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Next Gen Scientists

Dr. Biology: 0:02

This is Ask A Biologist, a program about the living world, and I'm Dr Biology. In today's episode, we get to explore a couple of our next-generation scientists. At least that's what I'm calling them. They're weaving together their science and their passion to communicate science. Kayla Berger is a PhD student in environmental life sciences at ASU and the School of Life Sciences, and she focuses on fisheries management and marine megafauna. There's a word for us to talk about - conservation. Kayla is working on an innovative solution to prevent bycatch. Hmm, what is bycatch? Well, that's the accidental capture of non-targeted species, or what we might say. Let's not catch the animals we're not looking to catch, for example, sea turtles, sharks and rays. She's pioneering the use of net illumination, testing different colors of light and expanding its use for new fishing gear. 

Dr. Biology: 1:07

Our other next-gen scientist is Risa Schnebly, a fourth-year PhD student in the Biology and Society program at ASU, the School of Life Sciences. Risa's interdisciplinary research explores how conservationists understand and emotionally respond to the concept of extinction. Through interviews and creative nonfiction writing, Risa weaves together the history of extinction, personal grief and the emotions of the conservationists. Her goal is to bring a deeper, emotional and meaningful narrative to the science of conservation. Now Risa aspires to a future in science writing, aiming to make scientific research more accessible and impactful through storytelling. Stay tuned as we explore their groundbreaking work and the personal journeys that drive their passion for conservation, as well as their pursuit of the art of telling a good story, a good science story. Let me also add we will be introducing their new podcast that just launched, called SciChronicles. So be sure to stay around, Kayla. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.

Kayla:  2:26

Of course. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Biology: 2:27

And Risa, thanks so much. You know it's great to have you in the studio. 

Risa:  2:30

Yeah, I'm so happy to be here. 

Dr. Biology: 2:32

All right, I call this the next generation scientist. I'm doing it because scientists they haven't been doing a really good job of storytelling and it's been causing some problems. Right? 

Risa:  2:42

Absolutely. 

Dr. Biology: 2:44

I don't think they're just not tuned into what we do and we have a tendency to use big words, very specific words, which really work well. You know, when we're trying to do things quickly, it makes sense why we use acronyms and we use very specific kinds of words. But when we're talking to the general public it can be a real problem. In this show today we're going to talk a little bit about what you're doing in your research, but also how you're weaving that into the storytelling part that I think is so important. Kayla, I mentioned you're working with some of the sea creatures that people love so much. You know they love sea turtles, right. They may not love the sharks as much, although I think those are misunderstood as far as animals go.

Kayla:  3:31 

Agreed. 

Dr. Biology: 3:32

Yeah, and rays. Rays are just fascinating to watch them as they move through the water, it's almost like just gliding, constantly gliding. So, let's talk a little bit about your research. Tell me about these nets. And well, maybe yet let's talk about what was the big word we had at the very beginning “megafauna”. 

Kayla:  3:52

Megafauna. Yeah, okay, let's talk about that. I'm sure, even if you don't think you're familiar with megafauna, I'm sure you've seen sea turtles, sharks, seabirds are megafauna, basically, any of those big creatures in the ocean dolphins, whales are all megafauna, so a lot of those, unfortunately, though, are endangered. They're threatened by human activities such as fishing, so that's one of the things that I try to work on is saving those creatures from human activities like fishing. 

Dr. Biology: 4:20

Right, and so we're talking about those nets, right?  

Kayla:  4:25

Yeah.

Dr. Biology: 4:26

You put a net out, you don't always catch just what you want to catch, so how do we deal with that?

Kayla:  4:31

Yeah, so I mean nets, depending on the type of net, can be extremely unselective. A lot of them can basically just catch anything that swims into them, so in that case we have to figure out how to make them a little bit more picky as nets. So, one thing that I'm doing is putting lights on nets. These are just mostly green LED lights and we just clip them on there and we don't know exactly how it works, but somehow it's providing some sort of cue for those animals so that they know oh wait, stop, let's not go into that net and instead turn around and avoid capture. 

Dr. Biology: 5:08

Okay, and so that seems to work for the megafauna. So, our sea turtles. I'll pick a sea turtle. Why not the other fish, the ones that we do want to catch? 

Kayla:  5:18

Yeah. So, what we're doing is we're using differences in how the fish see and how the turtles see, and also differences in their behavior. For thousands of years, actually, we've been using light to attract fish. However, it doesn't work the same for some of those bigger creatures. Instead, they kind of see it. We think we're not 100% sure, but we think they kind of see it and go oh, that's something new. We don't know what that is. We should maybe be a little scared of it, and then they can turn around. Or maybe what's happening is the light is illuminating that net. They can see the net finally, where they couldn't see it before, because often they're made out of clear twine and other things that are hard to see in the water. So maybe it's just making it so that they can see the obstacle and then they don't run into it. 

Dr. Biology: 6:03

So, it's kind of a win-win situation here, because the fishermen get to still fish and catch what they want to catch and the animals that we're trying to protect stay protected. 

Kayla:  6:14

Oh, absolutely. That's honestly the biggest reason for using net illumination is because it allows fishers to keep fishing. A lot of the ways that fisheries are managed right now is just by closing them. So, if a fishery is catching, a lot of the ways that fisheries are managed right now is just by closing them. So, if a fishery is catching a lot of sea turtles or sharks when they're not supposed to be, the fishers just don't get to go out. They lose their money that they're trying to make, and so putting that illumination on allows them to still fish, make their money, get a livelihood, while also not having to catch those kind of animals like sea turtles and sharks, which can also be dangerous for them to get out of their nets. 

Dr. Biology: 6:49

Ah, that's true. That's true. So, we talked about animals being endangered, but we also have the end of the line extinction. It's an interesting word, extinction.  

Risa:  7:01

It is. 

Dr. Biology: 7:02 

I think most of us think we know what that means, but can you tell us what extinction means when it comes to these animals? 

Risa:  7:14

Yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of part of my motivation in doing what I do is because I think the definition of it is a lot less clear than most of us would like to think. And I think that's been true since the word became accepted in terms of biological extinction, which was not until just a few centuries ago really, and it just kind of became understood as you know, when a species disappears. 

Risa:  7:34

But, unlike you know the species concept and the philosophy of science people have debated about what a definition of a species is. That hasn't really happened with extinction. The definition of extinction has always hinged on whatever we decide a species is, but we don't really question what disappearing means or how we even quantify and know that there's no more members of a species left. And I think that people are starting to talk about it a little bit more because of these novel de-extinction technologies, which are the technologies and projects of people trying to essentially quote unquote bring back these species that have gone extinct, like the woolly mammoth or the Tasmanian tiger, the Dodo bird. There's scientists trying to recreate these species using genetic engineering technology, which is basically messing with the DNA of different species to make lookalikes. 

Dr. Biology: 8:24

Wow, I'll tell you. You know Jurassic Park coming to life and it didn't turn out well there. 

Risa:  8:29

No, it didn't turn out so well there. That's what most people think of, I think, when they hear about de-extinction. But these scientists are really arguing for having really sound science doing really cautious testing and they believe that they'll have real ecological benefits with their projects. I personally am kind of on the fence about how I feel about de-extinction, but I think it's interesting for how it complicates the idea of what species loss means and extinction might not be forever. 

Dr. Biology: 8:58

Right, you also deal with the emotional side that scientists actually encounter. I know of a graduate student years ago who had to extend her PhD work because the species she was actually working on went extinct. The sadness there is you get to start all over. That's pretty devastating. You deal with what is called eco-grief. 

Risa:  9:25

Right.  

Dr. Biology: 9:26

Can you tell us a little bit about eco-grief.  

Risa:  9:27

Yeah, it's pretty much exactly as it sounds. It's grief extended towards ecological losses and devastation in the natural world. But that as a concept is really unfamiliar to most people because especially, you know, in the global north, we're not really connected to our landscapes or other species that we're living with here and we don't necessarily see them as beings that are worthy of our grief A lot of the time. That's not for everyone. 

Dr. Biology: 9:52

Right. So, we have an urban environment, we have lots of homes that are in the suburbs, we have big cities that are growing and we pretty much wall out a lot of the species plant and animal from where we're living and so we're separated from them. So, under those conditions it's not as obvious when you lose them. 

Risa:  10:19

Yeah, it's not as obvious. I mean, half the time most of us don't even know what species are out there. Right, there's that statistic of like people can recognize 10 logos but they can't like name 10 native plants of their area. So, a lot of the time we don't even have the knowledge to recognize the species around us that we're losing. And even if someone did tell us about it, it's not a part of at least American culture to really value them as beings with lives and let alone grieve for them and grieve for their loss. And I think that's the norm for a lot of people. 

Risa:  10:51

But there are the people who are connected to species loss and witnessing species loss, which there are many people, local communities, especially indigenous people. But I think one area of people that are feeling this eco grief is the conservationists who have been working with these species and watching their populations decline and watching them either get close to going extinct or actually go extinct. And so, I'm interested in that kind of story. Extinction is this hazy, gray concept that we have. But it still is emblematic of some sort of real loss that is happening. And why should that loss matter? And I think the emotions that people do have the people who are connected to these species what they're feeling when they watch these losses happen. I think that tells us why it matters. 

Dr. Biology: 11:35

It's interesting you say that, because I do think people understand loss, especially of animals. They just don't think about the species. So, for example, when you have your family, the family usually includes some kind of pet. If anyone has lost a pet, they know what grief is, they know the sadness in that. 

Dr. Biology: 12:02

Yeah, so if you can just imagine having that many pets or the animals that you really care about, and seeing less and less and less of them when you keep working hard to not have less of them, to actually maybe have them grow in numbers, you can start to get an idea of where this grief comes from and how profound it could be.  

Risa:  12:22

Absolutely  

Dr. Biology: 12:23

Let me ask you have you come across a conservationist that has given up? 

Risa:  12:30

Not yet. I haven't actually been talking to that many conservationists yet. That's the next step in my project. 

Dr. Biology: 12:35

Oh, okay, ooh we get to have you come back to the show, Kayla. Let's go back to our sea turtles. My grandson loves Nemo, oh my heavens. And in Finding Nemo we have the coolest, coolest sea turtles  

Kayla:  12:53

Crush.  

Dr. Biology: 12:54

Yes, yes, see, yeah. And while, I'm not always wild about some of the things that Hollywood does. They get a lot of things wrong. I do like the fact that they get kids at a very young age thinking about sea animals. 

Kayla:  13:15

Oh, absolutely. 

Dr. Biology: 13:17 

When did you start thinking about sea turtles and sharks and rays? 

Kayla:  13:24

From a very young age, so I can't even remember how young I was, but my family took me to the beach and I think that was kind of the first introduction into the ocean. And then I remember in fourth grade my uncle got me a book all about the oceans and I sat down for hours and hours out of multiple weeks and rewrote that book into my own nonfiction book about the oceans. So, I have always had that love of the oceans. Then, when I was in high school, I took a marine biology class and that's when I really fell in love with sea turtles. I'll never forget my instructor. 

Kayla:  14:00

He pulled up a picture of a sea turtle on the board and showed us their throats and I don't know if anyone's ever seen the throat of a sea turtle before, specifically a leatherback sea turtle, but they are just covered in these long spines and it's to help them swallow jellyfish and keep the jellyfish from swimming back up. 

Kayla:  14:20

But I saw that picture and I thought, wow, that is so cool that you know those turtles are so specialized and have evolved that crazy mechanism to help them survive in the wild and I was so impressed by them from that moment. And so, I think that really started my love for sea turtles and then it just took off from there. Got to go on a study abroad in my undergrad and meet my first sea turtle in person, and that was just the solidifying moment for me was seeing a sea turtle in real life, hearing it breathe. It just has this cavernous, huge breath to it that you can feel and that was the moment that sold me. I knew I was going to be researching and trying to save these creatures for my life. 

Dr. Biology: 15:01

Very good, actually, ask a Biologist. We have virtual biomes. You can go into 360 biomes and I was the one that did the marine biome and I have green sea turtles that I got to swim with, which was just an amazing experience and they were so gentle and so super cool actually, right, so if anybody's listening to this and you want to go explore, go check out our virtual biomes, you can. That's all you have to do is type virtual biomes in the search engine and you'll find us. We’ll be number one. 

Kayla:  15:35

Where'd you get to swim with sea turtles? 

Dr. Biology: 15:38

It was in the Bahamas ah, amazing, yes, yes and actually which they have? Turtle grass. 

Risa:  15:45

Oh yeah. 

Dr. Biology: 15:45

And they were actually down on the ocean floor. They were eating turtle grass. 

Kayla:  15:49

Oh, how fun yeah. 

Dr. Biology: 15:50

So, they were chomping down, so they're having a great time. Risa, we know when Kayla got excited about working with her turtles. You have a passion that's not necessarily an animal, but you have a passion for storytelling and writing, and you also have a passion in the realm of science. Has it always been that you have those two entwined, or is it something that evolved over time? 

Risa:  16:21

I think it's evolved over time. I think when I was younger, I have always loved writing. I, yeah, dreamed of being a writer when I was a kid and into high school. But no one tells you to be an English major because you won't make any money. So, I also liked science, specifically ecology, and I've always loved being out in nature and being with the natural world. I thought I would be a conservationist myself for a long time. 

Risa:  16:45

As I got into the program I'm in now Biology and Society I thought it was perfect for me. Because I was like okay, great my frustration with science is that it has always felt so enclosed, right, like it feels like scientists are doing science for themselves and for the project of science, but not necessarily for people. And I think, as I've gone further into grad school, I never thought I would be in grad school. Writing has become a way for me to feel like I can take science out into the real world and not just communicating it without jargon and all these big words, but also communicating stories that are compelling and emotional, that I think people can relate to, makes science for everyone.  

Dr. Biology: 17:25

Right, and I actually think the scientists are very passionate about what they do, think the scientists are very passionate about what they do and they often are thinking about society, but they're just so focused on the work that they lose the focus of storytelling. 

And a lot of the scientists I know are musicians, they're painters, they are writers, and I always say that science and art are kindred spirits, they're not separate. We say you design an experiment. We say that for a reason. I also say that if you are not a creative person, you won't be successful in art and you won't be successful in science. So, yeah, I agree. 

Risa:  18:15

I think that's right and I don't think it's the fault of the scientists themselves. I think a lot of scientists have this creative drive, but I don't think institutionally, like science within universities is necessarily incentivizing people or even giving them the space to explore and do their science in ways that can reach other people. 

Dr. Biology: 18:35

Right right, your publication records are based on publishing in journals. Journals have, over the years, become more and more specialized. If you go back to read Darwin's works and contemporaries of that time, what's very interesting is that they were really good storytellers. Let me ask you two. You both have this passion for science and a passion for storytelling, and you took this and ran with it, using a format that some people might be familiar with, called a story slam. So, let's first talk about the evolution, or the genesis, of the School of Life Sciences story slam.  

Kayla:  19:14

Yeah, this has been an amazing passion project of mine that I've gotten to work on, and I'm so grateful that I've gotten the opportunity to do so. And it all started when a couple of colleagues went to a conference in Washington DC called AAAS or the American Association for the Advancement of Science. So, we went to their meeting in DC, and they held their own story slam. So, we got to go watch a variety of scientists from all different disciplines, all different walks of life, all different stages of their careers even tell stories about their science, about their journeys in science, how they got to be where they are. And it was so inspiring to hear these stories from these scientists and hear about some of the struggles that they went through and how their pathways are not always straightforward. 

Kayla:  20:09

And as someone who is, you know, kind of just starting out on my scientific pathway you know, a PhD to me is just kind of the beginning it was amazing to hear these people share these stories and it gave me hope that I could become a great scientist. So, seeing that we wanted to bring those feelings and that inspiration and that connection back to ASU and back to the School of Life Sciences, and so we did. It took us a while, but we worked with organizations like the Story Collider, which is great. I recommend checking them out. They also have a podcast to bring this event to ASU, and we had an amazing group of graduate students and faculty members that joined us and were vulnerable and shared their stories on stage and hopefully inspired a bunch of other scientists here at our own university. 

Dr. Biology: 21:00

Right, and when I became aware of it, it was Kayla and Risa you two were the ones that were working on this. Risa, how did you get into this? 

Risa:  21:06

Yeah, I didn't go to this conference, but Kayla and our other collaborator, Baylee, is the last one, Baylee Edwards,  

Kayla:  21:12

Yeah we have to shout Baylee out, because Baylee has also been instrumental in creating this story slam as well. 

Dr Biology and Risa:  21:20

Oh, all right, okay, yeah, all right, Baylee yeah. 

Risa:  21:31

So, the two of them had gone to the triple as conference and when they came back with this idea I mean they both know that I'm always trying to do science storytelling stuff so they asked me to join and help out and I, of course, jumped on that, because this is everything I love to do and it was such a rewarding process. A lot of it was us working with our grad student storytellers, helping them make outlines and then write drafts and revise and practice, and, yeah, we gave them a lot of hands-on feedback and it just was so fulfilling to see everyone being so vulnerable with each other and being willing to help each other and creating that safe space for everyone to share a piece of their lives and then do it in front of everyone. 

Dr. Biology: 22:02

Right, and I was fortunate to attend the first Story Slam and I was just amazed. It's the other part of doing science. Ask a biologist. We get a lot of questions that come to us. You can imagine that most of them are about science, but it turns out there are at least 25% to 30% of all the questions we get have nothing to do with science. It's all about the person. What is it like to be a scientist? How do I become you? You know what is it like to be you? Those sort of things. This was a way of doing it. So, as a podcaster, longtime podcaster I wanted to be sure as many people could hear these stories as possible. Which of you would want to talk about what’s on the horizon? 

Risa:  22:51

Yeah, yeah, we're so excited. Well, thanks to you, Dr Biology, helping us get started creating the SciChronicles podcast, where we're having our storytellers record their storytellers to put them up online for anybody to listen to or re-listen to. And yeah, Kayla and I will be the hosts of that podcast and hopefully be able to recruit more storytellers in the future to both participate in our live events but also have their stories recorded for people to hear for a long time. 

Dr. Biology: 23:18

For me. I think of it as an audience of those who think they might want to go to grad school but aren't sure. Those that are in grad school and thinking what have I done? So those are the kinds of things that are really compelling, and I'm just excited to announce that, after you listen to this show, you will have links in this podcast so you can go to SciChronicles and listen to the first episode, which I think is going to be really fantastic. 

Kayla:  23:48

Yeah, absolutely. I'm so excited for this podcast to be available to everyone so that anyone of all ages can go learn about what it's like to be a scientist and what it takes along the journey to be a scientist, and we're so excited to inspire other people as well.  

Risa:  24:02

And also, just showing that it is not a straightforward path, which is my favorite part of these stories, and that everyone who's doing science and these people because it's not just grad students right stories and that everyone who's doing science and these people because it's not just grad students right. We have grad students at different stages, as well as faculty, at different levels of their career, and you might look at them and see what you think from the outside as a traditional group of scientists, but once you start hearing them talk, it's just so clear that everyone is so unique and has so much to say and has lived through so much and are doing science for entirely different reasons. 

