Fast Insects, Smart Science: Tiger Beetles Rule

[00:00–00:32]
 Dr. Biology
Are you ready for a change of pace? Let's turn back time and tune in to an old radio channel about the topic for this episode. 
 
[Crackling radio sound with dial changing channels to find old fashioned radio program.] 

The adventures of the Tiger Beetle. Faster than a darting dragonfly. Mightier than a mantis on the hunt. Able to sprint across the sand in the blink of an eye. Look out on the trail.
 
 It's not a bird. It's not a plane. It’s the tiger beetle. Champion of speed. Defender of dunes. This tiny Titan hunts with lightning reflexes and jaws of steel. Keeping nature's balance, one bite at a time.

[Radio show fades out.]

Okay, all kidding aside. This is Ask A Biologist, a program about the living world, and I'm Dr. Biology. We've had plenty of guests on this podcast who study animals like birds, fish, pandas, monkeys, and many, many more.

[01:12–01:38]
 Dr. Biology
All of which are what you might think of as big animals. But today we're shrinking things down—way down. We're going to meet the tiger beetle, an insect so fast and fierce it has earned the name of one of nature's top predators. My guest today is David Pierson, a scientist who has spent much of his career studying these tiny speedsters all over the world.

[01:38–02:00]
 Dr. Biology
And I can tell you, from being in his office and looking at the map with all the pins, I don't think he's missed any part of the world. But we'll find out if he has. He's also one of the people behind World Tiger Beetle Day that's going to be on November 11th. It'll be a time to celebrate these colorful beetles and learn about the important role they play in the environment.

[02:00–02:27]
 Dr. Biology
It turns out that tiger beetles aren't just fun to watch. They're also bioindicators—living clues that tell scientists when the environment is changing, and sometime when it's in trouble. So get ready to explore a world where insects race faster than they can keep up with their eyes, dig clever traps for prey, and help to understand how nature keeps its balance.

[02:27–02:36]
 Dr. Biology
Now grab your field hat, if you haven't already, and join us for a wild ride with the Tiger Beetle. Dave, thank you so much for joining me.

[02:36–02:38]
 Dave
It's great to be here, Dr. Biology.

[02:38–02:49]
 Dr. Biology
For those that may not have gone all the way back in our long history of episodes, Dave is a pretty special guest. He's been on Ask A Biologist—

[02:49–02:58]
 Dr. Biology
This will be his third time, which is the most of any guest I've had. And he's also the very first scientist I had on Ask A Biologist many years ago.

[02:58–02:59]
 Dave
And it was an honor.

[02:59–03:09]
 Dr. Biology
And we talked about these amazing animals then. And with World Tiger Beetle Day coming up, I thought this would be a perfect time to have you back on the show.

[03:09–03:13]
 Dave
Oh, it's wonderful to talk about Tiger beetles again. I can always do more.

[03:13–03:23]
 Dr. Biology
Okay, let's start at the basics. Not everybody knows about tiger beetles. Let's talk a little bit about, well, where you'd find them.

[03:23–03:35]
 Dave
Tiger beetles occur around the world everywhere except Antarctica and a few Pacific islands. And they are very colorful. For the most part, they can attract attention, and they're on the ground, but they can also be on leaves and trunks of trees.

[03:36–03:43]
 Dave
They are in virtually every habitat, from the Amazon rainforest to the tundra, from coniferous forests to deserts.

[03:43–03:46]
 Dr. Biology
How about inner cities?

[03:46–03:57]
 Dave
Yes, we even get them here on the campus of Arizona State University. There are some species that at night especially are attracted to lights, and they will come long distances to in the night to disperse themselves.

[03:57–04:00]
 Dr. Biology
And they're really good hunters, right?

[04:00–04:19]
 Dave
They are excellent hunters, both as larvae and adults. The adults have got large mandibles, big eyes to see their prey, and they run them down and grasp the prey and then start to chew them. They don't swallow the whole prey, but they chew them and then masticate them with external digestive juices and suck up the juices.

[04:19–04:21]
 Dr. Biology
Ah, so, they kind of make a tiger beetle stew.

[04:21–04:40]
 Dave
A stew, exactly—that's a good word for it. Yes. And the larvae do much the same thing, but they do it from a vertical tunnel in the ground or in a cliffside or in a bush stem. And they wait for a small ant or a spider to come by, and they reach out and grab it, pull it down, and do the same thing with their smaller mandibles, but still very effective mandibles.

[04:40–04:55]
 Dr. Biology
So we talk a little bit about how fast they are. Let's just pretend that we made one get as big as we are, right? How fast would a tiger beetle be if you could scale the speed as well as the size?

[04:55–05:19]
 Dave
If you scale up the body length—I mean, these are small little things, and they're running four kilometers per hour. Really fast. And one in Australia is especially fast. They can't fly. It just runs and runs and hard to catch. If you scale it up to our body size and look at the speed per body size, it'd be well over 120, maybe 150, 200 miles an hour, depending on how you calculate it. It's be very, very fast.

[05:19–05:31]
 Dr. Biology
Wow. So they're really great at hunting and they're extremely fast, but they don't necessarily have great brains for keeping up with everything they're doing.

[05:31–05:50]
 Dave
Well, they can run so fast and move so fast that they're neurological capacity is overwhelmed, and they have to stop and reassess. And if the prey item hold still and doesn't move, targer beetle probably misses it. So the tiger beetle has to be looking for moving things, and it runs so fast it overwhelms its own brain system.

[05:50–05:58]
 Dr. Biology
So if I do something like “Honey, I Shrunk Your Kids,” you know, and I end up being shrunk down to the size of a tiger beetle—

[05:58–06:30]
 Dr. Biology
I want to stay very still so that they can't pick me up. Okay. All right, so we've talked about where they can be found and where they can't be found, which is very few places. We also talk a little bit about what their role is. And the term bioindicator was something that I mentioned at the very beginning of this show. Can we talk a little bit about how tiger beetles are important, beyond the cool nature of them, and just watching them?

[06:30–07:07]
 Dave
Well, for conservation efforts, it's very difficult to do studies of birds and mammals. That takes lots and lots of years of experience and fieldwork training. And then when you get out in the field, it's really hard to see what the birds are eating, what the mammals are catching, and to look at them and try and use them as management practices in conservation. Takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of effort.

Well, it turns out that tiger beetles are easy to see, easy to train people, and the data are very reliable. Not only that, but we find that many, if not most of the data we capture with tiger beetles also reflect things going on with some of these vertebrates, like birds and mammals.

[07:07–07:27]
 Dave
So we can go into a site, for instance—I've done this in the Amazon a couple times—where I take students who have never seen a tiger beetle before in their lives, and we take about 3 or 4 hours out in the field. There's a tiger beetle, there's a tiger beetle, but there's one—catch that one—and training them in identification, and that 3 to 4 hours, they are ready to collect reliable data on their own.

[07:27–07:49]
 Dave
If I did that with bird people and tried to train them on birds, it would be at least a year to reach that level of ability to get reliable data. And beyond that, we find that tiger beetles are very specialized. Almost every species is very specialized. That is, they have a very narrow range of habitats they use, which means they're also very sensitive to any kind of change in the environment.

[07:49–08:20]
 Dave
So for management, we found in almost every habitat we've been in that we can look at them and understand quickly: Is that habitat succeeding? Is something happening because all of a sudden a species that not should be there disappears, or one comes in that we didn't know had been there before? It tells us we're doing something right. So instead of having very complicated mathematical models to try and predict where this is going and where our conservation efforts and money should be spent, we can use these tiger beetles in a very, very fast manner to understand this is working.

[08:20–08:27]
 Dave
This is not working. We're getting results here, and it reflects on not only the tiger beetles but all the other species that use that same habitat.

[08:28–08:41]
 Dr. Biology
And when we talk about working and not working, sometimes it is changed. So some habitats, for whatever reasons, whether it's climate change or other things that are going on, a habitat might change over time.

[08:41–08:54]
 Dr. Biology
And so some tiger beetles, they found that a really good environment now no longer do, but others move in. So you basically get an idea to see the ebb and flow of different environments.

[08:54–09:08]
 Dave
Yes. Here in Arizona especially, we're more and more trying to use tiger beetles as an indicator of wetlands recovery. It's a big thing here in Arizona—trying to use what little water we have to restore wetlands that have been long gone.

[09:08–09:34]
 Dave
And amongst the tiger beetles, there are different species that come in at different times. There are what we call pioneer species that come in from a long distance. When the water first appears, all of a sudden they're there. And then after the water's been there for a year or two, there's a second set of species that come in, and then there's a third set of species that—they're not quite as good disperses—but they finally find it and finally come in, the climax species that are only there when we know this is a super healthy wetlands.

[09:34–09:55]
 Dave
And they wouldn't be there otherwise. So if we're managing it and we're seeing that the succession is going on and we're doing the right thing—whatever we're doing to manage that, to keep the water going, to keep the grass down or keep the grass growing, or whatever it takes to make the wildlife attracted to the area, like these tiger beetles—we know quickly what's working and what's not working.

[09:55–10:14]
 Dr. Biology
So it's almost like a level one, level two, level three, and then those climatic species and say, okay, we're at it, right? And then once we get that, we can make sure it's maintained, because if that final species disappears or starts getting limited in number, then something might be changing.

[10:14–10:37]
 Dave
And even beyond that, know the economic benefits. There are very obvious. In Venezuela, we're also using them for lumbering. We have the same series of species of tiger beetles in succession—some that come into newly cut forest have to have wide open, sunny areas. Then they're replaced by others that are more tolerant to shade. And we have then a succession of species that gets to a climax species.

[10:37–10:57]
 Dave
Some of the lumbering companies are now using that as a quick way to assess: Is this patch of forest ready to be harvested or not? And once we put the economic benefits associated with tiger beetles, all of these decision makers—these policymakers, these politicians, these government agencies that are in charge of this—they start to pay attention.

[10:58–11:12]
 Dr. Biology
So I have you on the show for an ulterior motive. And that's because World Tiger Beetle Day is coming up on November 11th. This is a new day of the year, right. This is World Tiger beetle day number—

[11:13–11:13]
 Dave
Number two.

[11:13–11:20]
 Dr. Biology
Number two. Okay—November 11th. How did we pick November 11th?

[11:20–11:31]
 Dave
We had a get together in India a couple of years ago, and we were doing a Red List of threatened and endangered species all across India with citizen scientists.

[11:31–11:40]
 Dr. Biology
So Red List is something that if you go up and look in Wikipedia, for example, is a really good place. If you see certain species, you'll see what they're labeled. Are they—

[11:40–11:42]
 Dave
Threatened? Endangered?

[11:42–11:47]
 Dr. Biology
There's a very specific list that's created called the Red List. So you're working on the Red List.

[11:47–12:10]
 Dave
And we're all together. And this is—the importance of getting together with people. It was a community of citizen scientists and professionals getting to know each other. I was there to help them in an overview, because I've worked in India for many, many years on tiger beetles. And, towards the end, one of the people came up to me and said, you know, we want, have a new idea of having every year a world tiger be today.

[12:10–12:31]
 Dave
And we weren't sure what to you. So we want to ask you, what's your birthday? And so that's how it was chosen. They decided to do my birthday. And so last year on November 11th, we had our first Zoom. It was an international Zoom. We had people from about 18 different countries involved, and they seemed to get turned on to tiger beetles more and more, because there are some people who are new to talking beetles.

[12:31–12:56]
 Dave
And again, it's very catchy when you have that amount enthusiasm and a very, very positive attitude from people and conservation. Often all we hear is doom and gloom. We have to be realistic, but sometimes people need a little positive feedback and a little enthusiasm that there is hope. There are ways and things they can do it, especially last year was super, and the one they're planning for this coming up this year seems to be doing quite well too.

[12:56–12:59]
 Dr. Biology
Now can anybody join in on the Zoom?

[12:59–13:18]
 Dave
Absolutely. We'll have it on Facebook. It'll be most like on Facebook. And we'll advertise it out and we'll see what's going on. There will be prizes. There will be all kinds of, emphasis on interactions, not only amongst professional scientists, but how important the citizen scientist and the nonprofessionals are in advancing diabetes.

[13:18–13:43]
 Dr. Biology
Well, this episode will come out before November 11th, and so we'll be sure to include the link on there so people know how to get to that Zoom meeting of the minds on tiger beetles.

So, bioindicators—great. You and I have a history with tiger beetles as well. I always tease you because I say I lost an entire summer thanks to you.

[13:43–13:54]
 Dr. Biology
You were very instrumental in creating a tiger beetle guide for North America. And, one of the things we needed to do is illustrate those tiger beetles.

[13:54–13:56]
 Dave
And thanks to you, we got the illustrations done.

[13:56–14:11]
 Dr. Biology
Yes, it's several hundred of them. But the thing about it is, they are amazing animals. The range of colors and patterns is stunning, really.

[14:11–14:25]
 Dr. Biology
And one of the things I wanted to mention is even if you can't get out and hunt down the tiger beetles, if you want to learn about these animals, Ask. A Biologist has not only some stories on there, but we have a zoom gallery.

[14:25–14:36]
 Dave
Which is being used around the world in schools right now in India. In Brazil, it's been a spectacular way to attract especially kids, third and fourth graders, and even adults use it very, very effectively.

[14:36–14:55]
 Dr. Biology
This is a fun way to see them—and not just see them at a distance. It's up close and really personal. So I wanted to make sure people know that not only can they get involved, which we would encourage them, but they certainly can learn about tiger beetles even if they can't get out in the field right away.

[14:55–15:12]
 Dr. Biology
But let's get back to the field again. How would I get started hunting for tiger beetles? Because when I go out for a walk—ants? No problem. In our area—cicadas? No problem. Why am I missing seeing tiger beetles?

