such as anti-venom and storage in case somebody gets bitten. We have a whole protocol with Banner [hospital] and the toxicologist at Banner sort of looking at what happens if somebody gets bit by a rattlesnake. All of these things to mitigate dangerous animal risk. But that animal will be gently guided with a pole into a clear plastic acrylic tube, so its head is covered. But then I can feel its tail, I can draw blood from its tail, I can examine it, feel its musculature and kind of goes back to seeing what's normal in that snake. So, I think you brought up a perfect species for a zoo veterinarian, which is a huge challenge, a safety risk, but we also have to provide care. So, there's just a lot of experience on the keeper side and the veterinary side that has to go into care for a snake. 

 Dr. Biology:

 08:20

So, that definitely is a challenge. The other challenge is scale right. You can have a really, really big dog at home, say. You could even have, I suppose, the people that have horses right? What about a rhino and an elephant? 

 Gary:

 08:37

Yep, that's sort of the other end of the spectrum there for challenges. We deal with the largest terrestrial land mammal. We have an Asian elephant, Indu, who's sweet and kind and gentle and really loves her keepers. We can do a lot of things through training and behavioral enrichment and really do a lot with her. But on the other side, if she does not want to do something or she's upset about something, it's a potentially very dangerous situation. 

 09:04

Luckily those animals are highly intelligent, and work well with the keepers. They're typically what I say are friendly animals, not particularly aggressive animals, and so the keepers can do a lot of things with them through training. For an example, Indu had a urinary tract infection. We could do a lot of the work up with her in a sort of a confined space, what we call an elephant chute, so she walks into it and we could do an ultrasound with her awake and that sort of thing. The keepers can draw blood, they can give injections. So, she's trained for all those sorts of things. 

09:35

It's reinforced with a positive manner, usually food. That's the most positive thing for everybody, including myself. She does really well with that. We rarely would have to anesthetize her, or we wouldn't get in the same space with her. Typically, if she was awake, an elephant could accidentally hurt you just by spinning around or accidentally pushing you against a wall or a pole. You're talking about 8-to-9,000-pound animal, so I don't think she would necessarily do it in a malicious way, but she could accidentally really hurt somebody, sit on you, step on you, knock you over and really do some damage. 

 10:04

The rhinoceros another good example. We have a white rhinoceros in the Greater One Horned Asian rhinoceros at the zoo and we have had some recurrent inflammatory eye disease in one of our female rhinos and I would give a lot of credit to the keepers. They can have her come up station. She puts her head through two poles so we don't have to be right next to her. They can allow us to come up again. Positive reinforcement typically food she eats. We can look at her eyes while she has her head down eating. We can flush her eyes out, administer eyewitness and that sort of thing. So, a lot of times, through training in the facilities, we can work around them safely. 

 Dr. Biology:

 10:39

Wow, it just boggles my mind 300 different species. One day you're treating an elephant (thousands of pounds). The next day you're treating a bird in the aviary. And it brings up a question for me. You do have a staff of veterinarians. So, one of the interesting things there is do you specialize in different species? 

 Gary:

 11:02

We don't. That's what's really great about wildlife medicine for me. I probably have a short attention span,  but I have a real interest in wildlife and I've been a veterinarian for I have to think now 28 years and I'm still super excited about it. I don't even think about the years, because we do get to work with such a wide variety of species and work with animals that are often rare and in danger. It takes some training, though. We have a program at the zoo where we actually train graduate veterinarians in zoological medicine. They come to us for a one-year internship, then they go on typically to do more training or get a job in zoo medicine. 

 11:37

So, related to that question, you go to veterinary school. You learn about domestic animals. There are more zoo and wildlife programs now kind of creeping in, but when I was in school in the 90s there really wasn't a whole lot. So, you really have to get some training after veterinary school. But what I tell people I don't want to oversimplify it because a lot of these animals are dangerous and they're different. But a rhinoceros is really like a horse as far as its gastrointestinal tract, its feet. A giraffe I always joke about is a cow with a long neck. It's a ruminant like a cow. It's got a four-chambered stomach. That sort of thing Sea lions we don't have at the zoo but I've worked with. 

 12:13

To me, they're a lot like a dog with flippers. Really, anatomically they're like a dog. I mean they have some adaptations for diving and holding their breath and that sort of thing. Where we get and I say weird, but I say it in a complimentary manner where we get the weird things, is where we really have a lot to learn still and you have to kind of learn on the job or through training with other experienced veterinarians. And those animals are the reptiles, the birds, the stingrays, the fish, the sharks, those sorts of things, because it just really isn't a lot of that when you go to veterinary school. So, those are some of the big challenges. 

 Dr. Biology:

 12:46

Right, and speaking of challenges, we spoke about this on the last episode and, unfortunately, Phoenix is still under an amazing heat wave. 

 Gary:

 12:56

 Yes. 

 Dr. Biology:

 12:57

It's just been incredibly brutal for all animals, which we include humans, and we talked about it on the last show and Bert mentioned that the animals. One of the nice things is you give choice. They can decide whether they want to be out in the heat and there are places where they can get away from it, but it's still a lot of heat even if you are. As Bert mentioned, this is a zoo that specializes in animals that are used to warm climate areas. From your perspective, have some of the animals been struggling? 

 Gary:

 13:33

Yeah, I mean, I definitely think so. People are struggling, the animals are going to struggle Again. We mitigate some of that through misters shading and we have a loud, arid desert species that live at the zoo. Should I specialize in that? And you know, through the Association of Zoos and Aquariums we have very good, scientifically published husbandry manuals talking about temperature parameters. So, a Sumatran tiger, yes, can't really tolerate 118, so we give it access to air-conditioned space. If it wants to go out in the shade or to the pond, it can. But you know, if you come out to the zoo in the afternoon, to be honest, you're probably not going to see a tiger, it's going to be indoors and that's its choice. Orangutans, we have temperature parameters. They're really not going to be out, although we do have indoor space and you've probably seen it where there's glass viewing, and you can see them inside. 

