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Speaker 2: Oh hey, it's your bass at a yarn. That's sad
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Speaker 2: farm Fresh episode we just picked for you, and I
Speaker 2: hope that you're hungry for worms. So many worms. Why worms?
Speaker 2: Because before I came down with pneumonia last month, I
Speaker 2: was at USC Wrigley Institute on the island of Catalina
Speaker 2: teaching a sycom symposium to this group of really enthusiastic
Speaker 2: and endearing climate scientists and biologists who were just raren
Speaker 2: to get up on these mics, and I took advantage
Speaker 2: of their zeal and I asked them all about what
Speaker 2: they do, because it's not every day that you get
Speaker 2: to sit on two twin beds in a seaside cabin
Speaker 2: with a worm expert, so I did this. Guest has
Speaker 2: been a research associate in the Department of Zoology at
Speaker 2: the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, an assistant professor
Speaker 2: in the Department of Mematology at USC Riverside, and is
Speaker 2: now an assistant professor in the Department of Marine Sciences
Speaker 2: at the University of Georgia and runs her own lab
Speaker 2: looking at deep sea ecosystems, and has literally traveled to
Speaker 2: the ends of the Earth to ask what is in
Speaker 2: that mud? I love her, but I also love you,
Speaker 2: and thank you again patrons at patreon dot com slash
Speaker 2: ologies for being so supportive during the break I took
Speaker 2: to get healthier. We could not do the show without you,
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Speaker 2: also thank you, of course for the reviews. I read
Speaker 2: every single one to hear about folks who have conpack
Speaker 2: to school, or rediscovered a love of nature, or road
Speaker 2: tripped across the continent with us. I love it this week.
Speaker 2: Thank you for the review Willow loves Dinosaurs, who wrote
Speaker 2: that even when an episode drops about a topic I'm
Speaker 2: ambivalent toward or even actively uninterested in, as soon as
Speaker 2: I press play, I'm hooked. This one's for you, And
Speaker 2: also Fiddler to Be, who wrote the review that says
Speaker 2: thank you for pre digesting science for us and lovingly
Speaker 2: regurgitating it into our ears like a mama bird with
Speaker 2: bad aim. Everyone, it's an honor to be of service. Okay,
Speaker 2: let's talk worms. So Bentho means deep, pelagic means sea,
Speaker 2: and nematode comes from the Greek for threadlike, So let's
Speaker 2: talk skinny little worms at the bottom of the cold,
Speaker 2: dark sea. What are their lives like? What do they
Speaker 2: think about? Are they in love? Curl up my wormis
Speaker 2: for a talk about weird little mouths, hairy worms, demon nematodes,
Speaker 2: Anarctic exploration, mud collections, submersibles, moisturizers, deep sea mining, pork
Speaker 2: chop risks, and more with your new friend Bentho pelagic nematologist,
Speaker 2: doctor Holly Vick.
Speaker 4: Normally people aren't so excited about worms.
Speaker 5: I am Hollybig. I am an associate professor at the
Speaker 5: University of Georgia and the Department of Marine Sciences, and
Speaker 5: my pronouns are she and her. I see you have
Speaker 5: a deck of worms with you. I do have a
Speaker 5: deck of worms with worms.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 2: When I saw you holding these earlier, I thought they
Speaker 2: were business cards.
Speaker 4: They aren't business cards. What are they? They are?
Speaker 5: So I work on microscopic worms that are extremely hard
Speaker 5: to see. So when I say I work on nematodes
Speaker 5: or nematodes, I did my page in the UK, so
Speaker 5: that's what I say.
Speaker 4: Uh, people are like, what are those?
Speaker 5: And often I find it easy to carry around this
Speaker 5: deck of business cards so that after people meet me
Speaker 5: they can always remember, can.
Speaker 2: I see one? Like what do they have on them?
Speaker 2: So ooh, look at that? Is that it's face or
Speaker 2: its asshole?
Speaker 4: That is its face? That's its head?
Speaker 2: Oh it's beautiful, it's very sphincterous. Yes, and then what
Speaker 2: are Okay, it looks like I'm looking at a hose
Speaker 2: of some sort with a like a claw as a face.
Speaker 2: And then what are these dingled aangles all around it?
Speaker 2: I really don't know how to describe this gracefully, so
Speaker 2: I'll just be honest. This particular worm looks like a
Speaker 2: tube of wrinkly skin with a clawd buttthole face with
Speaker 2: a crown of ribbed ponytails, just a natural beauty.
Speaker 5: Those are well, so we call them CT but they're
Speaker 5: like hairs that project way far out. So that species
Speaker 5: is special because it has really long hairs all around
Speaker 5: its head. And actually, the way we describe species is
Speaker 5: you count, so the hairs are current circles, and you
Speaker 5: basically count how many rows of circles of hairs there are,
Speaker 5: and then you count how many pairs of hairs in
Speaker 5: that circle. So you literally have to like go on
Speaker 5: your microscope and count all the hairs, and if the
Speaker 5: species has six hairs, it's that species. And if it
Speaker 5: has ten hairs, it's that species. And we don't actually
Speaker 5: know whether that means anything because most people don't get
Speaker 5: DNA sequences from the worms. And sometimes worms will look
Speaker 5: the same but actually be quite different, or vice versa.
Speaker 5: They'll look really different but they're actually the same.
Speaker 2: Is this electron scanning microscope or what kind of microscope
Speaker 2: do you use to see these worms?
Speaker 5: Elect Yeah, electron microscopy.
Speaker 2: She showed me another few worm cards, one that looked
Speaker 2: like the thick scales of a crocodile but with a
Speaker 2: slit for a mouth, and another resembling cactus wearing like
Speaker 2: a cable knit sock. And these things they're just living
Speaker 2: their lives in the mud in Antarctica. They don't give
Speaker 2: a shit about you, And I respect that.
Speaker 5: That's given of the nematode can be plate like, so
Speaker 5: kind of like armor.
Speaker 4: And these cuticles. This one is.
Speaker 5: Striated, this one is kind of smooth. This one is
Speaker 5: like punctures sweater. Yeah, this one's like armor. This one
Speaker 5: has a smooth cuticle, so you can't actually see much.
Speaker 5: It's really just smooth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, worms with scales. But let's talk scale.
Speaker 5: How tiny the technically they're like a millimeter to five
Speaker 5: millimeters long. But the way it's easiest to picture the
Speaker 5: worms are the size of an individual speck of dust.
Speaker 5: So you can see them like if you have a
Speaker 5: slide and you hold it up to the light, it
Speaker 5: looks like a little speck of dust. But practically we
Speaker 5: say that they're microscopic.
Speaker 2: And then are they all the cards the same or
Speaker 2: they different?
Speaker 4: No, they're all different. So this is the next one.
Speaker 2: Who's this a fanged orifice rimmed with hair but wearing
Speaker 2: cinnamon earrings? What's happening? Oh wait, it's got a spiral
Speaker 2: on the side of it. That's a perfect spiral.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's amazing. So these are actually like princess leebuns
Speaker 5: on both sides of the worm.
Speaker 4: What do they do?
Speaker 5: They are sensory pores called amphids, and no one knows
Speaker 5: why they're in perfect spirals, but this is my favorite
Speaker 5: taxonomic feature of the worms. We don't know exactly like
Speaker 5: what they do, but we think that they are sensory pores.
Speaker 5: So worms don't have eyes, but they live in mud
Speaker 5: and environments where there's a lot of stuff going on.
Speaker 4: They're a lot going on right now, clearly.
Speaker 5: So the current theory is that it's like sensory pore
Speaker 5: and it detects chemicals because we know that worms can
Speaker 5: migrate towards specific bacteria, so maybe they're scenting metabolites or
Speaker 5: they're basically smelling stuff in the mud and that's what
Speaker 5: they're using to navigate, And we think it all happens
Speaker 5: through those pores. What happened when you zoomed in and
Speaker 5: got to see this for the first time in real life?
Speaker 2: Are you like there it is?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean the spirals are really obvious. Yeah, so
Speaker 5: they're the one of the easiest things to see. But
Speaker 5: not all the nematodes have spirals, just a select subset
Speaker 5: of groups do. But they are absolutely perfect and they
Speaker 5: can get really big too, So sometimes when you put
Speaker 5: them on the microscope, you just see the spiral like
Speaker 5: a slinky kind of in the middle of the worm,
Speaker 5: and it's really obvious and it's really cool.
Speaker 2: So right now, as you drink a horse shot at
Speaker 2: or do squats, there are these teeny tiny, itty bitty
Speaker 2: noodles alive at the bottom of the sea mud with
Speaker 2: Princess Leah buns and sphincter faces and very weird mouths.
Speaker 2: But she loves them, and so do I. That's so
Speaker 2: distracting that I almost didn't notice that there were like
Speaker 2: kitten claws all around this gaping mall.
Speaker 5: Yep, those are the teeth. So that's a predatory species.
Speaker 5: They have retractable mandibles with teeth inside, so it's kind
Speaker 5: of like a wishbone on a chicken with a spike
Speaker 5: in the middle.
Speaker 4: They have three of those.