Dr. Biology: 24:37

Absolutely All right, Kayla. So, we have storytelling and we have fisheries. I guess we could say it's a fishtail. [laughter] So, tell me a little bit about the link between those. 

Kayla:  25:10

Yeah. So, most people probably wouldn't think that storytelling and fisheries are related. But the truth is, you know, I'm trying to save these species, like sea turtles, but doing that through fishers, and I have to be able to work with the fishers, and the fishers have to be able to believe in our mission as well. And so, storytelling comes into play there when we are trying to, I guess, kind of convince these fishers to work for us or get them to see our perspective of things. And being able to communicate our passion and the reasons behind what we're doing is so important for them to connect with us. 

Kayla:  25:43

Because a lot of times the fishers are coming at it from a perspective of oh, those scientists are trying to shut us down, scientists are bad, they don't want us to fish. But that's not the case. The entire reason I love working in fisheries is because, you know, I love seafood. I want fishers to keep fishing, so I want to work with them, and to do that I have to be able to use these storytelling capabilities to explain to them what I'm doing and what my passions are and kind of get them on my side a little bit. And it really helps if you come at it from a storytelling point of view. 

Dr. Biology: 26:14

Right, just facts, data. They don't spring off the pages and they don't actually engage a lot of people other than other scientists. [Kayla Yep], Good point, all right. There are three questions I ask all my scientists on this podcast, and so I'm going to start with Risa, because, Kayla, you actually kind of answered the very first question and I might ask you if you want to add anything to it. The first question is when did you first know you wanted to be a scientist?

Risa:  26:25

I still don't know.  [laughter]  

Dr. Biology:  26:29

You still don't know. I still don't know. 

Dr. Biology: 26:30

So, do you think you're a scientist? 

Risa:  26:32 

I don't know. I got that imposter syndrome. You know I'm not sure I don't do hard science or lab work, so it feels difficult to call myself a scientist a lot of the time. But I'm trying to own it more. 

Dr. Biology: 26:45

All right, Kayla. All right, Kayla, let's pick up on your turtles. 

Kayla:  26:47

Yeah, so I think I mentioned that I have been really interested in turtles in the ocean since I was young. But I also just want to add that for me it wasn't a straightforward path. I've always been interested in science, but I didn't know that I wanted to be a scientist for sure until really when I was in college, and there was a lot of questioning going into that. But once I figured out my true passion, I think it ended up being my passions that drove me to where I am now. 

Dr. Biology: 27:14

All right. Well, now I get to be a little bit on the evil side. Here's where I take it all away. This is where I want you to stretch, and obviously I'm not really taking it away. It's just. It's a thought question. So, you can't do your science. I'm going to actually have to take away your storytelling and writing for both of you. If you couldn't do any of those things, what would you do, or what would you be? 

Kayla:  27:41

That's kind of an easy one for me. So, I've always had the backup plan of going and being a dive master, so scuba diving and teaching other people how to dive, and that way I can still see the ocean and hang out with the creatures that I love, but maybe in a different way than being a scientist. And you know, when I was young I did kind of imagine that scientists would just be scuba diving all the time, and that's not what I do, but I'm glad that I still get to do that in my free time. But that's definitely my if I ever get tired of science maybe I'll just go do that. 

Dr. Biology: 28:11

Okay, Sounds like a great, great gig. Risa, how about you? 

Risa:  28:18

I don't know. I think I'd love to be working with kids outdoors maybe some sort of wilderness instructor or, you know, even just a guide, you know, taking high schoolers outside and hiking and paddleboarding and showing them local plants. 

Dr. Biology: 28:30

Yeah, yeah, it can be really rewarding. Just a lot of these kids have never experienced it. 

Risa:  28:36 

Absolutely yeah, and I think I mean getting kids into nature is going to save the world. 

Dr. Biology: 28:41

Ah, yeah. So, the last question what advice would you have for a young scientist maybe even younger than you guys, because you're not that old in your career, but they always wanted to be a scientist, or maybe they weren't quite sure they wanted to be a scientist. And since we're talking younger, let's go to middle school and high school. What advice do you have, Risa? 

Risa:  29:08

Yeah, just that science doesn't always have to look like what you think it does, that you can incorporate your passions and your creativity into your science, that they actually help each other rather than work against each other. And even if something like math doesn't come easy to you, that doesn't mean you can't be a scientist. 

Dr. Biology: 29:29

Speaking of becoming a scientist and your interest in how grief impacts conservation science, you have experience with grief. You lost your mother at a young age. How did that change your course in life? 

Risa:  29:46

Yeah, I mean, it changed absolutely everything for me. I was 19. My mom was my whole support system. I didn't really have any other family and so when she got cancer I dropped out of school. I moved to Mexico, where she's from, and I lived there for a while until after she died, and then I eventually came over to Arizona because I have an aunt that lives here and then started school here, which is the whole reason I am where I am today.  I found the biology and society program. 

Risa:  30:10

I found a science writing course; the embryo project encyclopedia (Shout out to Jane Maienschein) and that's really what convinced me to pursue grad school. 

Risa:  30:35

But then, as I got into studying de-extinction and these novel conservation technologies and I was interested in them and I was interested in them in this philosophical definition kind of way, which I still am interested, but I couldn't help but be drawn to this way of studying and thinking about loss and grief, because it's been yeah, just I mean, I'm still grieving. It's been almost seven years now. I'm, yeah, I'm still consumed by grief, so much at the time and I think people don't - I don't even understand grief half the time and I think it's such a transformative experience and it's something that a lot of people stray away from and run away from, but I think it's a really powerful thing. And to think about what it would be like to actually grieve you know all the many things worth grieving in our world right now. It yeah, I don't know. I'm motivated to think about what that would look like because I have been so transformed by grief myself. Right, so using grief in a positive way. 

Risa:  31:05

Yeah, I mean recognizing that it's the hardest thing you'll ever go through.  I'm completely a different person and I think in a lot of ways for the better. I live my life a lot more in the present and I think a lot more about what's important to me because of that experience. And so, yeah, I think if we took that and thought about it in the context of ecology and the world, I don't know I think it could be a transformative thing. 

Dr. Biology: 31:37

Right For a lot of us and if someone wants to get a taste of the embryo project, we actually have Embryo Tales. 

Risa:  31:45

Yes, we do. 

Dr. Biology: 31:47

On Ask A Biologist, which is a great way to get introduced to the embryo project. 

Risa:  31:51

Yep, they're great. I've been working on those for years. 

Dr. Biology: 31:58

Yeah, I know, ask, a biologist is everywhere. Yeah, yeah, all right, Kayla, what's your advice? 

Kayla:  32:04

My journey, there was a lot of questioning. I knew I loved science, but there was a lot of questioning of, well, what type of science and what exactly do I like? And for that I would just recommend just going out there and getting experience in different things, saying yes to opportunities. If you have the chance to maybe join a club that has to do with science, do it. Just see if you like it. Even if it's not exactly what you want to do, it might help you narrow down what kinds of science you like. So yeah, my advice is just to get out there and try stuff. 

Dr. Biology: 32:33

Yeah, I agree those clubs can be really powerful. Well, Kayla, thank you so much for sitting down on. Ask a Biologist. 

Kayla:  33:01

Yeah, thank you so much. I've really had a great time on this podcast. 

Dr. Biology: 32:45

Risa, thank you so much. Thank you. It's great to have both of you here, and we'll be making sure that people know about SciChronicles. [Risa  - Woo], and it's the other part. It's the other part of science. It's actually the part of science that makes science so much fun. 

Kayla:  33:01

Absolutely. 

Dr. Biology: 33:03

You have been listening to Ask A  Biologist, and my guests have been Kayla Berger and Risa Schneble. As we do with all our episodes, we'll include links to learn more about their work and also their new podcast, SciChronicles, a podcast that explores the personal stories of scientists and how their experiences have shaped their work and how and why they became a scientist. 

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. Also, a quick reminder if you have not subscribed to this podcast, please take a moment and do that so you don't miss any of the future episodes. 

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 askabiologistasuedu, 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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Bringing Biodiversity to the City

Dr. Biology: 0:02

This is Ask a Biologist a program about the living world, and I'm Dr Biology. Okay, so from the sounds in the background, you probably already know we're not in the studio and you might think we're out in the field, but that's not the case. We're actually in a backyard, but not just any backyard. This is the home of our guest, Julie Stromberg, and it's pretty much a wildlife sanctuary inside the city. It's also the motivation behind her new book called Bringing Home the Wild, a riparian garden in the southwest city. Now, Julie is a professor emeritus at Arizona State University and a longtime plant ecologist who specializes in wetland and riparian ecosystems of the American Southwest. For this podcast, we plan to take a tour of this wild backyard to learn more about why and how the space was created.

Dr. Biology: 1:07

Hey there, Julie, 

Julie: 1:07

Hi Chuck (a.k.a. Dr. Biology).

Dr. Biology: 1:08

Thank you so much for letting me visit your wild backyard.

Julie: 1:10

Such a pleasure to have you over to welcome you through the portal into our little paradise and oasis in the city.

Dr. Biology: 1:17

You know that's interesting because when I was reading, one of your friends said something that it's like walking through a portal when you come in here. And I can get just an idea, because you know I'm just starting here and actually before we head out, can you tell me how big is your quote unquote backyard?

Julie: 1:35

We have a  backyard and a front yard and side yard! Originally it was 13 acres of dying citrus, but we sold nine and  we're starting from scratch and we now we have four. We have neighbors behind us who have an organic orchard on several acres, but our parcel is four. I envision it as sort of a series of rooms and trails which makes it feel bigger than it is. People get lost back there.

Dr. Biology: 2:02

I can imagine. I'm just looking out right now and I don't even know where we'd start, but talking about being in the city but having the wild here. There's a road out here, there's developments right next door. Yes, it's pretty amazing to me, because that portal really is a portal.

Julie: 2:21

It really is, and there are a lot of neighbors around us that are of a similar mindset to us, including appreciating the fact that the soils here are amazing. They're loam soils, they're fertile. This was a historic agricultural area and there's a tidal wave of dense houses that are encroaching. There's such potential here to have sustainable agriculture, to have ecotherapy, and to have a carbon-capturing oasis in the city. I'm so glad that 25 years ago we did buy up acreage and prevented it from becoming densely packed with houses. Now we have trees and shrubs and birds instead.

Dr. Biology: 2:58

It's interesting because we don't always think about these pockets and how important they could be.

Julie: 3:05

Yes.

Dr. Biology: 3:06

We live in an area where we have county islands and those are interesting because they have not really been incorporated by the cities yet and they have livestock. They have chickens, goats, you name it, it's there, big parcels. Goats, you name it, it's there, big parcels.

Julie: 3:36

And they're interesting because they do help to maintain populations that can’t otherwise easily disperse to new areas because the houses in the city are so dense. We've had so many insects and birds and plants arrive on our property that we didn't plant, and part of that is because when we moved in 25 years ago there was more agriculture in the area, the road was roughly paved, there was irrigation and there were many wild plants that one can also find growing along desert streams. Pollinators and other insects reproduce on our property and then can fly away and can populate others. We need to have these stepping stones of areas where non-human creatures can thrive, disperse and expand, right?

Dr. Biology: 4:08

There's almost, like you've heard, terms of wildlife corridors, and so these are not necessarily a corridor, but they are wildlife pockets.

Julie: 4:16

Yeah, wildlife pockets.

Dr. Biology: 4:17

And I think that's a great thing. Before we actually go for our walk, I do want to get a little bit of a vision for everybody. We know it's four acres now, but what prompted you to do this?

Julie: 4:33

Yes, multiple motivations. During my life at Arizona State University, I was a riparian researcher and I spent a lot of time traveling to rivers around the Southwest. They are beautiful and gorgeous and fascinating. I fell in love with mesquite bosques, which are a type of woodland that borders the Salt River as well as other rivers in the state, and I thought, wow, if I'm going to live in the city, I want to live in a mesquite bosque. So there was that motivation. And I taught restoration ecology and I thought, well, here's a chance to put principles into practice.

Julie: 5:11

Some people say ecological restoration is glorified gardening and in a sense it is. It's not quite that, but I do come from a long line of gardeners. My mother was a gardener and she taught me to love and appreciate plants, and so my gardening fingers just needed a place to be active. Also, when I was doing my research, I went to a workshop about mesquite as a food source for the Indigenous people of the Southwest and for other inhabitants. I've been fascinated with sustainable agriculture for a long time, because industrial agriculture is so damaging and people need an alternative. So I thought, wow, we can have birds in the city. We can have a food forest in the city. We can have a quiet space in the city. The noise of the city is- I just can't hack it. I've got to wake up to birdsong or I'm going to be a grumpy ecologist.

Dr. Biology: 5:58

Okay, no one wants anybody to be grumpy. That's true, I don't want anybody to be grumpy. So, because we're in this wonderful location and it's early in the morning. If anybody wonders, it's like 7 in the morning here and that means it's a little bit cooler, although not necessarily cool and interestingly enough, I saw what looked like some storm clouds. So who knows, we might even get a bit of a desert shower this morning.

 

Julie: 6:32

That would be lovely, right? Oh, the smells after the rains are incredible.

Dr. Biology: 6:37

I bet, speaking of this, let's go, okay, where do you want to go first?

Julie: 6:39

Oh gosh. Well, right here at the gate, we have to stop by the bursara, the elephant tree. These grow wild on South Mountain Park, which you can see just across the road there, and they are an amazing plant with respect to their smells. Here, take a berry and just crunch it between your fingers and take a whiff. Crunch between your fingers and take a whiff. Presumably you're going to relax.

Julie: 7:06

Yeah, and the compounds in this plant, which is in the family that frankincense and myrrh are in, have been proven to reduce your anxiety. It's called an anxiolytic. What a great way to get ready for work as you go out the door. What a great way to start the day.

Dr. Biology: 7:25

And it's a great way to bring your guests in. Exactly. Calm them down right away. Yeah, by the way, when you're listening to this, if you don't know what this plant looks like, we will be putting images in the podcast. We do that sort of thing. If you have an app that supports that, you can see it, or you can go to our website and you'll be able to see them as well. So just keep that in mind. All right, what's next?

Julie: 7:54

Well, let's head out down this path. Right now. One of the lovely plants that's in bloom is the desert willow. That was a short walk.

Dr. Biology: 8:04

It was a short walk, yeah, so I guess four acres you do get to pack a lot in.

Julie: 8:08

We pack a lot in, yeah. So, here's the desert willow- these are trees that are widely planted in the city as a landscape plant. Boy. After the rain the smell is kind of pungent, and just after the rain it's lovely and delicious. The desert willow is one we planted-  so we have a mix of plants that we planted and then the wildlings that came in. We weren't the only ones doing the planting- the birds, the wind, the water brought plants in, and this one that came in, right here, this wildling is called sacred datura.  The rabbits have been nibbling the leaves on this plant, and this plant is psychotropic!

Julie: 8:46

Oh, really, yes, and it's been used historically by shamans. Crazy rabbits, crazy rabbits, so they're having one heck of a party right now! Sacred datura has big, broad leaves. She's a herbaceous perennial, and in the morning and at night she has beautiful big, white tubular flowers that just fill the atmosphere with a wonderful odor and they attract bees and pollinators and they come in and they have a party and sometimes they will get sort of drugged and sometimes I help the bees out of the flower. They’ve had just a little too much and they can't find the door.

Dr. Biology: 9:19

All right. Well, we're going to move on a little bit before I join the rabbits, or the bees here. Right, let me see here what's next, because I mean it is incredibly green it's incredibly lush.

I could think of myself basically out in the desert in kind of those transition zones.

Julie: 9:33

Right, right. Some of our area is irrigated and some is not, so we have moisture gradients, which is part of what contributes to the diversity. So, we'll stay in the irrigated area for a while, and if we just walk a few more steps this way, there's a tree that I call the dancing tree.

Julie: 9:59

I call her the dancing tree but not because the tree is dancing. Although trees do move, they move very slowly, much more slowly than we do. They will close their leaves up at night. They will respond to touch. They're sentient creatures. This is a Mexican palo verde. She's one of the oldest trees on the property, just huge, and I've pruned some of her lower limbs so that we can go up and climb the tree and just sit in the tree and relax.

Dr. Biology: 10:26

And sit in the tree. 

Julie: 10:27

But beneath her there's sort of an open area. One time I had some friends over and they just spontaneously broke out and danced.

 

Dr. Biology: 10:34

So, you were dancing under the tree, so she's become known as the dancing tree, got it.

Julie: 10:39

This is one that some people call ratama, another name for Mexican palo verde. In some areas, some restoration sites one along the Salt River, she's not welcomed. She's been poisoned and killed and removed because she's not considered to be part of the historical flora of the area.

Dr. Biology: 10:58

Now you're bringing up an important point because there's, for those that don't know, there's native and non-native is the common terms that might come up, and there's a bit of a discussion going on to the fact that what is native and what is non-native, and who belongs and shouldn't be there.

Julie: 11:19

Yes, there is, and it's been going on for a while, and it can get fairly emotional because you know, when you're dealing with issues of belonging and attachment, the objective science doesn't necessarily have the last word. The terms native and non-native are not binary. Like many things, you know, it's not black and white, there are shades of gray- there are different lengths of time different plants have been here, different distances they've come. Plus, we're in a changing climate- changing CO2. Much in the world is changing. So what belonged here 100 years ago is not what belongs here now.

Dr. Biology: 11:49

Right, and that's really common with birds. For example, In the Phoenix area we have these rosy-faced lovebirds.

Julie: 11:57

Oh yes, we've had them periodically.

Dr. Biology: 11:58

Yes, yeah, yeah, and they're not native, but they're certainly taken up home in the Phoenix area and there are a lot of birds like that and, in some cases, those birds that were not native. It's important because it turns out in their “native” right now they're having a great big decline in populations of parrots, for example. Many species of parrots are dropping in numbers in their “native” habitats, but they're out in the strangest places, inner cities and all Without that we would have a problem, right.

Julie: 12:35

Migration and adaptation are ongoing and trying to stop it just creates more harm than benefit. People still actually are being taught that sort of very simplistically idea that “native is good, non-native is bad,” and once you learn that it kind of embeds. But it's not true. A newly arrived creature can have an effect that's neutral, positive, negative, and it depends on who is being affected. It's very complicated and we've reduced it to the simplistic idea. You can become sort of extreme. I mean I love native species; I plant them in my yard, but I'm not an extremist. It doesn't mean I'm going to hate the others. Everyone's welcome in our yard except the really, really pointy prickly ones that I could step on.

Julie: 13:12

And also, I guess my driving concern right now is the rapidly changing climate. My motivating factor, if you had to limit it to one, is that I want plants out there who are capturing the carbon, sequestering the carbon, taking that CO2 out of the atmosphere that we're releasing into it when we burn fossil fuels. So if a plant is thriving and doing well and capturing carbon, I'm like, go team. Go, “team carbon capture”.

Dr. Biology: 13:40

All right. So green is good, all right. So, while we're talking about plants, you have another term, when I was reading the book, that I hadn't really come across before, and it's plant blindness. Can we talk a little bit about plant blindness?