 14:18

But yeah, you know, recently a species that kind of surprised me was our big male Masai giraffe Migu. You know, giraffes obviously are from Africa. They live in hot, dry, arid. They often stand right out in the direct sunlight when it's 100-plus degrees. We're not really sure why, but he did have some issues. He was getting dehydrated. We could tell that through, you know, collecting urine and sort of decreased urine output and decreased fecal output and he wasn't eating as well. Again, some of those things we talked about. And the keepers know that, like you know, he's not doing what he normally should do. And so, we got together as a team the veterinarians and the hoof stock manager and the hoof stock keepers and sort of talked about what we could do, because a big, huge, 12, 13-hundred-pound male giraffe is probably not going to let me do a whole lot awake and the risk of anesthetizing a giraffe is very, very high. It's not easy to anesthetize him. 

 15:08

But kind of cutting to the story, sometimes you forget some of the simple things. So, I know from veterinary school a cow doesn't really want to drink water. That's over 80 degrees. So, we looked at water temperature. It was pretty warm. The other giraffes were drinking and maybe that put him off. So, we iced down his water, we put electrolytes, power-aid type things in his water and some sprinkled on his food. Each stayed inside quite a bit. It's more shaded, there's fans, there's misters, there's not air conditioning in that giraffe barn, which isn't really necessary. They're actually more cold-sensitive than heat-sensitive. But I think once he started getting some of those electrolytes, he started drinking more and then he started eating more and now he's sort of back to normal. But yeah, he was an example that kind of surprised me, but it happened. 

 Dr. Biology:

 15:51

Right, and it's just one of those things that a lot of times, back to humans, we don't always pay attention. Humans run into the same sort of thing where we're just not used to it for this length of time, and so, we might end up a little bit dehydrated. One of the things that I learned in the last episode was that zoos have a much bigger footprint in animal conservation outside of the zoo than I realized, and it was a pleasant surprise. I would say, in your role, are there specific conservation efforts you're involved with? 

 Gary:

 16:29

 Well, certainly with all the animals that have a conservation need at the zoo we work with our conservation department. So, the Black-footed Ferret, which gets reintroduced back to the wild, the offspring from the zoo, the Chiricahua, leopard, frog and those sorts of species. I've also been involved for the last several years down in Paraguay, in Latin America, working with the Chacoan peccary and the Lowland Tapir. So, the Phoenix Zoo has really a lot of great conservation programs that they're involved with and that was one. We've been involved with the Chacoan peccary for many years and if folks don't know, it's sort of the giant peccary. It's related to our javelina, our collared peccary. Here in Arizona, it was thought to be extinct and then rediscovered about 1970. A biologist was in the Chacoan area of South America, which is in Paraguay, Bolivia and even down into Argentina. Really incredibly biodiverse, just a wonderful place. I just love it down there. There's just so many interesting species down there. But the Chacoan Peccary lives in that area. It's a lot like Arizona it's dry, it's arid, but those peccaries don't deal very well with human encroachment. They don't deal very well around people Like you'll see the collared peccaries in your neighborhood and running around here. The Chacoan peccaries just aren't that kind of an animal. They're listed as in danger now. They're very rare now. 

 17:42

 The Phoenix Zoo was the first zoo actually to house that species in North America. Back in the 90s, we imported animals from Paraguay and now they're all throughout North American zoos and very successful breeding programs. I was asked because of our knowledge of working with them in a zoo, we can pass that on to our wild counterparts. Working with wild animals and working with biologists in those countries. I had quite a lot of experience working with the anesthesia of Chacoan peccaries how to immobilize them safely, wake them up and make sure everything's okay. I was invited down and we immobilized about a hundred of them for genetic analysis to look at their blood work, and their parameters and collect some anesthesia data and that sort of thing. Now we're placing radio collars on lowland tapers in the region actually wild animals and tracking their sort of movements in the areas. 

 18:29

 Physiologically, anatomically, they're in the horse rhinoceros family. You may have not seen one, but if you look one up it's sort of a stout, 500-pound, solidly built animal. Some people say they're sort of look like a pig, but they're really more horse-like. They have a long sort of proboscis or nose that they kind of use to navigate the environment. They have three toes, so just sort of a large terrestrial mammal. They're an herbivore. 

18:54

We'd love to see if there's a habitat where Chacoan peccaries might be able to be released back to the wild when we work with the center down there, the only one in the world dedicated to the conservation of Chacoan peccaries, where they breed them in a managed care setting and then we're hoping to re-release them. So, I've been pretty excited about that. You know, in a zoo you want to do everything. I'd love to go work on conservation projects all the time everywhere, but you know I have a job to do. I have the zoo animals to take care of. So, I've learned as I've gotten older to try to concentrate my efforts and expertise maybe in a more limited area. So, the work on Paraguay has really sort of fulfilled that. I really love working with the folks down there and the animals down there and it's an incredible area but just like everywhere in the world, it's in danger from farming, development and deforestation and that sort of thing. So, there's certainly challenges down there. 

 Dr. Biology:

 19:41

 Right, we actually also talked about some of the work that's being done with some jaguars down there and beyond the jaguars, some other animals dealing with animal corridors Lots of really great things going on with conservation outside of the zoo. Yes, a lot With the zoo being involved For this episode, I thought I would pull some of the questions that kids have asked, so we're going to call this kind of a lightning round right, we're going to do this fast. 

 Gary:

 20:05

 Right, think fast, aren't we? 

 Dr. Biology:

 20:07

I'll just start rattling off questions and see what we can do. Alright, what's your favorite animal to take care of, and why? 

 Gary:

 20:14

 Gosh. You know, I knew you're gonna ask that and I don't want to cop out. As a zoo veterinarian, I have to work with a lot of animals and I always feel bad I'm gonna leave somebody out or keepers out with their animal. I've always been infatuated with reptiles and birds, but I was recently talking about maned wolves, met the zoo. They're also found in the Chaco region of South America where I do some work, and so and I like to highlight some of the lesser-known species. So, I'm gonna say this week it's the maned wolf. They call it a fox on stilts. So, it's a big red wolf. It's not really a fox, it's not really a wolf. It's actually 50% of its diet is like a fruit-vegetable type diet, so it's not a particularly dangerous carnivore. They smell kind of like a skunk. I kind of like their smell, though they have kind of a kind of a difference if you go by there in the morning. So, I'm gonna say the maned wolf. 

 Dr. Biology:

 20:58

 Okay, so they're an omnivore if they're eating things? Yeah, exactly, yeah, great, yeah, it's great. All right, next one how do you give medicine to animals? Do they take it like we do? 