Speaker 5: They have tri radiant symmetry, and then they'll extend them
Speaker 5: out and then they grab a worm or they grab
Speaker 5: a bacteria or something, and then they pull it back
Speaker 5: in kind of like a sandworm or some weird sci
Speaker 5: fi thing.
Speaker 2: I was going to say this, did you ever see
Speaker 2: like tremors or the pit of Sarlac?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was thinking of Starlac.
Speaker 6: You will therefore be taken to the June Sea and
Speaker 6: cast to the pit of the nesting place of the
Speaker 6: old powerful Sarlac doesn't sound so bad in his belly.
Speaker 6: You will find a new definition of pain and suffering
Speaker 6: as you are slowly digestive over a thousand years.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. Okay, in this deck of business cards
Speaker 2: doesn't just have worms on it, but the back bears
Speaker 2: her contact info and a very short nematode tiny bio.
Speaker 2: And now the front of the card Deep Sea Biology
Speaker 2: Antarctica nematode worms. In the middle of that is Antarctica. Like,
Speaker 2: there's worms on Antarctica. Yes, on Antarctica and around the ocean.
Speaker 2: So nematodes are literally every handful.
Speaker 5: Of mud, dirt and soil that you pick up. There's
Speaker 5: thousands of nematodes in there. The terrestrial species on land
Speaker 5: are very different from the marine species. Actually, the terrestrial
Speaker 5: nematologists don't really talk to the marine ones. So there's
Speaker 5: some kind of like drama there. Not really, it's really
Speaker 5: just the taxonomy.
Speaker 4: Is very different.
Speaker 5: I'm creating drama, That's what I'm doing. Yeah, so they are.
Speaker 5: They're all the way down in Antarctica. There's nematodes in volcanoes,
Speaker 5: like hot soils in volcanoes. There was a nematod that
Speaker 5: was found a couple miles below the surface of the Earth.
Speaker 5: And like South African diamond mines, and yeah, like literally
Speaker 5: your garden, your lawn, They're everywhere, and everyone ignores them
Speaker 5: and doesn't really know that they're there.
Speaker 2: No one loves worms because they don't know how omnipresent
Speaker 2: they are. Maybe how recently did science figure out like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: there's worms on Antarctica, there are worms in volcanoes. How
Speaker 2: long have people been looking for worms there.
Speaker 5: Well, it's been hard to find them in Antarctica until
Speaker 5: technology kind of got like modern enough, So maybe mid
Speaker 5: twentieth century we started to find them down there when
Speaker 5: people actually went to start sampling and bring back the
Speaker 5: samples preserved in a way that we could look under microscopes.
Speaker 5: And the Antarctic dry valleys are actually really interesting, so
Speaker 5: that dry valleys in Antarctica don't get rain. They haven't
Speaker 5: seen rain since the plist scene.
Speaker 2: No, so some people call the plist de scene by
Speaker 2: its nickname the Ice Age, and it started two and
Speaker 2: a half million years ago up until eleven thousand years ago,
Speaker 2: and you know what, between you and me, it is
Speaker 2: fine to have had to look that up. But yes,
Speaker 2: Antarctica has parts that have been parched since then.
Speaker 5: And you actually find mummified seals in the Antarctic dry
Speaker 5: valleys because it's so dry. And what happens is the
Speaker 5: seals will like wander up a mountain from the ocean
Speaker 5: and then cross over into the dry valley and then
Speaker 5: freak out because there's no food there and there's no
Speaker 5: rain there, and then they just die. And then because
Speaker 5: there's no rain, they become mummified. So when you go
Speaker 5: to study the worms in those places, you're just trap
Speaker 5: seeing amongst the bodies of mummified seals.
Speaker 2: Why doesn't it rain there?
Speaker 5: It's the climate, I mean, Antarctica is just this really
Speaker 5: unique climate. And parts of Antarctica get snow and glacier formation,
Speaker 5: but actually the continent is super dry. So when we
Speaker 5: went on the boat, I mean, the first thing they
Speaker 5: told you to bring is lots of moisturizer.
Speaker 2: Really, how many times have you been there?
Speaker 4: Just once? And I just came back.
Speaker 2: When did you get back? So she had been back
Speaker 2: on unfrozen land for maybe two weeks at the time
Speaker 2: we recorded this, Oh, that was like yesterday.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I'm a little bit jet like still tired
Speaker 5: from the trip. It was a three months.
Speaker 2: Three months on Antarctica. How would you set an out
Speaker 2: of office reply? Do you what do you do?
Speaker 5: Yes? I had an email reply. So there's no internet
Speaker 5: down there. We were on a ship around the Antarctic
Speaker 5: Continental Shelf in East Antarctica, So not only were we
Speaker 5: in Antarctica, but we're in like literally the most remote
Speaker 5: part of the remote, most remote place on the planet
Speaker 5: where satellites don't really exist. So if you're on a
Speaker 5: ship anywhere else in the world, normally you have satellite
Speaker 5: internet and you can kind of check your email and
Speaker 5: it's fine. But we had it was basically like being
Speaker 5: back in the nineties. So you had like the equivalent
Speaker 5: of a dial up modem internet speed and for your
Speaker 5: ship internet and then you had a landline phone.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Did you feel like when you left? I hope nothing
Speaker 2: goes down. Like you mentioned you have kids. Yeah, did
Speaker 2: you have to prepare emotionally, like, Okay, if something happens,
Speaker 2: if there's an emergency, they'll tell me. Were you able
Speaker 2: to put that out of your mind or how long
Speaker 2: did it take to acclimate to the It's okay, someone
Speaker 2: will reach me if they need to.
Speaker 5: So I almost made a will before I went to Antarctica.
Speaker 2: Not a bad idea.
Speaker 5: Not a bad idea, because I was so worried and
Speaker 5: I was like, my husband doesn't know our bank account password,
Speaker 5: like I, you know, I don't know if he knows where,
Speaker 5: Like his birth certificate is, like what if he needs that?
Speaker 4: So I was over prepping.
Speaker 5: I felt like like an apocalypse prepper in the amount
Speaker 5: of notes and instructions that I left for him. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and then things did go wrong when we were down there,
Speaker 5: so we had we had like a catastrophic bathroom leak
Speaker 5: in our master bath and like the ceiling was pouring
Speaker 5: with water. So you prep for everything and then stuff
Speaker 5: still goes wrong unexpectedly. So he was juggling the childcare
Speaker 5: and also like calling plumbers and at three am to
Speaker 5: try to get that sorted.
Speaker 2: I'm glad, to be honest, I'm glad it was at
Speaker 2: your house and not on the ship, because at first,
Speaker 2: when you said a catastrophic ba through issue, I figured
Speaker 2: it was on the ship and I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: that had to be very smelly. But no, it's just
Speaker 2: back home, just back home. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we good luck with that, Yeah, but I couldn't
Speaker 5: do anything about it.
Speaker 2: Did you learn anything about being so remote? Did you
Speaker 2: learn anything that you've taken away? I know you've only
Speaker 2: been back a couple of weeks, but was there anything
Speaker 2: about that kind of remoteness that made you disconnect now
Speaker 2: that you've been back home or did it make you
Speaker 2: appreciate connection more?
Speaker 4: I would say both.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think I really didn't miss the Internet.
Speaker 5: I didn't even try. It was so slow that it
Speaker 5: wasn't even worth it. So I literally brought Tolstoy novels
Speaker 5: to Antarctica because I was like, what is the biggest
Speaker 5: book that I can possibly find that's like vaguely snowy,
Speaker 5: twelve punchrd page Tolstoy novel that sounds great about Russia.
Speaker 5: I actually used Antarctica like to pursue hobbies that I
Speaker 5: always wanted to do. So I bought a really nice
Speaker 5: Nikon DSLR camera, and I gave myself a project to
Speaker 5: learn photography. And I just never have time to do
Speaker 5: that in my everyday life. So I was just up
Speaker 5: whenever it was sunny and there were icebergs. I was
Speaker 5: just outside in all my polar gear, just trying to
Speaker 5: take pictures and practice my photography in addition to doing
Speaker 5: my science, because a lot of those days were the
Speaker 5: days that we were transitting. So you just like you're
Speaker 5: driving through fields and these amazing icebergs and there's sun
Speaker 5: and there's penguins and it's just glorious and that was
Speaker 5: just a really special way to kind of unplug and
Speaker 5: it was really rejuvenating.
Speaker 2: How much sun was there per day.
Speaker 5: So we were there pretty late in the season, but
Speaker 5: it was actually pretty sunny. So we also changed We
Speaker 5: went through time zone changes down so we were supposed
Speaker 5: to go through eleven time zone changes and the captain
Speaker 5: decides when you change the time zone.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, what an ego trip. That's amazing, Father time,
Speaker 2: Captain time. Holy shit, party time. And let's go back
Speaker 2: to nematodes because a lot of people might be like, Okay,
Speaker 2: what is what is a worm? Tell us what is
Speaker 2: a nematode? Because there's flatworms and there's round worms and
Speaker 2: never the twain shall meet.
Speaker 5: Right, Yes, flatworms are roundworms are different phyla. So there's
Speaker 5: other types of worms too. There's like oligo keets and polykeets,
Speaker 5: and also there's things that look like worms in the
Speaker 5: ocean that are not actually worms. Nematodes are roundworms by definition,
Speaker 5: and I think the easiest one that everyone would know
Speaker 5: is dog heartworm.