Julie: 13:57

Yes, plant blindness. It was a term that was coined by some botanists who were concerned about the fact that to most people, plants are just sort of background material. They don't really notice them. If you showed them a picture of a beautiful forest and it had a little bird in it, they would say, oh, what a lovely bird. And they would say nothing about the plants.  When we even talk about nature, mostly we're talking about plants, you know. Plants are the workhorses in an ecosystem and plants are so critical to our survival. I mean they give us the oxygen we breathe, the food we eat, the medicines, our housing, they function to help regulate the climate and they're so critical to our well-being. But courses in botany are declining in universities and grade schools. If I say the word wildlife to you, like what comes to your mind?

Dr. Biology: 14:47

Oh, you know pointed ears and whiskers and things like that even though wildlife includes plants and animals and fungi.

Julie: 14:55

Anything living that's not something that humans have planted or tended is wildlife, so that's sort of emblematic of plant blindness.

Dr. Biology: 15:02

I mean, we're animals.

Julie: 15:03

You know I love dogs. I'm a mammal. I love other mammals. It's rare to find biologists that really like to focus on the plants, so there's a group of people that are trying to counteract plant blindness and just bring plants to the attention of more people.

Dr. Biology: 15:17

I absolutely love this space with the dancing tree, but I did promise that we were going to do some more walking around here at four acres, yes, so what's the next stop?

Julie: 15:27

We have to visit the mesquite trees.

Dr. Biology: 15:30

Oh, the mesquite tree yes, all right.

Julie: 15:42

These are a species of mesquite called velvet mesquite. There are a lot of mesquites that are planted in the valley that came from South America, but these were the ones that you would have found along the Salt River hundreds of years ago.  And actually when we moved in, most of the trees had died because the irrigation had been shut off on most of the citrus trees, but there were a few velvet mesquite who had survived. And so we have a mix of the original velvet mesquite and then ones that we brought in and now they're reproducing on their own. Right, mesquite trees have really deep roots.

Dr. Biology: 16:14

Yes, right those tap roots that go way, way down so that doesn't surprise me that they were the ones that were surviving and the fruit trees just weren't making it.

Julie: 16:23

Right, and mesquite are an amazingly flexible and adaptable tree with respect to their water. They do have very deep roots, but they also, if the water is primarily on the surface, they will grow roots just below the surface. These plants are making decisions about where to grow roots and they can hear the water. They actually have a two-step process by which they can detect water and hone in on it, and so they're proliferating around our irrigation water, growing very quickly.  Mesquites have low branches- they are not tall like a big redwood tree or something. Their branches fall and sprawl across the ground, so they're as wide as they are tall, which makes it very easy to collect the pods.

Dr. Biology: 17:07

Right right.

Julie: 17:08

So, this tree right here, I call her Kui.

Dr. Biology: 17:09

Kui 

Julie: 17:10

Yes, which I believe is an Indigenous name for mesquite. Here, have a seat. You can see I've cleared out a little area where we can sit under her canopy and have a conversation and climb into her if you want. If Dr Biology wants to go up the tree, he can.

Dr. Biology: 17:29

Yeah, okay, well, maybe later after the podcast.

Julie: 17:35

Notice all the pods on the ground. They're kind of beige, five or six inches long, and over the past few years I've been harvesting the pods, learning how to collect them and clean them and mill them and cook with the flour..

Dr. Biology: 17:52

Oh right, mesquite, flour. Yes, the Native Americans, it was really popular with them.

Julie: 17:57

You can buy a bag online for like $15 to $20 but I'm not in this to make money. I'm driven by the idea of sustainable agriculture. Because mesquites, their roots, partner with bacteria that fix nitrogen, so they're self-fertilizing. You don't have to buy bags of fertilizer and they live for hundreds of years and every year they produce this amazing crop of food, which has protein and complex sugars. It helps regulate diabetes and if you're gluten-free, like I am, it's an alternative to wheat flour, so I eat lots of pods.

Dr. Biology: 18:29

So how much flour have you gotten this year?

Julie: 18:30

So far we've milled 30 pounds, 30 pounds of flour, and it's delicious, and we could have gotten so much more. Each year we learn a little bit better how to harvest. When I was at Arizona State University, I taught ecology. I consider myself an ecologist, but here in our four acres, I am part of the ecosystem. I am eating the food, I am breathing the oxygen that the trees are producing, I am tending them. I'm in a mutualistic partnership with these creatures. I'm not just reading about something or writing about something. I am part of the ecosystem, right, and I can't tell you how lovely that feels, and I want others to experience that ‘wow’.

Dr. Biology: 19:12

So, the other thing I noticed is a lot of birds. I mean, we've been walking through here and there have been at least two or three species that I've picked up there. It's amazing what's going on.

Julie: 19:25

Yes, and Matt, my husband, is the birder of the two of us. He's amazing. We've been keeping a record of all the plants and birds and creatures we've seen on our property. I'm a list keeper. We're up to 159 species of birds that we've seen or heard on our property. Of course, most of those are not residents. Some are migratory, Some we ask, “What are you doing here?”

Yeah, what's the most unusual? Oh, well, gosh. One of them, they're both rare species. One's an endangered species. One is the yellow-billed cuckoo and during the summer monsoon this is the time you will see them. They have an amazing call, kind of like a drumming sound, and they've become very rare. Another one is the southwestern willow flycatcher.

Dr. Biology: 20:15

A little bird.

Julie: 20:16

Little tiny bird, I mean, just gray, you know it's like if you didn't really know what you were looking for, you wouldn't notice it. A lot of the birds I do not notice. Matt points them out to me, thankfully. But this little bird, as the name implies, catches, flies. They feed on insects, and this bird has lost its habitat because riparian forests and woodlands have been converted to agriculture or cities. The water's been diverted. It’s a migratory bird. It flies from Central America to North America and back, and during migration season I'm pretty sure that one stopped at our water drip.

Julie: 20:55

Matt was like, “Julie, you've got to come out on the porch.” This little bird was just darting from the mesquite trees catching insects and he says, “yeah, that's a southwestern willow flycatcher.” We were talking earlier about wildlife corridors and migration corridors, and so our property is functioning as a stepping stone for these avian migrants that need some place to stop and refuel and rest up before they move on to their breeding territory.

Dr. Biology: 21:19

Right, it's a long trip. It is a very long trip, right? Okay, so I hear a little bit of rumbling in the background, so I think maybe we should walk on just a bit more. So, what's the next stop?

Julie: 21:31

Oh, yes, it's a little bit of a walk to get there. We're reaching the western edge of the property where it's getting a little bit drier, but look up.

Dr. Biology: 21:43

And what do you see?

Julie: 21:45

Well, that's, it's a dead eucalyptus tree.

Dr. Biology: 21:49

Okay, very, very tall.

Julie: 21:51

We did not plant it. It was barely alive when we moved in, and it did die from lack of water. But in its death, this eucalypt tree is providing so much life for so many birds. I mean, there are cavity nesting birds that are in there. Hawks like Harris hawk and red-tailed hawks use it as a perching site to visualize their next meal. And it's one that we had a little bit of a conflict with the city over. I mean, having dead trees in your property is not something that they want.

Julie: 22:22

We had to have a bit of a conversation about why that tree should remain standing. This tree is a community landmark. Community is important- knowing your neighbors and having some sense of place and space. Neighbors would walk by and they would tell us stories about oh, that's the tree where the hawks have their nest. It was sort of an anchor for the neighborhood and I think that made a difference.

Dr. Biology: 22:48

Made a difference. Okay, you know you talk about different kinds of birds. I have to say that I have seen some photos from Matt of some owls. Oh, the owls and the baby owls, yes, yes, owlets, is that right?

Julie: 23:06

Owlets, yes, yes, there were four owlets this year. Yeah, let's go into the broadleaf forest, duck your head there- some of the mesquite branches are kind of low. So a little background. These are three Fremont cottonwood trees that actually came from an experiment that one of my graduate students was working on, and at the end of the experiment it's like well, what do we do with the survivors? We're not going to throw them in the trash. So, they came to live at our house and now they're huge trees.  Fremont cottonwood are trees that historically grew along the Salt River, they are an iconic riparian tree, and now they are home to these family of owls and many other birds as well, and this is one of the coolest parts of the yard. 

Dr. Biology: 23:56

Cool as in temperature?

Julie: 23:59

Cool as in wow, this is great. No, cool as in temperature. It's hard to ignore the heat, it's just a pressing concern and I've come out here with students with my infrared temperature sensor and it will be 20 to 25 degrees cooler under this broadly forest canopy than out in the open, and that's significant when it's, you know, 110 or something outside, or 120.

Julie: 24:24

It gets us into this energy use versus water use tradeoff. Some people have said to me Julie, when you were at ASU you lectured about water and water conservation and now aren't you just wasting water?  Well, it might look that way, but we're not wasting water. Yes, it's water that was diverted from the Salt River, but it's going to very good use. I mean not just the bird habitat and the food, but the evapotranspirational cooling and the trees are capturing carbon. There is a tremendous amount of ecosystem services that these forests are providing.

Julie: 25:00

One of the reasons I wrote the book is to talk about these multifunctional spaces. In the city we're so, as a society, compartmentalized, like what we do and also the way we use land. Oh, this land will be used to grow corn, this land will be used to golf, yeah, golf, and then we'll have our little tiny strip of riparian habitat along the River. I like this idea of multifunctional spaces where in one space you can have agriculture, recreation, ecotherapy, climate capture, all in one space, and if many people are tending it and taking care of it, you feel a part of everything. You're not so compartmentalized and separate.

Julie: 25:40

Getting back to this idea of feeling like you're part of an ecosystem and understanding that we need to take better care of our ecosystems.

Dr. Biology: 25:47

Right, that’s actually one of the things we've talked about on shows before. Do community gardens do that as well?

Julie: 25:55

Yes, and with, you know, 8 billion of us humans on the planet we co-opt so many of the planetary resources.  Over half of the water in the streams is used for human use. There's just not much left over in terms of water or space for wild creatures, so there's a big role to play for urban gardeners, urban ecologists, urban dwellers, to share some of these resources with our non-human neighbors and coexist. Urban dwellers need to share some of these resources with our non-human neighbors and coexist.

Dr. Biology: 26:26

So, the storm actually is coming this way, for us. We love rain. Those people out there that don't like rain, you know you can come to Arizona because you won't get a lot of it, but soon you will become a rain lover, because it's something that we don't get a lot of and we love these summer storms.

Julie: 26:45

Oh yeah, summer storms, this is lovely. Yeah, let's walk over here to the chinaberry tree, which is right by the corrugated roof on what we call the pavilion. It's the storage area next to the chinaberry tree.

Dr. Biology: 27:05

Well, it's a good thing we got over here, because there is some rain here, so let's talk about this. You said chinaberry tree. 

Julie: 27:13

Chinaberry tree. Yeah, this was one of the few trees that had survived when we moved in and, as you can see here, this is a big irrigation structure and it's an old system. It's leaky, so even if we weren't irrigating at that time the neighbors were, so there was a little bit of water that leaked and kept this chinaberry tree growing. It was one of those trees that was planted decades ago. It's in the mahogany family. It has incredibly hard wood, beautiful wood, fairly drought tolerant, but also has these big, broad leaves, so it's a very good urban tree to provide shade and cooling but also withstand periodic droughts. It's one of those trees that are clonal, meaning she sends off new shoots. Trees have modular growth, so she sends off those shoots of herself.

Dr. Biology: 27:59

So, she pops up 20 or 30 feet away.

Julie: 28:01

Yeah, yeah. So that's not a seedling, that's just another piece of herself that she produced. This tree is fascinating… we heard the cardinal and we do have this nesting pair of cardinals, which are just lovely. But in the chinaberry actually, what we see every year are robins, American robins.

Dr. Biology: 28:17

I've never seen a robin here.

Julie: 28:18

I know, and I came from Wisconsin and you sort of take robins for granted, so it was just so exciting. And they were feeding on the chinaberries. There are some berries that humans can't necessarily eat but birds can, and this is one of them. We did have one experience when one of our dogs decided to munch on the chinaberries and got a little bit drunk. We took him to the vet and he said, yeah, just let him sleep it off and he'll be fine. And he was.

Dr. Biology:  

Did he learn?

Julie:

He did learn.

Dr. Biology: 28:46

Yeah, okay, all right. Well, that's good. Yeah, one thing about these storms is they're fun to have, but they don't last all that long sometimes. This one seems to be waning. You said that this was an orchard before.

Julie: 29:01

Yes, this was a citrus orchard, and we do have our own little traditional fruit orchard.

Dr. Biology: 29:09

Right, and so I was hoping we'd go.

Julie: 29:10

Yeah, definitely have to go over there. That's a bit of a walk.

Dr. Biology: 29:12

Okay, all right, so we'll start out. You guys get to teleport, we'll do the walking.

Julie: 29:19

Okay, so here's the orchard.

Dr. Biology: It doesn't look like an orchard to me, to be fair. It looks more like a meadow.

Julie: 29:27

Well, when we first moved in I was still using the lawnmower, but then over the years I just stopped mowing less and less. And I remember one time I was out mowing a strip in the orchard so the water could flow better, and I saw this butterfly. And it turned out to be a buckeye butterfly. Just gorgeous. And I thought. what am I doing? Why am I using this machine to just create havoc? So now the orchard has morphed into a meadow. We have some fruit trees- there's a few citrus trees, and then pomegranates, which are just delicious, and then the peach trees which are one of my favorites.

I should try a peach you should definitely try a peach. I hope you're not wearing a shirt you care a lot about, because it's going to drip some juice on you.

Dr. Biology: 30:13

Okay, well, I'll try one. [slurping sound] Very sweet.

Julie: 30:24

And then take a look just to the left of the peach tree. We had an almond tree here. We were trying to grow almonds and the tree just did not fare well, so we left the dead tree there and vines scrambled up and over it and now we have passion vines, clematis vine, we have snail vine that we actually eat the flowers of, and it's just a great substrate for plants, for butterflies and also food for us.

Dr. Biology: 30:52

Right, those passion vines have those beautiful flowers.

Julie: 30:56

Oh, they're amazing.

Dr. Biology: 30:57

And what is it? The fritillary butterfly.

Dr. Biology: 31:01

Yes, the fritillary, absolutely love those, and we have one in our backyard, oh nice. So, Julie, before I forget because I know we could spend all morning, if not longer, on this I always ask three questions of my scientists. Okay, so while we're in the orchard, while it's a little bit calm, let's go ahead and start with the questions. Okay, you ready, all right. So, the first question is when did you first know you wanted to be a scientist? Was there ever an aha moment, or did it just sneak up on you?

Julie: 31:38

Oh, I knew pretty early on when I was a little girl. I would collect data on anything, ridiculous things. Like if I was eating a bag of M&Ms I'd keep track of how many red M&Ms and how many other different colored M&Ms there were. There weren't any questions behind it, but I was collecting data. My father was a history professor at the university and my mother loved plants and I had this sort of data-driven, analytical, questioning mind and so I kind of fused my parents- my father had his intellectual academic path and my mother was a gardener who loved plants and all things wild- and I sort of fused that into becoming an academic plant ecologist.

Dr. Biology: 32:24

Well, the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to be a little bit mean, okay, and this is just a thought question. I’m going to take it all away- you can't be a scientist. Ooh, in this case if you weren't a scientist, I know you'd be easily shifting to gardening and farming, so I'm going to take that.

Julie: 32:45

Okay, you take that way too. That was my next…

Dr. Biology: 32:46

And you've written a book, so I'm going to take some of the writing and I know you love teaching, because most of us that do that teaching and what I'm trying to do is what if I took a lot of these things away, if basically your career, your life, if you had gone another direction? What would you be? What would you do?

Julie: 33:02

I would be a, not a trainer of dogs, a trainer of people that have dogs. 

Dr. Biology: 32:03

Really. 

Julie: 33:05

Yes, because I remember this big decision back in undergraduate like oh, should I be, a veterinarian, or should I be a botanist?

Julie: 33:25

I like to say that the plants ultimately pulled harder than the dogs.  I do spend a lot of time volunteering with dogs at the animal shelter and it's just that the human-dog bond needs attention. People need to be trained and they need to learn dog language and body language and how to communicate. So that's a passion of mine too.

Dr. Biology: 33:44

Oh, I like that. You know, we always talk about training the dog, but we don't really talk about training the dog owner. Yes, oh yeah.

Julie: 33:52

The dog usually wants to please, but you have to be able to listen and understand what they're about.

Dr. Biology: 33:58

Yeah, I like it. I like it. All right. And the last question with your years of experience, you probably have answered this before. What advice would you have for a young scientist, or perhaps someone who is doing something else? They're in a different career. Maybe they were the dog trainer that decides they want to become the scientist. What advice would you have for them?

Julie: 34:28

I would say get outdoors, get off your computer screen, get out of your book, meet people, practice, try things. Internships, volunteer experiences. When I was young, I volunteered at a Schlitz Audubon Center in Wisconsin and it's a supplement to what you learn in lectures and books. So yeah, just get out there and try new things in the real world.

Dr. Biology: 34:59

You know the other thing, Julie. Before I go I usually say my guests go, but in this case I'm going to have to leave this wonderful wild backyard. Would you do me a favor? Could you read a little piece from your book? We've been carrying it around here. It's not a huge book, so if anybody wants to tackle it. It's not going to take them along, it's got pictures too.

Julie: 35:22

Yes, pictures, Photographs. It's not going to take them along.  Yes, pictures and photographs.

Dr. Biology: 35:24

It's definitely worth checking out. So, the rain has stopped enough so that I think you can do it without getting wet, and I'll let you take it from here.

Julie: 35:34

Okay, this is the start of chapter five, which I call The Consumers, and it's Eating Local: Snatching the Bagel. Score! I snatched a whole bagel from the trash can. I can't stand it when people waste food. I hope no one was watching. I was attending an event at an animal shelter near our house while also looking out for my own pack. We have only four dogs, but that is many mouths to feed, explaining why I get excited when I find free food. As I was driving home from the bagel snatching event, I saw a skinny Rottweiler at an overturned garbage can. She was scarfing down scraps. As I got out of the car to help to help rescue, not to help scarf. I'm not that feral.

Julie: 36:14

Yet I pondered the bond between our two species. Food was at the root of our relationship with dogs and remains so today. Wolves hunted with our ancestors, warned them of danger and scavenged in their waste piles. Our ancestors, in turn played with their puppies and ate them during times of scarcity. Ew! One does what one needs to survive, I suppose A strong and enduring partnership ensued.

Waste makes me fret, as does thinking about the systemic changes our society needs to make soon if we are to feed the eight billion of us and our companion animals without irreparably damaging our soil and our above-ground ecosystems too. Not wasting food is one place to start. Going. Very local is good too. We in our own four-acre patch of green increasingly nibble off the land, feasting from the productivity of our deep, rich, alluvial loam prime farmland soil. I don't know if you've tried to feed yourself from your own garden. If you have, you know how much effort goes into producing even a single grain of an edible grass. If you were an urban farmer, I'm guessing it wasn't you who tossed the bagel.

Dr. Biology: 37:14

Right? Wow, I agree. 

As much as I would love to stay around, I am going to have to head on home, and it is getting a little bit warmer here. So, Julie, thank you so much for letting me come out and experience this portal into another world.