 Gary:

 21:08

 No, I mean, they take it probably, maybe like a toddler if you can remember back, you know having kids. You might have to hide it in some juice. It might need to taste good. You might have to hide it in a treat or something like that. But worst case scenario, we sometimes have to pull out the dart gun. That's no fun for the animal and so kind of like if you have to go to the doctor to get a shot, get a vaccine. Animals might be trained for a shot but sometimes they aren't and we might have to actually pull out the dart gun, which is kind of like a projected Syringe into your arm or rear end. We hope they take it orally but you know you can't administer everything orally. Vaccines, most of them, are not oral, except for like the polio vaccine, and so sometimes we have to inject those. 

 Dr. Biology:

 21:50

 Okay, have you ever had to rescue an animal from the wild and bring it to the zoo? 

 Gary:

 21:55

 Well, we have several animals that have come from Rehabilitation facilities, or we've worked with Arizona game and fish. Some examples I think you talked about in your podcast with Burt, our CEO, about the bald eagles. They can't fly, they're injured, can be re-released to the wild so they came from rehabilitation facilities. Our entire group of collared peccaries, our javelinas on the Arizona Trail. Unfortunately, uh, probably a well-meaning person thought he or she was doing a good thing, but they were feeding this group of peccaries in their backyard. They became very habituated to people and then they can become dangerous because they'll kind of try to push you away from the food or come after you for food, and so game and fish said hey, can you please take a group of peccaries and it's three boys, three girls. So, you named them after the Brady bunch kids and we were able to take them all in and they're happy as can be at the zoo. So, we have several animals on the Arizona trail that are native Arizona species, that came from rehabilitation facilities. 

 Dr. Biology:

 22:49

 Yeah. So, the next one, do animals ever get scared when you need to check on them or give them shots? 

 Gary:

 22:55

 Yeah, that's probably the part of the job I don't like most of the animals we love, we care about, they don't really like us. They see us as bringing some sort of uncomfortable situation to them, particularly primates. You know, they're super intelligent. There's an orangutan at the zoo. I love her but I've had to treat her for many medical conditions over the years and she will come running and hitting the glass and spitting at me and does not realize I want to help her. But also, the prey species. 

 23:21

 So, if you look at a lot of the hoofstock species again, which I love. You know, huffstock, big horn sheep, pronghorn, antelope, Nyala, giraffe, oryx , Arabian oryx, that sort of thing they have flight distances and what I mean by that is they don't want you to get too close. You might be a predator. And so, when we go to see them, observe them, try to give them medications, capture them they're often pacing, running, trying to get away. So, yeah, I would, I would say. Unfortunately, they are scared. It makes us feel bad, but we have to just remind ourselves we really are trying to help them, all right. 

 Dr. Biology:

 23:55

 Have you ever been scared while taking care of an animal? 

 Gary:

 24:02

 For sure. We, you know we work with a lot of Potentially dangerous animals. We have to think about all our protocols and our safety measures and have our group meetings and our medical Rounds and talk about what we're gonna do if this happens or that happens. Probably the thing that scares me most is I, you know, I don't want to make a mistake, I want a good outcome for the animal, and I don't want anything bad to happen to the animal. 

 24:22

 But I do have a story from 25 years ago where at another zoo not the Phoenix Zoo a grizzly bear actually got loose on grounds, and I was terrified because this was a bear that had again, we went to go back to the rehabilitation rescue had been a nuisance bear at Yellowstone and she had been kind of on the Strike three list. We need to find her home. She's going after campers. So, she ended up at the zoo I worked at. So, I always in my mind I thought she's not scared of people, grizzly bear, very dangerous. Well, she ended up loose on zoo grounds on a Saturday morning. We had to dart her and put her back in the exhibit and so, yeah, that scared me but luckily everything went well. 

 Dr. Biology:

 24:59

 All right, well, I'm gonna shift gears. Okay, that was great. Okay, that was kind of a lightning round which I haven't had guests do, so you did a great job. Okay, thank you. Let's shift to the last section, and this is where I never let my scientist leave without answering three questions. All right, we'll start with. When did you first know you wanted to be a scientist, and in this case, a veterinarian? 

 Gary:

 25:23

 I always wanted to work with wildlife. So, as a kid my mom always sort of fostered that in me. We raised baby rabbits and squirrels. I had a duck for a while. She would encourage me by getting books on animals. Of course, probably a lot of people in my generation watched Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom with Marlon Perkins and so those sort of nature shows back then and books really sort of got me interested in wildlife and so I knew I wanted to work with wild animals in some sort of capacity conservation and endangered species, helping wildlife. And then, you know, I got into college. I went to undergrad. I was actually an animal ecology biology major and undergrad. 

 26:01

 I really didn't think about veterinary medicine when my high school counselor and when I talked to them a little bit about it they're like well, you have to go to college for eight years. And I thought, geez, there's no way I'm going to do that. I can't go to college for eight years. You know you're thinking about that as a 16, 17-year-old, not realizing you have your whole life ahead of you. So, I went to undergrad. I really loved my zoology, my animal ecology and sort of anatomy and physiology classes and I had a friend and he said you know, I'm going to go into veterinary medicine, like you can work with tigers and lions and bears and gorillas and zoo animals. I never really thought of that and I'm like, well, maybe that's sort of the way to work with wildlife. I had sort of planned to possibly, you know, get a master's degree or PhD if I was able to and study wildlife in the wild. You know, I imagined myself sitting like Jane Goodall, you know, in Africa observing animals and writing about them and sort of falling in love with all of that. 

 26:56

 But then I got an opportunity to spend some time with a zoo veterinarian and I grew up in rural Iowa and I went to Iowa State University and there wasn't a major zoo near me. So, I traveled about three hours to a large zoo and the veterinarian there she was nice enough to. It's funny because now we get a lot of those requests and I'm kind of become the grumpy old vet where I like I don't have time for these young people. But I have to remember somebody did this for me and so she said come on over, Gary and like you can hang out with me for the day, because I'm like I'm thinking about this I don't know if I want to do this, but maybe, and I remember she anesthetized and mobilized a polar bear when I was there and I was just like star struck. This bear was so big, its feet were as big as my head and it could tell she was so happy, the most positive influence, and I felt almost like I was harassing her after that. Can I come back?