Speaker 2: So the reason, oh, I was gonna say an earthworm.
Speaker 5: No, earthworms are the wrong kind of worms.
Speaker 2: Really, what kind of worms are earthworms?
Speaker 5: Earthworms are anelids. So there are segmented worms.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. Okay, so we've got roundworms, which are smooth,
Speaker 2: non segmented, and they're round shaped. Then there's flatworms, and
Speaker 2: then there's analids. Anelids aren't a subtype of roundworms. They'rech
Speaker 2: a totally different.
Speaker 5: Thing, totally different things, separate phylum, like way far away
Speaker 5: on the tree of life.
Speaker 2: Yeap, oh my god, this is news to me. For
Speaker 2: some reason, I would have put an earthworm as a
Speaker 2: as a nematode. Okay, so dog heartworm. This is something
Speaker 2: that we have to give our dogs little pills every
Speaker 2: once in a while for So do they tend to
Speaker 2: be parasitic? What do they eat?
Speaker 4: What they eat berries?
Speaker 5: Depending on what type of nematode they are. The parasitic
Speaker 5: ones are designed to well. They evolve to live off
Speaker 5: the hosts, so they will essentially rely on the host
Speaker 5: for their nutrition. I'm not quite sure what they eat
Speaker 5: because I don't study those ones.
Speaker 2: For anyone with pooches who has taken heartworm medication, good job.
Speaker 2: I just read way too much about these wiggly scoundrels.
Speaker 2: And they're transmitted by mosquitoes, and they creep around for
Speaker 2: six months before your dog shows any symptoms, and without treatment,
Speaker 2: they may turn its heart into what looks like a
Speaker 2: dish of glass noodles. And if you are not a
Speaker 2: dog person. They're not the only species that can be afflicted,
Speaker 2: so watch out. Jackals and beavers and wolves and reptiles
Speaker 2: and foxes, raccoons, bears, African leopards, sea lions can get heartworm. Coyotes, yes,
Speaker 2: cats and humans.
Speaker 5: And there's also human parasite. So guinea worm, you know
Speaker 5: that one that like lives up your leg, that's a
Speaker 5: nematode too. Oncosoriasis, river blindness, the one that like burrows
Speaker 5: into your eye, that's a nematode. That's why the parasitic
Speaker 5: ones are super gross, which is why I don't study them.
Speaker 2: O mass.
Speaker 5: Thanks, So there's terrestrial and marine. So the majority of
Speaker 5: nematodes that we don't know anything about are free living
Speaker 5: and they eat anything from like plant roots and fungi
Speaker 5: on land to like bacteria and diatoms.
Speaker 2: And in case you're not familiar with diatomes, if you
Speaker 2: visit the very prodiatome's site diatomes dot org, you will
Speaker 2: learn that diatomes are algae and that they live in
Speaker 2: houses made of glass. They are the only organism on
Speaker 2: the planet with cell walls composed of transparent opaline silica,
Speaker 2: so they look like woven crystal baskets, but tiny, tiny,
Speaker 2: and they are microalgae that contribute twenty to fifty percent
Speaker 2: of the oxygen on our planet we need to survive.
Speaker 2: And the biggest ones are maybe the size of a
Speaker 2: width of human hair, and they live in dirt and
Speaker 2: of course oceans, and nematodes they snack on them, probably
Speaker 2: for the salty crunch.
Speaker 5: And actually some nematodes eat other nematodes. So the ones
Speaker 5: I did my PhD on are this group of predatory
Speaker 5: nematodes and they have like teeth and jaws and they're
Speaker 5: really physically big and they're active predators. So I have
Speaker 5: microscope images of worms ripping other worms apart, you can
Speaker 5: find a predatory nematode with another smaller nematode like hanging
Speaker 5: out of its mouth.
Speaker 2: Sometimes oh oh on a slav.
Speaker 4: I love it.
Speaker 2: I picture me eating like a chili dog and just
Speaker 2: covered in beans, just like that. How did you get
Speaker 2: into the field of nematology because you were in the
Speaker 2: department of nematology at the university. So did you ever
Speaker 2: introduce yourself as an nematologist? I mean you must, right.
Speaker 5: I mean I study worms, so I guess I'm technically
Speaker 5: a nematologist, But being in a department of ptologist kind
Speaker 5: of like, okay, yeah, fine.
Speaker 2: If you're not a nematologist, I don't know who is. Also,
Speaker 2: anyone who studies something is technically anologist of it. So
Speaker 2: if I were to be cracking open a book and studying,
Speaker 2: I would technically be a person who studies it. You
Speaker 2: are definitely a nematologist, okay, and a nematologist here, both
Speaker 2: of those things. But now when it comes to how
Speaker 2: you got into this field, especially deep sea nematology, that
Speaker 2: is a niche that is so so deey. How did
Speaker 2: you find yourself there among tiny worms in the most
Speaker 2: remote place on the planet.
Speaker 5: Right, So there is a story here. Actually there's multiple stories.
Speaker 5: I so, yeah, I get into science because I wanted
Speaker 5: to be a deep sea biologist. I grew up in Massachusetts, right,
Speaker 5: and so we have woods Whole Oceanographic Institute there. So
Speaker 5: I'm also first generation college student. So like, none of
Speaker 5: my family are scientists, and I'm the weird one that
Speaker 5: likes the ocean and my family actually hates the beach,
Speaker 5: which I.
Speaker 4: Just last year. How did you discover it?
Speaker 5: Because we went to the beach and everyone was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: we hate the beach. We don't want to go for
Speaker 5: a walk. I'm like, what, I never knew this. How
Speaker 5: far away from the beach? Did you grow up like
Speaker 5: an hour in Massachusetts?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I would go with my friends in high school and yeah,
Speaker 5: so we would go down to the beach all the time.
Speaker 5: But I also used to go on field trips of
Speaker 5: the ocean because your school will always bring you to
Speaker 5: the beach. And I remember we went at one point
Speaker 5: to Woodshole Oceanographic Institute. So they have like school tours
Speaker 5: that they host and they have the submersible Alvin down there,
Speaker 5: and then I remember also going to they would run
Speaker 5: these museum events at the Museum of Science in Boston,
Speaker 5: like shipped to shore and so you'd sit in this
Speaker 5: auditorium they'd like beam in the satellite connection from the ship.
Speaker 4: It was usually Bob Ballard.
Speaker 5: I was the one that discovered the Titanic, right, wow,
Speaker 5: And I was.
Speaker 4: Like, oh my god, deep sea biology. I want to
Speaker 4: do that.
Speaker 5: So I get into science, like really more for the
Speaker 5: travel and the exploration. I thought I wanted to be
Speaker 5: like an underwater arcologists, but then I realized that I
Speaker 5: don't like dead bodies and that's kind of creepy. Dead
Speaker 5: worm bodies not as creepy. Muh, So I didn't start
Speaker 5: with dead worm bodies. I actually started with jellyfish because
Speaker 5: they are pretty. But stanting into jellyfish research is actually
Speaker 5: really hard. Really, they're like the whales of the invertebrate world,
Speaker 5: and like everyone wants to study them because they're so pretty.
Speaker 2: Two people who wanted to study them medusology guest doctor
Speaker 2: Rebecca Helm and a toxinologist who studies jellyfish venom, doctor
Speaker 2: Anna Klompin. Links are floating around in the show notes
Speaker 2: and For more on sunken treasures, soggy boats, and watery graves,
Speaker 2: you can see the Maritime Archaeology episode. I'm going to
Speaker 2: link in the show notes because it's so good. But
Speaker 2: back to Holly and her worms.
Speaker 5: So when I was looking for a PhD, I had
Speaker 5: three criteria. I wanted to study something deep sea invertebrate.
Speaker 5: I wanted to get molecular biology skills because I really
Speaker 5: was attracted to genomics and DNA sequence in my college courses.
Speaker 5: I did really well in those courses and I was
Speaker 5: obsessed with DNA. And then my third criteria was that
Speaker 5: I wanted to keep living in London. So I did
Speaker 5: my undergrad in London, and I was like, I'm really
Speaker 5: a city person. I love the city, in the fashion,
Speaker 5: in the theater, and I wanted to stay there. So
Speaker 5: the three things that ticked all those boxes was a
Speaker 5: project on deep sea nematodes at the Natural History Museum
Speaker 5: in London.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, that's a beautiful museum. What did your
Speaker 2: parents think when they saw you going further and further
Speaker 2: toward a PhD? What do they do? And this was
Speaker 2: rare for your family?
Speaker 5: Yeah, my dad is an HVAC technician, so he repairs
Speaker 5: like oil burners and heating and cooling systems. And then
Speaker 5: my mom was a secretary and kind of town government.
Speaker 5: She stayed home with me for a while. But they
Speaker 5: just think I'm really weird. I don't think they understand
Speaker 5: why I do what I do. I mean, they're really
Speaker 5: supportive of it, and they connect most of the travel aspect,
Speaker 5: I think, because you like working class families. Travel is
Speaker 5: basically an indicator of success, right if you can travel
Speaker 5: the world and you know, go to these places. And
Speaker 5: so the fact that I somehow get into a job
Speaker 5: where my work pays me to go to like Antarctica
Speaker 5: in Japan and tropical islands, they're just astounded by that
Speaker 5: and also kind of worried for me. They're like, can
Speaker 5: you just stop traveling? And I'm like, no, I can't,
Speaker 5: It's my job.