Julie: 37:32

Oh, you're very welcome. It's so wonderful to have people come over and to be able to share our space and our vision with them.

Dr. Biology: 37:40

You have been listening to Ask A Biologist, and my guest has been Julie Stromberg, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University. She's a plant ecologist who specializes in wetland and riparian ecosystems. She's also the author of the book called Bringing Home the Wild- a Riparian Garden in a Southwest City. We'll be sure to put the link in the show notes so you can find it if you are interested. I think it's a fun read and a quick read, so it's definitely worth picking up.

Dr. Biology: 38:18

The Ask A Biologist podcast is usually produced on the campus of Arizona State University and 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. But today, well, you can tell we've been out in the wild, but we didn't have to go very far. Maybe we'll get more of these spaces. Think about making your own. It doesn't have to be four acres; it can be small.

Also, a quick reminder if you haven't subscribed to this podcast, please take a moment to do so. So, you don't miss out on any future episodes. 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 askbiologist.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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Charting the Mysteries of the Mind - Unraveling Alzheimer's and Dementia

Dr. Biology: 0:00

This is Ask A Biologist, a program about the living world, and I'm Dr Biology. This episode is, well to be honest, personal for me because we're going to be talking about dementia, including Alzheimer's. It's personal for me because my mother had Alzheimer's. In the early stages, when we weren't aware of her condition, she lived a few miles from our home and then later, when it became clear that she was having some challenges, we moved her into our home. For about a year and a half, both my wife and I looked after her, and I'll say right now that we also had the help of some great in-home caregivers. Now that we also had the help of some great in-home caregivers. After that, there came a time we had to make the difficult decision to move her into a memory care facility and, to be honest, even though that was difficult, my mother, as I had known her all my life was really gone. Now, our experience is not unique by any means.

Dr. Biology: 1:05

In case you don't know, according to the World Health Organization, more than 55 million people worldwide have dementia in some form, and there are nearly 10 million new cases that are added each year. At that rate, the number of cases is estimated to increase to well over 130 million by the year 2050. So what research is going on in this area and are scientists making progress? You might have heard about a new drug that's out for Alzheimer's. We're going to talk a little bit about that. We'll also talk a little bit about what we might do in the future, because one of the biggest challenges with dementia is diagnosing it early Now.

Dr. Biology: 1:50

For our guest today, we have Kimberly Olney from the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she's a bioinformatics scientist in the lab of Dr John Fryer. Kimberly is also an alumna of ASU and the School of Life Sciences. She received her PhD in 2021, and her research was done in the lab of computational evolutionary biologist Melissa Wilson, who has also been a guest on this program. Since then, she's been studying Alzheimer's and another type of dementia called Lewy body dementia, using her skills in bioinformatics. This is a big topic and one that requires certainly more than one podcast episode to cover all that's happening in this area, but we'll at least give it our best effort to introduce you to these diseases, if you don't know about them, and also the challenges we face with dementia. Kimberly, thank you so much for taking time out to sit down and talk with me on Ask a Biologist.

Kimberly: 2:56

Well, thank you so much for having me here.

Dr. Biology: 2:58

Before we begin, let's start with some basic brain anatomy, because everybody knows we have a brain,  but we don't all know what the different parts are. You want to just break it down? We're not going to go into an anatomy lesson, but we are going to talk about some basic parts.

Kimberly: 3:13

So, if you were to place your palm on your forehead and move it all the way back, that would be the cerebral cortex and that is the largest part of the brain and that is involved in language, decision making, and then all the way in the back of your head you can feel it kind of where your neck meets. Your brain is the cerebellum and that's involved in motor functions, so being able to move your hands and things like that. So those are the two main parts.

Dr. Biology: 3:41

Right, and so there's more. 

Kimberly: 3:44

Yes, there's a lot more.

Dr. Biology: 3:45

And so, as a reminder, we have a great story about the nervous system, including the brain, on Ask A Biologist and it's called A Nervous Journey, so you can go check that out. It even has a fun activity that you can do at home or in the classroom, and it doesn't cost anything. A Paperclip, a ruler, and we give you the sheet to work with. All right, so now we have a basic understanding of some of the parts of the brain. Let's also talk about a few terms that get used and how they might be a bit different. There's this global term, dementia, and then there are these more specific types so, for example, Alzheimer’s. So, let's talk about, maybe, some of the different kinds of dementia.

Kimberly: 4:29

Yeah, so dementia is an umbrella term and it's used to describe a set of diseases like Alzheimer's disease or Lewy body disease, and all of those diseases are comprised of symptoms that individuals have, which then get categorized as dementia. And all of those diseases are comprised of symptoms that individuals have which then get categorized as dementia, and those symptoms are cognitive impairment, such as short-term memory, like what did you have for breakfast this morning? And if you're not able to answer that, that might be an indication of early signs of dementia. What kind of dementia depends on the pathology that you have, and pathology, that's a big term. 

So, what is pathology? That is where you have different proteins that build up inside your brain, and that's what distinguishes individuals that have Alzheimer's disease because they have a certain set of pathology, versus individuals that might have Lewy body disease, where they have a different set of pathology.

Dr. Biology: 5:25

Right. So different causes in the brain for it not to be working just right.

Kimberly: 5:31

That's correct.

Dr. Biology: 5:32

And for those of you that don't remember what you had for breakfast this morning, don't worry, you're probably not suffering from Alzheimer's.

Kimberly: 5:40

No, the greatest risk for Alzheimer's disease is age. So, as we age the body doesn't function quite normally and these proteins build up in the brain, so it's really a disease of the age. There are rare cases where individuals under the age of 65 can get Alzheimer's disease, but it's very uncommon. More likely over the age of 65.

Dr. Biology: 6:04

Right, you know some people worry about inheriting dementia. Is that something a person can inherit?

Kimberly: 6:19

There are certain genetic risk factors that make you more likely to have Alzheimer's disease, but the vast majority of individuals have what is called sporadic Alzheimer's disease. That's not an inherited form. It's a combination of both genetic and environmental factors that aren't completely understood. So, there are genetic mutations that you can inherit that do put you at a greater risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, but it's just a greater risk. It doesn't necessarily mean that you will.

Dr. Biology: 6:43

Ah, so in the case of my mother that I spoke about, I don't have to be thinking that automatically that I might have some form of dementia. And, to be clear, I say she had Alzheimer's, but we really never looked inside of her brain after she passed away, which is really the only way you really know if you have Alzheimer's, right, or maybe any of these other kinds of dementia right?

Kimberly: 7:06

To be able to definitively tell, you need to be able to look at the brain post-mortem that means after death and look to see if these misfolded proteins are in certain parts of the brain and that can give you an indication of what kind of disease that they had, whether it was Lewy body, dementia or Alzheimer's disease.

Dr. Biology: 7:28

All right. So, we know about the brain, we know about the different kinds of dementia, but we really don't know what's going on. You mentioned these proteins. Let's talk about what's not working to cause someone to have dementia. 

Kimberly: 7:49

One of the early stages is called amyloid beta plaques. So, there is this protein in your brain, amyloid, and it's supposed to be there. It has a normal function and it normally gets dissolved in the brain after it's done doing its normal function. But what happens in Alzheimer's disease is that it is no longer in this like single form. It has almost like a double form of itself, which makes it really sticky. And then it sticks to other amyloids that are around that didn't dissolve, and then that's what creates the amyloid beta plaques, which don't dissolve. 

So, then they form up and accumulate in the brain. When that happens, they can interfere with the neurons communicating with each other, and when the neurons can't communicate with each other anymore, the neurons then begin to break down, and that's not good, because the neurons are really what makes up the brain and does all the communication and signals, what tells us how to even speak right now or move our hands. So,   when the neurons start to break down, that's when you start seeing the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.

Dr. Biology: 8:57

All right, we have these proteins that are usually there for a reason, but they break down, they disassemble, no problem. But if you're having a problem with dementia, you probably have these proteins that aren't breaking down and they're actually clumping together with other proteins.

Kimberly: 9:16

Yep. 

Dr. Biology: 9:17

And so that interferes with the neurons and then, once the neurons are not working properly, they begin to shut down. Do they deteriorate? What's going on?

Kimberly: 9:28

Yeah, so inside the neurons is almost a skeleton-like structure. They're called microtubules (micro, small) tubules almost like a tube, and there is a protein inside there called the tau protein, and that no longer sticks to the microtubules. So, then the microtubules break down, which then causes the nerve to break down, and then you've got these neurofibular tangles, and the combination of amyloid beta plaques and neurofibular tangles is what defines the pathology of Alzheimer's disease.

Dr. Biology: 10:06

Wow, that was quite a road we're on. So,  I suppose the challenge for scientists right now is first diagnose. Second is actually start to repair or slow down the process before those neurons start to break down, because once they break down, I assume you're not getting them back.

Kimberly: 10:32

That's correct.

Dr. Biology: 10:33

Okay, this is where we enter into something that's good. Right, we have a new drug that's on the market. It's the first one that's been out there to help treat Alzheimer's. Does it only work for Alzheimer's?

Kimberly: 10:47

That's correct. It's only for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. There is currently no cure for Alzheimer's disease, so these drugs are anti-amyloid. So, they're anti-amyloid beta blocks, which are the first hallmark of the Alzheimer's disease. So, essentially, if you give individuals that have early indications of having Alzheimer's disease, of having these amyloid beta plaques which they do have to confirm with like an image of the brain or looking at spinal fluid to confirm that there are amyloid beta plaques in the brain then they can give them this drug that has anti-amyloid. And what the drug does is it targets these amyloid beta plaques to help break them down so that there's less buildup of the amyloid beta plaques. And what the clinical trial has shown is that individuals that received the anti-amyloid treatment versus those that received placebo, essentially no drug, showed slight improvement over the cognitive decline compared to the group that didn't receive the treatment.

Dr. Biology: 11:52

So, it slowed the progress. 

Kimberly: 11:53

It slowed the progress. 

Dr. Biology: 11:55

You know, we've talked about just the basics of a few parts of the brain. How about we dig a little deeper, right? So, what else is going on in the brain? I mean neurons. Okay, You're going to tell me neurons are cells, but what else? What's going on?

Kimberly: 12:13

So, another major cell type in the brain are called glial cells, which is for the Greek word glue. And glial cells have a very important function in that they help to protect the neurons, and the neurons are really important for transmitting signals to other neurons, so that you're able to talk and walk and do all the things that you can do. So, protecting those neurons, those glial cells, those glue cells, help to make the neurons continue to function correctly.

Dr. Biology: 12:43 

All right, and are they involved at all in any of these diseases?

Kimberly: 12:48

Yes, what happens in some of these diseases is that there's a sheath that covers the neurons it's called a myelin sheath and that degrades in these neurodegenerative disorders. So, when that happens, then the neurons can't send the signals as well, because they're not protected as well.

Dr. Biology: 13:08

We've talked a lot about Alzheimer's. What about Lewy body disease? How is that different 

Kimberly: 13:14

Yeah, so in Alzheimer's disease you have amyloid beta plaques and you have neurofibular tangles. In Lewy body disease they often also have amyloid beta plaques and, in some cases, these neurofibular tangles. But what they also have is called Lewy bodies, which is a different type of misfolded protein that forms in the brain, and it's extremely challenging to diagnose individuals with Lewy body disease, as they have symptoms that are very similar to Parkinson's disease. Those symptoms include jittering, motor movement issues. So, they have those symptoms, but they can also have symptoms that are very similar to Alzheimer's disease, such as cognitive impairment. But what really distinguishes the symptoms of Lewy body disease is hallucinations and sleep disturbance. So, they don't sleep very well at night. They get horrific nightmares, and they have hallucinations where they think they see something that isn't there.

Dr. Biology: 14:16

Does it affect the same part of the brain?

Kimberly: 14:19

So, with all of these different diseases, there's different progressions of them, where they start in certain parts of the brain and then they work their way towards other parts of the brain, and it's not one size fits all. Every individual is different of what part of the brain was or was not impaired.

Dr. Biology: 14:39

So, it doesn't always start in the same place.

Kimberly: 14:42

Not necessarily because you can have a different degree of amyloid beta plaques that start in one part of the brain and work their way everywhere, but the neurofibular tangles may be concentrated to only one other part of the brain, but there are stages and phases of these that typically follow a similar pattern.

Dr. Biology: 15:03

Now your area of expertise is in bioinformatics. We use that term a lot. So, in general we're using computers. We have the term bio in there, so it must be something about biology, life and in general you collect and you store and you analyze a lot of information. That's just a thousand foot view. Let's talk a little bit about a life of a bioinformatics scientist, especially the one that's studying Alzheimer's and Lewy body disease.

Kimberly: 15:40

Yeah, so my typical day involves reading literature to see what others are talking about in the field, what they have found. And then a large chunk of my day is also involved in processing and analyzing data, which I do need computers for. If we tried to do this by hand it would take a lifetime if not several lifetimes. So we do use computers, which is essentially like taking really large puzzles, like a bunch, a bunch of puzzles from all over the place, and trying to piece them together. And oftentimes you don't even have all of the puzzle pieces, you only have parts of the puzzle pieces. Then, when you put them all together, you try to see what that puzzle was looking like, what was the story that puzzle was telling you, and then you communicate that with others.

Dr. Biology: 16:28

It's interesting you mentioned puzzles, because at Christmas I play this little trick on my kids and I've done it for many, many years. Basically,  it's with a box of Cracker Jacks. I remove all the Cracker Jacks and, just so you know, I save them so they can have them later, and then I replace those Cracker Jacks with something else in the box that sounds a lot like it would be Cracker Jacks, but it's not. So, one year I actually got a bunch of 100-piece puzzles and what I did is I scrambled them all up and I put them all in the different boxes and it's become quite a favorite for the kids. What I didn't know is maybe I was creating future bioinformatic scientists. So, in this space, if we're talking about data, how much are we talking about? I mean, is there any way to get a visualization of how much information we're having to process?

Kimberly: 17:29

Absolutely so. If you think about your cell phone or your laptop and how many pictures you have stored on there, I'm sure of your friends and family and it's probably happened to everyone where it's like, oh, you've ran out of storage, which is quite surprising, especially in today's technology where you can have almost a terabyte of data on a cell phone, like that's a lot of data that you can have storing tons and tons of photos. The kind of data that we're working with won't even fit on a standard laptop or a cell phone, and that's just for like one project. So, you need what's called high performance computing for like one project. So, you need what's called high performance computing. So, it's essentially stacks of laptops and you use all of those laptops to process and analyze the data.

Dr. Biology: 18:17

Right, a bunch of computers all working together Got it. And then, when we're talking about looking for data and what might be missing, what would you be asking for to make it a little bit more effective?

Kimberly: 18:32

Yeah, so there's very different types of data. Data that I often work with is pathological data. So, what was their pathology scores? So, when they actually looked at the brains, how many amyloids did they have, how many neurofibular tangles did they have, or how many Lewy bodies did they have? So that's one type of data, is their pathology score. Another type of data is sequencing data. That could be information like what kind of variants did they have that could give them a greater risk of having Alzheimer's disease or Lewy body disease, or what genes are on and off, called gene expression, and that assumes all the cell types together. You can also look at individual cells. That’s a different type of data as well.

Kimberly: 19:22

And one thing that we really haven't talked about was their clinical data. What did the clinicians or the neurologists that they met with say that they had? Did they say that they had Alzheimer's disease? Because it's really hard to distinguish between Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body disease and Parkinson's disease. And why is it so challenging to tell if someone has one disease versus the other is because they often overlap in their symptoms, such as cognitive impairment or motor dysfunction, and it's really important to properly diagnose, because the treatments available to them could have adverse reactions if they're not given the right treatment for the right disease that they have.

Dr. Biology: 20:08

Right, and also what their history was.

Kimberly: 20:12

Right, absolutely so. If they were a female, did they have children during their lifetime? Because we know that pregnancy can cause changes in a female's brain hormones. Menopause how did that impact the brain? What age were they when this happened? That's often something that isn't included in the clinical notes, and it's something that I would like to see be included in future data collection.

Dr. Biology: 20:40

What do you see, from your perspective, as the future for treatment of dementia?

Kimberly: 20:50

Well, I recently went to a conference and one of the big talking points at the conference was early detection, because that's so important. Just as you shared, you didn't even know that your mother had the early signs of Alzheimer's disease. So, at the conference they were talking a lot about how can we better understand what's happening at the population scale. If we're only looking at post-death individuals. We're really missing an opportunity to understand what happened before then. So, one of the big things was like wearables, like smartwatches and being able to monitor movement and rigidity that is common in Parkinson's disease. How are people walking that shuffle to really kind of understand the early signs, to give them the treatment that they need, to kind of slowdown that progression?

Dr. Biology: 21:48

Oh, interesting. So,  the wearables other than you know, right now I'm wearing one that will do my heart rate and things like that. But if we have something that's incorporated that starts to detect that I'm doing some kind of behavior, that could, doesn't mean it is, but could be a pre-dementia mode or early dementia or early Parkinson's 

Kimberly: 22:12

Yep. 

Dr. Biology: 22:13 

All right. So how long have you been at the Mayo Clinic now?

Kimberly: 22:17

Three years.

Dr. Biology: 22:18

What's your favorite part of this research? What really gets you excited every day?

Kimberly: 22:24

What really gets you excited every day? What really gets me excited every day is to help enhance health research to help everybody, and that includes males and females, people of diverse backgrounds. It's something I'm extremely passionate about is making health information available to everyone, and that includes the data that we analyze and process has to be a good representation of the population. 

Dr. Biology: 22:52

Okay, so sex differences.

Kimberly: 22:56

Yes. So that's something I'm very interested in is understanding sex differences in these diseases. So,  females are more likely to have Alzheimer's disease and males are more likely to have Parkinson's disease, and Lewy body disease tends to be somewhere kind of in between the two. And what I would like to know, is there certain molecular mechanisms that differ between males and females to why they would be more likely to have one disease over the other, so that we can create better treatments to help treat both men and women?

Dr. Biology: 23:33

Right, this personalized medicine, something a little more targeted. It's not one size fits all.

Kimberly: 23:39

No, exactly, it's not one size fits all, and before we can even begin to talk about personalized medicine, I think we need to include half of the population, which includes females because most research in the past has been primarily focused on white males.  

Dr. Biology: 23:54

Really? 

Kimberly: 23:55

Yeah.

Dr. Biology: 23:56

Well, Kimberly on, Ask A Biologist. None of my scientists get to leave without answering three questions. It's the same three questions, so you ready. It's the same three questions, so you're ready. 

Kimberly: 24:06

Let's go 

Dr. Biology: 24:07

All right. The first one is when did you first know you wanted to be a scientist?

Kimberly: 24:13

Immediately 

Dr. Biology: 24:15

immediately at birth 

Kimberly: 24:17

Yes, ever since I could remember, I think evolution is the greatest show on earth and I just wanted to be part of understanding it. Obviously, I love puzzles and it just seems like the biggest puzzle to be a part of and I just really greatly enjoy it.

Dr. Biology: 24:39

That's interesting. You love puzzles. Do you really love puzzles? Do you do a lot with crossword puzzles and other kinds of puzzles?