 27:45

Can I do something else? Then she worked on a tiger one day and I was just, oh my gosh, this is what I got to do. Like you get to actually touch the animals. You're not in the field looking at them from hundreds of yards away. You get to touch them. You get to get blood samples, you get to safely handle them, wake them back up and possibly save them from a life-threatening illness. And so, I was so inspired by that. 

28:04

 I went back and I really started studying hard because, although I took my studies seriously, you have to take it up a notch if you're going to get into veterinary school and things like organic chemistry and physics and things that I may not have really loved before. I'm like I've got to do well on these courses if I want to do this, and so that's sort of my path. I think a lot of times nowadays, you know people have pets and they go to the veterinarian's office and that's sort of how they want to be a veterinarian and that's great. I didn't really have those role models. 

28:31

I grew up in rural Iowa. Most of it was large animal, food animal type animals. Growing up in the 70s I had pets, but you didn't really think about taking them to the vet and the vet really didn't do a whole lot with dogs, cats or guinea pigs or fish or that sort of thing and in rural Iowa. So, I didn't really have those kind of role models as a kid. As a veterinarian I really was more interested in wildlife, so it kind of took a little bit of a different path that way. 

 Dr. Biology:

 28:56

 Well, I'm going to do the usual thing and I'm going to take it all away from you after all these years, right? Especially, you know, having to go through basically med school and all that work. If you weren't a veterinarian, if I took that away from you and you had to pick some other kind of career, what would you do or be? What would you like to do or be? 

 Gary:

 29:20

 Yeah, that's. That's a great question. I am living a dream, I would have to admit, and so I'm super satisfied and happy with my career and you know, again, after 28 years, I love it, but if I didn't, I would just do something very calming and relaxing about being out in nature. So, if I worked at an, in a park, as a park guide, or if I could be a rock climber and teach people how to do that or something, I'd probably be interested in that. 

 29:45

 As a, you know, 11, 12, 13-year-old, I made some trips to Canada fishing with my father and at that time I dreamed I want to be a fishing guide. I loved catching fish and that sort of thing, but it was being out in nature on a lake and hearing loons, seeing bears and moose in Canada, just something just so very relaxing about being out in nature, and I even have to remind myself of that now. You know I get removed from it and I need to sort of get back into it. So, I think it'd be something related to wildlife, to nature, you know, being out, exploring and that sort of thing, trying to make a living that way, which is tough to do Unless you're really, really good at something, or you're great on social media maybe, or something like that. It's tough to make a living that way. You know, I love to canoe and to kayak and all those sorts of things, so probably some sort of nature-based job, right?  

 Dr. Biology:

 30:36

 Last question.

Gary:

30:51

Okay, 

What advice would you have for a young scientist, a future veterinarian Perhaps, who wanted to follow your footsteps, so to speak? 

Gary:

30:49

 Yeah, I always start off. I mean I want to be encouraging and I sometimes come across as discouraging Because it's difficult. You know a lot of people want to do it. I see why I'm doing it. I love it. I would worry even nowadays, like would I be able to get the job that I have now If I was sort of getting into it now Just because a lot of people want to do it? 

 31:08

 You know, I think a lot of people over-focus on animal experience. Certainly, you want animal experience. You know how to take care of animals, sort of the ups and downs of that. I think veterinary medicine has incredible highs and incredible lows and so you have got to think about that. And I think you know what we see nowadays, some of that emotional toll that it takes on people you have to be prepared for too. So, not to be discouraging, but think about that. You know we get to hug and love animals and save animals and bring them back from life-threatening diseases. Sometimes we lose and that can be very, very sad. I think that even at this point in my life it's an emotional toll. You work day and night with an animal and you still lose to cancer or some bad disease and it's just. It just punches you in the gut. But you know other animals need you, you know your coworkers need you. So, you think you have to think about that, but also thinking about get good grades and stay in school, because I think people overemphasize the animal experience and that's the end goal. 

32:06

 But you've got to get through in college Organic chemistry, physics, physiology, maybe a difficult anatomy class, all of that hard science I say they sort of weed you out and it's kind of a natural weed out, but that is sort of what those classes do. You have to get high GPAs and I worked on a vet school admissions committee when I was a faculty member at a veterinary school and there's a lot of data that shows GPA and those hard science classes Directly correlate to success as a veterinary student. So, you know you think undergrad is hard. I did too. But veterinary school is a notch up. I say it's twice as hard, probably more. I mean you're taking 21, 23 credits a semester, a lot of hard science, a lot of material, 8 to 530 every day. You might have patient care. When you get your third or fourth year on top of that, I sound like somebody who's you know kind of discouraging, but I think you just have to be mentally prepared for that. 

32:58

I think a lot of people think they're going to jump right into Working with animals and that's again the end goal. But there's a lot of hard work that has to be done before that and really working hard on that science. Because I even thought when I was an organic chem Like oh my gosh, like why do I need this? Well, when you take pharmacology class and you're learning about drugs and pharmacokinetics of drugs and how they interact with the body, okay, now I understand why I need chemistry. I didn't really understand that before and that's a hard class. Pharmacology is hard. You're going to go to a medication to an animal. You're going to anesthetize an animal, maybe give it something for pain. You got to know how does that interact with other drugs? How does that interact with the kidneys, the liver, that sort of thing? So, the physiology, the pharmacology it's. 

 Dr. Biology:

 33:43

 You know, there's a lot of science Right, and I would say it's a realistic outlook or a realistic perspective on how to get there. So, yes, I agree, those courses can be tough, but if you're persistent and you're passionate I guess the two P's persistent and passionate that will work well for you. Well, Gary, I want to thank you again for taking time out from your busy job with all the animals and to sit down and have a chat on Ask A Biologist. 

Gary:

 34:14

 Well, thank you, it was a lot of fun and I appreciate you having me. 

 Dr. Biology:

 34:17

 You have been listening to Ask A Biologist, and my guest has been Dr. Gary West, the Senior Vice President of Animal Health and Living Collections at the Arizona Center for Nature Conservation, which is the group that runs the Phoenix Zoo. It also means Gary is the doctor to many animals and many different kinds of animals. As we do with our other episodes, we'll include links to some of the content that you might want to follow up on, like how to go visit the zoo, or maybe you want to go to the Ask A Biologist section on how to become a biologist, because if you want to become a veterinarian, it's not uncommon to get a degree in biology first. The Ask A Biologist podcast is produced on the campus of Arizona State University and is recorded in the Grassroots Studio Housed in the School of Life Sciences, which is an academic unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Now, obviously, we're not there today. 