Speaker 2: Do you think there's any good nematodes in HVAC systems.
Speaker 5: I'm not a cold There are nematodes and drinking water,
Speaker 5: which is really disturbing, really even tapwater.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So when I was processing my samples at the Natural
Speaker 5: History Museum in London, right, I work with deep sea samples,
Speaker 5: so all the worms I ever saw were dead and preserved.
Speaker 5: But occasionally when I'm picking through my sample at the microscope,
Speaker 5: there would be like a thrashing, live nematode there, and
Speaker 5: I would ask my taxonomists mentor.
Speaker 4: Why why is this worm alive? Where did it come from?
Speaker 5: And he's like, oh, yeah, you know the piping systems,
Speaker 5: there's nematodes that come up occasionally from there. And actually
Speaker 5: recent studies of drinking water they do like the environmental
Speaker 5: DNA sequencing.
Speaker 4: And they look for DNA barcodes of things, and yeah.
Speaker 5: You find like signatures of nematodes and drinking water worms, worms,
Speaker 5: worms everywhere, which makes sense, right because our drinking water
Speaker 5: comes from reservoirs and you know it's put through pipes
Speaker 5: and stuff.
Speaker 4: But yeah, it's not completely sterile.
Speaker 2: Don't worry about it.
Speaker 4: It's fine.
Speaker 2: Now when it comes to I'm going to say nematodes
Speaker 2: and nematodes this whole thing, and I'm gonna think I
Speaker 2: say wrong every time, But that's fine. When it comes
Speaker 2: to their life cycle, what are they out there doing?
Speaker 2: How are they fitting in with their environment? Are they
Speaker 2: cleaning things up? Are they changing the pH of systems?
Speaker 2: Like what nematodes, Why why are they?
Speaker 5: I will talk about marine systems because that's what I
Speaker 5: know best, and I'll mention a little bit about terrestrial
Speaker 5: ones too. I mean, they kind of are like earthworms
Speaker 5: in the marine system, but just like on a microscopic scale.
Speaker 4: So think you have this patch.
Speaker 5: Of mud on the beach at low tide, and you
Speaker 5: just have all these microscopic nemotodes kind of wriggling around,
Speaker 5: and so they're doing things like bioturbation right on a
Speaker 5: microbial scale. They're also eating lots of bacteria. So a
Speaker 5: lot of nematodes have specific little mouth parts that just
Speaker 5: suck up bacteria. They can have species specific feeding preferences,
Speaker 5: so like one nematode eats a very specific type of bacteria,
Speaker 5: and you have some separation there that eat things like
Speaker 5: diatom So larger microbial eukaryots.
Speaker 2: Don't be scared of all those syllables. So microbial eukaryots
Speaker 2: are just tiny organisms like fungi or single celled little
Speaker 2: blobby things, or algae or other little creatures with eukaryotic cells,
Speaker 2: that is, cells with a nucleus and usually organelles and
Speaker 2: some DNA. You are a eukaryot Many of the animals
Speaker 2: living inside of your body also are because we're never
Speaker 2: alone and everyone living in you mostly loves you.
Speaker 5: They are predatory, so they're kind of like the base
Speaker 5: of the food chain. So you have the you know,
Speaker 5: the bacteria, and then you have the nematodes and then
Speaker 5: the bigger things like polykeat worm. Larger worms would eat
Speaker 5: nematods or amphipods or crustaceans, and they are the base
Speaker 5: of the food chain. Probably also important for carbon cycling
Speaker 5: because there's a lot of them and they do Some
Speaker 5: of them do deposit feed like sea cucumbers, so you
Speaker 5: have like miniature kind of ce cucumber like species that
Speaker 5: are just ingesting the sediment, pooping it out and turning
Speaker 5: stuff over.
Speaker 2: So yes. In this world, stuff eats stuff that eat stuff,
Speaker 2: and bacteria at the bottom of that chain they really
Speaker 2: get the shaft. So bacteria they're just trying to exist
Speaker 2: and then nematodes come and gobble them up like kettle corn.
Speaker 2: Nematodes are acting like the compost bins of the deep
Speaker 2: sea mud. So thank you for the recycling service bentopelagic roundworms.
Speaker 2: But as a thank you, the nematods gets slipped up
Speaker 2: by polykeat worms, which are briskly segmented things that look
Speaker 2: like aquatic centipedes. They just come and eat up the
Speaker 2: nematodes like paskette. How small and how big you nematodes get.
Speaker 5: The smallest nematodes are the deep sea ones because when
Speaker 5: you get into the deep sea, the food quality and
Speaker 5: the amount of food is really poor and there's just
Speaker 5: not much there. So that leads to reduction in body
Speaker 5: sizes and those can be like a tenth of a millimeter. Oof,
Speaker 5: I'm a weetle'll be really tiny. Yeah, And the largest ones, so,
Speaker 5: the largest nematode that we've ever found is actually.
Speaker 4: A parasite of a sperm whale.
Speaker 5: Placenta specific so specific, yes, and that one is about
Speaker 5: thirty meters long and no yeah yeah wait ninety feet yeah.
Speaker 5: So at the Natural History Museum we actually have it
Speaker 5: in a jar. So it's like this giant glass jar
Speaker 5: which is like coiled worm all up. And yeah from
Speaker 5: a sperm whale, but placenta of a sperm whale specific.
Speaker 2: How do they reproduce if they have such small niches?
Speaker 5: So I mean they reproduce sexually just like a lot
Speaker 5: of organisms, you actually have males and females of species.
Speaker 5: So fun fact, see Elegans is actually like the worst nematode.
Speaker 2: What No, Okay, so see elegance. I know just enough
Speaker 2: to know that this is a study species for a
Speaker 2: lot of scientists across a lot of different platforms. Why
Speaker 2: do they pick see elegans? And is it an elegant worm?
Speaker 5: It is a boring worm, and it's it's a hermaphrodite.
Speaker 2: Oh love that, But scientists can get a little fluw
Speaker 2: mixed in the lab.
Speaker 5: Most nematodes are not hermaphrodites. Most nematodes have males and
Speaker 5: females and they are sexually reproducing, so we need the
Speaker 5: males and females. The Elegans is a hermaphrodite, so it
Speaker 5: can fertilize itself. But also it has no body parts,
Speaker 5: like it's literally just a tube that's pointing at both ends,
Speaker 5: and it has no discerning features and like, obviously according
Speaker 5: to my cards, there's a lot of stuff on the worms,
Speaker 5: so most of them don't look like that. And the
Speaker 5: reason we pick the elegans is because we can freeze
Speaker 5: it and unfreeze it and it will survive. So yeah,
Speaker 5: you have the frozen worms and they're kind of hibernating,
Speaker 5: and then you'll just unfreeze them and you'll do your experiments.
Speaker 5: They found it from rotting fruit like it lives on apples,
Speaker 5: rotting apples and orchards, and someone found it and brought
Speaker 5: into the lab one day and now it's that's our
Speaker 5: model organism.
Speaker 2: What is this worm? Who is this worm? Okay? First off,
Speaker 2: it is elegant and its name means recent, rod like
Speaker 2: and elegant, which is an app description for a teenage
Speaker 2: supermodel in the nineties, and just like one. It was
Speaker 2: discovered minding its own business in an Algerian orchard by
Speaker 2: worm scout and amateur biologist Emil Malpass around the year
Speaker 2: nineteen hundred and Mapas just loved science and noodled around
Speaker 2: on worm projects and other stuff as a hobby, eventually
Speaker 2: getting published multiple times and being honored with a doctorate
Speaker 2: and knighted for his contributions to science. Broddim Now, in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty five, there was this guy named Sidney Brenner
Speaker 2: and he ushered this tiny one millimeter see elegance onto
Speaker 2: the side seen and from there sea Elegan's fame exploded
Speaker 2: its usage rows and yes, I will link to a
Speaker 2: publication called Worm Book, which has an extensive table of
Speaker 2: studies in which c. Elegance was instrumental. But a few
Speaker 2: highlights are the discovery of cell death in nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 2: the first complete wiring diagram of a nervous system in
Speaker 2: ninety eight, insulin pathway genes why naps help after physical stress?
Speaker 2: See Elegance was the first multicellular organism to have its
Speaker 2: whole genome sequenced. Also, Sea Elgan's nematodes survived the space
Speaker 2: Shial Columbia disaster in February of two thousand and three.
Speaker 2: How did they do that? Nobody knows. Also, in researching this,
Speaker 2: I learned that there was a conference called the International
Speaker 2: Worm Meeting and apparently, folks, we just missed it a
Speaker 2: few months ago in Glasgow, Scotland. But luckily you can
Speaker 2: catch up on what happened via the hashtag worm twenty three.
Speaker 2: Also fortunate, it's annual and they gather in different places
Speaker 2: around the world to talk cl elegans, which has been
Speaker 2: called Nature's gift to science. So a lot of people
Speaker 2: love the worm. Others well, kind of a big, big,
Speaker 2: grudging sigh. Has anyone ever said, hey, what if we
Speaker 2: switch up the worm people, or no, it's over, it's
Speaker 2: sea elegans. That's it. We got a sea elegans tattoo
Speaker 2: on our back and there's no going back.