Kimberly: 24:45

Not crossword puzzles, more of the cardboard puzzles.

Dr. Biology: 24:49

Jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles. Yeah, yeah, okay.

Kimberly: 24:52

Jigsaw puzzles. My favorite part of my job is the coding aspect of it, because computers are really good about telling you if something didn't work or not, because they're very sensitive to it. So, if you didn't code it exactly the way that you want it to, it's not going to give you the answer that you were looking for. So,  it's very precise and I just really like that meticulous organization of it.

Dr. Biology: 25:17

Okay. When did you start with bioinformatics? Because I bet that wasn't right at the beginning. I mean, you like puzzles, but you didn't necessarily know about bioinformatics.

Kimberly: 25:26

No. So I got my undergraduate degree here at ASU in the School of Life Sciences and that was in biology, and then afterwards I worked as a chemist and I didn't really quite enjoy it, it wasn't for me. And then I got a position as a research tech in Melissa Wilson's lab at ASU and her lab specializes in bioinformatics and I fell in love with it.

Dr. Biology: 25:53

Ah, ok, so you got turned on to bioinformatics when you were in college, 

Kimberly: 25:58

Yep. 

Dr. Biology: 25:59

Well, now I'm going to take it all away. I'm not going to let you use your computers, I'm not going to let you teach. I want to see what you might want to do, if you could do anything.

Kimberly: 26:11

Movie director. Movie director yes.

Dr. Biology: 26:15

Yeah, yeah, because you've got to pull together a lot of pieces to tell the story.

Kimberly: 26:20

Yeah, storytelling.

Dr. Biology: 26:21

Oh, I like that Movie director.

Kimberly: 26:24

I love to storytell.

Dr. Biology: 26:25

Okay.

Kimberly: 26:26

Bioinformatics is one aspect of storytelling.

Dr. Biology: 26:31

Do you have any particular movies? You like the types of movies.

Kimberly: 26:35

Oh, I enjoy all movies. My favorite right now is Dune, part Two.

Dr. Biology: 26:38

Hey, you said you're a storyteller. Do you do any writing?

Kimberly: 26:43

Well, I write papers for the projects that I work on for my job. That is most of the writing that I do, but I do enjoy writing poems every now and then.

Dr. Biology: 26:53

Oh, I should have had you bring a poem. All right, the last question what advice would you have for a future young scientist, or someone that's maybe not even in the sciences but always loves science? What's your advice for them?

Kimberly: 27:10

To keep going and to not be discouraged. So, growing up my parents didn't go to college. They cleaned houses for a living and going to school, especially for a PhD, kind of seemed out of the cards. But I just had the mentality of I'm just going to try, I'm just going to keep going until I can't keep going. And I'm still going and I plan to keep going.

Dr. Biology: 27:38

As a graduate student. If you're talking to another graduate student, what advice do you have for them?

Kimberly: 27:43

It's a marathon, not a race.

Dr. Biology: 27:47

[Laughter] It's a marathon, not a race.

Kimberly: 27:50

One of the other aspects that I really enjoyed about graduate school was the other graduate students here at ASU, and particularly the School of Life Sciences, is such a great community of individuals.

Dr. Biology: 28:02

And it's a big community, right, Because we have a lot of graduate students here. So, is that an advantage you think?

Kimberly: 28:10

I think so. Yes, absolutely so. There's many graduate students, but then you're in your own particular program. So, I was in the evolutionary biology program and in my cohort so the individuals that all started at the same time that I started graduate school there was five of us in our cohort.

Dr. Biology: 28:28

When you graduated, were you thinking you were going to be doing work on dementia, the many forms of dementia?

Kimberly: 28:36

No, so I didn't know much about neuroscience or even neuroanatomy before graduation. My PhD is in evolutionary biology and I got a position at Mayo Clinic in the neuroscience department and I was just extremely excited because I think the brain is a crazy puzzle that I had to be a part of. So, I was really excited to be part of that, but I also had to learn a lot in my first couple of years as well.

Dr. Biology: 29:03

Right, so you get your doctorate, your PhD. You're not done learning.

Kimberly: 29:09

No, learning is a lifetime.

Dr. Biology: 29:10

Well said. [laughter] Well, Kimberly. With that, I'd like to thank you for being on Ask A Biologist.

Kimberly: 29:18

Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Biology: 29:20

You have been listening to Ask a Biologist. My guest has been Kimberly Olney, a bioinformatics scientist and one of our alumna in the School of Life Sciences, who's now working at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, studying two forms of dementia Alzheimer's and Lewy body dementia. Now I suspect, and I hope, that you would like to learn more about the things we talked about today. For that reason, we've put quite a few links in our show notes and I'm hoping that you'll take some time out to check those out.

Dr. Biology: 29:06

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 quick reminder, if you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, please take a moment to do so. That way you won't miss out on any of our future episodes. 

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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From Cicadas to Centrifuges - The Frugal Science Revolution

Dr. Biology: 00:01

This is Ask A Biologist, a program about the living world, and I'm Dr Biology. In today's episode we get to explore a wide range of topics, from insects that shoot jets of pee —yes, you heard that correctly—to a tangled ball of worms that have the answer to a problem we've all faced. I'll let you think about what that problem might be. Along the way we're going to explore how our is also making science accessible to a larger audience, and I don't mean just reading about it, but also doing science. My guest is Saad Bhamla, a scientist and researcher in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

00:52

He's been exploring the world of physics and biology, and, like all good scientists, he's been sharing what he's learned and discovered in research journals such as Science, Nature and PLOSOne, and that's just to name a few. But that's not the only way he communicates what he's discovered or created or developed from his research, and that's where I think we might be in for a treat, something Saad calls the Curious Zoo of Extraordinary Organisms. But before we get to that, let's learn about what Saad and his lab team have been doing and a bit about what they've learned and created. Welcome to Ask A Biologist, Saad. 

Saad: 01:38

Thank you for having me Always enjoy chatting science and science communication with other folks. 

Dr. Biology: 01:43

And so everybody knows they might actually hear it that we're beaming you in via Zoom. You, interestingly enough, have combined a passion for physics with your love of insects, and that sounds like a fun combination to me, but to some people that might seem like an unlikely pair. Let's begin by talking about your work with insects and other tiny animals. 

Saad: 02:08

It's so interesting you phrase it that way because I think there was a particular moment in my life, maybe six or seven, eight years ago, where I realized I had this kind of epiphany that I could combine my interest in studying bugs and weird creepy crawlies and actually kind of unravel and discover interesting physics, mathematics, use them to design interesting widgets, robots, tools, and you could do that sustainably. You could actually do that in a respectable way, a fun way, work with other collaborators, colleagues, students, get resources to actually do this, and when I realized I was like duh, why would I do anything but this? So it's one of those things in life when you see something, it's like a superpower. You're like, oh wait, does everybody know this? And to me it was like a special revelation and I was like well, I'm going to do it. 

Dr. Biology: 03:05

Right, basically the physics of insects and how these other tiny     animals figure out how to do things that, honestly, we don't know how to do yet, and we get to learn from them, right. 

Saad: 03:18

Yeah, absolutely. I think there are two ways we always discuss this in the lab but the team members will say it's not a bug, it's a feature. [laughter] And then the second aspect is bugs especially epitomize nature's physics, biology, chemistry and engineering, right, all kinds of engineering, mechanical, oftentimes very sophisticated engineering, all in one package. But nature doesn't know all these fields and languages. 

03:53

So, we take this living system with all these you know, moving structures and it does amazing things. Maybe it's hunting something, maybe it's just flying or whatever. And our goal is to put these different lenses on and kind of understand, well, what are the physics going on, what are the engineering principles going on? Basically, playing detective which who doesn't like? Like when I was a kid I was all into Sherlock Holmes and trying to figure out puzzles, and to me every living system [or] creature is doing a puzzle, oftentimes with unknown answers or much more complex answers, and we just get to apply these different hats. And we might apply a mathematics hat and we might apply a robotics hat and try to understand nature's remarkable engineers. And, yeah, most times we get some interesting insights, but always the satisfaction of having fun is there. F or whatever that's worth.

Dr. Biology: 04:42  

Right, and I love that it's not a bug, it's a feature. Another thing, because my entomologist friends can get really cranky with me sometimes when we say bugs in general and so I always say to people OK, all bugs are insects, but not all insects are bugs. 

Saad: 05:01 

Right.

Dr. Biology: 05:05

And that's a bit of a riddle and we actually have a story on Ask A Biologist called True Bugs, and I can give just a hint about one of the differences between what makes a bug a bug and not just an insect. And that's true bugs suck. 

Saad: 05:15

[laughter] That's a good one. It's a good bio joke, it's a good entomology joke. 

Dr. Biology: 05:22 

Yes. Let's pick out one of your not necessarily a favorite, but one of your insects that you've been studying. Let's talk about them, because I know there's a large collection that you have been exploring. 

Saad: 05:34

A most recent study, which is a continuation of theme of things. We just published this paper on cicadas and how cicadas excrete or pee in jets. 

Dr. Biology: 05:46

Seriously, they pee in jets. 

Saad: 05:49

Faster than any mammal, faster than you and I or even an elephant. And that was basically the remarkable discovery that these enigmatic insects pee in very powerful, fast jets. And you're like what the heck? But the whole question became like five or six years ago when I was starting, and I actually made an observation in my backyard in Atlanta. I think it was on a basil plant. [I] saw a bug actually flick a droplet of pee from its, you know, we call it the business end and I couldn't catch it. So, I took an iPhone and I tried to use the slow-mo feature because it records at 240 frames per second and that's usually my first tool I use in my puzzle solving. We all carry this phone, a beautiful piece of technology. 

06:35

Zoom in and I can barely see what's happening and I can see a droplet being flicked away and at that point it struck me that this insect was actually peeing. And I had to stop and think to myself I'd never thought actually, do insects pee? A behavior, a biological function I had never associated with insects. It's obvious, of course, my dog pees, I pee. I have a four-year-old change enough diapers in life but never considered that it would be ubiquitous and in hindsight it's so obvious, makes sense. What goes in must come out. And you know, of course organisms should have like feeding and excretion - are the hallmarks of any living system, irrespective whether you're a tiny cell or a giant whale. But I've never appreciated this. So, this is where it all started from. 

Dr. Biology: 07:25

So now we've got this cicada with a jet stream. My question is why, why so fast? 

Saad: 07:35

This is what I find interesting as a scientist. It's partially a selfish thing we do. Why do I want to know why this insect pee? I don't know. I have an itch that I need to solve, but also there is a delight, partially in me and my team members. We want to be the first to figure something out. Because money doesn't give me joy. I have enough money to be satisfied. But what really gives me joy which happens every day, every week and I think is a special power that makes me so grateful to be alive, is that I keep getting these joys of figuring things out and getting an answer and it makes me feel like, ah, it's just this deep, immense joy of knowing something and understanding something about nature, especially of a living system, and so I just wanted to know why this insect has to pee. 

08:21

As with any good story and understanding, we have to kind of appreciate what these cicadas are doing. I think of these cicadas as like a whole civilization of aliens living under our feet, because this year we're going to have these two broods come out, at least for us in North America. I did a rough ballpark estimation because you can estimate per acre, 10,000 or a million, depending on density, I estimated that about a trillion to 100 trillion. That's a lot of zeros. I don't even know how many zeros are there in trillion, but we're going to have like trillions of these bugs come out of the ground, come up and they'll stay for a week or so, mate and die. And I commented to one of my entomology colleagues and I said well, cicadas have such a short life, you know, they just die in a week. And he corrected me. He said cicadas come out to die, they're living underground and that's a fact. They actually have the longest developmental stages of any organism 15 years, 17 years. That's a huge time. They're just living underground, feeding on plant xylem sap. 

Dr. Biology: 09:31

We actually had John McCutcheon on this podcast, and he does a lot of work on cicadas and it's interesting, you call this alien. I think I even said to him they kind of look alien to me and he says, yeah, I think they're kind of cute, but that's me. [laughter] So these cicadas, they come out. This is the final hurrah, right? This is the big date night, right? Or a couple of date nights maybe. So back to our pee what's the story? 

Saad: 10:01

So, cicadas are a group of organisms that specialize on feeding on plant xylem sap. So, just like we have arteries and veins, one of them takes fresh blood from our heart with oxygen to the rest of the body and then the rest is just weighed back to our heart. Plants have a similar vasculature and you've got xylem, which brings us water from the roots all the way to the top, and then you've got the leaves, which are like the kitchen, making all this delicious glucose using sunlight, and then they send this glucose-rich sugary sap in the phloem all throughout the body. Now these glassy-winged sharpshooters another organism, the one I observe in my backyard, cicadas cousins right, Cicadidae, they feed on xylem sap, and xylem sap is very, very nutrient-poor. Basically, it's water, so 95% water because it's just coming from the roots. 

10:57

It's like if you or I were living on just a diet of diet lemonade and not being able to eat any solid foods or any nutritious food. So you have to constantly be eating, constantly be drinking the xylem sap because it's so poor in nutrients, which means that they have to constantly be peeing, because they're trying to extract energy from that little dilute nutrient source and that's why they have to pee so much because it's basically their ecological diet. And this raises lots and lots of questions. Why feed on xylem sap in one place, like if I were a robber, if I knew a castle, why wouldn't I go after the main area where all the rich goods were being transported? Why would I go to the back alley and the back road? You know there's nothing of value and work so hard and there's so many questions we could ask. 

Dr. Biology: 11:49

So, we have our cicada, but that's not the only creature. You've been doing some work with. One of your other organisms that caught my attention, and it's not an insect or a bug, it's a worm, or maybe I should say a tangled ball of worms. And these worms have solved a problem that everyone has had at one time or another, and that is how to untangle a tangled ball, and, in their case, almost instantly. Can we talk about these worms? 

Saad: 12:25

Yeah. So this is another observation I made. I did my PhD and postdoc in the Bay Area, at Stanford, and if you ever go to the Stanford campus, there's a lake. It's called Lake Lagunita, and because for folks in California, you know that there is constant droughts and during those five years of my PhD, drought the lake was dry, just grass. But I stayed on for my postdoc and then one day it rained in 2016. And all the undergrads, grads, faculty, everybody's at the lake, which we know should be filled with water, and it's temporarily filled with water, people are bringing out kayaks and windsurfing. 

12:59

And I had a question. I wanted to know that, in a lake that was, I knew, dry, I had seen with my eyes, and overnight there was water what kind of life would emerge in something that was so-called dead or dry. And so I took a pipette from the lab and I had my empty plastic water bottle and I'm walking around the lake trying to see if there are any bugs and asking myself well, this is an amazing thing, right, like you have desiccation cycles, and how are the organisms living in this crypto state where they're just waiting for water? How are they computing when the water will come? So I saw these worms.  

13:34

They're called California blackworms, which of course at the time I didn't know, but they're very common. They're actually called California blackworms. They're very common up and down the coast and as the water recedes they form up this blob. They just tangle up with each other like a bunch of ethernet cables or your ramen, if you're eating ramen noodles. But unlike those two examples, these are living. So I did what any scientist would do I took a stick and poked at it and they started wriggling away. And there are two reactions to that usually my partner, who basically tries to run away, screaming because I poked a wriggling ball of red worms. I basically was like the happiest person because I knew what my first Ph.D. student's first project was going to be as soon as I start my lab. 

Dr. Biology: 14:22

Right, and so the story of these ball of worms is that they have solved a way of untangling really fast. 

Saad: 14:33

Right. So we brought them to the lab and now we have like millions of them in our lab downstairs at Georgia Tech. We figured out why they do it because it protects them. Survival in numbers and they tangle up and protects them from evaporation and heat. But one day one of my grad students, Harry, actually made a discovery. He actually shown some UV light on this ball of worms and it quickly dissipated. 

14:58

And this was kind of the aha moment because, as we all know, if you have long hair or if you are knitting or headphones, when you put them in our pocket not the Bluetooth ones, but the ones with wire they always get tangled up. It's like this weird law of the universe, like if you have a flexible filament, it will always get tangled up, and the worms tangle up, and untangling them is basically a problem that hairdressers face, that sailors face, that grandmothers face and you and I face. But these worms are able to quickly unravel, and there are beautiful videos on the website, and so the question then became like how are these nature's Houdini's able to get out of this knot that they're in? We want to understand what topological tricks, what biophysical tricks they have up their sleeve, of course, and we figured that out and ask ourselves could that help us design interesting robots, interesting materials? 

15:50

Like, imagine your t-shirt and you could give it a cue and voila like all of the threads come apart. We never recycle clothes. That's a huge problem. Your N95 mask inside, if you ever open it up, it's filled with non-woven fibers. They end up in the ocean. We can't recycle these things. But what if there was a   trigger and all of these fibers untangle and then we could recycle them and reuse them. Give these plastic, polyester filaments a new life. Anyways, those are the ideas, but you think about it from worms. 

Dr. Biology: 16:22

Ah, all right. You talk about these puzzles and figuring out how we might be able to find solutions to problems by observing nature. Another part of your work is tied to health care and the medical sciences. This is something you talk about as the need for frugal science and global health. One of the instruments that came out of this that amazed me is based on an ancient toy that you've repurposed to provide a similar capability as a centrifuge that costs thousands of dollars. Only your instrument based on the toy costs just pennies. 

Saad: 17:05

So, there's this growing moment, our lab and part of other labs that thinks about how do we build medical   devices and, essentially, hardware that is more accessible and affordable. The vision is that for you and I to do science or anybody to do science there are two things I think we need. One is information, which you have. Billions of people today have phones and they're, in some form or the other, connected to the internet, so you get information for free. You could potentially look up what Moderna's RNA vaccine, nucleic acid, amino acids formulation looks like. You could understand how CRISPR works, et cetera, et cetera. But that's not really how we do science. There's another part which is actually doing it. The experience of hands-on science, because you could know a lot of information, but in most aspects of science you require hardware whether it's a microscope, a centrifuge, any number of hardware and that's our perspective that hardware is both kind of an impediment if you don't have it, but also an enabler if you have it, and in some sense it decides who gets to do science. The difference between the haves and the have not and that's kind of our perspective is how do we empower the billions of people we all inhabit this fragile, resource-constrained planet, but not everybody gets to partake in the joy and contribute to the modern scientific inquiry, not that because they don't want to. And hospitals, schools, they all look different depending on where you are. If I were in Afghanistan today, or if I were in Iraq, a hospital in Uganda would look completely different to if I were in Afghanistan today, or if I were in Iraq, a hospital in Uganda would look completely different to where I am in Atlanta. And so the idea is how do we make biomedical hardware different? And that's where frugal science come in.

18:55

The example you talked about a centrifuge. It was the inspiration to create a centrifuge so we could make diagnostics for malaria and anemia easier. We were in Madagascar doing fieldwork for malaria and we had to hike like, I think, like four miles. It's so inaccessible. We had to cross a river. Motorbikes were not accessible. We just had to walk and there were a village of, you know 200, 300 people who've been living there for, you know, almost a hundred years, if not more. Well, how do they get medical access? So you can't just carry a commercial device. So, we were able to think about the challenge and I got this idea. 