[15:12–15:27]
 Dave
Well, this is something you have to develop what we call a search image. And once you train your eyes and your brain to recognize real quickly—because tiger beetles are not slow, it's not often going to just sit there and wait for you to say, well, I wonder what that is or not.

[15:27–15:49]
 Dave
They're going to be running or flying, and they have a very peculiar way in which they take off and fly the short distances. Their running patterns are very distinctive—going very fast, stopping, starting, stopping, starting. Also, knowing which habitats to expect them in can be very important. Sometimes I'll be surprised. I'll see—I'll talk to people—hadn't expected to be there at all, but that's again because my brain is hard wired now after all these years.

[15:49–16:12]
 Dave
It takes a little work, but I've done this with third graders. I've been working with a group of first graders in Los Gatos, California, and there's a rare and endangered species of tiger beetle lives near them. So their teachers are teaching them about conservation, using this rare species, taking them out into the field. And then we will Zoom every week or so and they'll line up and have questions.

[16:12–16:43]
 Dave
And two weeks ago, the six year olds lined up, and the third one that—a young girl—said to me, Doctor Pierson, can we expect tiger beetles to be carnivorous? This from a six year old? I mean, what those teachers are doing in their expectations, having been so high that the students just are amazingly able to respond, and how quickly they learned—drawing pictures of tiger beetles, drawing posters, going out in the field, even gathering funds for protecting tiger beetles.

[16:43–16:48]
 Dave
Starting early—like a language—is always a good thing, but you can still do it if you're an adult,

[16:48–16:57]
 Dr. Biology
Right. So it's not like, “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?” Here is: can you ID a tiger beetle that a third grader can do?

[16:57–16:58]
 Dave
There you go.

[16:58–17:12]
 Dr. Biology
Right. So I'll be out—challenged to do that. When I did the illustrations, I was very lucky—you brought them to me very well prepared. So I did not have to spend time hunting them down.

[17:12–17:15]
 Dave
Although we've had you on the field a couple of times, I know we've looked at tiger beetles together, a couple of times.

[17:15–17:21]
 Dr. Biology
Yes, yes, I've seen them. Yeah. It's just not as often as I thought I would see them.

[17:21–17:40]
 Dave
Well, they're also very seasonal. In much of the world, you can't expect to see them in the middle of the winter because they do need warmer temperatures. They are what we call cold blooded organisms that need external temperature to keep going. So wintertime, the larvae and adults are usually underground.

[17:40–17:52]
 Dr. Biology
Now you mentioned that they have a very distinctive running pattern and flying pattern. Is this again because they run so fast that they can't keep up?

[17:52–18:13]
 Dave
I'm not sure which came first. They have to run fast to catch the prey, and sometimes they run too fast to overwhelm their neurons again. But again, that's a generalization because there are some tiger beetles in the tropics who run up and down the trunks of trees or on leaves, but they still have this kind of stop, start, stop, start way of pursuing their prey in a very different type of substrate.

[18:14–18:37]
 Dave
And there are some species that are flightless—they've lost their wings. And that one in Australia that runs so fast is one of those. I know we were on the salt flats in Western Australia trying to catch one. We could not keep up with it. It was just amazing. We finally had put up little traps for it and try and have it fall into a pitfall before we could catch anything. Even though it couldn't fly, was so fast.

[18:37–18:43]
 Dr. Biology
Beyond their beauty and speed, they are part of the food web.

[18:43–18:49]
 Dave
Yes, they are an important top predator, but they're also prey.

[18:49–18:59]
 Dr. Biology
So let's talk a little bit about food webs, because that's a term that everybody's heard at least once in their lives. Let's talk about food webs.

[18:59–19:28]
 Dave
They are a central part to these food webs, especially being a top predator. They can control a lot of the rest of the community, and they themselves can be very important food for birds, for robber flies, for other types of predators. But in response, of course, it's a whole other set of adaptations that target beetles have, that we have seen—their colors, for instance. There are some species that produce a type of chemical called Ben's aldehyde, which turns into cyanide.

[19:28–19:51]
 Dave
I don't know if they ever smelt cyanide—it smells like almonds. If you catch a tiger and pick it up, it'll smell sweet. It's giving off this chemical. It doesn't affect us, but most of these insects, like robber flies, won't touch them, and it's very, very protective. But not only do they have the cyanide that they produce, but when they spread their wings to fly, they have a bright orange abdomen that you don't see unless they're flying.

[19:51–19:57]
 Dave
And that appears to be advertising—don't touch me. You're going to get zapped by this cyanide if you touch.

[19:57–20:06]
 Dr. Biology
Yes. It's a warning sign. Yes. So there are top predator. What's their favorite food?

[20:06–20:37]
 Dave
They're not very choosy on what species that eat—this mostly size. And their mandibles, we found, are directly related to the size of prey that they can eat. The big target beetles with the big mandibles can't handle the small things very well. And the small tiger beetles with the small animals, of course, can't handle the big tiger beetles. They just get turned over in their back, and they try and catch a big prey item. So other than their prey having also chemicals or having another protection that would keep them from being eaten, it's almost all by size of prey.

[20:37–20:45]
 Dave
It can be a small spider, it can be an ant, it can be a weevil. Anything that's small and isn't too hard to eat.

[20:45–20:54]
 Dr. Biology
Yeah. Because they're going to again chew them up, create little bits, put some digestive juices on them, and create that stew.

[20:54–21:23]
 Dave
And we also found that when, when tiger beetles occur together at the same site—you get 3 or 4 species—they're not the same size. They're almost always around the world—you're a small one, a medium one, and a large one. And what we found is that very likely is important, because they don't compete for the same prey item. So if their prey are rare or not real common, this is a way that you can keep on going in a site—that you won't be eating somebody else's food.

[21:23–21:40]
 Dr. Biology
Very interesting. So for those that we're going to have, go try out the zoom gallery—there are a dozen there, by the way, so don't worry, you're not going to be overwhelmed—do you have a favorite out of that gallery?

[21:40–21:54]
 Dave
Well, there's that Manticore is in the gallery. Yes. There's one called Albina, which is almost all white. One occurs on white sands, and when it's running on that sandy beaches, I swear I can barely see it.

[21:54–22:00]
 Dave
And it's not all pure white—[it] is white lines, and it just disappears as you're looking at it as a camouflage.

[22:00–22:16]
 Dr. Biology
That brings me to the patterns. Some of them have some amazing tiger stripes. Others are these really bright greens. Some of them have some really interesting patterns. What's the story behind that?

[22:16–22:39]
 Dave
Well, one thing is to be careful of how we perceive the colors—[it] may not be how other predators perceive the colors. There may be ultraviolet colors that we can't see, and so we have to be careful in that, too. But in many, many cases, what we call the kind of blaw ones—the ones that don't have bright colors—are specifically camouflage to their background. It could be a leaf, it could be sand, it could be dirt.

[22:39–22:59]
 Dave
And they're really restricted to a very, very narrow range of colors that they are almost invisible on. Others have brighter colors—advertising I'm dangerous, don't eat me. But there are some that don't have the poison, don't have the chemical, that are brightly colored, but they look just like a mutillid wasp. They look like other things that do sting.

[22:59–23:22]
 Dave
So they're again mimicking for that benefit. They're cheating, in other words, and looking like the bad things. We also find colors—we get into economic situation. There's a tiger beetle in Yellowstone National Park that occurs in hot, hot ponds. I mean, there's nothing else there. And people have fallen into those ponds and died—it's so hot it is able to endure.

[23:22–23:24]
 Dr. Biology
Right. This is in the extremophile.

[23:24–23:52]
 Dave
Yes. And that tiger beetle, even though it occurs in other types of habitats that are wet but aren't so hot, somehow that same species is able to go in here. And we're finding now engineers are now looking at the way the structure of the outer covering of those tiger beetles—looking at the color—trying to figure out what it is, is a combination of factors that they can mimic and perhaps do something for us in creating ways that we can endure heat as well. So, a jacket, a coat, a covering,

[23:52–24:03]
 Dr. Biology
Right. In this case, the scientists are trying to figure out from the tiger beetle: what do we need to mimic so that we can make use of that—whatever it's doing to endure these really hot temperatures.

[24:03–24:42]
 Dave
And that's becoming more and more common—where we're looking at how things have evolved over millions of years, really stark natural selection, and are surviving. How can we go in there and mimic that, use that, and have an economic return from it? It's becoming more and more common. So biologists have to learn to work with engineers. We have to work with economists and business people as well to get this out. And again, in conservation terms, the benefit is again—the politicians, the decision makers, the people who don't know about tiger beetles—this will catch your attention long before anything about color, long before anything about how fast they can run or how wonderful they are.

[24:42–24:53]
 Dr. Biology
Right? The term is biomimicry. And there are institutes that are all about this, and engineers have been learning from nature for quite some time.

[24:53–26:08]
 Dave
For instance, I was working for several years in India and getting very little response from the government officials who were trying to work with me, on the tiger beetles there. I was there until I told them we had discovered a tiger beetle is attracted to the rice paddies—if you change the angle of the dikes to 45 degrees—because the females prefer to put their eggs, what's called oviposit, their eggs in that angle. If it's flat, they won't do it. If it's 90 degrees, they won't do it. We had some farmers put half their fields to a 45 degree angle on the dikes, and keep the others at 90 degrees. We found in the fields at 45 degrees the number of these tiger beetles, the females coming in, tripled, quadrupled. And of course, when the females are there, more males come in. And this species has another habit—it climbs the rice dams to eat the rice. Them borers that are up there. And by doing that, the farmers don't have to use expensive and dangerous pesticides. We've got preliminary data—it's still a little bit arm waving as far as how far we can go, and what we can do with it. But just introducing that possibility, these politicians—they turned 180 degrees and say, wow, this is important. We've got to look at this. Oftentimes biologists and people in basic research don't appreciate how important it is to work with economists and business people, but that's—in conservation—it's becoming much, much more common now.

[26:08–26:11]
 Dr. Biology
Well, it's nice to have a common goal, right?

[26:11–26:11]
 Dave
Absolutely.

[26:11–26:17]
 Dr. Biology
If you want a certain outcome and it's both beneficial, that's great.

[26:17–26:24]
 Dave
It's a wonderful change I'm seeing. Yes. In and working in teams that include non biologist.

[26:24–26:37]
 Dr. Biology
So Dave, on Ask A Biologist I always ask three questions of my scientists. And this is your third time on the show. So I was trying to think about how we should vary this. So that was—

[26:37–26:38]
 Dave
A new question, okay.

[26:38–27:06]
 Dr. Biology
Well, there are two things I thought of. One of them is to see how consistent you are. And the other one is maybe to vary it a bit. Now, I do like the very first question. A lot of people wonder how people get started—when, you know, when did you decide you're going to be a biologist, that sort of thing. Do you have a story about becoming a biologist that you recall that just kind of sticks in your head?

[27:06–27:24]
 Dave
Well, when I was ten years old, back in Minnesota, for some reason—and I don't know why—I got really interested in birds. And there was a group of adults who started to take me out birdwatching, who were very good and took me under their wing, so to speak. And birds tend to slow down in the middle of the day.

[27:24–27:52]
 Dave
So during our field trips, and all the—these are the birdwatchers who decide to give me—those are the six legged birds. We can kind of fill in the time until the birds become active again. And I worked on that, and I became interested in birds and tiger beetles because of that. And as I grew older and older and I decided to actually do some research on birds—which I did my PhD on birds—I found out I couldn't answer the questions I wanted to with birds.

[27:52–28:23]
 Dave
I couldn't see what they're eating. I can see who's eating them. I couldn't manipulate them. I couldn't do experiments. It was really difficult. At the same time, there were tiger beetles in each of these sites, and I found out, wow, I can answer these very important questions using tiger beetles. I don't need to use birds. So I, in essence, switched from birds to tiger beetles to be able to do the research I needed to understand general and important questions of ecology, behavior, and conservation.

[28:23–28:28]
 Dr. Biology
I think you're pretty close to what you said before.

[28:28–28:29]
 Dave
I'm allowed to change now.

[28:29–28:30]
 Dr. Biology
You are.

[28:30–28:32]
 Dave
Professors shouldn't get caught up in no change.

[28:32–29:16]
 Dr. Biology
Yes, well, that's where the second question [comes in], because that's the one where I take it all away. Because I want to see if you would change what you would do. And so with you it's—it's kind of difficult, because you do so many things. You are a well known and avid birdwatcher—that's without a doubt. obviously, there's tiger beetles, conservation, teaching—all those things. I'm going to take those away. I always wonder what my scientists would like to do if they were outside of what they've done all their lives—what would be something they'd like to do, even if they don't have the skill? But they would love to have that skill.

[29:16–29:30]
 Dave
Wow. It's so much a part of my life. I am very interested in languages. I am very interested in other cultures, and I would be very, very happy to have had a lifetime career working there as well.

[29:30–29:33]
 Dr. Biology
How many languages now are you speaking?

[29:33–29:46]
 Dave
Well, I teach workshops in conservation in four and a half. Four and a half. What's the half? Well, in Brazil I started out in Portuguese, but by midday it's Portunhol and it goes to Spanish. I can't keep the Portuguese up—it fries my brain?

[29:46–29:51]
 Dr. Biology
Yeah, it's kind of like Spanglish rather than—yes. In this case, it's a blend of Spanish and Portuguese.

[29:51–30:07]
 Dave
But German was my second language I learned as a child. And, I've worked a lot in West Africa, where French is necessity, and of course Spanish throughout South America. And I can get in trouble in a couple of other languages where I'm just barely able to carry on some conversations.