Speaker 5: I mean, they're sort of like, what if we get
Speaker 5: the worm that's most closely related to sea elegans and
Speaker 5: we work with that too, And from my perspective, that's
Speaker 5: like literally the same thing because it's on this tiny
Speaker 5: part of the nematode tree of life. It's very distant
Speaker 5: from the marine species because those are like the most
Speaker 5: ancient lineages of nematodes, and sea elegans is, yeah, just
Speaker 5: a completely different part of the tree. So it's yeah,
Speaker 5: I'm not bitter, not like not throwing shade at see
Speaker 5: ale agans.
Speaker 4: It's important.
Speaker 5: You can order it on the internet with whatever gene
Speaker 5: knocked out that you want. So it plays an important role,
Speaker 5: but it's not representative of the crazy diversity of nematodes
Speaker 5: that we have in the environment.
Speaker 2: Are you not mad but just disappointed?
Speaker 5: My one of my good friends says that I'm motivated
Speaker 5: by just disinspite.
Speaker 4: Well that those are good things.
Speaker 2: Those are good fuels. What about the Age of Niama
Speaker 2: shows how can you even find fossilized ones? Are they
Speaker 2: so gooy that they just kind of melt?
Speaker 5: For the most part, we do not have fossils. The
Speaker 5: oldest fossil that I recall is from the Devonian Age,
Speaker 5: and I don't remember how ancient that is, but I
Speaker 5: don't think it's actually pretty ancient.
Speaker 2: The Devonian Age was four hundred million years ago, just
Speaker 2: so none of us have to google.
Speaker 5: So we have like this one fossil of a plant
Speaker 5: parasitic nematode and some tree sap, but that's it. There's
Speaker 5: no fossil record. So yeah, we're working at a disadvantage
Speaker 5: compared to most other phyla. And that's why DNA and
Speaker 5: genomics is really important, because a genome is basically like
Speaker 5: a time machine or the equivalent of a fossil record,
Speaker 5: and that's what we use.
Speaker 2: And what about the ones in Antarctica that you are studying,
Speaker 2: do they freeze or does it just not freeze? In
Speaker 2: the deep sea mud.
Speaker 5: It does not freeze. Okay, so the ocean water in
Speaker 5: Antarctica is super cold, but because of the salinity, it's
Speaker 5: so salty. It does not typically freeze the surface.
Speaker 4: Well, so you'll get sea ice.
Speaker 5: But the nematodes that I work with live in the sediments,
Speaker 5: so the sediments will typically never freeze, and if they do,
Speaker 5: it's like near a glacier, and then you've got other
Speaker 5: problems like the scraping of the glacier killing all the
Speaker 5: worms on the sea floor.
Speaker 2: Oh, I forgot to ask what moisturizer you did bring, by.
Speaker 5: The way, Ooh, that is a good question. I brought
Speaker 5: a giant tub. I want to say, it's like like
Speaker 5: first aid beauty something. I get it target, I get
Speaker 5: like a giant tub of like ultra healing moisturizer.
Speaker 2: Smart Holly wrote me later to say, not only did
Speaker 2: this cream keep my skin fabulously moist in the coldest
Speaker 2: and driest place on Earth, but this product lasts forever.
Speaker 2: She says, I bought the six ounce tub back in
Speaker 2: February before Antarctica, and I am still using the same
Speaker 2: one with a quarter of the tub left. So one
Speaker 2: recommend for your listeners, especially if you have combo to
Speaker 2: oily skin like me, because the space cream isn't greasy
Speaker 2: at all. So there is her tip, and she is
Speaker 2: a world class scientist. And because of that, she also
Speaker 2: included a helpful citation, and by that I mean a
Speaker 2: link and it's called Ultra Repair Cream by first Aid Beauty.
Speaker 2: You're welcome. And no, they're not paying us even one
Speaker 2: worm for the mention. But when you use it you
Speaker 2: can think of worms. It does not contain any worms.
Speaker 1: Though.
Speaker 2: Let's change the subject now, what about glaciers. You mentioned glaciers.
Speaker 2: When we think of glaciers, I think of melting, and
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 6: Of oh no, and may yeaher.
Speaker 2: Do you find out anything about climate from studying deep
Speaker 2: sea worms? Do you see anything change over time? Like
Speaker 2: are there more or less of them?
Speaker 4: That is one question that I have.
Speaker 5: I would say there's not enough people studying worms, and
Speaker 5: there's not enough data on the worms to be able
Speaker 5: to tell that. And that's kind of what we're trying
Speaker 5: to do. So we're trying to get a baseline of
Speaker 5: the biodiversity. Most places in the ocean, we just don't
Speaker 5: even know what's there. So how can we track change
Speaker 5: if we don't have that data set to start from.
Speaker 5: So a lot of my work is really just a
Speaker 5: race against time to get a baseline of knowledge.
Speaker 2: God, if you watch things going hotter and hotter and hotter.
Speaker 2: You must be like I needed to get this information
Speaker 2: like in the fifties or something, right, Yeah, Well, we.
Speaker 5: Know nematodes are really sensitive to temperature shifts. So the
Speaker 5: thing that kills all the deep sea worms when you
Speaker 5: bring them up on deck the deep sea is like
Speaker 5: two degrees celsius.
Speaker 6: That's thirty six point five degrees fahrenheit tuned after Americans.
Speaker 4: So it's like living in a refrigerator.
Speaker 5: And when you bring that sample onto the deck of
Speaker 5: a boat, even if you just go into the lab
Speaker 5: and it's like sixty degrees, Like sixty degrees for a
Speaker 5: deep sea worm is like the Arizona desertation.
Speaker 2: Night summer, like the mouth of Hell for that. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So like most people ask me if the pressure changes
Speaker 5: kill the worms, but they're fine with the pressure, Like
Speaker 5: it's the temperature shift. So we could infer in a
Speaker 5: changing ocean where the climate is causing temperature increases, a
Speaker 5: lot of the species that are really sensitive to temperature
Speaker 5: are not going to do so well. And I think
Speaker 5: that's a similar thing that we see with you know,
Speaker 5: corals and other invertebrates, is that you have very species
Speaker 5: specific responses to temperature change. So some species just will
Speaker 5: completely die and never be able to adapt, and other
Speaker 5: species are more resilient to fluctuations and temperature. So, you know,
Speaker 5: the worms will survive the apocalypse. I'm never worried that
Speaker 5: they will go away because there will always be nematodes there, Like,
Speaker 5: come on, if they can live in volcanoes, they're going
Speaker 5: to be able to live in yeah, an ocean. But
Speaker 5: it's just the species composition is going to be completely
Speaker 5: different because the ones that are sensitive are going to
Speaker 5: go away. And my worry is that we don't really
Speaker 5: know what they do in the ecosystem. So maybe the
Speaker 5: sensitive worm eats a bacteria that's like a keystone species,
Speaker 5: and then if that worm goes extinct, then the you know,
Speaker 5: bacterial populations will completely change. So it's kind of like
Speaker 5: the butterfly effect. We're messing with things maybe that we
Speaker 5: don't want to mess with.
Speaker 2: What's their lifespan?
Speaker 4: Usually it varies.
Speaker 5: Usually the marine species I work with are they can
Speaker 5: live for a couple months to a couple of years.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, Yeah. The idea of a millimeter long worm
Speaker 2: in a deep sea just being like I'm five, that's nuts.
Speaker 5: You know, well, but deep sea species, a lot of
Speaker 5: them live for a really long time, and we don't
Speaker 5: know why that. You know, they slow down their metabolic
Speaker 5: rates because like there's just not a lot of food.
Speaker 5: So think of it kind of like hibernation. They're just
Speaker 5: really slow and that like extends their lifespan. Again, we
Speaker 5: don't know if this happens with worms because there's not
Speaker 5: a lot of data and we can't really easily do experiments.
Speaker 5: But the trend is that the deep sea is just
Speaker 5: a place where time.
Speaker 4: Is very slow. And that's how I think about it.
Speaker 2: What about how you're getting your samples? How deep are
Speaker 2: you going and you're on this ship. Are you sending
Speaker 2: an ROV down? Are you going down in a submersible?
Speaker 2: Are you sending a court like a big PVC pipe
Speaker 2: and seeing what you can dredch up the large straw
Speaker 2: spipe in it?
Speaker 4: Ah accurate.
Speaker 5: Actually, PBC pipes are pretty much the cutting edge technology
Speaker 5: in DPC science. I took a I thought that that
Speaker 5: was hyperbolic, but that's amazing. Okay, yeah, I mean slightly
Speaker 5: fancy PBC pipe. So we use what's called a multicore megacore.
Speaker 5: It's like a circle of pipes and they're just really
Speaker 5: long tubes and then they have some sort of mechanism
Speaker 5: at the bottom which will kind of feel it and
Speaker 5: bring up the mud. So yeah, you send down we
Speaker 5: call it a rosette because it's a ring.
Speaker 4: Send that down.