19:31

My grandmother used to give me these buttons and threads to play with. We weren't very well off, but it's a toy that every culture has and it has different names uh, very onomatopoeic names like buzz, buzz, run, run and essentially you take a button, you put the thread through and you hold it between your hands right in front of you, and it goes [buzz-run]. The aha moment was that this object was spinning at hundreds of thousands of RPM, all by using your hand, energy and a piece of string and a button. So, we converted into a centrifuge and I think might even have the or used to have the Guinness Book of World Records for the fastest spinning object, using just human motion. Along the way, as with this that we applied our lens of physics, we realized what we've figured out is these strings, which are inelastic, were coiling up and super coiling up to act as a nonlinear spring, which were allowing us to do it. So, we use these physics from DNA to understand how this object worked also showed its application. 

20:33

There's a more recent example that we've spun out a company takes inspiration from a household barbecue lighter and thinks about vaccine delivery, because even today there are billions of people who don't have access to mRNA vaccines because of cold chain issues and lipid nanoparticles that enable this modern miracle that saves, arguably, millions of lives. It still has a lot of issues and many, many countries around the world don't have access to mRNA, and it's supposed to be the future of how we will address epidemics. So we got insight that you could use a barbecue lighter the same device that you use for your 4th of July barbecue and if, when you click it, you hear this characteristic sound and what it is a piezoelectric crystal, and that allows us to temporarily open up tiny holes nano holes in our cells, because we need to put mRNA or DNA inside our cells. These are modern nucleic acid vaccines, and we've now spun out a company, and one of my students is the founding CEO. 

21:28

But the point is that we can take some of these everyday objects and think a little bit cleverly, because these things cost less than a cup of coffee, but hopefully they can scale up in billions, and we're working on efforts to try to translate them and demonstrate that not everything needs to cost a million dollars, and these superlatives are one aspect. Like one of my colleagues used to say, what would you do if you have a million dollars? And that's kind of how Western science works. Our approach is a little bit more Gandhian. We'd say what would you do if you just had a dollar? What can you do with that? So, we apply this box and then we have to think outside the box. 

Dr. Biology: 22:01

Okay, so back to our worms. 

22:04

That's an interesting segue right Because you talk about in order to be able to do science, you have to have certain instruments, and not everyone has them. So if you can build these instruments that are very inexpensive, you can open up a world to a lot of future scientists. You also have another way you are opening up science to a wider audience, and that's something you call the Curious Zoo of Extraordinary Organisms. This is a place where you have transformed a typical science article, some might say boring article into a comic book that is accessible to a wide audience. So, can we talk a little bit about your Curious Zoo of Extraordinary Organisms? 

Saad: 22:58

This was one of those crazy ideas that once in a while we have like these brainstorming sessions in our group meeting. We call these things super happy, fun time, where you know we do the science and then every group meeting we'll have like a little bit of time allocated. We give ourselves permission to come up with crazy things. And in this spirit, I thought wouldn't it be amazing if, like each paper when we publish this, we had comics? Because the realization was that I'd publish these papers and I'd be so happy and next day I'd check my paper to see you know how many people opened it, read it, just because you know we're all a little bit vain. And I'd realize, like three people opened it, maybe four, and no kid, no young person I know will ever actually go to science or nature and like, oh, let me open up this issue and read it from cover to cover. And so I thought, well, I really want to share my science. I really want everybody to appreciate this beautiful system, these insights. It's so amazing, but I can't expect them to come. 

23:59

And sometimes these things are behind paywalls, the barrier is so high. Well, why do I have to wait? Why can't I do something about it? Why can't I put money where my mouth is? I was like wouldn't it be amazing if each paper had a comic? You could read a paper. We make videos, but why not a comic? 

24:13

And comics are amazing for many, many, many reasons, and why stop there? We translate them. Why not multilingual comics? I write a lot of Panchatantra and Hindi comics and wouldn't be amazing if they're not just about historical fiction and fables, but actually had some science mingled in it, some bugs, some stories about how scientists solved these things, what it meant, and amazing if it was in Telugu or Tamil or Arabic or Mandarin. There's this hegemony of things and so, anyways, that was the idea, and, as we sometimes get caught in these things, we started doing this and we had so much fun. Now, for each paper, we make a comic, and it's sometimes in life we have good ideas and then now we're just doing them and asking ourselves what have we started? Because it takes a lot of effort to make these things, as you probably know very, very well. 

Dr. Biology: 25:11

Right, and you mentioned something important A lot of people don't have access to certain journals because you have to have a subscription and they're not inexpensive, and so that's one of the reasons why it's so great that you're creating these comics. The other thing, I think, is this really good exercise to distill down the essence of what you're communicating to scientists in a way that everybody can understand, and the format of a comic fits very nicely, because I suspect that it's not something that you do just overnight. It takes a little bit of time to think about what is the story and how can I tell it in an engaging way or a fun way. 

Saad: 25:50

Sometimes we do these things for others, but at least I think, 90% of the things I do, I'm very honest. I do them for myself and for my kids. My kid, my four-year-old, loves reading books. I read to him, like last night right, he won't let me stop. And, yes, I will show him videos. I have the Khan Academy app. We play games when I'm biking with him and we're on the train station. But I do want him to have something tangible, something he can engage with, something so beautiful. It's like a work of art, but it's not stuck to a screen. One day I'll hope I write a book, but for now I'm going to make a comic, because it has all these characters and I'm not bounded by lines and margins. And I can break rules and I can add puns and jokes and I can put all my dad jokes in there and that's basically why I do it. 

Dr. Biology: 26:35

Okay. All right. So, Saad, before you get to go, all my scientists have three questions that I ask of them. So, are you ready?

Saad: 26:45

I'm ready, 

Dr. Biology: 26:46

You're ready. Okay, when did you first know that you wanted to be a scientist? And I always say, it's kind of this aha moment, and it may not have been an aha moment when you were that age, but when you look back on it you go, oh yeah, that's how I got started. 

Saad: 27:02

I was an undergrad and it was my first research experience and my mentor at that time this was in Pune, India. He basically gave me the independence to try an experiment. I was actually studying dough. The idea was that in South Asian continents, like if you think about India, we make a lot of flatbreads, and if you go towards the other continents in Asia, like China, you'll see a lot of noodles. And the question was well, how did these societies decide they're going to take the same amount of wheat, but one will make flatbread, one will make noodles. And the kernel of insight over there was that it's in the gluten and the starch and the rheology, which is just the ability of how we process these materials, that shapes what kind of foods we make. And so my project was on something like that, and so I was hooked because it was such a beautiful puzzle to think about our food and how material properties shape the kind of shapes we make out of food. And I was just like, oh my God, this is so cool. I was just hooked. And my advisor goodness, he gave me so much independence. 

28:13

That was my first taste for science and some of my advisors when I was in India, at the research institute. They used to say stuff like for the love of science, and I'd be like I don't understand what they're smoking. What do you mean for the love of science? And then I get it. At that time I was too young to figure out what they were talking about, but it was just seeing them do this and I was like I don't think they're being paid that much to do it. But I just saw them so happy and get this delight and they were so on and it was like they were alive and I was like I need to be in on whatever this drug they're on and basically I felt like they would never age and they would never run out of puzzles. And so that's how I got hooked. 

Dr. Biology: 28:46

Right, I always say I'm easily amused. Just the tiniest things that you can discover, it's like wow, that's just amazing. You know I'm a microscopist, so I do a lot with a microscope and you know there are a lot of days I get to go see things that no one else has ever seen before, or at least I get to see it first, which is cool. 

29:12

Yeah, all right. So, we're both passionate about science. You're starting off on your career, but I'm going to take it all away from you. This is just a thought question, so no one panics and I'm going to take it all away. And I always take away teaching, because almost everyone loves to teach that I have been talking to. So if you weren't a scientist and you can't teach, what would you be or do? 

Saad: 29:32

I would be an artist. I would love to make movies. I just watched Dune. I love the Matrix movies, Lord of the Rings. I'm fascinated by how we communicate ideas through different mediums. Fundamentally it's just a bunch of vibrations, right Like a bunch of jiggling of electrons and atoms, but somehow encoded in there is like a profound idea that a person or a small group of people can communicate and transfer from one brain to millions, if not billions, of brains and help them experience through all their senses. To me that's just so crazy. To me making videos. To me using the medium and the art world to tell a great story and convey this idea, to make somebody feel excitement, happy, sadness, I don't know. I find that so fascinating. Like if I had another world, I would be an artist of some sort. Yeah, I just I think of my science as an art. 

Dr. Biology:  30:3 0

I can't fault you there, because my undergraduate degree is in fine arts, so I'm a painter and a sculptor and a photographer, and more photography these days than anything else. 

Saad: 30:42

I knew I would like you. You're growing on me. 

Dr. Biology:

30:47

All right. So the last question what advice would you have for a young scientist, or perhaps someone who always wanted to go into science but didn't know how to go down that path? 

Saad: 31:00

I think the best advice I always tell students is to be yourself. I'm grateful that I'm in a place where I can be myself. I'm a chemical and biomolecular engineer who study bugs and worm balls, and I always tell my students you just have to be the best version of yourself. You don't need to be some version that you think your parents want to be, or your teachers or your brother or sister or friends, because it's so easy to be influenced and it's okay. Sometimes we try to aspire, and every time we fail to be like somebody else, we become a little bit better version of ourselves, and so people have these ideas a scientist should look like this, should talk like that, should wear this. 

31:39

That's nonsense. Anybody can be a scientist and there are different levels of science. Citizen scientists exist. High school teachers do science. You do science anywhere on the streets, under a tree. You could do science in your kitchen, in your backyard. 

31:53

History is full of that. You don't need to be in a particular building which has some university stamp on it that tells you okay, now you're allowed to do science, you don't need any of that. And so, if you remove all of that. Suddenly you realize, okay, well, I don't need permission and you don't need to look like X and there is no way to do science. 

It's so easy to say but so hard to do. But it's like the most amazing thing, once you figure this out, that really you can have your flavor of science, you can have your smell of science, your taste of science, whatever that means, and it's actually makes science even better to have a scientist, because they say you know the lion by the claw for a great scientist, and I think that means something. Essentially, I think you can't decouple the science from the scientist, and so it's important to be genuine and find your own thing. 

Dr. Biology: 32:41

Well, on that note, Saad, thank you so much for being on Ask A Biologist. 

Saad: 32:45

Thank you, Dr Biology. Thank you for having me. 

Dr. Biology:  32:48

You have been listening to Ask A Biologist, and my   has been Saad Bamla, a scientist and researcher in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

33:12

Saad's also the creator of a fun series of comics that make up The Curious Zoo of Extraordinary Organisms. Now I bet you will want to see Saad's work, especially those comics, so we'll add links to them in the show notes. 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. 

Also, a quick reminder here if you have not subscribed to this podcast, please take a moment to do that so you don't miss any of our future episodes. 

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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In the Swarm's Shadow - Locust Science

Dr. Biology: 0:02

This is Ask A Biologist a program about the living world and I'm Dr. Biology.

Dr. Biology: 0:06

The insect world is filled with many amazing animals. Some are strange-looking, at least to some of us, and there are others that are beautiful. Yes, we know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There are those that can fly and others that can walk on water or even upside down on a piece of glass. And then there are those insects that can hop and fly like your common grasshopper, or for some parts of the world, locusts. 

Under most circumstances, we may not pay attention to these animals, but when locusts swarm and in large numbers, they can turn the sky dark. It's almost like twilight. These swarms have a big appetite and can eat just about anything they find. Locust plagues have been causing problems for humans since well, the pharaohs led ancient Egypt. Today, they can be just as destructive to crops and, for that reason, a risk to food supply and safety. 

Today I have not one, but two experts who are studying locusts and who can help us understand the complex roles these insects have in our ecosystem. Rick Overson is a research scientist in the College of Global Futures and part of the Global Locust Initiative at Arizona State University. Mira Word Ries is also part of the Global Locust Initiative and is the project coordinator for this team of researchers. Rick and Mira are also the creators of a new online tool called HopperWiki. You can think of it as kind of a locust central. For this episode, I have Rick in the studio and Mira is joining us remotely from the field. Next up, we explore the world of hoppers, grasshoppers, and locusts. Welcome to Ask A Biologist, Rick.

Rick: 2:07

Fantastic to be here, Dr. Biology.

Dr. Biology: 2:09

And Mira, thank you so much for joining us remotely.

Mira: 2:12

Thank you, Dr. Biology. Happy to be here.

Dr. Biology: 2:15

All right before we explore the world of grasshoppers and locusts, maybe we begin with the fundamental question. They may look the same to some of us, but grasshoppers and locusts, I suspect, are a little bit different. Who would like to give us the basics of grasshopper and locust physiology?

Rick: 2:35

Yeah, so one of the fascinating things about locusts is it's basically just a very special type of grasshopper. So, there's thousands of grasshoppers. Depending on who you ask, there's about 19 species of locusts, and you would never know it from looking at them. So, they’re tough survivors. They persist in really hot, dry areas like the Sahara Desert or the Sahel region, which is hot and dry, a massive area. They sort of live there at low levels and then, when times of opportunity come, and times of plenty come, they are able to respond to their environment in this dramatic way. 

So, they can change color, they can change their brain chemistry, they move down a different path and they morph into this other form. They become attracted to one another and eventually they can start to march across the ground in massive formations and, if these good conditions persist, eventually they become adults and can take to the skies.

Rick: 3:39

And so, this ability to turn into this other morph is something that only grasshoppers few can do. It's an ability that's coded deep in their DNA, and so a lot of times when we think about traits that DNA codes for, we think of, maybe, someone's height or their eye color, but this is a very different type of thing that is called phenotypic plasticity, and scientists like to make up complicated terms for things. That phenotype is just your form, and plasticity is like plastic. So, if you think about something that's plastic or mobile, and so a researcher thinks that phenotypic plasticity is this ability to morph into this completely different form in response to the environment. 

Dr. Biology: 4:25

Right, malleable. They have the ability to change.

Rick: 4:36

Right.

Dr. Biology: 4:27 

So, there are these two different forms and I think I read that when they are individuals they’re in their solitary state. Then when the conditions are right they become more social and form these huge groups that can become swarms – and then we use gregarious to describe them. 

Rick: 4:48

Exactly, scientists’ kind of think of these two different forms as solitarius and gregarious. The solitarius form is something that we would think of as sort of grasshopper normal. What it normally normal does for a living is it hangs out in the field, it nibbles on plants, and this gregarious form is what we usually see or think of when we're thinking about these locusts.

Dr. Biology: 5:11

So, Mira, where do we find grasshoppers and where do we find locusts? Because I'm getting the idea that all locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts. So where are we going to find them today? Because I'm assuming they've changed over the years.

Mira: 5:14

Yeah, that's exactly right. Here in the United States, we used have a locust called the Rocky Mountain locust, but that is extinct now. We have plenty of grasshoppers of here in the US. Many of them are pests in the rangeland western United States but they are not technically locusts, although you may see them sometimes covering highways and even fence posts and causing trouble on grazing lands and crops. 

But typically when we think about locusts, as Rick said, Africa has many different types of species of locusts. Primarily we think of the desert locust as being somewhat troublesome, and the Middle East, in India, Pakistan, the Caucasus, in Central Asia, and China. There can sometimes be a locust in Europe, the Italian locust. At the moment there's also a locust that causes trouble for agriculture in South America and in Central America.

Dr. Biology: 6:35

So, Rick Mira mentioned the Rocky Mountain Locusts. When were they active?

Rick: 6:41

Yeah, so the first stories and reports I think started up in the late 1800s and then by the early 1900s, short time after they darkened the skies, they mysteriously went extinct. Kind of a forgotten chapter of American history that was very dramatic at the time and halted westward expansion for a time. It was written about in Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder, but now is largely forgotten.

Dr. Biology: 7:09 

Alright, so we'll get back to these locusts. We know they're around the world. They're not in North America so we don't have them there, but we have them in quite a bit of mainly dry areas.

Mira: 7:23

Some of them, but they also do well in some hot and humid climates, like in Mexico, the Central American Locust. So, we primarily think about them as being desert adapted species, but there are differences across and so we can't say always.

Dr. Biology: 7:41

I'm going to ask this question, you're going to say, well, if we knew that answer, we wouldn't have to do more work. [laughter] What causes locust swarm?

Rick: 7:49

Yeah, that is a big question and I think it's one of the fascinating things about working in this space of trying to understand these dynamics. So, for perspective, I think we, as you mentioned, know about these swarms going back to the time of the Old Testament and the Quran they were written about, but certainly these locusts were doing this for eons before that. They're a natural part of ecosystems and so they've been swarming and doing this thing since time immemorial.

Dr. Biology: 8:24

But we don't really know exactly what triggers it.

Rick: 8:27

The main thing, if you had to pick one thing, to say that triggers it, especially in the case of the two locust species that are most economically important and most damaging, is rainfall. And so, they are able to survive at low levels in these dry areas, as we've said, but they also can quickly respond to their environment and capitalize on these dramatic rainfall events that turn desert areas into lush oases overnight.

Dr. Biology: 8:55

So once a swarm starts, how do we stop it?

Mira: 8:59

That is the million or, I guess, billion-dollar question because often that is what it costs to control these types of outbreaks. So, if you think about locusts, they don't know the difference between countries and borders and people and places and languages. So, it turns into a pretty big effort to coordinate across different countries, oftentimes, like in the case of the desert locust, where the campaigns end up being a lot of manpower and a lot of organization and really trying to control these locusts with pesticides, unfortunately. 

So that means spraying them by plane and also with folks going out on the ground and actually looking for them in often really remote and hard to reach places. So, you can kind of see the challenge where these very highly mobile creatures are off to the races, eating everything in sight, and we're usually a few steps behind them trying to control them. So, it's a big effort indeed and often it triggers a pretty big emergency.

Dr. Biology: 10:08

All right. So, I guess the answer here is catch it early.

Mira: 10:13

That is exactly the answer. So, we talk about preventative management a lot, and that means working together with forecasters, who are paying attention to weather patterns and where rainfall is going to hit and where we think locust outbreaks are going to originate, and then doing everything we can to be prepared and launch these control campaigns early.

Dr. Biology: 10:37

We talked about these swarms. I talked about the skies going dark, but have you seen the skies go dark?

Rick: 10:43

I have never seen the swarms. What I have seen are the marching locusts, which are very impressive, hundreds of thousands of individuals marching across the landscape. But the scales of these swarms in the desert locust outbreak are very hard to exaggerate. So, you can imagine these are large grasshoppers, like the size of a man's index finger. But hundreds of millions of those locusts will look like dust or smoke on the horizon and they will fly by for maybe three hours at those densities. And that's one small subswarm in a larger outbreak area. So, you can have these areas of hundreds of square kilometers where small swarms the size of Manhattan are flying around in a larger outbreak that can last for years.

Dr. Biology: 11:36

Wow. Mira. What do locusts like to eat? Or maybe I should say what don't they like to eat?

Mira: 11:42

Well, when they're swarming, they will eat the clothes off clotheslines. So, they essentially will eat everything in their path. But if you want to get into more nuanced nutritional ecology, we could have an earful for you.