 35:18

We're actually at the Phoenix Zoo, but that's where we usually do the recordings. And remember, even though our program is not broadcast live, you can still send us your questions about biology using our companion website. The address is askabiologist.asu.edu, or you can just use your favorite search tool and enter the words ask a biologist. As always, I'm Dr. Biology and I hope you're staying safe and healthy.

---

Breathtaking Biology – a metabolome adventure

Ask A Biologist Podcast, Vol 125
Podcast Interview with Heather Bean

 

Dr. Biology:

This is Ask A Biologist. A program about the living world. And I'm Dr. Biology. For some of our listeners, Metabolome is a new word. And if today's episode is going to be an adventure, we should begin with what a metabolome is. So, I want you just to imagine you have a workshop filled with lots of different tools, and each tool represents a molecule in your body. Now think about all the different ways these tools can be used to interact with each other. That's kind of what a metabolome is. 

For a real metabolome, it is a collection of all the different molecules in your body. These molecules called metabolites are important because they help your body do different things. Some metabolites give you energy. Some help your cells grow and others help your body get rid of waste. To name just a few. Just like how different tools can be combined with other tools and used in different ways, the molecules in your body can also be arranged and used in different ways. 

Your body can take in food and break it down into smaller molecules that it needs. It can also change the molecules into different forms to use it in different parts of your body. Some scientists study the metabolome to understand how these molecules work together and how they affect our health. They can look at different metabolites in your body and see if there are any patterns or changes that might be related to certain diseases or conditions. 

Our guide for this episode is Heather Bean. She's a bioanalytical chemist and a faculty member in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. Her research is all about, well, something that takes your breath away and figures out what's in it. Heather, thank you so much for joining me on Ask A Biologist.

Heather:

Thank you so much. Dr. Biology I'm so happy to be here.

Dr. Biology:

Now, I gave my view or my definition of what a metabolome is. Do you agree or would you put a little bit of your own twist on it?

Heather:

I thought that was a really great start. There are different ways that people think about the metabolome often depending on what they are interested in. In the metabolome some people are interested in how the metabolome fits into what we call the central dogma of biology, how our genes encode all the information about how our entire organism is supposed to work, how those genes are transcribed into RNA that are instructions for making proteins. 

The proteins can be structural. They can be enzymatic and perform functions in our body. And then beyond the proteome or the collection of proteins in our body is the metabolome. That is sort of the next link in the chain of going from our genes to our entire phenotype. All the expressions and the ways that our cells function, our organs function, our tissues function, how our entire bodies function, that's our phenotype. 

So, the metabolome is one of the ways I think of it is a link in that chain between our entire being in the genes that lay out the instructions for what we are.

Dr. Biology:

And it's perfect timing because the last episode we had Brandon Ogbunu in here and he's a big fan of RNA, and we actually talked about this central dogma of biology. So, this is the next piece in the story. Well, we talk about metabolomes, and we said animals and plants. So, we're saying all living things.

Heather:

That's true.

Dr. Biology:

So, you have a metabolome and I have metabolome. Yes. Is your metabolism the same as my metabolism?

Heather:

Absolutely not. And my metabolome right now, as I sit at this chair, talking with you is not the same as it was this morning right after I ate breakfast. And it's not the same as it was when I ate the same breakfast yesterday. 

Our metabolome is constantly changing. It's a reflection of everything that we are taking in as far as nutrients. Everything that we are exposed to in our environment, everything that our cells are producing as a process of their day to day living and all of the waste that is being generated. The metabolome is really a very small snapshot in time of how our entire organism is operating. And my metabolism is different than your metabolome is.

Our metabolisms are going to be different from another person's. But part of what I'm interested in is not just the differences, but what are some of the commonalities between metabolomes and what that can tell us about our current physical state at this time?

Dr. Biology:

Could this lead us into some areas such as I mentioned a little bit about disease? Is this one area that would be really important to know about how some metabolisms are very similar?

Heather:

Yes, that's something that I actually specialize in. So, one of my big interests in the metabolome is how we can use metabolic information to diagnose disease or even to just track health. So, one of the things that we routinely do when we go to the doctor's office, particularly once we get a little older, is we give blood samples to monitor our health. And when our blood is taken, there are hormones that are measured checking for the levels of our thyroid or of our insulin. 

There are other markers of inflammation that might be measured or how well our liver is functioning, or our kidney is functioning. Every single one of those measurements that are taken are measuring metabolites. So, these are actually used already in medicine to track our health, to make sure that we are healthy and to look for early indications of signs of problems or of disease. That might tell the doctor that we need some further testing, that our kidneys might be struggling, that our liver might be struggling, and some medications that we might be able to take to help correct that.

Dr. Biology:

When we talk about changes, I'm getting the impression that we have some changes that are really quick, and we have some changes that happen over time.

Heather:

That's a great point.

Dr. Biology:

So, you're focusing on?

Heather:

Both. So, I'll give you a couple of examples of some of the things that we're interested in. One of the aspects of health and disease that is a little bit more long term might be the development of cognitive dysfunctions.

Dr. Biology:

How well we're thinking how well, we’re proecessing...

Heather:

Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, or even just aging or cognitive functions related to fatigue.

Dr. Biology:

Right. Get enough sleep.

Heather:

Right, absolutely. So, let's just follow that idea of fatigue. If we're not thinking clearly because we didn't sleep well last night, that could be something that could be recovered in just one good night's sleep or a really good nap. But there are also cases of chronic fatigue where we're really accumulating lots of missed nights of sleep or interrupted sleep. And that can really impact your thinking and your cognitive abilities. 

One thing I'm interested in and am working on right now is developing measurements of our metabolites. How does that cognitive fatigue, that chronic fatigue? Does it change the metabolites in our blood and our breath in our urine in a way that we can take a sample and determine how fatigued are you today? 

The reason that that's important is that there are some professions that really require excellent, good, sharp thinking. Think about that doctor in the emergency room or that nurse or that EMT going out to an emergency call. A firefighter responding to a fire. Think about our military personnel in high-stress environments and how they need to be good at thinking on their feet, but also how much chronic fatigue they might be building up over weeks and weeks and months and months of time. 