Speaker 5: It pushes into the sediment. The tubes get sealed off,
Speaker 5: and then you bring it up and you can preserve
Speaker 5: the sediment water interface. So it's actually like a really
Speaker 5: sensitive way of sampling the seafloor. And then we slice
Speaker 5: little pancakes of mud off the top of the cores
Speaker 5: and we put them in the freezer to bring back
Speaker 5: to the lab to work.
Speaker 4: On the worms.
Speaker 2: How much product do you get to take home, like
Speaker 2: your luggage back. Is it a pelican case full of
Speaker 2: mud or is it only like we really only can
Speaker 2: take a couple cores because it's going to take us
Speaker 2: ten years to figure out what's in one little slice.
Speaker 5: So I have a problem with hoarding mud. This has
Speaker 5: been a problem I have faced for a decade now.
Speaker 2: It's very important.
Speaker 5: Technically we only need like most of the worm biomass
Speaker 5: lives in I would say the top five centimeters of mud.
Speaker 5: But you do have vertical distribution So you have some
Speaker 5: nematodes that burrow really deep, and the species composition will
Speaker 5: change as you go in the core.
Speaker 4: So we tend to.
Speaker 5: Collect everything because we don't know what we're gonna find,
Speaker 5: and we don't process it on the boat. We put
Speaker 5: it in the freezer and then we send it back
Speaker 5: to the lab on dry ice. And I just I
Speaker 5: am always just like all of the mud. Let's bring
Speaker 5: it all back. And I have a problem saying no,
Speaker 5: if someone hands me like a bag of mud, what
Speaker 5: about is there respiration is it? Are they anaerobic? Are
Speaker 5: they aerobic? Do they breathe through their skin or through
Speaker 5: their pit of sarlac?
Speaker 2: So she pulled out another card and who boy, wow,
Speaker 2: this one, this one really got me. So imagine a
Speaker 2: thick long beard beard hairs sprouting from a garden hose
Speaker 2: made of skin that also has awkward bald patches if
Speaker 2: you can picture that, or maybe like a weasel with
Speaker 2: bore bristles that escaped in the middle of a grooming.
Speaker 5: So this is what we call the Chewbacca nematode. But
Speaker 5: I would say so in this funny story behind this photo.
Speaker 5: So this nematode is basically like Chewbacca's leg and all
Speaker 5: those little hairs that you see are bacteria, so they're
Speaker 5: symbiotic bacteria that live attached to the worm. But in
Speaker 5: this photo we actually we like shaved it because the
Speaker 5: electron microscope made most of the bacteria like fall off
Speaker 5: and there's only just one little part remaining, so it
Speaker 5: kind of looks like a poodle tail, which I always
Speaker 5: laugh at and my graduate student would like kill me
Speaker 5: if she knew.
Speaker 4: I put this on a business card.
Speaker 2: So yeah, you've got it looks like some of it
Speaker 2: is shaved, and then you've got like if you were
Speaker 2: to forget a patch of a very hairy leg. Yeah,
Speaker 2: as you shaved it. That's amazing. Normally covered, normally covered.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So several nematode groups will have bacteria attached to them.
Speaker 5: This one is filamentous bacteria, so they're really stringy bacteria
Speaker 5: that completely cover the worm. And these are sulfur utilizing bacteria,
Speaker 5: so we don't quite know what they do, but the
Speaker 5: worms that are covered in bacteria tend to live deep
Speaker 5: in the sediments. In sediments, the reason why it smells
Speaker 5: is because there's a lot of.
Speaker 2: Sulfur mud farts. We're talking of mud farts.
Speaker 5: Sulfur is actually really toxic to invertebrates, So the species
Speaker 5: that can live down in that anoxic mud are they
Speaker 5: need special adaptations to be able to repel the toxicity.
Speaker 5: And the theory is that these bacteria on this Chewbacca
Speaker 5: nematode are using the sulfur or physically protecting the worm
Speaker 5: body from the effects of the sulfur because the bacteria
Speaker 5: that's what they use for their metabolism.
Speaker 2: So the bacteria love the stinky mud, and the nematodes
Speaker 2: use the bacteria like a mink coat in January. How
Speaker 2: did you shave this worm?
Speaker 5: So when you prep stuff for the election microscope, you
Speaker 5: need to like spray it with gold particles, and that
Speaker 5: I guess just like that the bacteria fell off when
Speaker 5: you did that.
Speaker 2: Where you get in the gold particles, Can you reharvest
Speaker 2: the gold particles or is it just like but bye gold,
Speaker 2: you served your purpose.
Speaker 4: I think it's goodbye gold. Yeah, I think it's gold.
Speaker 5: I'm not the one that does a microscopy. This is
Speaker 5: my graduate student, Marianna that does all this. So she's
Speaker 5: amazing at what she does. And I know she was
Speaker 5: not happy with this because she shaved the worm.
Speaker 2: Wait, so you're telling me that you work with a
Speaker 2: grad student who works in deep sea biology whose name
Speaker 2: is Marianna.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 2: Is that not the name of a trench Mirianna? So
Speaker 2: she's Brazilian Okay, just wondering. I was like, did she
Speaker 2: get into it for the trench? Like I heard about
Speaker 2: a trench and was like, I'm a shoe in for this.
Speaker 2: I have never asked her that A might ask her
Speaker 2: when I go. I mean, if there were a trench
Speaker 2: called the alley Ward Trench, I think I'd be like,
Speaker 2: I'll google that, you know, Like that's exciting. I emailed
Speaker 2: Holly later and she said that Marianna grew up in
Speaker 2: southern Brazil, right next to a glorious tropical beach, so
Speaker 2: that is probably why she became a marine biologist, and
Speaker 2: that she is more of a warm weather person and
Speaker 2: the deep sea is very cold. Still, I think it's cool,
Speaker 2: and that she should tell people it's named after her.
Speaker 2: They let them Wikipedia in later. Also, if you must know,
Speaker 2: when someone has a name that seems to correlate to
Speaker 2: their job, that's called an aptronym. Let's hear a few
Speaker 2: good ones, such as weatherman, Dallas rains an in house
Speaker 2: technology firm lawyer named Sue You, British hydrologist doctor Andrew Drinkwater.
Speaker 2: Doctor Ted Stankovich is someone I've wanted to have on
Speaker 2: the show for a while. He studies skunk glands. And
Speaker 2: there's a Russian hurdler by the name of Marina Stepanova.
Speaker 2: She's a hurdler Stepanova. Coincidence or nominative determinism. That means
Speaker 2: that people choose careers subconsciously because they're kind of already
Speaker 2: a big name in them. We may never know. Also,
Speaker 2: this interview was in the wake of the Ocean Gate
Speaker 2: Titan submersible implosion, so all eyes were really at the
Speaker 2: bottom of the sea.
Speaker 4: Oh, can I quickly talk about it? Deep sea mining?
Speaker 5: Yes?
Speaker 4: Yes, so deep sea mining. If you are not.
Speaker 5: Aware of this issue, there are these polymetallic nodule failds
Speaker 5: in the Equatorial Pacific and it's basically like the rainforest
Speaker 5: of the deep sea. And if you are at all inspired,
Speaker 5: you know, by the biodiversity the deep sea, or you're
Speaker 5: concerned about climate change, like deep sea mining is the
Speaker 5: worst thing that we can possibly do right now because
Speaker 5: we don't even know if we're going to need those minerals.
Speaker 5: We don't even know what's in those those nodules, and
Speaker 5: battery technology is changing and people want to go and
Speaker 5: basically bulldoze the microbial rainforest in this beautiful region on Earth.
Speaker 5: And you even have like worms living in the metal nodules,
Speaker 5: and it's just like this incredible source of biodiversity and
Speaker 5: it really is not getting enough press coverage and it's
Speaker 5: upsetting because the payoff is not going to be worth it.
Speaker 5: These ecosystems take tens and thousands of years to recover.
Speaker 2: And who is in charge of the green light on that?
Speaker 2: Who's saying yes or no?
Speaker 5: The International Sea Authority, which is part of the UN.
Speaker 5: I believe there has been this clock that is triggered
Speaker 5: because certain nations want to pursue deep sea mining and
Speaker 5: there's this policy and I don't even quite fully understand
Speaker 5: the policy, but it's complicated. So there's a ticking clock
Speaker 5: right now to develop a policy that oversees deep sea mining,
Speaker 5: and scientists are not happy about it. And the mining
Speaker 5: companies are using these machines that look like these horrible
Speaker 5: like I don't know, think of these machines and superhero
Speaker 5: movies that all over cities like they're like they it's terrible.
Speaker 5: It's like you like, could you make a machine that
Speaker 5: looks more evil? I was like, how evil could it be?
Speaker 5: And it was more evil than I thought. Picture a
Speaker 5: steamroller covered in giant mad Max spikes. It makes my
Speaker 5: crotch hurt looking at it. Also, Holly mentioned some great
Speaker 5: activists in this area, including a marine biologist and the
Speaker 5: director of Species, Diva Ammen, and woodhole scientist and ocean
Speaker 5: explorer julieh and senior research scientists at Big Low Laboratory
Speaker 5: beth Or Cut And yes, they are all linked in
Speaker 5: my website for this episode, which is linked in the
Speaker 5: show notes, so do follow them. We need more press
Speaker 5: coverage about the horrors of deep sea mining, and we
Speaker 5: need the un to hear our voices and just elevate
Speaker 5: the voices of the scientists and find out more about
Speaker 5: those issues. And we need renewable technology, you know, we
Speaker 5: need to convert our energy sources. But it's just it's
Speaker 5: not worth it for destroying the deep sea.