[30:07–30:25]
 Dr. Biology
The last question is the one I'm changing, and the last question is: what advice would you have for a future scientist? What I'm changing it to is—what would you like people to do for World Tiger Beetle Day?

[30:25–30:57]
 Dave
Well, as you mentioned, Dr. Biology, they can certainly visit, Ask A Biologist and play around on zoom and get into that. And maybe—hopefully—we'll have our zoom topic be from India and you can get an idea of what other people are doing. But I would say there are guides like iNaturalist you can go to online, or there are field guides that we've published. You can look at those and on your own start to look for tiger beetles. The discovery is sometimes a big part of the adventure, and at first it may be a little difficult and maybe hard. Maybe you can get some other people working with you.

[30:57–31:16]
 Dave
Working in groups oftentimes is the best way to do this. Know the right time of year and get that information on Google or—and some of these websites—and look for them. Some are much, much more obvious. If you're in the eastern United States, as a bright green six spotted tiger be lit—famous for being in the forest as you walk along the paths.

[31:16–31:45]
 Dave
I know that sometimes looking down, you miss the birds and other things that are up above, but look in front of you. Just keep your eyes up—maybe 3 to 6 ft in front of you—and watch for things to fly up. It's again a learning experience, and I would say from my experience, I go out and work a lot with elementary and secondary schools, and when I'm working with third graders, second graders, it's why, why, why, why, why all the time—they are super enthusiastic.

[31:45–32:07]
 Dave
And when I get them out in the playground right around the school, it's just amazing what they can find, what they can see, what we can do to to encourage them. And it sticks. I have had people who were with me as first graders, who contacted me after they graduated from college and told me that was the major part of their life in changing their attitude towards biology.

[32:07–32:43]
 Dr. Biology
And I've always thought that a lot of people that get interested in insects will do collections, but not everybody has the materials to do that and the space to have the collections. But with photography nowadays you can create quite a gallery of these insects. One of the questions I have—is there a way to capture the insects and immobilize them enough briefly so that they're hopefully still in a natural state, but where you could then take a photograph? So what would you suggest?

[32:44–32:59]
 Dave
Well, there's two things. First of all, in nature, without catching the tiger beetle—they can be hard to catch sometimes—if you hold still and watch your movements, Tiger beetles will calm down and do their thing around you. You have to get on your hands and knees and get kind of eye to eye with them.

[32:59–33:16]
 Dave
And you get some spectacular photos. I naturalist online—it’s full of pictures like that where people have done a good job. And what's more, there are experts who identify your photos for you. If that doesn't work and you're willing to try and catch a tiger beetle, you can put it in a jar and put it in the refrigerator.

[33:16–33:39]
 Dave
Cool down a little bit—because it's cold blooded, it doesn't remain real active then—so you can take it out. It'll stand there and maybe walk slowly around; as it warms up, it'll get faster and faster, but it's a kind of way that you could maybe get some other photos. It would not be possible if you're just going to nature. There are some photographers who are purist—this is cheating—but the photos look pretty good too. You can decide how you want to do it.

[33:39–33:45]
 Dr. Biology
Well, I mean, it's still getting involved, and I think that's what's great. Well, Dave, thank you again for being on Ask A Biology.

[33:45–33:48]
 Dave
It was my pleasure. Anytime.

[33:48–34:03]
 Dr. Biology
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.

[34:04–34:35]
 Dr. Biology
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. And let me say that we are using real scientists. No AI bots. As always, I'm Dr. Biology, and I hope you're staying safe and healthy.

---

Sneezes, Swelling, and Smart Defenses: The Science of Allergies

Dr. Biology:
This is Ask A Biologist, a program about the living world, and I'm Dr. Biology. Before we jump into our episode, I want to remind those who have not subscribed to this podcast—take a moment and do that now so you don't miss out on any of our future shows.

Now, today we're diving into a topic that affects many of us, especially kids.

Dr. Biology:
What am I talking about? Talking about allergies. And when you think about it, why does something as simple as peanuts or eggs trigger such a strong reaction in our bodies? And what if our immune system is doing more than just overreacting? What if it's trying to protect us in ways we don't understand?

Joining us today is Esther Borges Florsheim, a researcher at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute and a faculty member in the School of Life Sciences.

Dr. Biology:
Esther is on a mission to uncover the secrets of our immune system—not just how it fights off germs, but how it might shape our behavior, decisions, and even our survival. Her work looks at unexpected ways the immune system interacts with our brain and body.

Whether you're someone who has allergies, a student curious about science, or you just love learning about how our bodies work, this episode will open your eyes to a whole new world of possibilities.

So grab your favorite snack—unless you're allergic to it—and get ready to learn about the incredible connections between allergies, immunity, and human behavior. Welcome to Ask A Biologist, Esther.

Esther:
Thank you very much.

Dr. Biology:
So, on this podcast, allergies have come up—not as much as we're going to talk about today, but the immune system definitely gets talked about.

Dr. Biology:
But not everybody catches every episode. So, can we talk just a little bit about the human immune system?

Esther:
Okay. The human immune system—or the immune system in general, to all the animals and other organisms that have them—is a tool or a system that is composed of different cells in your body. Different organs can also help to perform that.

And the main function of the immune system is defense—defense classically understood by defense against pathogens like microbes, bacteria, viruses, and things that make you feel sick. So, the immune system is this complex defense system full of cells and things moving around.

It’s not a static thing. For example, your stomach is always in that place.

Dr. Biology:
Your liver is always in that place. The immune system is all over your body. It's in different places, and it's everywhere at the same time. It moves around. So, that's part of why it's complicated to study—because it keeps moving around, and different cells do different things.

So, it adds to the complexity. But the idea of having an immune system is that you get protection from a lot of things in the environment, and it helps your organism do what it needs to do on a daily basis.

Dr. Biology:
Right. For those that want to know a little more about the immune system—and in particular about those things with viruses and bacteria that you might think about when you think about the immune system, like getting a cold or the flu—we have a fun comic and story called Viral Attack.

That’s a good way to dig into the details that we're not necessarily going to go into in this podcast. But we are going to talk about allergies.

And it’s interesting because there are allergies like when I was young—I had allergies with grasses, right? That was a common thing for people to have. But today there are people that have allergies, and it seems like more people have allergies to different kinds of foods. So, why do some people get allergies and other people don’t?

Esther:
Yeah, that's the million-dollar question. That's exactly why we want to know that. And to me, it's even more interesting—the opposite question—which is why some people don't get allergies.

Because usually that's the question—why do some people get such severe allergies that you cannot even have someone eating something with peanut nearby? You can smell that, and that can trigger a really potent reaction.

Why do some people have nothing when they are facing that same thing—even within a family? So, it seems clear that it's not only genetics—things that are passed from your parents can contribute to how much of an allergic reaction you have—but this seems to not be the only thing.

I think this whole field of allergy now agrees that your environment in general is contributing to increasing allergies. What you said about increasing allergies is very true. The number of cases more than doubled in the last few decades.

This has been true for asthma, atopic dermatitis, drug hypersensitivity, and food allergies—the main one increasing now. So, it is increasing worldwide.

Dr. Biology:
So, with that said, how does our immune system know what's harmful and what isn't?

Esther:
Good question. That's what we are asking also. So, the immune system decides at some point—this is what we call sensitization. This is when you first encounter what later is going to become the allergen.

So that peanut thing, or milk, or eggs, or whatever you're allergic to—or grass, as you said, like seasonal allergies induced—this is the part that is hard to study in humans because you don't know when people first encounter those things.

And probably those first encounters are the ones that your immune system uses to determine: is this good or bad for me? Sometimes, in people who become allergic later on, it’s because your immune system looked at that thing and said, “This is probably really bad for you.”

So, it mounts this type of response. And then later, when you get exposed to that thing, you have a very intense response because your immune system decided long ago that that should not be good for you.

Dr. Biology:
Which makes a lot of sense for those that develop allergies early on or come in contact with something for the first time. I don't know if I'm atypical or not, but when I was young, I had severe allergies against grasses—in particular hay fever—and as I've gotten older, they've gone. What was going on with my immune system?

Esther:
So, this and the opposite is also true. There are a lot of people who have eaten—this is especially true for seafood and shellfish—people who have eaten these types of foods their whole lives, and then suddenly when they are 30, 40, or 50 years old, they start reacting against it.

They become anaphylactic and can never eat that thing ever again. So, both stories happen. What you said is more common—to have allergies when you are a toddler, a child, a baby—and then you grow out of them.

That's the most common. We don't know the reason for that. We think we’re becoming tolerized, and that's what people try to do when they do immunotherapies.

They try to make you become tolerant—meaning they make a trick so your immune system stops seeing that thing as a noxious, dangerous substance and starts seeing it as, “Okay, maybe I don't need to react every time I have that thing.”

So, you naturally did that. And that's where we have some evidence that that's how we should treat allergic patients, which is the main idea of immunotherapy.

Dr. Biology:
So, is that a little bit of peanut butter at a time?

Esther:
Exactly. It’s a tiny bit every day, and you start increasing the amount. That presumably works well for a lot of people for certain allergens. Sometimes it only works while you're doing it. Some people report that once you stop, you’ll go back and have allergies again.

For some people, you can cure your allergies for the rest of your life, and you’re good.

Dr. Biology:
Right—and we'll remind everyone, do this with a physician and don't do it on your own. Okay, so allergies—do you have allergies?

Esther:
Actually, I do. I have one. I have a nickel allergy, which is a very weird one. Jewelry that is not gold and has some type of nickel or copper—yes, that—which is a weird one to have. Like, why do our bodies care about nickel?

Dr. Biology:
So, what brought you to study the world of allergies and the immune system?

Esther:
I liked infectious diseases a lot when I was in college, and I really liked doing research in biomedical sciences. So, I think the immune system was my first entry into this world. I thought diseases in general that are contagious and infectious were very interesting.

I wanted to study those. But then, once I started studying bacterial infections, for example, I heard in my immunology classes that there was something even more puzzling.

Because with bacterial or other pathogenic infections, we kind of know what immune responses are triggered and how the immune system detects those bugs and responds to them.

We don't know all the details, but we know more or less what happens. When we get to different types of toxic stimuli—like allergens and other things—we don't know anything. That captivated me more than anything.

Allergies were a thing that did not fit the paradigm of immunologists. Immunologists were like, “Oh, we know how things work. We know how we detect things that are bad for you.” But then you go to things like toxins, allergens, and venoms, and we're like, “Okay, this is inducing a very strong immune response—people can even go anaphylactic and almost die—so how don't we know what is going on there?”

 So, I moved fields a little because I thought that was more interesting.

Dr. Biology:
You mentioned that, but there’s a link that we don’t always investigate—or at least I hadn’t heard was being investigated—was the link between the immune system and brain. Let’s talk a little bit about that link, because it seems like you have some ideas in that area.

Esther:
Yeah. Again, all the research that we do is we look at what happens in infectious diseases first, which is the more established and known thing—like what happens when you have a cold or a flu.

Esther:
We usually develop what we call sickness behaviors, and you can relate to that if you ever got sick in your life with any of these bugs. You can relate to things like you don’t want to eat, you feel tired, you don’t want to hang out, you sleep too much, you have fever, and so forth. You don’t want to hang out with other people.

Esther:
So, you have an antisocial behavior. All of those things together we call sickness behaviors, which we don’t like—obviously—because they make us feel pretty bad, and we feel pain. But those things are actually very important for you to cope with this infection. You have to have those symptoms. You have to have those things so you can get better, if that makes any sense.

Esther:
And the second point is that it’s your immune system that is making you feel like that—just so the immune system can work on fighting the infection for you. So, the immune system has this dual role. One is we’re going to deal with this bacteria, but we need you to lay down. We need you to stop moving around.

Esther:
We need you to not see other people. We need you to not eat—or to eat specific things, depending on the infection, like “starve a cold, feed a fever.” So, this is the interesting part where we start being more interested because—okay—how the immune system deals with the bacteria, that’s more known. But how does the immune system tell your brain on purpose—this is not just the side effect that happens; it’s purpose. We need to make you feel like that and have these types of behaviors so we can do our job fighting this bacteria or viruses. So, that part is less known. Again, it’s more known when we’re talking about a cold or a flu—completely unknown when we’re talking about allergies.

Esther:
So, our question was an obvious thing. It was like: if your immune system acts in your brain to change your behavior during infection, would that be the case in allergies, which is also an immune response—but it’s a completely different immune response than a bacteria, for example?

Dr. Biology:
Right. Hives or itch? Itch. Yes. Or swelling and all those sort of things.

Dr. Biology:
So, when we think about that, then the brain basically says, okay, stay away from people. Shut down for a little bit because I’m busy battling this bacteria or this virus. It’s coming in. With the allergies—as we said—here we have I get a rash. Okay, so I’m itchy. A little rash is okay. A lot of rash is a problem. A little swelling—

Dr. Biology:
A little inflammation is okay. A lot is a real bad thing. It could be deadly. So, what is going on there? I mean, this again is back to the immune system talking to the brain. And you’re saying the immune system is sending signals to the brain. It’s not the brain sending signals to the immune system. Oh. That’s happening, true.

Esther:
That’s definitely happening. And that’s another reason why we started being interested in this relationship between nervous system and immune system, is that those symptoms that you just mentioned—red, like itchy, and edema, which is like swollen tissues, and so forth—like vomiting, diarrhea, and so forth—those things are all neuronal reflexes that are normally felt by anyone.

Esther:
Like, you don’t have to be allergic to feel the symptoms. Everyone has experienced those things in their life, right? You itch when you have a mosquito bite, for example. That’s not an allergen. So, you have those normal processes. The whole idea of all of those symptoms is to get rid of that thing that is noxious for you—that is dangerous for you.