So, one of the things that we're interested in is whether or not that's altering a person's metabolome in a way that we can take a test to actually measure. How fatigued are you and how likely are you to make mistakes in your job? Have you been on a recovery for a long enough period of time to where now you've gotten rid of all of your fatigue, and you can think clearly again? So, some of these things can be acute. It could be one bad night's sleep, or it can be chronic and build up over time. And we're interested in both those short-term metabolic changes, but also the long ones that take a long time to accumulate and we need some ways to measure how quickly those states are accumulating, how much they're impairing the person and how they're able to function.

Dr. Biology:

What are the instruments you use to do this? Because especially if there’s things that are happening really fast, the long-term ones probably a little easier, but those fast changes. What do you do?

Heather:

Yeah, that's a great question. So, I'll take one step back and mention that so far for the human metabolome, we think that there's over 140,000 compounds that could be measured in our body at any given time. And there's lots of different kinds of compounds. Some of them are very water soluble, and these would be the compounds that are circulating easily in your blood.

When we need to eliminate them, they leave our body in our urine. There are some of these metabolites that are very small molecules, and they don't dissolve well in water. And there are actually what we term volatile organic compounds or VOCs. And these can enter our body through the air we breathe. They are also being made by the cells that are making energy and making waste products. Some of those are the VOCs, the volatile organic compounds, or volatile waste, and our body gets rid of those through breath. 

So, when we want to measure these different types of molecules, 140,000, we need lots of different types of instruments to measure these big different classes of compounds, depending if they are they water-soluble? Are they really solid materials? Are they gaseous materials? And what I specialize in are the compounds that are the VOCs. These are going to be really small molecule metabolites. They exist in the gas phase, meaning they are floating around in the air. And our body primarily gets rid of them through our breath. All of the garbage wastes that are circulatory system picks up as it moves through our body, picking up waste from our liver, from our kidneys, from our tissues, from our brain, from that toe infection that we have. As it's moving around the body, the blood is picking up all the waste from all these sites. It goes to the kidneys to get rid of the water-soluble waste and it goes to the lungs to get rid of the gaseous waste. 

And I specialize in that gaseous waste. So, the instruments that we use, we do a lot of work in analyzing breath as one of the major collections of metabolites from our body. We capture breath on the technical term as a thermal desorption cartridge, but what it is is a very fancy Brita filter. It's a cartridge that's packed with carbon and polymers that can grab all of the organic compounds out of our breath and hold on to them until we are ready to analyze them. We can put breath in the mail. We can collect breath from people all around the world. We put them on these very fancy Brita filters. They go into the mail, they come to the lab here at Arizona State, and then we can heat those cartridges to get those volatile compounds back off of that sample so we can reincarnate a breath sample that came from halfway around the world. 

We can put it back into the gas phase back in our lab here. And then we want to know what are the compounds that we trapped on that cartridge. The way we do that is we use an instrument is called a gas chromatograph. Chromatography is the process of separating molecules. That is what every form of chromatography is for, separating different molecules that have different chemical characters. Gas chromatograph are very specifically designed to separate mixtures of volatile compounds. So, we take this reincarnated breath sample, we revive it, we get it back into the gas phase, and then we separate every single breath, sample using a gas chromatograph so we can see all the hundreds of compounds that a single breath sample.

Dr. Biology:

Wow. Hundreds.

Heather:

Hundreds from just a single exhalation. As I'm giving this answer. Hundreds of VOCs are coming out of my mouth and into this room and if you were to collect my breath over the period of a day, you might see thousands of compounds. Again, my metabolome is changing minute by minute. After I've eaten breakfast, after I've eaten lunch, after I've gone for some exercise, after I've taken a nap the VOCs in my breath are changing because those metabolites are reflecting what my body was doing in those few moments before.

Dr. Biology:

We were talking a bit about how the metabolome changes under different conditions. One of them I think that is really important and I think it's important. It doesn't matter what age you are. I think people run into challenges with sleep and I don't think we realize. I think we're still learning how important sleep is. But what's changing when you're not getting enough sleep and you're not getting sleep for a long period of time? And I say that because, you know, those are the classic, you know, I need to catch up on some sleep. Can you really catch up on some sleep?

Heather:

As far as I understand. So, this is really where working with collaborators is important. I'm not the sleep expert on this project. My collaborator who's at Texas A&M University is the sleep expert and the fatigue expert, and her name is Ranjana Mehta. But I'll tell you some of the things that I've learned from her. So, when it comes to sleep, it does seem possible that you can catch up on sleep to a degree, but it depends on how much sleep deprivation you have. 

So, as far as I understand it, if you missed an entire night, sleep stayed up for 24 hours straight and you take a nap to try to recover some of that sleep, you will recover most of that. If you had a really good, long, high quality nap, but not necessarily the entire full functioning that you would have had if you had had a nice restful night's sleep in the first place. When you build up sleep deprivation by not getting enough sleep night after night after night. For college students, it's a big deal cramming for those finals, staying up too late, doing your homework late at night, waking up, trying to make it to that 9 a.m. class. Chronic fatigue is a big problem in the college student population and just crashing during spring break and sleeping as much as you can won't make up for all of those chronic deficits for many, many missed hours of sleep over long periods of time. And some of the ways that that changes our physiology is it changes our hormones. 

There have been some really good studies that have linked nurses and they work overnight shifts in hospital settings, nurses that are working on long term night shifts so that their sleep is really disrupted compared to how the day and night cycles work for our normal biology, our normal circadian rhythms. It alters their hormones and makes them more susceptible to breast cancer, for instance. So, even for those of us who are not getting enough sleep on a nightly basis, our hormones are being altered and our hormones are some of the key metabolites that regulate so many functions and so many organs and so many tissues and cells in our body that a disruption in hormones can really alter downstream metabolism.

Dr. Biology:

So, the question about metabolomics is how can we use those for disease diagnosis and also treatment? 

Heather:

I will start with treatment first. And there's a couple of ways for us to think about this. So, there are some diseases that are fundamentally metabolic diseases. There are some conditions like diabetes, which are an alteration of our metabolism is largely linked to the hormone insulin, but there are a lot of other downstream effects on our metabolism that are a consequence of insulin, not being produced sufficiently, which alters our ability to metabolize glucose. And glucose is a major energy source for our body, a major nutrient. So, when that is disrupted, your entire metabolism is altered. 