Speaker 2: Have you ever gotten to go down would you ever
Speaker 2: want to go down to those depths? Like what's the
Speaker 2: difference when it comes to research between like Rova's and submersibles.
Speaker 2: Do deep sea biologists want to get down there or not?
Speaker 4: Yes, we do.
Speaker 5: Going in Alvin is my next bucket list thing. Antarctica
Speaker 5: is my first, and so I kind of check that off,
Speaker 5: and deep sea submersibles are my next thing that I
Speaker 5: want to do. So yeah, I totally want to go
Speaker 5: down there. And I think the research submersibles the safety
Speaker 5: procedures are incredible. I mean, they would never send down
Speaker 5: a human if they thought there was anything wrong with
Speaker 5: the engineering. And every time they do upgrades to Alvin,
Speaker 5: you know, they do a lot of test dives, and
Speaker 5: by the time you're going in it like there's not
Speaker 5: really any question about safety.
Speaker 4: I mean, like it's always a risk, and I think
Speaker 4: I would worry about it in the back of my mind.
Speaker 5: But typically scientific submersibles are one of the safest things
Speaker 5: that you can do.
Speaker 2: I was like, one of the safest things you could do. Holly, really,
Speaker 2: I sat on my ass and did a thousand piece
Speaker 2: puzzle this past weekend and I felt pretty safe doing that.
Speaker 2: Then again, an hour ago, I was eating yogurt out
Speaker 2: of a pyre X measuring cup because all the bowls
Speaker 2: were in the dishwasher and I sliced my pinky finger,
Speaker 2: I bled on my shirt, So I don't know. I
Speaker 2: don't know what safety is. But I looked up some
Speaker 2: stats and this deep sea submersible has completed more than
Speaker 2: five thousand dives since the mid nineteen sixties. No deaths.
Speaker 2: But if you get in a car and go buy
Speaker 2: some granola, you have a one in ten million chance
Speaker 2: of meeting the reaper, which is not zero, so less
Speaker 2: dangerous than buying granola. Also, how many bones are we
Speaker 2: talking to board Alvin? Okay, well, between renting the mothership
Speaker 2: that it's attached to, it's like forty five thousand a day. Easy. Also,
Speaker 2: why Alvin? What does Alvin stand for? I think it's
Speaker 2: like aquatic life supporting vessel investigating nautical exploration. So I
Speaker 2: looked it up because I knew it stood for something bonkers.
Speaker 2: But no, it's just named Alvin because a guy named
Speaker 2: Alan Vine convinced Woodshull Oceanographic Institute to build it in
Speaker 2: the sixties. Thanks Alan. Sadly, he ventured to the Great
Speaker 2: Beyond at the age of seventy nine in nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 2: but not in a submersible. But either way, Holly can't
Speaker 2: email him and ask him for a favor. How do
Speaker 2: you get onto an Alvin or something like that? What
Speaker 2: kind of research do you have to do? How do
Speaker 2: you plead your case? Who do you have to know?
Speaker 4: It's really hard.
Speaker 5: I would say, I think there's a lot of people
Speaker 5: that want to go down in Alvin, and it's difficult
Speaker 5: to get onto those cruises. So I mean I could
Speaker 5: get on in one of two ways. I could beg
Speaker 5: someone to get on their cruise and maybe get on Alvin.
Speaker 5: Or I could write a grant to include Alvin in
Speaker 5: my research. I have been trying to do that. I
Speaker 5: have not been successful so far. But even for scientists
Speaker 5: it's hard.
Speaker 2: How many scientists get to go on it?
Speaker 5: I would say, I mean a team of scientists on
Speaker 5: a boat is maybe twenty people, and you have multiple
Speaker 5: cruises per year that go sometimes it's the same people
Speaker 5: that go over again. But I think in the actual
Speaker 5: sub itself it's two scientists.
Speaker 4: And a pilot.
Speaker 2: Your odds are not zero.
Speaker 5: They're not zero, but it's so pretty hard.
Speaker 2: You'll get on there. Anyone listening to this who has
Speaker 2: an inn Can I ask you some questions from listeners?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Sure, okay, they know you're coming on. Get her on that, Alvin.
Speaker 2: Someone pull some strings or some ship ropes or air
Speaker 2: hoses or what have you, and we donate to a
Speaker 2: cause of theologists choosing this week. Ally said, I would
Speaker 2: love it if you could support Earthjustice dot org. They
Speaker 2: are a wonderful nonprofit legal organization that tackles environmental issues
Speaker 2: related to public health, preservation of wild space, clean energy,
Speaker 2: and climate change and you can find out more about
Speaker 2: them at Earthjustice dot org. So thank you to sponsors
Speaker 2: to the show for making these donations every week possible.
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Speaker 2: Okay, let's dig deep. Let's crack open a cold can
Speaker 2: of worms with your questions, including this one that was
Speaker 2: also asked by Belle Britney Rouis has a question, would
Speaker 2: you still love me if I was a worm?
Speaker 4: I'm going to get the.
Speaker 2: Answers yes on that right, I mean.
Speaker 4: Obvious.
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm going to see if that's a song lyric,
Speaker 2: but it might be just a just a good question
Speaker 2: for anyone. Of course it's a meme. Of course your
Speaker 2: dad me did not know this, but according to the
Speaker 2: Research Library Know your Meme dot com, would you still
Speaker 2: love me if I was a worm? Originated from a
Speaker 2: tweet by shut your hell that depicted a scenario of
Speaker 2: a woman crying at three am asking her husband if
Speaker 2: they were both born as worms, if he would still
Speaker 2: like her? Would they even have married? Who hasn't wondered this? Honestly? Worms?
Speaker 2: But if you have a few minutes and you want
Speaker 2: to hear someone with a fabulous accent recite their original
Speaker 2: poem about being loved as a worm, look no further
Speaker 2: than instagrammer miss Poneypenny.
Speaker 4: Would you still love me if I were a want them?
Speaker 2: And many of you, a shocking number, including Sam Isibrillard,
Speaker 2: Emily Staufer, laser intro legator Kleb, and Slayer needed to know.
Speaker 2: Do nematologists cut their worms into pieces? Is this their
Speaker 2: lab research? Sam wants to know if you cut a
Speaker 2: worm in pieces, will each of those pieces become new worms?
Speaker 2: Or is that only certain worms?
Speaker 5: That is only certain worms, that is flatworms, not nematodes,
Speaker 5: although we do have one nematode that can regrow its tail.
Speaker 5: And actually that worm is really cool because it's basically
Speaker 5: like a two filled with bacteria.
Speaker 4: So it's lost its gut and.
Speaker 5: It's just like packed its former gut with these symbiotic
Speaker 5: bacteria and it's lost its mouth and it just hangs
Speaker 5: out and it if it loses his tail, that like
Speaker 5: regrows it and seals the bacteria back in.
Speaker 2: And we have nematodes in us, right.
Speaker 5: I hope you don't really. I mean, if you ate dirt,
Speaker 5: you might, but we would not. I mean, if you
Speaker 5: had a.
Speaker 4: Parasite, you would, but okay.
Speaker 5: Or you like drink some drinking water with a worm,
Speaker 5: you might, but yeah, you should not have nematodes in.
Speaker 2: You, okay, just checking. I wasn't sure if that's one
Speaker 2: of those things like of course you have a bazillion
Speaker 2: nematodes or it's like if you do, you better you
Speaker 2: better call nine one one or something, okay.
Speaker 5: Or you've like eaten some uncooked pork, you know, nematodes
Speaker 5: are the reason why we cook pork to whatever degree
Speaker 5: temperature because trick and Ella is the pork parasite.
Speaker 4: Really, yeah, that'd be bad.
Speaker 2: So if you eat these undercooked pork worms, they start
Speaker 2: their journey in your guts and then they move to
Speaker 2: your muscles to make babies. You might experience such sensations
Speaker 2: as nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, fever, fatigue, and abdominal discomfort before
Speaker 2: it escalates to headaches, fevers, chills, cough, swelling of the
Speaker 2: face and eyes, aching joints, and muscle pains, as well
Speaker 2: as itchy skin and constipation. And according to the Beach
Speaker 2: read the Textbook of Medical Microbiology and Terek, nematodes are
Speaker 2: among the most common and widely distributed animal parasites in humans.
Speaker 2: And in nineteen forty six, apparently they had a worm
Speaker 2: meeting via the American Society of Parasitologists, and this one
Speaker 2: expert gave a lively lecture titled This Wormy World and
Speaker 2: estimated a truly gergantuan number of all kinds of nematode
Speaker 2: infections in humans. But if you don't want pork cyst
Speaker 2: infections specifically, the CD says to cook those chops at
Speaker 2: one thirty degrees fahrenheit for thirty minutes or at one
Speaker 2: forty for one minute. That's like fifty five to sixty
Speaker 2: in celsius. If you're concerned. Also, please wash your porky
Speaker 2: hands before eating fingerfoods. Your body will thank you, your
Speaker 2: toilet will thank you. One person asked. Jennifer Machin asked,
Speaker 2: jumping worms they haven't got no legs. Have you ever
Speaker 2: heard of jumping worms?