Esther:
So, the immune system is doing that. The immune system is now trying to tell the nervous system like, “Hey, there is a substance here that will cause a lot of trouble, so we need to get rid of it immediately.” So, you have this immediate reaction, and your immune system might think that this is really important because it’s a matter of minutes.

Esther:
You can have those types of reactions. Right. So, that’s kind of the idea here. In the brain, we had no clue what was happening. So, that’s when we went to study. It’s like, okay, we know about these reactions like itch, but you don’t need the brain to do all of those things—like diarrhea, vomiting—you don’t need the brain necessarily for some of those things.

Esther:
But what about the brain and behavior? For example, what types of feelings do you have when you are allergic compared to when you have an infection? So, we found that—interestingly—when you are under an allergic reaction or an allergic response, you feel more anxiety or an anxiety-like behavior. First, you have an avoidance behavior, which is really interesting.

Esther:
That means it’s your system trying to tell you, “Hey, stop eating or drinking that thing that is making you potentially sick,” and you will notice this very quickly. So, we do experiments to show evidence that that’s the case. So, this is the first thing that happens. It’s what we call aversion or avoidance behavior. And this is known in humans—like pediatricians tell me all the time the kids have this.

Esther:
They show this all the time. Toddlers—sometimes I think they know that they’re allergic before their parents notice that they are allergic—because they start refusing eating or drinking something that can be potentially allergic. The parents later will recall that and say, “Oh yeah, my kid was indeed trying to refuse when I had the food with this particular allergen,” and so forth.

Esther:
So, the first thing is that you try to avoid that, which is a very good mechanism. Right? It’s extremely strategic. Right. It’s a good thing—if something is causing you pain, you avoid that. You stop doing that. You don’t go to that environment, and so forth. Now, for example, if you are in a situation that you cannot avoid—let’s say you ate that thing—it’s too late.

Esther:
You already ate that. Your system tried to tell you like, you should avoid this thing, but you didn’t. You ate that thing—probably because it’s delicious and full of things that are full of sugar or full of salt, or something that you really like. So, you didn’t notice that there was that allergen thing, and then you waited, and then you waited.

Esther:
Now it’s too late. What happens now? So, now your brain is going to go on mode two. It was like, okay, we tried to avoid—that was too late. You cannot avoid, like seasonal allergies; you cannot avoid those. Trees and grasses are out there attacking you all the time. Obviously, they don’t care about you, but they’re there in the environment that you have to be in, so there’s no way to avoid.

Esther:
So, the second mode of your brain is like, okay, I am in an environment with this noxious, dangerous thing. What do you do? Then you become slightly anxious, and it seems to correlate with the feelings that allergic individuals have. So, this is well reported with people with asthma, for example, with hay fever. So, anyhow, we always thought that this was a side effect.

Esther:
I was like, oh, of course you’re feeling anxious in the case of asthma—for example, it’s like, yeah, of course you cannot breathe. So, no one paid attention to that symptom as much throughout the years. But now we think it’s not just a side effect. We think that—again—the same analogy as the immune system in case of infection saying, “Hey, brain, do that so we can deal with this dangerous thing.”

Esther:
So, your brain’s probably trying to tell you something—like, behave like this. If you think about animals in the wild, a little bit of anxiety could be protective. So, I think it has a heavy weight to this type of word nowadays because of mental health, and we’re going to get to it. But a little bit of anxiety is good because it makes you be aware of your environment and potentially prevent things.

Esther:
So, we know that—for example—if you think of an animal in the wild, if you are not anxious at all, you would just go out and not care about the presence of predators, for example. If you have too much anxiety, that’s also not good, because that’s going to prevent you from even going out of your place and looking for food, for example.

Esther:
So, you cannot live your life. You cannot eat, drink, reproduce, socialize—anything. So, you have to have a little bit of anxiety to be aware of predators, but not so much that it would prevent you from going outside, for example. So, in the case of the immune system, it’s triggering just a little bit of this anxious behavior. The good news is that it’s temporary.

Esther:
We found that it only lasts while the allergic response is maintained. So, this cannot be—for example—the main cause of people having anxiety. We think that it could be helping, making people susceptible to that, but that cannot be only explained by that. And we don’t know what’s the consequence of that in humans. We don’t know.

Esther:
Like, why is anxiety a good thing to have when you have allergies? How does that help you cope with this allergic reaction? For example, does it get any better? That’s what we’re going to try now—like, if we prevent them from having anxiety—which is what you were asking—what does the brain cause in the immune system? So, that’s the question now.

Esther:
It’s like, if we block this behavior, do you see any response? Does the immune system act differently? Right. We don’t know.

Dr. Biology:
Okay. Well, this is why we do science, right?

Esther:
That’s right. We’re still doing it.

Dr. Biology:
If we knew all the answers, we wouldn’t need to do it. So, there’s anxiety—you can almost say hypersensitive, more in tune. You know, modern-day spidey senses are a little more turned on, and maybe it keeps you from going out for that bike ride that might cause problems if you were talking about hay fever, because you’re thinking, oh, I’m—

Dr. Biology:
That’s—I’m in this mode. I probably shouldn’t do that. Maybe I’ll stay inside and exercise inside. All right. So, you’re talking about this relationship between the immune system and the brain, and it’s a two-way communication. Okay. Is that the big question you have for the immune system? Or is that just one of the big questions you have for the immune system?

Esther:
It’s one of the big questions we have for the immune system, because there are so many not known things that this is one of them. We are still trying to understand how allergies occur in general—like why do we get allergic again? Or why some people don’t get allergic, which was your very first question to me. And we still don’t know that, but that very idea is still not solved in this field.

Esther:
We’re a little stagnant, I would say, in this field. So, we need different ideas. That’s one of the reasons why we started looking for different issues. Maybe we were too focused on the immune response, and maybe the answer is elsewhere—maybe in the brain, maybe in another tissue. So, my main question is how the immune system detects things that are not pathogens.

Esther:
Because for pathogens we know—it’s like, oh, we have detectors for specific molecules that are in pathogens. This was like 30 years ago that we figured that out. It’s not that long ago, but we are now asking questions like, what about other things in the environment? Because we have so many more things that can cause us harm than just pathogens.

Dr. Biology:
Right. Besides those viruses and bacteria, we’ve got a lot of other things that are going on.

Esther:
That’s right—like allergens, phytochemicals. There’s xenobiotics, which are these compounds that we are putting in a lot of things in the modern environment, for example. Again, allergens, poisons, phytochemicals, drugs—and I call this group toxins in general—poisons. Those are things that are not pathogens.

Esther:
So, they’re not contagious. They are not like a virus or a bacteria. They could be inside—or a bacteria, for example, can make a toxin and you feel sick because of the toxin—but they are usually not within pathogens. So, for those things we have no idea how the immune system senses those. But we think that the immune system is the major defense system.

Esther:
So, it should sense those things or detect those things and do something about it. So, those are the two questions that I have in general. Allergies are one special category of that. But the major question is: how do we detect things that are not microbes, and what is the function of the immune system in protecting you? Or is the immune system just trying to make you sick?

Esther:
That’s what we think happens in allergies. That’s the current idea—is that, oh, your immune system is just dumb, is just misunderstanding what is happening, and is just mistakenly targeting things that you should not do. We don’t think that’s true. We think that the immune system is way smarter than that. We think that this immune system knows something that we don’t, and they are acting accordingly.

Esther:
We don’t think that those things are completely innocuous, neutral things.

Dr. Biology:
So, for example—picking on peanut butter—we don’t know what it is for those that have the reaction. We don’t know what it is that’s causing the reaction?

Esther:
We totally know. We know exactly what’s causing the reaction. But this is the part that is complex. The thing that causes the reaction was not necessarily the thing that made you induce that response in the first place.

Dr. Biology:
Okay.

Esther:
That’s different. So, for example, a peanut has a lot of different compounds inside, right? So, when you react to a peanut because you’re already sensitized to this peanut, you’re seeing the part of the peanut that is the most abundant, for example. But that’s not necessarily what—in the first place—induced that reaction in you. It could have been other things inside of the peanut that induced the response.

Esther:
And now your immune system is seeing something else, if that makes any sense. I think the analogy would be—for example—if someone lights a match and starts a whole fire to the point that it burns down a house, the firefighters were not called because of that match, because no one knows where the match is and what caused the fire, right? I think that’s the analogy. The firefighters were called by the neighbors because they saw the house was in flames. So, that’s why they called the firefighters—which are the immune system in this case. But what caused the fire was the match—was something different. So, that’s not what induced the firefighters to come in the second place. But that’s what induced the fire in the first place. That’s the analogy.

Dr. Biology:
Right. So, our body was no longer looking at the matches. It sees the fire and it says, oh, there must have been a match.

Esther:
That’s right.

Dr. Biology:
Okay.

Esther:
That’s right. That’s what allergies are.

Dr. Biology:
So, then how do we tell it not to worry about the match and/or the fire?

Esther:
For the immune system, it’s a hard job because they are trying to protect you. They are like, look—whatever—if it’s that match or whatever is related to that match, I’m going to protect you from it. It doesn’t matter. It’s what we call “better safe than sorry.” I don’t care if you’ll never eat peanut in your life anymore. I am going to protect you, because that thing could cause something really bad in you later in life.

Esther:
That’s what the immune system is trying to tell you. So, for them, it’s okay if you never eat peanut or milk or anything ever again. It’s like, okay—oh well—that’s the cost of you being alive for much longer, for example. So, the thing that we don’t know is what are the matches in this analogy—like, what are the things that cause this in the first place that we are seeing as a noxious thing, as something that causes some danger, or it can be actually really bad for you?

Esther:
We don’t know that. But in a lot of the allergens, we do have some idea that they are things that could be actually really bad for you. Nickel—the metal that I’m allergic to, for example—is supposed to be pretty bad for you. Long-term contact with nickel increases a lot of susceptibility to cancer and potentially other diseases.

Esther:
So, the allergy to nickel might be a protective mechanism for you to not develop those things later in life. So, I’m protecting my body by having an allergy to nickel, because now I’m not going to wear that ever again—this type of jewelry. It’s protecting you in a way. For example, when you get allergic to shellfish, most of the time it’s because there was some other bug that had a toxin, and it’s contaminating your oyster, for example, or in your shrimp—they carry something that is a toxin, a real toxin.

Esther:
So, the shrimp is not the problem. The problem was the toxin. But the immune system saw them together, so it doesn’t know anymore—what is this? A shrimp or a toxin? It will target both things, because it will think that whenever you eat a shrimp, it will come with a toxin. So, it was like, I don’t care if you’ll never eat shrimp.

Esther:
I am going to target those things.

Dr. Biology:
Do people then with allergies have like an advanced immune system over the rest of us?

Esther:
That’s a good question. I don’t think so. We don’t know. That’s—the answer is we don’t know. But that’s a good, good point. And that is, like, maybe it’s better in detecting things. That’s why we call them hypersensitive individuals.

Esther:
Right. And I think that’s at many levels. I think not only the immune system but even their neuronal system might be better able to detect things. And it’s always a threshold, right? Like taste, for example—some people can taste something bitter very quickly, and some people take much more of the food to finally perceive that taste.

Esther:
The immune system is probably similar, and people with allergies probably are people that can sense things a little bit more—detailed or faster—than others. I wouldn’t think that this is a general thing for everything, because the immune system is complex. So, maybe it is true for this type of stimuli—like allergens or this type of challenges—but maybe that’s not true for other things like viral molecules, for example.

Dr. Biology:
Well, if nothing else, we are learning that we have a really complex system that we need to learn a lot more about.

Esther:
It is.

Dr. Biology:
Well, Esther—on Ask A Biologist, I always ask three questions of my guests. You ready?

Esther:
I’m ready.

Dr. Biology:
Okay. The first question is: when did you first know you’re going to be a scientist? And, you know, it’s kind of like that moment. Or maybe you have to think back and say, oh, well, actually, this is when it started.

Esther:
That’s a hard question because I never had—I don’t think—this, like, “Oh yeah, I’m going to do this forever.” I always left it open, like, this is what I’m interested in now.

Esther:
But later, I don’t know. I think I ended up doing biology because I was interested in diseases in general, and also because I was a good student in biology. So, it was kind of a natural thing. I like biology. For me, it’s easier, and I ended up studying biology. It was like opportunities that showed up. I was guided by curiosity.

Esther:
Then I was planning to do infectious disease, and then I got there to do infectious disease. And then I thought, oh, but this allergen thing is much more interesting because it’s more puzzling. We don’t know anything about it. Then you jump to the other one, then you start doing the other one—like, oh, what about the brain? Let’s look at that too. So, I prefer to leave it open. Like, I never had this “ah ha—this is what I’m definitely doing for life.” I’ll leave it open. I guess you can do science communication. Can do movie production and be a scientist at the same time. It is just an extension of what you’re doing. So, I could do a lot of things—being a scientist, right?

Dr. Biology:
Right. A lot of my guests do recall certain moments that are like turning points, right? But I think you got to the heart of it. It is just about all of them—if not all of them—are curious. Yes. And it’s their curiosity that has led them down their paths.

Dr. Biology:
Okay, I’m not going to take away your curiosity. You’re going to keep that. But I am going to take away all your science career. Okay, good. And I’m going to take away teaching. That’s something that a lot of our faculty love doing. So, I’m going to take all that away from you. This is just a mind game, so I’m not really taking it away. What would you be, or what would you do?

Esther:
That’s a good question. I would be an explorer because that’s the other thing I wanted to be as a child.

Dr. Biology:
Explore the world.

Esther:
Explore the world, travel around—like an anthropologist, for example. Be able to get to know different cultures. How do people live?