So, some diseases are metabolic diseases and the way their diagnosis to measure metabolites, how well is your insulin level functioning when you eat a meal and then the downstream consequences of that would be do we see your cells metabolize in glucose? If they're not, you'll see certain chemicals showing up in the blood and in the breath that indicate that this person is diabetic. And if they're being treated for diabetes, that is not under control, that the medication isn't working sufficiently. So, that's one way to think about treatment. Sometimes a disease is metabolic, and you can monitor the disease and you can alter the metabolism. The underlying metabolism to make them healthier. There's another way to think about using metabolites for treating disease, and it would be to maybe the disease isn't fundamentally a metabolic disease. Not directly, anyway. We can measure metabolites to see how well a drug is working. 

So, whenever we take a medication, it needs to be active and functioning in our bodies. But our bodies, they are designed to get rid of those things. The reason we have to take an antibiotic twice a day for ten days to treat an infection is because our bodies are altering that drug and getting rid of it. Here's another long word for you. That's called pharmacokinetics, pharmaco, meaning drug kinetics, meaning motion or change. So, our bodies are changing those drugs to get rid of them. And it’s important to know when you're trying to dose someone with the proper dose of a drug, how fast their bodies are getting rid of that drug. Your body will get rid of a drug at a different rate than my body will. And so sometimes metabolites are monitored to see how quickly or how slowly is that individual patient's body getting rid of that drug. That tells the doctor how frequently do they need to take that medicine and at what dose? If my body gets rid of the drug really quickly, I might need to take a higher dose in more frequently in order for that medication to work. 

Dr. Biology:

Right. Right. And it's also why it's so important to take your medications on a regular basis, whatever the amount, the dosage and however often you're supposed to take them.

Heather:

That's right. Yep. Our kidneys are constantly working. Our liver is changing that drug into a form that our kidneys can get rid of. That's their primary function. So, we always have to fight against that whenever we are treating with a medication is our natural biology to get rid of that foreign compounds.

Dr. Biology:

Okay, So, we've talked about the way of treating disease. What about diagnosing?

Heather:

So, that is actually a lot of what I am focused on currently in my research is using the volatile organic compounds or VOCs in our breath, all of those metabolites as hundreds of compounds to identify patterns that help us detect disease. There are some obvious applications of this that I do work on. So, let's say someone has a lung infection. That infection is in their lungs, is going to be creating all sorts of metabolites. The bacteria, the fungus, whatever is causing that infection is creating metabolites. Our immune response is creating metabolites as it's trying to fight that infection in our lungs. 

And all of that metabolism comes out in our breath. We're working on developing breath-based diagnostics to be able to detect whether someone has infectious pneumonia or not. And if they have an infection. One basic question is, is that infection, a bacterial infection, a fungal infection, or a viral infection? Those require three different types of treatment. And a lot of times doctors will prescribe an antibiotic without knowing that that's a bacterial infection and hope that that does the job of making the patient better. 

So, one of our basic goals is can we help the doctor know is an antibiotic needed in this case because this patient has a bacterial infection? Should they be prescribed an antifungal because they might have a fungal pneumonia or do they have a viral pneumonia, something like influenza or COVID that should be either treated with antivirals or just with some good old rest and extra fluids and Tylenol to help them control the fever. So, that's one application of diagnostics based on metabolites.

Dr. Biology:

Do you think that there's the possibility that we'll be doing a lot more diagnostics using just a breath sample. 

Heather:

Yes. 

Dr. Biology:

Where do you think it's going to lead to?

Heather:

Well, here's the crazy thing about breath that a lot of us just don't think about. I mentioned before that urine is one of the major waste streams of our body. It gets rid of all of the water-soluble waste from our body. It could be waste from our brains, waste from our skin tissues, waste from our livers. It all exits through the urine because the blood collects all that waste from all over the body goes through the kidneys and dumps all of that water-soluble waste into the urine. 

The same thing happens with our breath. Our blood is collecting gaseous waste from every single cell in our body. It delivers it to our lungs to get rid of that waste there. So, in every single way that a urine test could test for the function of your kidneys or of your liver, or even whether or not you might have a form of cancer that is developing or whether a blood test is looking for certain metabolic markers of cancer or of diabetes. If those diseases have volatile metabolites associated with them, they will show up in breath. So, I sort of think of potentially any disease or condition that a blood test or a urine test could measure or test for. There could be a breath test developed.

Dr. Biology:

So, your fancy Britta filter.

Heather:

Yes,

Dr. Biology:

Possibly, take it at home.

Heather:

Yes.

Dr. Biology:

Mail it in and get some results. We're not there yet, right?

Heather:

No, but I think we are getting close and possibly quickly.

Dr. Biology:

That sounds exciting.

Heather:

Yeah.

Dr. Biology:

Hey, Heather, I heard rumors about Human Breath Atlas.

Heather:

Yes?

Dr. Biology:

Can you tell me a little bit about it?

Heather:

Yeah, I would love to. So, the breath research community is putting together this grassroots effort. It's a collection of scientists across North America, Europe and Asia so far to build the human breath atlas. And what we want to do is to characterize, detect, identify, quantify every single compound that is in human breath. What can we detect in breath? Define it all. That's what we want to do. Ultimately, we think that we would need to sample a quarter of a million people, collect their breath.

Heather:

Maybe even over a period of time, but at least one time point from a quarter million people and then put all the best instruments on that sample, see how many volatile organic compounds we can detect and see if we can name them all, identify every single one. And we want to just basically make a map of all the chemical information, all the metabolites that are in our breath, so that we can know the foundation from which we are investigating and exploring the breath for many different purposes for diagnosing disease and monitoring health.

Dr. Biology:

That sounds exciting.

 Heather:

Stay tuned. I think you'll see more information coming out about that in the next few months.

Dr. Biology:

So, Heather on Ask A Biologist. I never let a scientist leave without answering three questions. The first one I'm going to ask you will kind of modify it a little bit because it basically says, When did you first know you wanted to be a scientist? I want to know that. But I also want to know, when did you really get excited about the world of metabolomics?

Dr. Biology:

So, when did you first know you wanted to be a scientist and when did you really get excited about metabolomics?