Dr. Biology: 11:56

OK, so do locusts have a favorite food besides clothes on the clothesline?

Mira: 12:01

That could arguably be the doughnut diet, and it may be because of their fueling up for their marathons of migration, which is something that we are investigating here in our lab at ASU and around the world.

Dr. Biology: 12:20

Now there might be some people listening to this podcast who have visions of locusts swarms converging on the local doughnut shops. But that is not why we call it the doughnut diet. So why do we use that name? 

Rick: 12:31

Yeah, so I think one of the things that's interesting is that locusts can be thought of as vegetarians, so they largely eat plants. So, if we think about like a human who's a vegetarian or a vegan, someone might be concerned that they get enough protein in their diet. And so that's what researchers thought about locusts for a long time they thought, well, they're eating grass, they must really be hungry for protein. But it turns out that continuing research by our team at ASU and other collaborators and colleagues have shown that in many cases, especially when they're in this adult form where they're needing to travel long distances, they actually prefer to eat a carbohydrate or sugary doughnut diet and they perform better when they eat these sort of more sugary foods.

Dr. Biology: 13:26

So what Miro was saying? It's kind of like the marathon runner they want to build up on those carbs so they can do those long marches or flights. Right, got it. So, they're wow, so many of them and they can eat the clothes off your clothesline. Hopefully, not the clothes off your back. What have farmers been doing about this on their own? Is there anything they can do on their own?

Rick: 13:56

Yeah, so when you see, for instance, when these outbreaks get to extreme levels that we've been talking about, there's not very much that can be done. You see sad images of individuals that are trying to shoo the locusts out of their fields or bang pots and pans, and then, as Mira mentioned, there's a lot of pesticides spraying for control campaigns. But when things get to a level of a huge swarm, it becomes very difficult, even with massive coordinated efforts, to sort of punch back this locust swarms. You're almost metaphorically fighting a massive fire.

Dr. Biology: 14:35 

Right. Again, it's really important to stop these things before they even happen.

Mira: 14:42

There is an idea where, if we're looking at the locust management from a preventative standpoint, then we can think about how farmers are managing the land and the soil specifically because in the soil we could have a reservoir of nitrogen with different soil management practices that help build that up and then therefore those plants might be higher in nitrogen and less appealing to those locusts. So, from a long-term sort of sustainability perspective, there are things that farmers can do to help manage local populations where those fields and crops that they're growing may be less appetizing. The more we think about working and using locust biology against them if you will.

Dr. Biology: 15:35

Miro talks about working with quite a few people. One of the things about science research is people have this vision of the lone scientist in the lab and it's no longer the lone scientist. There's quite a few people, that typically teams like your team, but beyond that, you also have to engage other participants if you really want to be successful, in particular, with locusts. Let's talk a little bit about the teams that you have to have in order to make this work.

Rick: 16:06

Yeah, I think this is one of the things that's really fascinating about the locust problem. At face value it seems deceptively simple, other than the fact, as Mira mentioned, that these bugs are really good at growing. They come out in huge numbers. They can move across many countries. So, there's these problems of scale, but the locust challenge is also even more deceptively complicated than that, in some ways down at the level of even locust brains and the behavior of an individual insect that is interacting with something that's almost meteorological or almost like a weather event in scale. 

And research over the last decade or so by our team and others has shown that, perhaps not surprisingly, there are connections between the way we behave as humans and locust outbreaks. And so, as I said before, these are natural processes, locust outbreaks, but humans through modifying the climate and through modifying the way we use the land for agriculture and ranching, we are modifying the frequency and the places where these outbreaks happen. So, one of the ways to work at solutions to more sustainably managing them involves working with all of the people that these areas overlap with, so farmers, politicians, people who make decisions about the land, researchers and many others.

Dr. Biology: 17:37

Right. It doesn't surprise me. It also gets us back to what I was talking about at the beginning of the show, and that's Hopper Wiki, what I'm calling locust central. [laughter] You and Mira created HopperWiki. Whose idea was it first?

Rick: 17:54

We might have different versions of that.

Mira: 17:56

Oh, it's Rick. Rick is the wiki wizard, as I call him.

Rick: 18:00

I think the idea of doing it arose pretty organically. During the last desert locust outbreak, which happened during COVID. As an insult to injury. It was a large locust outbreak in Africa and the Middle East that lasted for multiple years. At the Global Locust Initiative here at ASU, we received a huge amount of requests for emergency information and help. There was a lot of chaos in the panic of all the coordination that needed to happen. And so, we started to put files and resources and fact sheets and pesticide manuals and grasshopper identification guides in Dropbox folders and Google Drives and eventually realized the need for a place where all of these people that we've been talking about can access a central location of information.

Dr. Biology: 18:55

Right, so we're talking about hopperwiki.org. Mira, you have been really working on Hopperwiki. Let's talk a little bit about your involvement.

Mira: 19:06

Yeah, my involvement has been working along with Rick since the idea came to be, and Rick is the mastermind, which I feel like he understands all the things under the hood. So the nuts and bolts of the technology, of how we write, code and script and how things work together, and I am not that, but I am definitely devoted to creating content, thinking about the design, being able to think about the user experience, and, of course, we're both thinking about these things, but this is something that I've really gone in deep, so doing some writing and trying to make the experience great for our users.

Dr. Biology: 19:52

Because it's a wiki, I'm assuming you're going to be asking the community to actually contribute to the entire project. How do they get started?

Mira: 20:06

That's a great question and we are so excited for this next phase. It's as easy as going to hopperwiki.org and clicking on the right. There's a button that says request an account, and that's a great way to just get in touch with us and then we can start the conversation from there. So, we're really looking for folks with expertise in any of these sorts of disciplines that touch on locust biology or social science or management or any different perspective from all these different stakeholders that we've been mentioning are an important piece of the puzzle. We want to hear from you.

Dr. Biology: 20:47 

Okay, you named a lot of the I would say the science community. What about farmers, ranchers, politicians, have them chime in?

Rick: 20:58

Yes, we would absolutely love that, and we actually have another website that has been a small success. That's about two years old now. That's called Hopperlink, that we jokingly call LinkedIn for locusts, and that is more of a private social network for many of these people who work in this area. We have representatives from the UN there, representatives of farmers groups, researchers, students, grasshopper enthusiasts all communicating there. So, we would very much like to engage that community and anyone of interest within the sound of my voice to help produce content on Hopperwiki.

Dr. Biology: 21:39

Let's hope this gets some people interested in participating. 

Before the two of you get to leave, there are three questions I always ask my scientists. I'm going to start with Mira. 

Mira, the first question is when did you know you wanted to be a scientist or involved in the world of science?

Mira: 22:02

I think I could pinpoint it to working on a tea farm in Ecuador and I was digging around in the soil, and we were taking samples to think about how the soil ecosystem is impacting the plants that they were growing. And I just thought that was so cool that I wanted to continue digging around in the soil. And when I got back I started applying for master's programs and I luckily got connected to Dr. Cease and her work with locusts and soil and ecology and I got hooked.

Dr. Biology: 22:46

All right, Rick, I know you're hooked. When did you get hooked?

Rick: 22:50 

When I was three years old, I had my first memories of fistfuls of worms and mayonnaise jars filled with beetles, to the chagrin of my mom escaping in the house. So,  I've always been obsessed with insects. And it was later on as an undergraduate I majored in biology and my parents didn't go to college, so I wasn't really sure how grad school worked, and luckily I met the right professors in my junior year and realized oh my gosh, this is the thing you can do for a living. You could study insects for a living, and the rest was history after that.

Dr. Biology: 23:27

Okay, so now I get to the second question. I'll stay with Rick, and this one is where I'm a little evil. [laughter] I take it all away. Yeah, you know If you've listened to the show. It's a thought question, so no one freaks out. I'm not actually taking your job away or career. [laughter]

But I'm going to say you can't be a scientist, you're not going to be a teacher, because everybody falls back into the world of teaching, which is wonderful. I love it. So, what would you be, or what would you do, if you weren't a scientist?

Rick: 23:56

Whoa, yeah, that's the hardest question I've ever been asked. If I couldn't be a researcher. I love the outdoors, so I would be very interested in working with groups of people to go backpacking or mountain climbing or do things in the outdoors.

Dr. Biology: 24:17

Right. Run those adventure excursions for people that like to go out in nature. 

Rick: 24:18

Exactly. 

Dr. Biology: 24:19 

Yeah, [it would] be good. All right, Mira, you got a little bit of a reprieve. You got to think about this for a little bit. What would you be or do?

Mira: 24:32

I don't even think I would have had to think about it, honestly, but I love digging around in the dirt, so I think being able to be a full-time gardener and hobby farmer would be my calling. I'd probably adopt a herd of sheep and a few horses and chickens and goats and just have a full on menagerie. So that would be my dream. I know that farming is the hardest job in the world and a shout out to everyone who is doing that full-time and I would love to learn more about that and grow food and just be connected to the animals and the land.

Dr. Biology: 25:13

I like that and you're in good company. A lot of my guests have said that they'd like to be a gardener or a farmer. So, Mira, the last question. You ready? 

Mira: 25:28

Ready. 

Dr. Biology: 25:29

I want to know what advice you'd have for someone who wants to be you. And to be clear, you're a project coordinator. Let's talk a little bit about the job of a project coordinator and how someone could become you.

Mira: 25:47

A project coordinator gets to do a lot of different things, because what are we doing? We're coordinating projects, so that means that I'm not always in the lab or doing science directly, although sometimes I get roped into field seasons and get to collect data and catch locusts and all that good stuff. But ultimately I like to help put the spotlight on our research that the team is doing. So that means helping with projects like HopperWiki to get educational resources out to the public, to work on our website, to write content, to work with students. I just get to have my hands on a lot of different things. So, I really enjoy that part of the job.

Dr. Biology: 26:34

So, I would say you're a wrangler right? 

Mira: 26:44

Yes. 

Dr. Biology:  26:14

In your theme of farming and ranching type of thing. You're the wrangler. How does someone become a wrangler?

Mira: 26:45

I think, follow your curiosities. If this is something that speaks to you, then that's what I did, and I really am a proponent of that sort of philosophy of follow the breadcrumbs and eventually you'll be led to something that is a good fit for you and has a lot of potential to satisfy your different curiosities. If you're like me I've never been able to settle for one thing so doing something that has different outlets and ways to work with different people then just keep on one step in front of you.

Dr. Biology: 27:21

All right, Rick, you got your reprieve this time. What advice do you have for future scientists?

Rick: 27:30

Yeah. So, I would share some similar sentiments to Mira. This is possibly a non-answer, but I had no idea that I would have this job today when I started even college or even started grad school, and so everything that I'm involved in today came through hundreds of interactions of like taking risks and getting involved in projects and meeting people and constantly kind of figuring out, as Mira is saying, like what things do I find rewarding. I always knew that I loved insects and I wanted to work with insects, but it's not easy to just finish college with an entomology degree with insects and then just start with a company immediately. And so all of this is kind of following your passions, getting involved, volunteering when that's feasible, and networking and figuring that out.

Dr. Biology: 28:28

Yeah, in particular, the volunteering and the networking probably leads to more success in getting the career you want than just about anything else.

Rick: 28:36

Definitely. 

Dr. Biology: 28:37

On that note for the two of you, thank you so much for being on. Ask A Biologist, Rick. Thanks for being here.

Rick: 28:42

Absolutely fantastic, thank you.

Dr. Biology: 28:45

Mira, thanks for beaming in.

Mira: 28:47 

Thanks so much for having me.

Dr. Biology: 28:48

You have been listening to Ask A Biologist, and my guests have been Rick Overson, a research scientist in the College of Global Futures and part of the Global Locust Initiative at Arizona State University. Also joining us remotely, we had Mira Word Ries, who is the project coordinator for the Global Locust Initiative, and the two of them have been creating what I call Locust Central, or what they call Hopper Wiki, and for those listening in, we will include a link to HopperWiki so you can pop over there and check it out for yourself. 

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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Capturing Curious Minds: communicating complex science

Dr. Biology: 0:01

This is Ask A Biologist a program about the living world, and I'm Dr. Biology. On this show we spend most of our time talking with biologists and other scientists about their work, but there is a part of science, in fact, part of what we call the scientific method, that we also need to talk about. In case you're rusty remembering the parts of the scientific method. They are observation, question, hypothesis, prediction, testing, conclusion, and finally communication. 

Now, in science, communication usually involves writing a scientific paper that is submitted to a science journal for review and possible publication. This helps others learn from your work. Now, the problem with this is that papers are generally written for other scientists and even a particular group of scientists who do research in a very specific area, so they use really technical terms and things that a lot of us may not understand. This often results in a very technical paper that a limited number of people would or could read and understand. 

There are people, science communicators, who do specialize in communicating science beyond the science community. They have the role of taking that highly technical paper and communicating it in an accessible way. Maybe even more important, a good science communicator can tell a story about the research in a way that is fun and exciting to learn. 

My guest today, I think, will be perfect for diving into this topic of science communication. James Gorman is a science reporter. He was on the New York Times staff for 28 years, working as an editor, reporter, and host of the video series ScienceTake, which I hope we get to talk a little bit about in this podcast. He is also the author of seven books that cover a wide range of topics, from dinosaurs to penguins, to name just a few. Today, we'll explore the challenges and rewards of telling a good story, a good science story. Welcome, Jim, and thank you for taking time out to join me on Ask A Biologist.

Jim: 2:30

Oh, thank you for having me.

Dr. Biology: 2:33

So, first of all, I have one big question in three parts. [laughter]

Jim: 2:38

Okay, I'm ready.

Dr. Biology: 2:41

So, I'll tell you what it is, how should we communicate science? Okay, that's the big question and we're going to break it down. The first one is how do we communicate science if we're the science writer or communicator? How should we communicate science if we're the scientist right? And then, finally, how should someone consume science content today? So, let's start off with how should we communicate science if you're a science communicator.

Jim: 3:08

Accurately. [laughter] As a science communicator I mean you're essentially or as a science reporter, a science journalist. I mean people cover many different aspects of science. Some are more on the politics and funding and how scientists act, the ethics of it. My career has always been on how cool is that sort of science, explaining the actual scientific investigations and what scientists have found out. So, the most important thing is that you have to be accurate. When you're talking to people who don't have a scientific background, you've got to find a way to make it interesting and appealing, but it always has to be accurate and I would say that's the first thing that you have to do.

Dr. Biology: 3:52

Right, and when you say interesting and appealing, can you give me an example of something you've done in the past where you took something that probably wasn't going to get consumed by the public, the general public and, with a twist, you actually can tell a really cool story?

Jim: 4:09

Sure, I mean, that's sort of the definition of the job. I can think offhand of a video that I did. We did this series of videos ScienceTake at the Times and it involved fruit flies and aggression and looking at genes and how genes were affecting the expressions of aggression. So, this is a really complicated and the work was done with a high level of sophistication and it's the sort of thing that writing about it is going to be really tough. 

You could, and you can, paint any picture in words, but we did it as part of a series called ScienceTake and we had video from the scientists so we could see the process of their research and one of the things that they did the way they gathered the data about how the fruit flies were behaving was they looked at male fruit flies fighting and they're great to watch. It's like watching a little boxing match with fruit flies. So, that immediately catches the attention of the viewer. And then you can go into some of the detail. You can show pictures of the neurons, you can show some of the things that they found out in terms of the genetics, but you've got that immediate hook. So that was one way to make it interesting.

Dr. Biology: 5:33

Right, that visual picture.

Jim: 5:35

Exactly.

Dr. Biology: 5:36

And in this case it truly is a visual picture. So now let's turn our attention to the scientists, because anybody who listened to this show I have a tendency to pick on scientists. I say they're great at doing science, but they aren't necessarily great writers, which is not a good thing. Because I still say it's good for their science colleagues and it's certainly going to be helpful for the rest of the world to understand what they're actually doing and, quite frankly, why it's cool, because most of the scientists really love what they're doing. It's important to be able to communicate it. So, what's the advice for our scientists?

Jim: 6:12

Well, scientists. I think they have a responsibility to talk to the public about their work, and actually most of the scientists that I've encountered are really anxious to talk about their work. They enjoy it. The thing is that they've been trained to speak to their colleagues. That's what your whole career depends on. You have to present your findings in a very precise way and you have a shorthand, the scientific jargon, which is incredibly useful because you don't have to use a paragraph to describe something. You can use one word. To the average reader you have to say what a genome is or what proteinase is or something like that. 

But as far as I know, there's not enough emphasis in science education for researchers, in communicating to the public and learning that you  have to meet your audience, where they are. You have to tell them a story, you have to use the language that they use and you have to leave out some of the details. Now, you don't want to mislead anybody and you don't want to be incorrect, but the things that are very important to you, the exact percentages or the particular computer program that you use to analyze the data, are not going to be of interest and they're just going to make the reader or the viewer, sort of their eyes glaze over. 

It's easy to say, very hard to execute. You speak in simple language, directly. Use the active voice, say what actually happened. I mean scientists tend to talk abstractly about the grand concepts and the import of what they're finding. They need to also say well, in the lab we poured this red viscous liquid from one container into another and then watched as it transformed itself into a gremlin or whatever. The point is, you're telling a story, you're grounding the viewer or the reader in a specific, concrete example of what you do and how you find out what you're looking for.

Dr. Biology: 8:10

Right, painting that picture, putting them in that place.

Jim: 8:15

Right.

Dr. Biology: 8:15

Yeah, absolutely. We just did a workshop with you earlier today. I was thinking scientists out there could actually do it for themselves by recording themselves.

Jim: 8:24

Yeah.

Dr. Biology: 8:25

You want to talk a little bit about what we did for an exercise? And all I'm saying is why don't you do this, record it and listen to it, because they'll immediately start hearing these words that are a problem.

Jim: 8:36

Sure, this is an exercise that I stole from another writing teacher and I can't remember who that writing teacher is. So, wherever you are, thank you. But you write down the 15 or so words that are most important to your field, for instance genome, proteome, whatever field you're in the sort of the terms of art that you use to talk to your colleagues. Write them all down on a piece of paper. Then you try to tell someone about a recent finding and its importance and why they should be interested in it, without using any of those words. 

Now you can do this in a fun way. I've done it in class where we have little buzzers and every time somebody uses a word that's too technical, bezzet, or you can just keep an eye on it yourself. But you see, time and again it's remarkably difficult not to use the words that you're used to, because that's how you think of your work. So, to change it into a story, it's very hard to switch to that way of speaking. 

So sometimes when I'm interviewing scientists, I ask them to explain it as if they were talking to their niece or nephew or a smart eighth grader. And if you do that, you realize that actually you do have the vocabulary and the way of talking about these things to people that don't know the terms of art. So, if you imagine yourself sitting across from your favorite nephew and explaining how you figured out the biological basis of aggression and fruit flies, you're going to talk in a completely different way and you'll find that it comes very naturally, if you can switch yourself to that frame of mind. 

Dr. Biology: 10:16

Right. So out there, scientists, you're practicing. Go get a recorder, Do the exercise. Listen to yourself, and I think you will find that you need to do some practice. Now the last part of that three-part question what advice do you have for someone who's consuming science these days, consuming science articles that are not written by scientists?