Esther:
Different languages? I don’t know if there’s a job that can do that. Maybe if you work for National Geographic, for example, and you could go explore. I could be a photographer also, but I’m pretty bad at that. So, maybe an explorer is better. Let’s go through cruises in Antarctica, or go to all the exotic and remote places we can still find on Earth.

Dr. Biology:
That’s great. So, the last question is: what advice would you have for a future scientist?

Esther:
My advice is to read as much as possible. Read the things that you like. I think there’s nothing like books. I think we’re flooded with internet stuff and social media, but there’s nothing like a book for your mind to be inspired by—and read what you want to read.

Esther:
Anything. Inspiring things, things that make you curious. Could be fiction, could be nonfiction—ideally both. So, just read as much as you can.

Dr. Biology:
I think that’s wonderful advice. And for those that want to get a little bit closer to science—on Ask A Biologist, we have these articles that are called PLOSables, and they’re a relationship with the Public Library of Science.

Dr. Biology:
It’s a journal that’s out there for scientists. And what they are is— they’re primers. So, you can get the layperson’s view of a primary research article that’s directly linked to the primer. So, you can get the overview and then you can try—and I always say try—because scientists, while they do great at science, they’re not always great at writing about their science.

Dr. Biology:
Part of it is because they use shorthand—things that they use within their groups. It makes it faster to communicate with other scientists, but it seems like a foreign language to anyone else. So, try out the PLOSables. They’re fun. Esther, I had a really great time learning about allergies with you. Thank you so much for sitting down on Ask A Biologist.

Esther:
Thank you.

Dr. Biology:
You have been listening to Ask A Biologist, and my guest has been Esther Borges Florsheim. She’s an immunologist that’s also a researcher in the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, and she’s also a faculty member in the School of Life Sciences. Now, if you want to learn more about what she’s been doing, we’ll include links in the show notes, including a link to her profile that we have on the Ask A Biologist website.

Dr. Biology:
This podcast is produced on the campus of Arizona State University, and is recorded in the Grass Roots Studio House 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.

Dr. Biology:
The address is askabiologist.asu.edu. Or you can just use your favorite search tool using the words “ask a biologist.” As always, I’m Dr. Biology, and I hope you’re staying safe and healthy.

 

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Coral Reef Checkup

Dr. Biology:

This is Ask A Biologist, a program about the living world. And I'm Dr. Biology. We talked about coral reefs on the show before. My guests at the time were Diana Lipscomb. And in another show, we had Greg Asner on to talk about coral reefs and his high-flying research aircraft that he was using to study coral reefs. So, we've been covering this topic for more than 15 years.

00;00;30;25 

Dr. Biology:

Today we get to talk with a researcher who has been studying corals, not just in the ocean. She has them in her lab. My guest today is Liza Roger, a professor in the School of Molecular Sciences. And she's alSo, part of the new School of Ocean Futures at Arizona State University. She's studying how impacts of environmental change on marine life, such as corals, anatomies and some cool jellyfish.

00;01;01;11 

Dr. Biology:

There upside down jellyfish. Not only does she study these organisms in the ocean, she's also raising corals and jellyfish in her laboratory, where her lab can, as they say, unlock the next level of coral research. It's a new way of exploring and understanding these ocean animals, and maybe even learn how to heal corals. Using some exciting new technology that works at the tiniest scale.

00;01;30;18 

Dr. Biology:

You can imagine what we call the nanoscale. So, grab your snorkel, or at least your headphones, and join us for a coral reef checkup. Lisa, thank you So, much for joining me on Ask a Biologist. Great to be here.

00;01;47;17 

Liza:

Thank you.

00;01;48;14 

Dr. Biology:

All right. Let's talk a little bit about corals. And even though everybody thinks they know about corals, we always find that we don't all know exactly what a coral is.

00;02;00;09 

Liza:

There are some people that think they're plants, and some of them that see dead skeletons might even think of them as rocks. Let's talk a little bit about corals. Well, as even people who see live coral and think they are rock, they aren't. So, corals are animals that have a symbiosis with a plant. So, symbiosis is when two different living organisms decide to work together for the benefit of both.

00;02;32;13 

Liza:

So, they're the symbiosis between the coral and the plant is actually a bit like, the Russian dolls, the babushka. You have one inside the other. So, the plant cell is inside the coral cell, and they work together, to have more energy. And most of the energy comes from sunlight. So, we're taking that sunlight. Photons? Yes.

00;02;56;17 

Liza:

The plants are actually converting that into food energy, right? That's correct. And our corals, they actually those polyps, they need that food because they can't make their own food. Right. Yes. So, they can't make their own food. So, the plant cell again, that lives inside the coral cell, then exchange this, energy with the host, with the coral. 

00;03;19;16 

Liza:

And that allows corals to grow in places where there's not much of food in the water in general, because otherwise, the other way the corals can feed is by catching things that are floating in the sea waters that would be plankton or little particles. And so, there are some species of corals that rely on the plant cell a lot.

00;03;41;25 

Liza:

Up to 90% of their energy. And then you have other species that rely on the plant cell a little bit less. That tends to drive their resistance or their sensitivity to bleaching and stress in general. You bring up the word bleaching. Yes. And we say that because they look white instead of being colorful. Right. What is bleaching? So, the symbiosis I explained before the bleaching is actually the breakdown of this partnership.

00;04;12;22 

Liza:

The symbiosis and the white that you're seeing is actually the coral skeleton that is underneath, because most of the color of the coral comes from the plant cell. So, when they lose their plant cell, their skin, their tissue becomes transparent. And what you're seeing underneath is the skeleton, which is white because it's made of calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate is like limestone.

00;04;39;28 

Dr. Biology:

Very rock looking.

00;04;41;11 

Dr. Biology:

Well, it is a rock. It's what we call a bio mineral because it's a mineral. So, I rock that is made by a living organism. So, bio mineral, bio mineral. You mentioned it's a symbiotic relationship. So, we see what the corals are getting from the plants. What do the plants get from the coral. Well, so, the plant cell also gets certain things from the coral, like waste nitrogen.

00;05;07;04 

Liza:

Plants like nitrogen. It's like a fertilizer for them. So, they get some of this from the coral and to some extent, the plant cell as well, gets to be protected inside this other organism that has, you know, a skin that has all these things. It's still debated whether it's proper protection. I don't think everybody would agree, because eventually we do know that those plant cells can live in the seawater on their own, and they do fine.

00;05;36;17 

Liza:

So, they don't necessarily need extra protection. But the evolved, this, symbiosis, this partnership through time because at some point it must have been hard to be in the water like that. So, I think it's a partnership that is very old, and maybe the conditions are easier now than they were before. But the partnership has remained because they maybe noticed that it was nice for everybody.

00;06;04;23 

Dr. Biology:

There was an advantage still.

00;06;06;09 

Liza:

Yes.

00;06;08;06 

Dr. Biology:

When we talk about corals and coral reefs, whether you've gone to the ocean or not, you've seen videos, documentaries, and they see this beautiful, colorful plant, an animal. We don't often think about their importance. Other than, you know, you think if you lose corals, okay, what's the big deal? Well, turns out that corals end up being a key and in this case, a keystone to a lot of other animals.

00;06;39;10 

Dr. Biology:

What I'm getting at is I think I've read before where they all talk about coral reefs as being the rainforests of the ocean type of thing. Right? What if we didn't have coral reefs? They're all gone. What's going to happen?

00;06;58;11 

Liza:

Those types of predictions are really hard to make. I don't have a crystal ball. We know what the corals do right now.

00;07;08;11 

Liza:

And So, we can imagine that losing this, it's going to have quite negative effects. Like you said on other organisms. So, the coral reefs, they serve as a nursery for baby fish. They are a food source for larger fish. You know, it's a whole ecosystem. So, you have an entire food chain there. If you take it away, everything becomes lopsided.

00;07;36;25 

Liza:

The other thing that the reefs bring is coastal protection. So, all the people who live by the coast, where there is a reef, get protection from large waves, from storms and cyclones and the general rise of the seawater. So, as ice is melting at the bull's, the level of the oceans is rising. But having a reef there kind of also protects you from all of this.

00;08;02;27 Liza:

And so, if you take all of that away, we can imagine there's just going to be a problem. Even the communities that fish on reefs, they're going to lose their food source and they're going to lose coastal protection. So, it's doesn't necessarily mean that some of these services aren't going to be fulfilled by other systems, but it's going to be a huge loss to biodiversity.

00;08;26;19 

Liza:

The fish won't magically go somewhere else. The turtles won't go and feed somewhere else. They might, because they do move. But the level of mobility of some of these organisms that are able to swim away is not necessarily far ranging enough.

00;08;45;14 

Dr. Biology:

Right? So, and I don't want anybody think we're just doom and gloom here, because the idea of all coral reefs going away is not necessarily where we're going.

00;08;58;00 

Dr. Biology:

We had Greg Asner on the show before. At that time, I was thinking, okay, well, all the coral reefs are impacted equally, and that's not true. I think he said there are some winners and there's some losers. So, what's the score right now, would you say, with winners and losers around the world, if you can even answer that?

00;09;19;05 

Liza:

Well, I think we are all working at trying to figure out who has the potential to be a winner and who is more likely to be a loser. And here So, far, we've been talking about tropical and subtropical reefs. So, the corals that we've been talking about have this partnership with the plant. So, you have other species that live in deeper waters that don't have this partnership, that don't need sunlight, that aren't suffering from the heat, stress that is causing bleaching at the moment in the tropical cousins.

00;09;55;12 

Liza:

So, we might be losing some reefs and some surface area coverage of corals, in tropical places. But there's other places where it might be growing. But the it depends where you're looking and what you're looking for. Like you said, there's going to be winners and losers. And you have some corals that are bouncing back really well after, a shift in the ecosystem.

00;10;24;22 

Liza:

So, where let's say there's marine heatwaves, excuse my term, but a lot of corals cook and die and that kind of leaves space for species who are faster growing to then thrive. So, they've replaced the assemblage that was there before. So, maybe before there was ten species. And now you go back after this heat wave a few years later and you actually only have three, because those three are fast growing and they've managed to pick back up the slow growers again.

00;10;59;08 

Liza:

They are slow growers. So, they're going to take much longer to get back to a stage where it would be similar to what it was before. But I think what we're seeing with changes in our ecosystems, whether it's on land or at sea, we shouldn't be looking for, bring up things back to how they were before. We have to know that systems are constantly evolving.

00;11;23;19 

Liza:

Even the changes that we are seeing aren't, you know, very nice initially. It doesn't mean the whole ecosystem is going to crumble. It is shifting and hopefully it's a shift that can still maintain a good amount of diversity, but it's not always the case. So, this is the kind of work that a lot of people are doing in the field to try and assess which are these corals are able to grow super fast and recover.

00;11;49;03 

Liza:

Do we have ones that are more resistant to temperature? How do they have this resistance to temperature or be it another type of resistance that allows them to come back or still be there? You know, having gone through this type of heat wave and still being alive afterwards, what do they have that the others don't? What do they do that the others don't do?

00;12;11;24 

Dr. Biology:

The super coral?

00;12;13;02 

Liza:

Yeah. This is a term that people well, people, scientists. Yes. We all have this problem. Those people. No. But So, a lot of scientists are a bit, unfortunately tired of the super coral term because, it's been, you know, bundled with Superman and all these heroes that can do everything. What the super Coral category actually does is they seem to be, very well suited to doing one thing.

00;12;46;02 

Liza:

So, they're not all rounders. They have Kryptonite. And so, for example, if one of your corals is a super coral, let's call it that, okay. And it's super power is resistant to temperature. The temperature changes aren't the only thing that we are going towards. There is alSo, ocean acidification, pollution and other mechanisms like even the decrease of oxygen in the seawater.

00;13;14;11 

Liza:

So, while they might be very good at resisting temperature, they might not be good at living in a low oxygen environment. So, they will still suffer soon. So, maybe in this time window, maybe a short window, they are super coral. But tomorrow the Kryptonite will hit them.

00;13;31;10 

Dr. Biology:

Got it. Make sense? So, what's interesting about your work is. And full disclosure, I got to go to your very cool lab the other day, and, it's interesting because you don't think about studying corals in the desert.

00;13;50;15 

Liza:

Why not?

00;13;52;04 

Dr. Biology:

Well, we don't have any oceans around here, but, you make your own, right? That's right. And so, let's talk a little bit about your research, because this is this is what we're getting into is what makes a coral a survivor. And for those that do survive, or maybe even those that are just surviving, well, what can the doctor do in this case to help them recover?

00;14;16;23 

Dr. Biology:

Just like if we get sick, how do we go to the doctor and what do we end up getting to help us get better? What's your lab been doing?

00;14;26;04 

Liza:

So, we're actually looking into the super powers that the super corals have, or some other organisms that are able to do something cool that the corals aren't very good at doing.

00;14;39;15 

Liza:

So, this is why we have the upside down jellyfish and the sea anemones in the lab. They happen to also have a partnership with a plant cell. So, both of these organisms and the coral. And it's the same type of plant cell. The only thing is they do this partnership differently. So, the sea anemone for example, it has what we call a facultative symbiosis.

00;15;03;01 

Liza:

That means that the partnership can be on or off. You know, the are fine with a partner with a plant cell. They are fine without. So, how are they able to switch this on and off? Because if you compare this to bleaching, it's like if they are completely fine being bleached. So, could we make corals be completely fine being bleached?

00;15;26;14 

Liza:

Because most of the time when a coral is bleached, it will die. It's very hard for them to recover from that. So, maybe if we understood better this on an off switch, then maybe we could make corals flip the switch, then the upside down jellyfish. They actually grow or live in mangroves. So, mangroves are on the coast. They have a lot of trees.