Heather:

First, know I wanted to be a scientist. I really wanted to be an astronaut when I was little. The very first clubs that I joined when I was in elementary school, in middle school were astronomy groups. I did Science Olympiad when I was in middle school and was on the astronomy team, but also when I was a kid, I don't remember if I asked for it or if I just received it as a gift. I got a big chemistry set and I thought it was so cool that you could mix things together and see bubbles and reactions and things change colors and follow a recipe to make an experiment happen. 

So, I don't know that I made a conscious decision when I was a kid that I wanted to be a scientist, but I knew that was the direction I was going. When I went to undergrad, I went to school at Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech. I thought I was going to be an engineer. So, I had a lot of family members who are engineers, and I was following in their footsteps, and I thought I was going to be a chemical engineer. I love chemistry and I love math. And then I went to a class, and you got to shadow a student who was a chemical engineer. And I went to one of her classes and I went, Oh, that's not what I thought this is about. She was calculating the flow of liquids through pipes because chemical engineers build reactors. I didn't know that. I thought they thought of chemical experiments to do so I decided I would follow chemistry and in fact, I was a biochemistry major. Biochemistry is the study of metabolites. 

[It] turns out I actually didn't like it very much when I was an undergrad. It was my least favorite class and I think it was because it was a lot of memorization, at least the way it was taught to me then. And that was 20 years ago. And I was a little bit lazy about memorizing all that stuff, but it stuck with me. I understood that biochemistry is really describing how cells function, how they get energy, how they transform molecules into energy, how they transform compounds into proteins and proteins into other metabolites that can be used for energy. And that foundation stuck with me. 

When I finished my undergrad, I went and worked for a pharmaceutical company, and it was just really because it was a good job. They needed a chemist. But once I was there and working there for a few years, I was inspired to go back to school. I saw a job at this pharmaceutical company that I wanted, and it was going to require a Ph.D. in chemistry. So, I went back to school, and I actually joined a Ph.D. group that was investigating origins of life chemistry. So, how do bio molecules, how do RNA get formed before there are enzymes in all of the cells that we have that do all this work? How did all this life happen before there were cells? And fundamentally at the root of that, again, it's biochemistry. I kept coming back to it, even though in undergrad I thought it was the worst class that I was taking. 

And when I was done with my Ph.D., I was really interested in seeing if I could figure out a way to sort of move back to human health. So, I'd worked in pharmaceutical industry for a minute. I sort of took this detour into origins of life chemistry, which I loved, and was fascinating, but I wanted to see if I could apply my science and my knowledge more towards a human health angle. And that's when I had the opportunity to join a lab that was doing breath research, that was working on using breath as a source of metabolites to develop new test for detecting infections and for monitoring health. 

So, I turned back to biochemistry again. And also analytical chemistry. How we learn and understand what all the volatile compounds are in breath. I use those skills too, and that's when I really got fascinated with metabolism and metabolomes. So, it's a long, winding road, lots of detours.

Dr. Biology:

And now I'm going to be a little bit mean to you. We're just going to imagine I'm taking all this stuff away from you. My scientists, also, most of them love to teach, so I'm going to take that away. My question is, what would you be or what would you do if you couldn't be the scientist, you are and you're not going to be able to teach?

Dr. Biology:

What would you do?

Heather:

Last week I told someone I think I would be an accountant because I find a lot of satisfaction in spreadsheets and numbers and data and making two columns of information line up and perfectly synchronized. I don't think I would find as much fulfillment in that as being a scientist, but yeah, that was my answer last week.

Dr. Biology:

Right? A bit of order, right?

Heather:

Yeah. Yeah. And just and I love numbers. They have so many secrets and hidden patterns and they tell us so much about the world that we live in. And fundamentally, most of the science that we do gets converted into a number format at some point in time. And so I guess I can find satisfaction in numbers in lots of different ways.

Dr. Biology:

Yeah, I can see that, absolutely. And I can admire a good spreadsheet.

Heather:

It's a thing of beauty.

Dr. Biology:

Yes All right. So, we have the long winding road, so you should be good on this last question.

Heather:

Okay.

Dr. Biology:

What advice would you have for a young scientist or perhaps someone who always wanted to be working as what? What are we going to say as a bio analytical chemist?

Heather:

Well, I think the first thing is that I could never have predicted when I was a kid, that I would end up being a professor or working at a university. I had no idea what professors did. Even when I was earning my bachelor's degree in chemistry, I had no idea that my professors had this entire other research life that they maintained. So, I think one thing is to keep an open mind. 

There are opportunities or interest or ideas that will float your way that you never saw coming. And if it's interesting to you, pursue it. Never, ever feel like you are locked in on a particular path or trajectory because it's simply not true. If you get to high school and you were developing an interest in biology and then suddenly, you're like, I find physics so much more fascinating, pursue that. 

See if there's some opportunity to join a club or to learn some things from YouTube. What a gift. So, much great stuff that you can explore and learn about from information that's online and just learn more. See what it is about that particular topic or idea that was so fascinating to you and see if there's a way for you to pursue it and learn more about it. You might go down that path and be like, Oh, this isn't what I thought this was going to be. I like it as a Nova program, but in practice taking those particular classes. Now that I understand what that particular topics about, not so interesting to me anymore. 

Okay, so pivot, you're never locked in. There's so many ways to exercise your science brain to pursue things that are interesting to you, even if you don't become a professional scientist. Ways that you can engage as a citizen scientist, help to generate those numbers and collect data that if it's interesting to you, there will be ways for you to participate in that in your professional career or in your hobbies in the future.

Dr. Biology:

Right? I say that everyone is a scientist.

Heather:

That's true.

Dr. Biology:

Heather, thank you so much for being on Ask A Biologist.

Heather:

It's been a pleasure. Dr. Biology Thank you so much.

Dr. Biology:

You have been listening to Ask A Biologist, and my guest has been Heather Bean, a bioanalytical chemist and faculty member in the School of Life Sciences. Now don't forget to check out our companion links and images we include for each podcast. It's a great way to dig deeper into some of these topics. The Ask a Biologist podcast is produced on the campus of Arizona State University and is recorded in the Grassroots Studio housed in the School of Life Sciences, which is an academic unit of The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

And remember, even though our program is not broadcast live, you can still send us your questions about biology using our companion website. The address is askabiologist.asu.edu or you can use your favorite search engine and enter the words Ask A Biologist. As always, I'm Dr. Biology and I hope you're staying safe and healthy.

 

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An A.I. Conversation