Jim: 10:39

Well, that's the hardest question of all. It's a lot easier to say how you're going to deliver good information. How are you going to tell whether you're getting good information? One thing is that you can, and this is less and less true of how people consume news, but you can rely on a particular publication that you trust. Where you think the writers and reporters are doing their due diligence, they're talking to the scientists, they're asking the right questions and they're giving you information that is reliable. 

That's a little bit of a shortcut. If you're coming upon an article somewhere and you have to decide well, is this something legitimate, is this reliable or not? There are different things you can for. One is what is the source of the information? Is a scientific journal quoted? Can you look it up? Did they give you a link so that you can see what kind of a journal it is? There are journals with very fancy names. They're not real. But if you have the opportunity to go to it, the reporter has at least provided you that background. So, you know, okay, that's a good thing. I can go to the original research if I want to. 

Another thing is to look for sweeping generalizations and kind of avoid them, and particularly when you're consuming health news. You know there's not really a huge issue like in the evolution of how crickets jump. If you get that wrong and you read something and you think, oh my god, I know how crickets jump and it turns out you don't, you got it wrong. There's not a lot at stake unless you're a cricket researcher. But one of the biggest problems in health reporting is when people say Three times as many people died from whatever the cause was, if they were coffee drinkers and you go oh my god, three times as many people. But really it was one in a billion people who died if they didn't drink coffee, and three in a billion who died if they did drink coffee. If you look at it that way, you think, okay, what do I care? Three in a billion, one in a billion so I'm exaggerating to make an effect. 

But it's one of the biggest problems reporting on health when that sort of information, in that perspective and context, is left out. Another thing is the difference between and this is correlation and causation. You know, you have many studies where you show that, well, people who live longer exercise, okay, but is that because they're already healthier and that's why they're exercising? Where's the cause and effect and how did they figure that out? So really, I think you have to question, you have to look at their credentials of the publication, whether it's online or in print, and see if you know, if you're familiar with them, if you know who's reporting, and then you look at the kind of information that's presented. You have to develop a kind of detector, for I guess I can't say what you're supposed to detect, but you know nonsense. A nonsense detector, that's it.

Dr. Biology: 13:44

Yes, oh, I like that. A nonsense detector. In essence, this is back to digging deeper. 

Jim: 13:49 

Yeah 

Dr. Biology: 13:50

Take a little bit of time to make sure you get all the facts and information. You mentioned a little bit about ScienceTake. 

Jim: 13:58

Mm-hmm. 

Dr. Biology: 13:59

This is a collection of short videos. Let's talk a little about ScienceTake. First of all, why'd you start it?

Jim: 14:06

Well, that's really interesting. It wasn't my idea. It was actually the idea of one of our photo editors who was very involved in the visual aspect of things, and we all knew at the time when we started it that there was a lot of video out there available from researchers. For instance, the ScienceTake that I mentioned, that was called fight club for flies. So as part of their experiment, they were videotaping and then analyzing the videotape of the fruit flies in combat. And there are many other scientists who do it for a lot of different reasons. So there's a lot of video out there. 

As reporters, we would look at a new paper that was published. We would see okay, here's the results, here's how we can tell the story. But look, they have a clip of the New Caledonian crow bending a wire and we can actually see it happening and we can see how smart the bird is. We can also see how the experiment is being done. So, there was this availability of a lot of really cool looking video. That was really useful, I think, to explain how science works. And there was also, at this time, the publications, like the Times and everybody else was looking for ways to get more people to click on their stories. That's also a big part of it. And cool video. You know, if you're looking at your phone or you're on your computer, you're gonna go to cool video. 

That's always gonna pull you in. And we found that over time how appealing the video was, how interesting it was to look at, was really significant in terms of how many people watched it. Which may seem like the dumbest, you know, duh, of course, but you know we tend to think of science, reporters and a scientist that it's how important is the conclusion? How important is the actual science is being done? And those are all parts of it. But the visual impact was really important. So how did we use that visual impact? That was something that, in the end, really surprised me because I thought, since we were doing these things, I would narrate, do like a little news item of a discovery that scientists had made. Talk over the videos and you could see what the flies were doing, or the salamanders, or the frogs or the parrot. And I was worried that because the visuals were so important and the time was so short that scientists would not appreciate this kind of dumbing down of their work and that we wouldn't be able to convey enough of the essence of the science to make it you know, valid, really good reporting, instead of just entertaining. 

Because if you look on YouTube or TikTok or whatever platform you're looking on now, you can see a million cool cat videos and lots of different things, some stuff that says it, science, some stuff that is science, some stuff that's not. So how are we going to make it so that it was really useful? And we found out two things. First of all, scientists. I checked everything with them so we'd go back and say is this right? Is this right, is that right? So, we were very careful to get it correct. 

But scientists were very happy to see it presented in a way that essentially a middle school student would enjoy. I would say that was our target audience. You know smart middle school student. So, we loved creepy crawly stuff. You know bugs, ticks, stuff like that, cockroaches doing karate kicks to fend off wasps. The other thing we learned was that you tell a short story and you can get maybe one idea in one scientific idea. But that's good enough. I mean, if you're getting somebody and you're giving them one sort of Interesting scientific idea in a minute, that's fun and it's useful. 

And the other thing that we figured out, which I think was even more important was that and this is going to be obvious to anybody who's a filmmaker or photographer who's not a text person like me was that the images carry a huge amount of information. So, we're delivering a view of how science works, of what's actually going on in the lab. You are seeing an experiment going on, instead of just the dry words that describe why flies are aggressive. You are actually watching the flies fight, and that video contains so much information about what the behavior was, how they were looking at it, how they were categorizing it. 

At the beginning, I was fixated on the idea that this should do exactly what a news item does, which is it should deliver what the finding was and how they found it out. And by the end, it seemed to me that the more important thing was it was showing the process, it was giving you a window. People who watch these things could see science at work. So, by being careful not to get anything wrong and knowing what to leave out, telling a simple story, we could deliver something that was entertaining, really fun to look at, gave you a glimpse that you didn't even know you were absorbing of how science works. And had one central idea, one scientific idea. 

So, I think we managed and, judging from the feedback from scientists and middle school science teachers, who are my favorite people in the entire world, I have to say they're the best. Judging from the feedback, we succeeded in not misleading anybody and having correct information, but finding a way to simplify it so that you're delivering only one piece of the information.

Dr. Biology: 19:35

And you mentioned that part about the process of science how important that was. We had an earlier podcast with Joe Palca. [The] same thing talking about this and part of the reason why we started Ask A Biologist and in particular the podcast is scientists don't do this because it's boring, they don't do it because it's hard, they do it because it's really cool and fun to them. And karate kicks by a cockroach to another insect. I'm sure they're just as excited about seeing that as the viewers that when they watch the ScienceTake.

Jim: 20:10

Absolutely. And the other thing that it captures I think in all science writing should capture and should focus in on, is that what's exciting about science is asking the questions. It's not just the answers, it's not a body of knowledge that we've found out. As you say, what makes scientists? Why are they doing it? Because it's really interesting. They want to find out. Well, how do cockroaches defend themselves against wasps? How do fruit flies fight? What genes come into play when they're fighting? They have all these questions they want answered and it's a process of asking the questions and figuring out how to ask the questions that make science interesting. 

Also, if you see that and you're a middle school student or anyone for that matter when I read something about science, I know that somebody was actually working. They didn't just come up with this answer. There was a process that they went through. It's a way of asking questions. Science is a way of asking questions and getting answers, and you get a good glimpse of that with video. You can do that in writing as well, of course. I mean, that's my job. I was the writer and I had to learn to not describe what was already on the screen but to write in a different way, but I think that was the best thing about ScienceTake really was the way that it emphasized the process.

Dr. Biology: 21:29

Yeah, you talk about the process. What are some of your rules or best practices that you follow when you're writing your stories or preparing for a video?

Jim: 21:38

Well, I guess the first thing is you do as much homework as you can. You have to read the paper. You don't want to have to ask questions that you could have answered by reading, because that's a waste of the scientist's time. On the other hand, you have to not be afraid to ask dumb questions in two ways. One if there's something you don't understand, you have to be really clear about it when you're interviewing. You don't pretend that you're the expert, and I made this mistake a lot as a beginning science reporter. I would try to talk the talk. So, we're talking about the evolution of spiral galaxies. Boy, I want to be in there. 

And I listened to my interview afterwards and I didn't get any of the questions answered that I wanted in. But scientists didn't say anything in comprehensible language. So, I had to learn to ask dumb questions and not be afraid to ask dumb questions. But also, even when I knew the answer, if I wanted to see if the scientists could say it in a way that people would understand because it's always appealing to have the actual researcher talk to you, not just the science reporter to learn to ask questions and say can you explain this in again? We're talking about talking to your nephew or something like that. So, the two preparations [are] doing all your homework, but then not pretending that you've learned the subject, knowing how to ask dumb questions and elicit responses in the normal colloquial speech. 

Dr. Biology: 23:08

It's interesting because it doesn't take much for me to be outside of my comfort zone, even though I'm in the world of biology. There are so many areas of biology, so it is important to ask those questions, because it doesn't serve anybody any good if you don't get the answer, because you're not going to be able to convey it in any way.

Jim: 23:31

Exactly right. So, I have written a lot about the evolution of dogs and wolves and ancient DNA and I would often find myself saying, okay, I get the idea that you've figured out by comparing DNA, you've sort of figured out how close wolves are to dogs. But you get into this section where you describe the statistics and what you actually did. I'm lost. Please can you explain that to me, so I don't have to give all the details, but I have to give people some idea of what you did. And why should we believe this? I mean because we can just say fancy statistical analysis showed boom and we can't go into all the detail of it because nobody's gonna get that. 

But I wanna get some understanding and I have to sort of be clear about my ignorance, and my ignorance is a valuable thing in many ways because I'm the representative of the reader. What I shouldn't have is ignorance that I could have remedied by doing my homework beforehand. I don't wanna have that kind of lazy ignorance, but basic, representing the point of view of the layperson. That is valuable ignorance.

Dr. Biology: 24:37

Now, we've talked about articles. We've talked about ScienceTakes. You're also an author of books. To name a few, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to be Forever.

Jim: 24 :54

Right.

Dr. Biology: 24:51 

Ocean Enough and Time Discovering the Waters Around Antarctica. And The Total Penguin.

Jim: 24:58

Ah, the Total Penguin was on my favorite.

Dr. Biology: 25:00

Well, that's exactly what I wanted to ask you about - Is The Total Penguin. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that book.

Jim: 25:07

Oh, the Total Penguin. I had some of the most fun ever. At the time I was freelance, I was not on staff. I was looking for work and I had an agent who had been involved in a previous book that I had done and I said you know, I'm looking for work. And she said well, so-and-so, they're gonna do a coffee table book on penguins, and would you be interested in that? And I say, yeah absolutely. 

So, we go to meet with the editor at the publishing company and this is the only time in my life I think I've ever thought well on my feet in this kind of circumstance. But she said, well, would you need to see them in the wild? And I immediately said, oh, absolutely, I have to. You got to go to Antarctica. How much would that cost? Oh well, I'll check it out. And so, I went on this three-week cruise to Antarctica and that gave me a lot of the physical detail and the sort of emotional appreciation of the penguins and that contributed to the research that I did on all the different species and so on. So, it was a lot of fun. 

The one drawback was that I thought, and this has nothing to do with being a good science writer, but with human frailty, I'm gonna be on this cruise and I'm gonna be the guy who's writing the book on penguins. This is gonna be cool. I'm gonna be like a mini celebrity. So also on the cruise was a writer named Diane Ackerman who was writing the story on penguins for the New Yorker, and so I was the other writer on the cruise. Anyway, it turned out to be a great experience and I really fell in love with certain kinds of penguins and part of the fun was looking through the old accounts of explorers where they gave everything, including recipes for how to cook penguins and how tasty they were, which is a strange thing, but not so strange if you look at like Audubon's work. I mean, he sometimes includes recipes. 

Dr. Biology:  27:06

Speaking of penguins what is your favorite? 

Jim: 27:09

Rockhopper. 

Dr. Biology:  27:10

Rockhopper. 

Jim: 27:11

The Rockhopper. If you see them, they have these tufts of hair coming out of them. They look as if they had dyed punk kind of hairdo and they're very vociferous. Vociferous, I mean incredibly noisy and raucous. And they're aggressive in defending their nests. And one of the previous explorers talked about walking through a rockhopper colony and then attaching themselves to him like terriers, clamping their jaws in this case their bills on his sleeves, and that he could swing them around and they wouldn't let go. As I said, some of these early explorers had great descriptions. One of them talked about how they had landed and they saw many, many large penguins and they could knock down as many as they wanted with a stick. It really gives you a glimpse into another world.

Dr. Biology: 28:02

So now, Jim, on Ask A Biologist I always ask three questions, and it's typically of my scientists, so we're going to modify this just a little bit. So, you're ready, 

Jim: 28:14

I'm ready.

Dr. Biology: 28:15

Okay, these are the same three [questions] at the end. I stole this from James Lipton. They're not his questions, though.

Jim: 28:21

Right, right.

Dr. Biology: 28:22 

When did you first know you wanted to be a journalist and were you always interested in science?

Jim: 28:28

I have to say that I was always interested in science to a certain extent. I mean, I was a kid who was always interested in the natural world. But I didn't have a plan to be a journalist. I planned to be a famous novelist, as many of us do. But it turned out after I got out of college and started work on science fiction. Novelist turned out. I was sitting there typing away at my typewriter and my funds were disappearing and I thought, you know, I better get a job. What am I going to do? What am I going to do for a living? 

So, I had been editor of my high school paper and I was interested in writing, of course, and so I thought, all right, well, you know, I'll get a job on a newspaper. This was in the days when the only kind of mail was snail mail. So, I sent out many letters and applications. Went to a few interviews, but the only really positive response I got was from a tiny weekly newspaper in Madawaska of Maine that there are two bumps on the top of the Maine map and it's on one of the bumps. It's way up there. That was my first job. I was there for about six months and it was 24 below zero and the snow drifts were six feet high and I thought maybe I can go move to a bigger paper. And from then on I went to the Hartford Kern and a variety of other papers. 

You know I liked journalism in the sense I liked being the position of asking people questions and having being able to call them up. I think there was a kind of combative aspect to sort of daily journalism, reporting on the police and the school board and things. People didn't always want to tell you what you wanted to know and I was fascinated with science. At the time I was taking extra courses in science and I got the idea that I wanted to really write about science. I'd read people like in the old days. This name won't mean anything to most people, but there was a science writer at the time named Walter Sullivan who was a real major figure, and these people were describing how scientists are understanding the natural world, which I liked ideas. I like the strange things that you could discover, and I found out, as I'd hoped when I got into it, that scientists like talking about their work. 

So, it's not to say that there aren't scientists who fudge their data or do things that are incorrect or that you don't have controversies. You can't get involved in an adversarial relationship and reporting, but in most of what I did, I was on the side of, or in the area of writing, where you're looking at the awe factor. The how cool is that. And when you talk to scientists to ask them about the research, they usually love to talk to you.

Dr. Biology: 31:03

Well, you had a wonderful career, still continues, but I'm going to cut it off. I'm going to take it all away Now this is a thought question, because some of my scientists freak out about now because I take it all away, and I'm going to do the same thing for you as I do for them. They like to teach, almost all of them love to teach, so I'm going to take your teaching away. If you couldn't do what you've been doing and again it's going to be, I'm going to say writing in general If you couldn't do it, what would you do? Or be?

Jim: 31:33

I'd be a field biologist. That's what I would have loved to have been. I mean, if I had it to do all over again, I would have been some kind of field biologist - birds, marine biologist, whatever out in the field watching animals observing their behavior. So, in a way it's kind of cheating, because you say I can't do what I've done, but why can't I do what I always wrote about people doing?

Dr. Biology: 31:56

Oh, I think it's perfect. So, you're going to become a biologist. That's great. In your career as a science journalist, have you had any adventures there that would lead you down that path?

Jim: 32:12

I think my favorite field trip was I got a chance to scuba dive and Belize with these vast spawning aggregations of drum, certain kind of fish, and it was one of the most spectacular events that you could see in nature. We were down about 70 or 100 feet and there are thousands of fish in the sort of ice cream cone spiral and at one moment they all release the sperm and eggs at once, and that's what attracts whale sharks. 

Whale sharks are sharks, but they look more like baleen whales and they swim, just sort of hoovering in all the sperm and eggs that are in the water. 

What I've always loved about being a science writer is that I'm a sort of professional undergraduate. You know I just constantly get to ask people well, explain, how did you do that, how did you do this? But there's also and the reason that I said I'd like to be a field biologist there's also this chance to be in situations you'd never ever be in otherwise, unless you were a scientist.

Dr. Biology: 33:22

That's truely one of the things that's amazing about scientists.

Jim: 33:26

Yeh.

Dr. Biology: 33:27
 
Now the last question what advice would you have for a future science communicator?

Jim: 33:34

I guess read. Read is the most important thing. I mean, you have to just read constantly how people do the things you admire. So, if you want to be a science communicator, presumably you've seen movies or videos or you've read articles and you've watched it and you've thought you know, boy, I'd really like to do that. So, you have to absorb as much of that as you can and figure out how they do it. You can go to school, you can get a degree, you know a journalism degree and there are programs in science writing. 

And getting a job these days is tougher. When I started out, you went to a small newspaper and then you went to a bigger newspaper and then you went to a magazine or something, because there were millions of newspapers Everybody, that's all they did, was reading newspapers. And that's not true anymore. So now I'm a little befuddled about what you should do if you're a young person and you want to get into this field, because it seems to me there's more opportunity than ever to write about science, but maybe less opportunity to get paid for writing about science. So, you can have your own blog, you can post things, you can write about this, you can do TikTok. The platforms are there, but how are you going to make a living at it? 

That's a question I don't really have the answer to. I mean, I think you need to make contacts, you need to find some people who do what you're interested in doing and try and get them to introduce you to other people, see if somebody there can get you a job. Doing the sort of cold calling sending in your resume. That's tough. Although I did get my job through the New York Times. My first science job. There used to be these ads on the subway. I got my job through the New York Times. This was in an ancient era when the way people found jobs was through classified advertisements in newspapers, so that would be a subject of a whole other podcast. But I actually answered an ad and got a job. 

My first science writing job was on a little magazine called the Sciences. I don't think it exists anymore. It was a wonderful job, and don't be discouraged by editors who aren't that happy with what you're doing. When I got my first job as a science writer, the editor said well, you're not very good, but you're the best of the applicants, so if you want the job, you can have it 

Dr. Biology: 36:10

Well, Jim with that final thought, I want to thank you for sitting down and being on Ask A Biologist.

Jim: 35:53

Oh, thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed it.

Dr. Biology: 36:00

You have been listening to Ask A Biologist, and my guest has been James Gorman, a science reporter and an editor for the New York Times.. He's also the host of the video series ScienceTake, which we talked about, and is really a great series to go check out. We'll be sure to include a link in the episode notes so you can get there. Jim is also an author of seven different books, of which his favorite is The Total Penguin, so we'll be sure to include that link in the show notes as well. 

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 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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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.

---

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.