00;15;50;05 

Liza:

Mangrove trees are pretty cool. They have roots that go into the sea. Their branches and their trunks come out of the water. And so, the protect the coastlines as well, these mangroves. But what you have in mangroves is a system that doesn't have much, flow. So, the water doesn't move very much in there. This is why you protest coastline, by the way.

00;16;13;27 

Liza:

So, you have warmer waters, lower oxygen, higher nutrients. So, there's more nitrogens and things like that. The pH can also be a little bit more acidic. However, these jellyfish love living there. Their entire life cycle is there. So, how are they able to maintain the partnership with the plant cell in these conditions? Because not many corals like to live in mangroves.

00;16;40;28 

Liza:

There's a handful of species that do that, and they would probably also fit in the super coral category. So, we are interested in understanding how they do these things and whether these are things that we can make the corals do, you know, could we make a coral do jellyfish tricks? We're not talking living upside down, but we are talking symbiosis.

00;17;01;29 

Liza:

And the same with the sea anemone. So, the first part is this is trying to understand what are these tricks that, special organisms have evolved to have. And then once we know that, can we make the corals do these things? The other angle that we are working on is actually developing what we call nano medicine for corals.

00;17;28;14 

Liza:

That's where the coral doctor comes in.

00;17;31;27 

Dr. Biology:

I wanted to know about that. We're talking about giving an aspirin. Or are we talking about Band-Aids?

00;17;37;12 

Liza:

We're actually talking about both. Well, I'm not, into making Band-Aids. There are some labs that do that. They're actually developing materials that, So, not sticky like a Band-Aid. Not made a plastic, like a Band-Aid or something we would call a biomaterial to help corals recover, heal from injuries and grow better.

00;17;58;00 

Liza:

What we are looking at is more the aspirin route. And So, we're looking at some of their ailments. Of course they have diseases, but we're more looking at signs of stress. And can we reduce the stress using medicine. Some of the things you might have heard around is antioxidants. So, you have antioxidants in grape juice for example. You have antioxidants in orange juice.

00;18;26;12 

Liza:

So, all of these are natural antioxidants, and they're here to address something that goes on in your body when you're struggling a little bit. It could be from heat. We also get too hot, right? I live in the desert. I live in Arizona, So, we can get hot. And So, the process of this stress that happens is what we call oxidative stress.

00;18;50;02 

Liza:

You have molecules that have oxygen in them, and they're very reactive. We normally make them because we are aerobic. So, we breathe air. That's why they have oxygen in them because this area and there's oxygen in air. And So, these molecules are very reactive. And we have our own antioxidant system in our body that is there to meet this baseline production.

00;19;17;13 

Liza:

When we get stressed or we're tired, we haven't slept enough or we are too hot, or you know, when you're not comfortable, when something's going on, you can produce more of these to a level that is not met by your homemade antioxidants. That's when a glass of orange juice could help. So, we're looking at what is the glass of orange juice for corals.

00;19;42;05 

Liza:

And the reason we're talking in the nanoscale to the very, very small scale. So, let's see, you're making pasta and you have to put salt in your pasta. Are you going to put a giant block of salt in there or are you going to put tiny little crystals of salt there. And which one do you think is going to work the best.

00;20;04;25 

Liza:

So, it's going to be the little ones that are going to dissolve faster into your pasta water. And they will actually give some flavor to your pasta. The big rock of salt is not going to change much. So, for the medicine or approaches, the same, we want something that will work better. That will be easier to get in the system, because alSo, you're not going to be eating a giant block of salt.

00;20;27;01 

Liza:

If you put salt on your food itself. So, tiny little crystals. So, the idea is to make medicine. So, here, antioxidants that are teeny tiny that we can deliver to the corals or, put in the water So, that the corals take them up. And to make them feel better, to reduce their oxidative stress.

00;20;48;23 

Dr. Biology:

The interesting thing about that is when you're giving them this medicine, they're in a liquid.

00;20;55;16 

Liza:

Yes.

00;20;56;08 

Liza:

That's a hard part.

00;20;57;24 

Dr. Biology:

Right, right, right. Well, if it was easy, we would have done it already, right?

00;21;00;29 

Liza:

Yeah, absolutely.

00;21;02;03 

Dr. Biology:

So, how do you get around the challenges of that? Because I can see two things. One, right. Diffuses it. It just doesn't get to the corals in any kind of quantity because it gets washed away by the all the other water.

00;21;17;04 

Dr. Biology:

The other thing is what about the other animals that are around? You know that, you know, you have to think about. They might be just fine. Are we doing anything that could be detrimental or damaging to them?

00;21;29;15 

Liza:

Yeah. So, those are the two part to this is one is it depends on the type of antioxidant that you're trying to deliver because you can make different ones that are some natural ones and you have some that while they're made of natural compounds, you know, that are chemicals or molecules that are found around us.

00;21;50;12 

Liza:

It might seem odd to be putting that in the water. And then there's the aspect of getting the treatment to the coral. So, the first one depending on the type of antioxidant you're trying to deliver. So, this one, the first trials we did because it was initially science is we're trying things right. And we're trying to see whether our idea works or not.

00;22;14;27 

Liza:

So, the first idea we tried was to make these nanoparticles that are actually cerium dioxide. So, it's one area with two oxygens. So, what this does is it is a metal oxide. That's what it's called. And this is the kind of thing that most likely the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, would not let us put in the ocean.

00;22;41;24 

Liza:

However, you have oxygen everywhere. You have Syria in a lot of places. Well, cerium. So, you know, there shouldn't be alarm bells, but because it's a metal oxide, there's a good chance we would not get the green light for that. So, pivoting. We've been looking at greener sources of antioxidants. So, things that are already made by nature, that are antioxidants.

00;23;05;28 

Liza:

We make our own. The corals make their own, the plant cells make their own. You can get it out of orange juice. Vitamin C is is an antioxidant. So, that's the kind of thing we're looking at packaging in a tiny, tiny form and seeing how the corals respond. So, again, we're not doing bulk. We're not doing a giant rock of it.

00;23;25;12 

Liza:

We're doing teeny tiny things. And these ones because every system that breathes in any way, even underwater, we'll have oxidative stress. Whoever eats it, they'll be fine. Yes. There is no negative effect to antioxidants, right? Unlike pesticides and other things. Exactly. This is not, is it? Chemistry is a tool that allows us to design these because they are made of chemicals and compounds.

00;23;58;04 

Liza:

And, So, they are molecules. But it's not a pesticide. It's not a negative compound. It's an antioxidant. We all we all need them. And then the other portion for the delivery, that gets a bit more kind of, it's going to show my age, MacGyver style. Right? Where you have to think. How could we bring that to the castle?

00;24;25;10 

Liza:

Because sprinkling fairy dust from the surface is most likely not going to get us there. It's not going to be efficient. A lot of fairy dust. You have to get it. Well, yeah, a lot of fairy dust. And how again, you know, what is the dose that the corals need and is it going to be met? So, the idea there, which we haven't, you know, gotten to the stage of trying out yet just because we got to find a compound that works before we try these things.

00;24;54;01 

Liza:

You know, how the we actually going to go back to pesticides, but how they spray pesticides on fields or how you spray weed killers in your garden. They use these kind of sprays or they use planes to go and spray entire areas. So, underwater, we don't have underwater planes, but we have tiny robots. So, could it be a tiny robot that is fitted with a spray system that you are able to remotely control guide all the way to the reefs, and then it just swims over the reef?

00;25;27;18 

Liza:

Fun sprinkles with alSo, knowing the flow of the water. So, you would do it slightly, not upstream because there's no stream, but up, the wave motion So, that then the waves casually carry your compound across the reef and spreads it and takes it into the lagoon. So, you would do that, for example, on the reef front, if you're thinking about the barrier, you would do it in front of the reef.

00;25;52;23 

Liza:

That way the waves are coming in towards the reef, are washing it into the reef and into the system. And then that gets circulated and we spread the love around.

00;26;02;07 

Dr. Biology:

Right. So, you pay attention to the tide and, you know, as the tide coming in, the tide going out.

00;26;07;20 

Liza:

Yes. You do things like that and, and, you can model wave motion, wave dynamics, oceanic currents.

00;26;15;10 

Liza:

There's times of year where it would be better to do it compared to others. So, there's a lot of logistics involved in this. You can do remote sensing as well to look at how or when it would be best to sprinkle your fairy dust.

00;26;26;07 

Dr. Biology:

So, this gets us back to your lab and the reason why you're doing all this research in your homemade ocean.

00;26;32;23 

Liza:

Yes. One of the things that we do that not many labs do, aside from growing corals in the desert, is we work on cell cultures. So, corals are being studied a lot. It's not a new thing, but a lot of people come from an ecology angle. And So, there's little work that has been done on how the cells work.

00;27;02;25 

Liza:

And they're also the reason for that is that we don't have great protocols, great methods to have the cells in the petri dish to study them. We have this in humans, and this is why we know So, much in terms of human medicine and diseases and things like that. Because in humans we're able to call a seed bank and order liver cells.

00;27;27;20 

Liza:

They arrive frozen. You thaw them and you can do your experiments, and you can have a really good study with a lot of work being done without having to poke hundreds of patients to get liver cells out of them, or even taking the entire liver, which is great because we don't want to be doing that. I would agree.

00;27;47;18 

Liza:

So, with the corals, we don't have that. I can't call a seed bank and say, hey, I need coral cells, send them to me. So, this is why we have the corals in the lab, So, that we can take small pieces of coral, take the cells off of the skeleton, and then study those in a dish. So, that gives us this new level of research where we're able to dig in deeper into how does the partnership work.

00;28;13;07 

Liza:

We're able to do it now as well in the anemones and the jellyfish, plus the corals. I don't get me wrong, the method isn't fully figured out. We're still working out the kinks, but this allows us to dive deeper. And even once we have these medicines design, we can test them in a petri dish. Instead of having hundreds and hundreds in corals in tanks and killing half of them because we got the dosage wrong.

00;28;38;11 

Dr. Biology:

And so, we have a little bit of culture in the lab.

00;28;40;27 Liza:

Yes, we have loads of culture in the lab.

00;28;43;07 

Dr. Biology:

All right. So, Liza before you get to go. All my guests have three questions that I ask of them. So, are you ready?

00;28;52;21 

Liza:

Yes.

00;28;53;23 

Dr. Biology:

The very first question. When did you first know you wanted to be a scientist?

00;29;01;09 

Liza:

I don't know if it was to be a scientist specifically, but I've always wanted to do marine biology. I was, TV generation. I was born in 85. So, that's when you started having documentaries on TV that took you in the sea, right? They perfected scuba diving gear and underwater cameras. So, Jacques Cousteau, those documentaries were huge.

00;29;27;07 

Liza:

I was glued to the TV watching those, and that's what I wanted to do. I didn't know if it was actual science that I wanted to do, but I wanted to be in the ocean and look at stuff down there.

00;29;36;26 

Dr. Biology:

Right. Drawn to the ocean. That is a common magnet, I would say, for a lot of people. But you are actually there.

00;29;45;25 

Liza:

Well, not right now. I’m in Arizona, but I have tanks in the in my lab. So, you know, if I need a bit of, ocean and low tide, sense, I can I can go and have a whiff in the tank room.

00;29;59;12 

Dr. Biology:

All right, So, this brings us to the next question. And, this is a, again, a thought provoking question.

00;30;08;17 

Dr. Biology:

And that. What would you do? I'm going to take everything away from you right now. Right. You're a scientist. You’re that marine biologist slash drawn to the ocean, taking it all away from you. I'm going to take away your teaching, too, because almost all my scientists love teaching. What would you be? Or what would you do?

00;30;26;04 

Liza:

Well, actually, when I was younger, I had, those two things that I was really passionate about.

00;30;31;15 

Liza:

So, there was the ocean, and then it was horse riding. So, maybe something related or associated with horses. The only thing once I needed to start making up my mind for real was with horse riding. I like to ride. And if you're an instructor, you're actually not riding that much. You're standing in the middle, freezing your toes in the sand or cooking, depending on, you know, the temperature where the climate, where you are.

00;30;56;10 

Liza:

The stailers were riding you know, that's not what I was interested in. I wanted to be the writer. So, I thought, okay, I'll keep that as a hobby. But yes, it would have been something with horses. Yeah.

00;31;08;12 

Dr. Biology:

Very good. All right. Last question. What advice would you have for a future scientist? And sometimes it's the young ones that are coming up, but it's also people that maybe were always, well, maybe one of those people that was watching the documentaries all their life and they decide they want to switch careers.

00;31;32;19 

Liza:

Well I think for me, the thing is, I'm stubborn. So, people told me I couldn't do it, but I proved them wrong. So, I think it's that if you want to do it, however old you are, I don't think it has anything to do with anything. If it's something you want to do, there's a way to do it.

00;31;53;27 

Liza:

Mostly is going to involve the bunch of swings and roundabouts, but you can get there. Did take me a while to get here. Think these swings and roundabouts as well are helpful. They can forge character to some extent, but they also give you some life experience that maybe others who have gotten there in a straight line don't have.

00;32;17;03 

Liza:

So, in my book, they did it the easy way, and you don't learn as much if you do it the easy way. In essence, we're going to be, you say, stubborn. You could say tenacious. Yes. It's perseverance, because one of the things that I see often is. So, I grew up in France and in France. In middle school, they start pointing you towards three different general fields.

00;32;43;22 

Liza:

Let's see. One is more literature and languages. One is more economics, and one is more sciences. Because I already knew I wanted to be a marine scientist, I wanted to go in the sciences, but they did the selection for that through maths and I was pretty average. So, they were telling me no. On top of that, I was bilingual French and English because my mother is British.

00;33;09;19 

Liza:

It's like you're bilingual. Just go. Go and do languages and go do literatures at night. And no, and that was not what I wanted to do. There was for that one a lot of philosophy to do every week. I couldn't fathom philosophy. You know, I'm I need data. I can't just, you know, go of thoughts of different people.

00;33;31;04 

Liza:

So, no, I, I wanted to be in, in science. And the very early they told me, no, you can't do that because you're not good enough. So, I didn't end up going into science, but I didn't end up going into literature. So, I went for the middle one, economics, which still had a little bit of science, but much less.

00;33;46;16 

Liza:

That meant that later on I had to catch up, and it wasn't easy because the step was quite high, because once you select, you didn't do either of those three. You lost a lot from the others. So, catching up was tricky. But eventually, you know, I found, fit in a university program that worked really well. That opened the door to having an internship in Australia with the Australian Institute Marine Science.

00;34;10;29 

Liza:

That opened the door. I ended up working for them for several years, and then I was already in Australia on campus, decided to do my PhD there. And, you know, So, they did things took time to click into place, but they did click. It's like when you, you know, you have the your, padlock on your locker on your you're trying to find the right combination or you don't quite remember the digits.

00;34;33;27 

Liza:

So, I was playing with the digits for a while. It's to see that. But I found it, you know.

00;34;39;08 

Dr. Biology:

Well, Lisa, I want to thank you So, much for sitting down. Ask a biologist to give us an update on corals and the cool stuff you're doing.

00;34;47;22 

Liza:

It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me. And come and see our critters again anytime.

00;34;52;00 

Dr. Biology:

Oh, and we forgot to mention that we're going to be doing a virtual tour of your lab. That's right. Yeah. So, somewhere in the, I would say the beginning of 2026, it would be, if not earlier, you'll be able to go to your lab and people can see all the cool things that you're doing. Yes. We'll put the link in the show notes for those that listen to this later on.

00;35;17;20 

Dr. Biology:

We'll add that later when we have a direct link to it. In the meantime, thank you again for being on the show.

00;35;23;20 

Liza:

You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

00;35;25;25 

Dr. Biology:

You've been listening to Ask A Biologist and my guest has been Liza:, a professor in the School of Molecular Sciences, and she is alSo, part of the new School of Ocean Futures at Arizona State University.

00;35;38;20 

Dr. Biology:

As always, we'll include links to anything we discussed on this episode, So, make sure you check out the show notes. 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.

00;36;02;10 

Dr. Biology:

Also, let me give you a quick reminder that if you haven't already subscribed to this podcast, please take a moment and do that 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 askabiologist.asu.edu.

00;36;28;20 

Dr. Biology:

Or you can just use your favorite search tool and enter the words ask a biologist. Keep in mind these are answers from real people. We're not using any I bot to generate the answers. As always, I'm Dr. Biology and I hope you are all staying safe and healthy.

 

 

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Biology, Books, and Movie Magic

Dr. Biology: 0:08

[Electronic keypad sound – vault door opens]

This episode of Ask A Biologist is being pulled from our special collections that have been stored in our secret vault. 

This is Ask a Biologist, a program about the living world, and I'm Dr Biology. Today, we're going to be talking about a lot of things. It'll be biology, filmmaking, climate change, and the E-word, yes evolution. In case you missed it, this year 2009, is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. Actually, his birth date is February 12th, and it's also the 150th anniversary of the first publishing of his famous book on the origins of species. Now, both climate change and evolution have stirred up a lot of discussion and a lot of news stories.

My guest scientist is Randy Olson, marine biologist turned filmmaker. He's been making documentary films since the 1990s and two of them have been on the topics of evolution and climate change. Since he's both a scientist and a communicator, it seemed like a great way to learn a little bit about both subjects. Welcome to the show, Randy Olson.

Randy: 1:25

Great to be here Dr. Biology.

Dr. Biology: 1:25

While preparing for this conversation, I did my homework and I realized, you know, we probably have enough material to create our own little mini-series, but unfortunately we don't have that much time. So how about we start with evolution? But right now I want to start with your evolution from biologist to filmmaker. Why did you change careers?

Randy: 1:50

Oh, in my mind I never changed anything. The two careers actually have the same basic form, which is both of them involve storytelling. And I've come to realize in recent years people ask me that question all the time how in the world could you go from being scientist to filmmaker? And I've come to realize that the years people ask me that question all the time how in the world could you go from being a scientist to a filmmaker? And I've come to realize that the unifying theme is the telling of stories. And this is one of the things that scientists don't really understand these days is that they are storytellers. They do the same thing that a filmmaker does. A scientist goes out into nature and collects data, comes back into a laboratory, puts it all together into a story that they can tell to the world about something that they think they see going on. A filmmaker does the same thing goes out into the world and shoots film, comes back into an editing suite, puts the film together into a story that they then share with an audience in the same manner.

Dr. Biology: 2:38

Well, you know, I ask that because I was going to say has your career really changed? And the reason for it is on this show. I often say at heart we're all scientists, because I think we're all inquisitive.

Randy: 2:48

Right, that's very true, I think we're all searching for patterns to try and understand the world with, and so when we see somebody do something once, we notice that when they do it a second time, we start to think oh, maybe that's a pattern. Somebody does the same mistake three times. You draw the conclusion oh, we've got a basic rule here this person does this. That's the same thing that a scientist does goes out and tries to look for patterns.

Dr. Biology: 3:12

Now your early career, before you added filmmaking, is in marine biology. Did this come about like every other young wannabe scientist? The allure of the ocean.

Randy: 3:27

Absolutely. I grew up in Hawaii from ages five to ten, spent unbelievable amounts of time at the beach, in the water, snorkeling, and more or less imprinted on the ocean. I think I got the ocean so deep into my blood back in those early years that when my family moved to Kansas, stuck me in the middle of the country. I never went away. I spent all those years in junior high school and high school and even college in Kansas, constantly trying to get back to the ocean, taking countless trips to the Caribbean and to California, and it was just inevitable. That's all I knew. When I was in high school I used to say to people I'm not sure what I'm going to do, I just know it's going to have something to do with the ocean. I thought for a long time I was going to be an underwater archaeologist because I began diving a lot when I was in high school and was really interested in shipwrecks and that seemed like something I could do. That was in the ocean. And I don't really quite know how I got into science, but it was kind of my sophomore year of college that I and actually I know exactly what happened.

Randy: 4:27

My sophomore year of college I dropped out of college and wandered around with a few friends for a while and ended up getting a job in Puerto Rico working on an oceanographic project for that semester and met some wonderful scientists marine biologists and nowadays, when I look back and think about it, what was it that was so wonderful about those scientists? It was that they told amazing stories. And we worked on this ship off the north coast of Puerto Rico and every evening at the end of the day, after we collected samples, everybody would gather on the back deck and sit there at sunset and have a little cocktail and watch the sun go down. And these older marine biologists would sit and tell stories of all their travels around the world, of all the work they'd done South Seas and Australia and the Pacific and all over the place.

Randy: 5:09

And I just sat there, mesmerized, and I think that I first fixated on the idea of I want to do this career. That involves all this traveling, and what is this career? Oh yeah, this career is science. So, okay, that's what I'm going to do, I'm going to go become a scientist. And then I think the deeper I got into the science stuff, the more it appealed to me in terms of the logic of science and the idea of using logic to try and make sense out of the world. I still really enjoy that.

Dr. Biology: 5:34

So that was the easy part of evolution. Now the hard part. Let's talk about the evolution of living things and the topic of your movie Flock of Dodos. The full title is actually Flock of Dodos, the Evolution Intelligent Design Circus. Before we jump into that, can you first give a brief summary of what evolution is all about, because I don't think a lot of people understand what it really is.

Randy: 6:03

Here is what evolution is.

Randy: 6:05

It is the science of change.

Randy: 6:07

One of the unfortunate things that has happened is that scientists are not very good with communication.

Randy: 6:13

They're not very good at understanding how to present themselves to the public, and what has happened over the last hundred years. In particular, the field of evolution has been burdened by all sorts of political baggage that people have thrown onto this topic of evolution, and nowadays there's a great deal of misunderstanding and people associate evolution with all these horrible things, and there are movies made that try and cast all kinds of aspersions at the field of evolution, and I really wish the world of science could step back and start everything back to square one and reinvent the topic of evolution and give it the subtitle the science of change because that's what it's about at heart. It is the field of science in which people take a look at the way in which things change and come up with some of the basic principles to explain how that change happens, what the consequences of it are, and so, at its core, there's nothing political about the topic of evolution. It's simply the principles of how it is that populations change, that species change, that everything changes over time.

Dr. Biology: 7:15

Is there a single moment or thing that most convinced you that evolution is real?

Randy: 7:23

In all of my studies and education and everything, the single thing that most hit me to make me realize that evolution really has happened and takes place is looking at the skulls of animals. There's nothing more amazing than to look at animal skulls, and I would encourage any kids out there to just go to the computer and type in animal skull on Google and maybe even click the Google Images button and start looking at all the different types and shapes of animal skulls and realize that they all started from a single common form. They've all got two eyes, they've all got a single mouth, they've all got a brain case and what you see is that evolution has taken that one form and bent it and twisted and shaped it around. Look at the skull of an anteater, which is stretched long and thin. Look at the skull of a polar bear and look at the skull of a grizzly bear. Look at the skulls of dogs and all the ways in which it's just bent around and shaped around and you begin to realize that it's almost like it's a piece of plastic or silly putty or something like that, and that over time evolution has selected different forms, but they all begin with those same basic elements.

Randy: 8:29

When I was in graduate school we did exercises in classes where we sat there and looked at all those skulls in comparative anatomy. And you look at the teeth as well. They've all got the same original bunch of teeth and you see that the reptiles have got tons of teeth and then some of the mammals that have become very specialized have them all reduced down into just a few very specific forms. It's so fascinating looking at skulls and that to me is the single most compelling piece of evidence that you can see all these bridges between different forms and the way they reshape skulls.

Dr. Biology: 9:01

When watching your movie. There's this particular poker game where you have a bunch of biologists discussing the merits of evolution and creationism and intelligent design and one of them says evolution is a fact. Is evolution a fact?

Randy: 9:17

As much as anything in science is a fact, is evolution a fact, as much as anything in science is a fact. Evolution is an idea that Charles Darwin kind of formulated in the mid-1800s, and it's been 150 years since then, with all of the greatest minds in the world, in the science world, trying to show that Darwin was wrong. And after 150 years of all the best minds doing their best to show that he was wrong, nobody's been able to show that. And at that point, there is so much information gathered that supports everything that Darwin suggested that you get to the point where you simply have to conclude that it is a fact.

Dr. Biology: 9:50

So a lot of people have a problem with teaching either evolution or creationism in schools. You know you can be on one side or the other. So there is this. You know conflict. But my question is is there really a conflict between evolution and religion?

Randy: 10:04

I don't think so. There are a great many major evolutionists who are deeply religious, and the fellow that I feel is the greatest popularizer of evolution in the past 100 years, Stephen J Gould, wrote an entire book near the end of his life called Rocks of Ages, in which he said that these two realms of science and religion are not in conflict. They don't overlap each other, and so they're completely different topics, and you're welcome to keep them completely separate. And that's what happens. Evolution tends to be more in our heads. We think about it a lot. It's based on a lot of information. Religion tends to be more in our heads. We think about it a lot. It's based on a lot of information. Religion tends to be more in our hearts. They're completely different organs that we're bringing into play when we're talking about the two different subjects.

Randy: 10:45

I was raised in Kansas. I was taught from an early age to respect people's religious beliefs. There's no need to get into it. These are just simply parts of human nature that we quite often differ on, and my feeling these days is the best thing you can do about religion is try and keep it at a fairly intuitive level. It's something that you sense and you believe, and when you start to get very analytical about it and come up with a whole bunch of rules as to how religion works, things like that. That's when it comes into conflict with other people's sets of rules. So that's my feeling is let's keep evolution up in the head with lots of information and logic. Let's keep religion down in the lower organs, where it's more intuitive and less defined.

Dr. Biology: 11:24

We started the Darwin Distinguished Lecture Series and our first lecturer was Ed Wilson. He actually was on the show earlier. In that lecture, one of the things he mentioned was that scientists would love to be able to prove there is a God. I think he even said there would have to have multiple Nobel Prizes just for that. So the big thing for me is to try to, as you pointed out, separate these two. I think they can exist. One is science, the other one is a belief, which is a really important thing to humankind. So I'm pleased to hear you say that and it was actually very interesting because your movie Flock of Dodos. I bet, when people go to watch it, if they're on one side of the spectrum versus the other, if there's an evolutionist over here and there's a creationist over here or an intelligent design person, I have a sneaking suspicion that they have different views of who are the dodos. Absolutely yes, who are the dodos?

Randy: 12:34

You have to watch the movie and come to your own conclusion. I think there's a little bit of dodo-ness to go around for everybody. Both sides make plenty of mistakes. The movie is not that much about science. It's mostly about communication, the way in which people are communicating about this issue and presenting themselves, and unfortunately, scientists sometimes don't come off very well. Scientists sometimes don't come off very well and that's very important in this day and age because people increasingly are assessing whether or not they're going to trust somebody and believe them based on what they think of them as a person, in their basic kind of presentation.

Randy: 13:08

And that's sort of what I did with the movie was I held a mirror up in front of a group of scientists and showed them what they look like when they get together and start talking about these issues, and they come off as very arrogant, condescending and full of themselves and know-it-alls. We had a screening in Kansas the very first screening ever of this movie. There was a group of 15 high school kids that came to it and when it was over, a journalist asked them what they thought of the movie and the single biggest impression they walked away with was wow, those scientists sure were obnoxious. That wasn't really the goal of the movie entirely. You know, I would hope they'd also realize that the people presenting the intelligent design side weren't very credible and I think they had that secondarily. But it was that one image of these scientists and the way in which they really are a bunch of know-it-alls, and that's the downside of academics Sometimes that happens.

Dr. Biology: 13:55

Okay. So my guess is you're going to say scientists need to work on that skill.

Randy: 14:00

That is the truth. It's unfortunate, but true increasingly in the world today. There was once a time, 30 or 40 years ago, where a scientist could get up and talk to a group of people and they would respect the fact that the scientist had a PhD and simply accept them relatively uncritically. We're in a different world today. People now have access to the Internet, they do a lot of reading, they come up with their own opinions, and the communication has shifted a little bit. It's quite often less about what the person's saying and more about how they're saying it, and so that's what's important. It's important to everybody. You need to think about that. It's not just what you're saying, it's how you say it, and I think everybody knows what that means.

Dr. Biology: 14:36

Well, in this case, it's the storytelling. Again, Like you said, we need to be better storytellers. I like to bring this up because, in the world of science, we often think of math, we think of chemistry, we think of all of the hard sciences, but we often forget the fact that language arts are so important and communication is so critical. You can be the best scientist in the world, but if you can't communicate what you've learned to the public not just to your peers, but to the public you really haven't done your job.

Randy: 15:06

So true, and the world of science hasn't had to worry about that very much. They haven't had to worry about integrating with humanities, with those sorts of things, with the arts. But again, nowadays we have so much information floating around out there that it's become very competitive. And today the big battle is in terms of trying to get people's attention, and you see this all over the place. More than ever today, people are fighting for attention.

Randy: 15:32

I saw somebody being interviewed on a TV show a couple of weeks ago and they were in front of a crowd of people Actually, it was last fall around the election time and behind the person being interviewed were all these people holding up signs with their own personal websites yada, yada, yada.com. And you just realize, every one of those people holding up signs, they're fighting for their own attention. Look at me, look at me, come to my website, pay attention to me. That didn't go on 30 or 40 years ago. It used to be. Everybody stood in the crowd and was very humble and happy. Now everybody wants to have their voice out there. It's turned into a big cacophony and it becomes disorienting for the public, who you're supposed to listen to.

Randy: 16:11

One is to make government more repressive and simply pass laws that prevent people from trying to grab attention like that and having alternative views. That doesn't happen in this country. We're a free society, so the only solution is to engage in this competitive process and communicate more effectively and more powerfully than everybody else. That takes a lot of attention to, a lot of dedicating resources, and prioritizing it. That's what the science world hasn't done in the past, but they're starting to. Now, and this is a new topic that is gaining a lot of momentum, is the communication of science. There's a shift that's going on.

Dr. Biology: 16:49

As if evolution is not a hot enough topic. I'd like to talk a little about your other movie, Sizzle: a global warming comedy. Now, climate change is another subject today that some people think isn't really not real. They think it's being made up. Others, like Al Gore, are very concerned about climate change. So let's talk about your movie and why you would, in the first place, call it a comedy, because that was curious to me.

Randy: 17:24

So why would I make a comedy about such a serious topic as global warming? And many people have asked that and some of the people have been upset and my answer is we can't afford to not be making comedies about global warming. We can't afford to not be using any means of grabbing the attention of the audience. And again, this is. The problem today is that everybody's so distracted it's hard to get their attention. But we know that humor and entertainment is still a very powerful force in our society.

Randy: 17:46

If you look at things like the Daily Show and The Colbert Report, they've become enormously popular in the last 10 years. When Jon Stewart started on the Daily Show 10 years ago, it was still a silly little, frivolous piece of nonsense on Comedy Central. All of a sudden, about six or seven years ago, they began getting serious journalists coming on there and realizing that actually this piece of humor had a lot of substance to it and it's a means of reaching particularly a younger demographic. And nowadays this is a byproduct of all this. Noise is the one thing that people always have time for. It's just like Jell-O there's always room for Jell-O, there's always room for entertainment. So it's an opportunity to reach people and that's why I've tried to utilize a little bit of entertainment in the form of comedy to open up the door for an audience and let them have some fun and then eventually get around to a very meaningful message that we have with this movie.

Dr. Biology: 18:34

So do you believe humans are causing global warming?

Randy: 18:38

Yes, absolutely. Not only do I believe that most of the skeptics in the movie even concede that when the skeptics fall apart is they disagree on exactly how it's happening, on what to do about it and all those sorts of things, whether we can do anything about it, but several of the major skeptics also concede that Even Michael Crichton, before he died last year, also conceded that humans were causing global warming.

Dr. Biology: 19:02

Well, it turns out. I don't like to do a shameless plug, but we actually have an institute here. It's called the Global Institute for Sustainability, and they're looking into these very things. They're looking into climate change, and not only that, but also our resources. You know, the planet is a self-contained sphere. It doesn't get things from outer space other than rays and energy from the sun. So if we don't take care of what we have here and conserve, we're going to have a real problem. So if someone really wants to dig into it, they can With sizzle. I love the idea that you use comedy. I just had to bring it up that way, because it's when I look at the title. I come from a science background and so you expect a documentary, and in this case, I think, is it called a mockumentary? Is that what?

Randy: 19:49

it's called Sizzle's made up of three genres. It's mockumentary, documentary and reality.

Dr. Biology: 19:54

Oh, okay, all right Wow.

Randy: 19:56

The reality element is the cameraman that we had. So we did these interviews with real scientists and one of our cameramen was a stand-up comedy actor and we had him pretend that he was a cameraman until halfway through the interview and then he would suddenly out of nowhere, interrupt the interview and start arguing with the person I was interviewing and that brought out all sorts of unplanned moments that you see in the movie and it's a bit like the movie Borat. That's sort of our inspiration. That got us started and that was the starting point for the movie was wouldn't it be interesting to interview a major expert and to have somebody in the crew actually disagree with the expert and to just out of nowhere interrupt and start arguing with them and stealing the interview from me and then see what happens, which is what we did about a dozen times.

Dr. Biology: 20:39

If you were able to have a person make one change in their life to reduce the impact of climate change, would you be able to pick one?

Randy: 21:03

I would say the number one change is to support all major politicians who are pushing for legislation at the large scale to do these things, to get involved with political actions of that sort, because this is what most of the experts know is these problems are so large at such a broad scale, they're only going to be really solved by large-scale government political action. It's important to do the best you can in living your lifestyle and changing light bulbs and driving efficient cars, but in the end the real solutions are going to come from big governments and trying to figure out ways to get some of these countries that are putting out the most carbon emissions, including the US, to change at a national level. So the problems are so urgent and pressing that it has to happen through politics.

Dr. Biology: 21:41

On this show. I asked three questions from all my guests. This is stealing from James Lipton in the actor's studio, Uh-oh. The first one you actually answered it's when did you first know you wanted to be a scientist or a biologist? So you did a great job of that. Now what if I took it away from you? You can't be a scientist and you can't be a filmmaker. I'm going, if I took it away from you, you can't be a scientist and you can't be a filmmaker. I'm going to take all that away from you. And a lot of times my scientists like to slide into the world of education and I really, really love hearing that they would become teachers. But I want to really stretch you a little bit. If I take that all away from you, what would you be?

Randy: 22:18

Pro surfer.

Dr. Biology: 22:21

You are my second pro surfer. You know that I have a physicist from Exeter, England, that would be a pro surfer or a pro snowboarder, so why a pro surfer?

Randy: 22:33

Surfing is the most wonderful sport in the entire universe. Yeah, I surf very avidly and it's a wonderful way to get out there in nature and sit out there on the ocean and, as I said, I got imprinted on the ocean at an early age and so this is a great way to connect with it nowadays. So I just can't get enough of surfing.

Dr. Biology: 22:52

Now, what advice would you have for young scientists? Or I'm going to take the pro surfer out there that decides they want to become a biologist. What are you?

Randy: 23:01

going to tell them to do, to become a biologist? Discover what truly excites you. Discover that one thing that you so thoroughly enjoy, that you're willing to do it for free. When I was in college, I worked on marine biology projects for professors for free and I had a lot of friends that wouldn't work on anything for free.

Randy: 23:25

They, you know, demanded to be paid. I so thoroughly enjoyed being around the ocean and studying it that I was willing to do it at all costs. My motivation level was so high that I was willing to endure all sorts of pain. Go out there and miserable, rainy, stormy days and walking along the shoreline and counting mussels and starfish and things like that.

Randy: 23:45

You need to find that deep motivation and sometimes you have to just go out and sit on a rock and meditate and figure out what it is that you really thoroughly enjoy. But it is that passion and drive that can get you through the very worst of times. And when you don't have that, that's when things get really painful. So when people get stuck in difficult jobs and they just don't have any passion for what they're doing, that's when life is fairly miserable. I've spent 20 years being fairly poverty-stricken but doing what I wanted to do, and a lot of my friends who went to film school with me are now making large amounts of money working on shows that they hate and they're deeply depressed and miserable.

Dr. Biology: 24:29

So, given the choice, I think I'm a little better off being poverty-stricken and enjoying what I do.

Randy: 24:31

I find it interesting you mentioned that you've been taking acting lessons. Has this been going on for very long? I began getting interested in filmmaking 20 years ago and as a part of that, I've taken a number of acting courses over the years, because acting is a fundamental part of presenting yourself and other people, so learning those basic dynamics are important, and when you look at people on camera, they are usually acting. They're presenting something to you, and so getting an understanding of that is very important.

Dr. Biology: 24:56

Do you find that taking the classes also help you with your communication skills?

Randy: 25:01

Taking acting classes has been the most important part of learning about how to make films and how to communicate. I've written a book that's called Don't Be Such a Scientist, and the core of that book is the two-year acting program that I took when I moved to Hollywood in 1994. I went into this class with this crazy acting teacher who screamed her lungs out at me on the first night of the class in front of all the students, and what she said was that I don't want you in this class. You're overeducated, you think too much. You're an intellectual, you're too analytical, you're not an actor.

Randy: 25:31

Acting is the opposite of thinking. When things happen, actors act. They don't stop and look at them and analyze them and think. That's what intellectuals do, and this is the antagonism that you have between highly educated people versus the general public. General public prefers to kind of act, and what she would scream at me was you're no good as an actor. You know, nobody wants to watch you standing on a stage thinking instead of acting. So that's one of the hard things when you get a big education is realizing that you need to still be able to act and do things rather than think be able to act and do things rather than think.

Dr. Biology: 26:06

You're actually going to be talking a little bit, I suppose, about the book, because you have a lecture to give later today and it's about your book. Don't Be Such a Scientist. I'll be there front row. I'll be there front row because I've made the case that everybody is a scientist in reality. So, with Don't Be Such a Scientist, it's this again the case, where we're talking about the fact that scientists need to do a better job of communicating and actually talking with everybody around them, rather than just a select few.

Randy: 26:37

Yes, the first message of my talk in my book is that scientists, to start with, need to understand how communication works and understand the handicaps that they have by having so much information in their head and whether they can do anything about it. That's step two, but number one is just understanding the way that it works. When I moved to Hollywood in 1994, I was a tenured professor and I felt that I understood these things better than anybody else. It took this horrible acting teacher to beat me down and make me realize you aren't as smart as you think you are, and that's the problem. We tend to think that education is the solution to everything and some things. It's not.

Dr. Biology: 27:13

I asked you about things people can do to help with climate change. For the scientists listening to this show, what do they need to do? Do they need to take acting lessons, or what is it that they can do to improve their communication skills?

Randy: 27:30

There are a number of things that scientists can do to improve themselves as communicators, and the first thing is a whole bunch of things to not do. Don't do things that offend people. Don't be condescending, don't be arrogant, don't say insulting things when you're giving talks. Scientists sometimes do these things and they don't even realize it. Quite often, if you look at a videotape of a talk that you've given, you can see little moments where, wow, you know, a lot of people find that really off-putting. The poker game in Flock of Dodos where they came off so badly. None of those people that night had any idea that they would come off like that. They had to see it on the screen and realize, wow, you're right, we do kind of come off as condescending. So there's lots of things to not do. And then there's lots of good things to actually do, such as to work on storytelling skills and to work on this idea of being more spontaneous, because that's what bigger audiences connect with.

Randy: 28:18

They love spontaneous moments. They love nothing more than to be sitting there watching a prepared talk where a person is carefully doing everything and suddenly the person knocks a book off the podium. That wasn't planned. All of a sudden everybody comes to life and goes, wow, what just happened? That wasn't in the script. That's what improv acting is about. That's what spontaneity is about. There's a chemistry to that that goes opposite to the chemistry of intellectuals and all of this knowledge and preparation to try and control everything. But it's about control, and so that gets very difficult and challenging when you've spent your whole life in this environment where you're taught to keep everything under control and very methodical. Sometimes that's a handicap.

Dr. Biology: 28:55

Well, Randy Olson, I want to thank you for visiting with us on Ask a Biologist.

Randy: 28:59

Great to be here and good talking with you, Dr Biology.

Dr. Biology: 29:02

You have been listening to one of the Ask A Biologist Special Collection episodes. My guest was Randy Olson, a scientist and filmmaker. Now, I'm not sure about you, but I find it interesting that even though this was recorded almost 15 years ago, the discussion remains as relevant today as when we sat down to record this episode. For those who would like to learn more about these topics, including how to improve your storytelling skills, we will include links in the show notes so you can check out Randy's movies and books. His latest book, The Narrative Gym, is available in several versions, including one specifically for those who work in the world of science.

Dr. Biology: 30:00

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 to do that so you do not 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. 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 are all staying safe and healthy.

 

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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.