Speaker 5: There is a jumping nematode yep okay z shiragane. How
Speaker 5: can marine worms get crazy adaptations to make make them
Speaker 5: look like wild little aliens while terrestrial worms are normal
Speaker 5: and boring? Well, that is not accurate because terrestrial worms
Speaker 5: basically like have harpoons in their mouths. So the terrestrial
Speaker 5: nematodes I said, they eat plant roots and fungi juice,
Speaker 5: so they have evolved like a harpoon in their mouth
Speaker 5: that they will stick out and puncture a plant root
Speaker 5: and then stuck out the juices. So I would argue
Speaker 5: that the terrestial adaptations are even crazier than some of
Speaker 5: the marine ones.
Speaker 2: Holy smokes. Sam wants to know what's the wiggliest worm species?
Speaker 2: Is there a way to quantify that? Who wiggles the most?
Speaker 4: I mean, my answer is always going to be nematodes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, I take it.
Speaker 5: They thrash around in an sh shape because that's the
Speaker 5: only way they can move because they're lacking some key
Speaker 5: muscles for wriggling.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, when you are a worm, you just
Speaker 2: whip your worm back and forth. Craig Collins wants to know,
Speaker 2: would love to know about the research surrounding worm memory.
Speaker 2: I recall that if you teach a worm a maze
Speaker 2: and then grind them up and feed them to another worm, Oh,
Speaker 2: my dear, that worm will know how to solve the maze.
Speaker 5: Is this true?
Speaker 4: Ah?
Speaker 5: This sounds like a very far outside my area of expertise.
Speaker 2: Yes, that may have been apocryphal, that may not.
Speaker 5: I mean, I know c elegance is used in Alzheimer's
Speaker 5: research because one of the reasons it's a useful model
Speaker 5: is because it has some of the same proteins and
Speaker 5: neural pathways that for human diseases. So like Parkinson's and
Speaker 5: I believe Alzheimer's. Yes, we have a lot of proteins
Speaker 5: in common with the lily nematode.
Speaker 2: Can you feed a worm to a worm? All right?
Speaker 2: I looked into this, but because there are thousands upon
Speaker 2: thousands of sea elegant studies and I have to bathe
Speaker 2: and eat at some point my goose was cooked here,
Speaker 2: I'd never find the study. I did find one titled
Speaker 2: Principles for Coding Associative Memories in a Compact Neural network
Speaker 2: about worm's memories to avoid stinky stuff. And there was
Speaker 2: this other study with this effusive name, an Elegant Mind,
Speaker 2: Learning and Memory in Sea Elegance, which detailed worm plasticity
Speaker 2: of the tap withdrawal response, which is just a fancy
Speaker 2: term for worms doing the backstroke in response to tapping
Speaker 2: the petri dish containing the worm. They're like dang earthquake.
Speaker 2: I'm out. There was also a very recent study, likely
Speaker 2: the Talk of Worm twenty three, about how descendants of
Speaker 2: worms trained to fear a certain odor also got stressed
Speaker 2: out by that odor, and that fear was transmitted to
Speaker 2: the offsprings cells nucleus via sperm, but not oocytes. So
Speaker 2: paternal odor trauma affected future generations as a way of
Speaker 2: a warning system. And just when I felt dazzled and
Speaker 2: overwormed by info, I finally stumbled upon that holy grail
Speaker 2: of worm research I was looking for. I thought I'd
Speaker 2: never find it, but I found it. Folks, magoose was
Speaker 2: not cooked. So in twenty twenty one there was a
Speaker 2: study out of Princeton and it was called the role
Speaker 2: of the sir one transposon in horizontal transfer of transgenerational memory,
Speaker 2: about which doctor Colleen Murphy, who was the principal investigator
Speaker 2: on this explained, we found that one worm can learn
Speaker 2: to avoid a pathogenic bacterium if we grind up that worm,
Speaker 2: or even just use the media the worms are swimming
Speaker 2: in and give that media or the crushed worm to
Speaker 2: naive worms. These worms now learn to avoid the pathogen
Speaker 2: as well. Doctor Murphy explained, So there you have it. It's true.
Speaker 2: One millimeter tiny nematodes transfer warnings, memories, and I suppose
Speaker 2: trauma to each other by swimming in the same goop,
Speaker 2: or eating each other or being I guess fed each
Speaker 2: other by scientists. And yes, this information about worms is interesting,
Speaker 2: but I hope it opens your heart to the possibility
Speaker 2: of more empathy for just every living creature you ever encounter,
Speaker 2: including the bitchy receptionist at my dentist's office. You don't
Speaker 2: know what her great grandparents went through. Neither do I.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: If you'd like to know more about worms on drugs,
Speaker 2: you can check out the Plenariology episode, which is a
Speaker 2: stunning and charming one with Doctor one Pegan, who we love.
Speaker 2: So you have more in common with the rest of
Speaker 2: the world than you ever thought possible. So welcome, welcome
Speaker 2: to unity with worms. I mean, we share so much
Speaker 2: DNA even with yeast yep alex rtman wants to know
Speaker 2: what is the deepest underground a worm has been found. Also,
Speaker 2: maybe this sounds strange, but do landworms have community? Like
Speaker 2: are they down there building nests or networks of tunnels
Speaker 2: together or do they just occasionally bump into each other
Speaker 2: say a quick eye and move on? Do worms acknowledge
Speaker 2: the presence of other worms in marine environments? And yeah,
Speaker 2: like how deep do you think worms go?
Speaker 5: I believe the deep it and I'm going to talk
Speaker 5: about nematodes specifically. The deepest that we found is that
Speaker 5: one in the South African diamond mind, and I.
Speaker 4: Believe it's like three kilometers. It's pretty deep.
Speaker 2: How did they find a worm? Were they looking for worms?
Speaker 5: I'm maybe because there's a lot of like a subsurface
Speaker 5: microbiology research, but mostly what they find down there is
Speaker 5: just bacteria and fungi. But then they found a nematode
Speaker 5: and then it was a science paper.
Speaker 2: Did that person have to name the nematode?
Speaker 5: I think they invoked vampires, but I can't remember the
Speaker 5: exact name.
Speaker 2: Okay, I got you. So this worm was found in
Speaker 2: twenty eleven in a gold mine over two miles below
Speaker 2: the surface of the Earth, and the geoscientists who first
Speaker 2: saw it described them as half millimeter black, little swirly
Speaker 2: things that quote scared the life out of me when
Speaker 2: I first saw them moving. So you can read more
Speaker 2: about their discovery and the paper Nematoda from the terrestrial
Speaker 2: deep subsurface of South Africa. But the long and short
Speaker 2: of these teenies is their genus and species is Hella
Speaker 2: Cephalobis Mephisto, named after the underworld demon Mephistopheles, whose name
Speaker 2: itself means he who loves not the light. And if
Speaker 2: this vibe of darkness intrigues you, please find the link
Speaker 2: in the show notes with all of our Spooktober episodes,
Speaker 2: including a two parter on vampire lore with expert Jeff Men,
Speaker 2: a demonology episode, bats, spiderwebs, bones, body farms, catacombs, forest creatures,
Speaker 2: got one on vultures, mortuary, makeup, pumpkins and more. But yes,
Speaker 2: worms named after demons.
Speaker 4: What a world?
Speaker 2: What a beautiful world? Have you gotten to name any nemotodes?
Speaker 5: Not yet, but we are trying to do that with
Speaker 5: the Antarctic samples that's on the radar it's just really
Speaker 5: hard to name nematode species because you need some ridiculous
Speaker 5: amount of individuals from the same species.
Speaker 2: What are we talking.
Speaker 5: You need like five females and five males and then
Speaker 5: some juveniles, and usually sometimes we never find more than
Speaker 5: one nematode from a given species. So, like just getting
Speaker 5: the checklist of things you need to describe species is
Speaker 5: actually really hard for nemotodes because there's all these rules
Speaker 5: written in the eighteen hundreds that don't make sense anymore.
Speaker 2: Do you have a mentor or someone that you really
Speaker 2: admire that you would want to name or would would
Speaker 2: you name it like a Chewbacca nematode or something like that.
Speaker 4: That's a good question.
Speaker 5: I haven't actually thought about that, And I don't know
Speaker 5: how I feel about naming nematodes after people, because there's
Speaker 5: been some pretty big press about like why we name
Speaker 5: species after people and why that may or may not
Speaker 5: be a good thing. Maybe I would name one after Buddha,
Speaker 5: because well, that would still a fend some people, but
Speaker 5: I feel like that's what I would be comfortable with.
Speaker 2: But that's a problem that you're gonna have to catch
Speaker 2: a lot more worms. Yeah, to even have that problem.
Speaker 2: Curious Kat wants to know do worms have a nervous
Speaker 2: system or is it species reliant? They don't seem to
Speaker 2: have eyes, but are they like jellyfish and able to
Speaker 2: detect light? So what kinds of sensory organs are we
Speaker 2: looking at?
Speaker 4: So I'll give you this card.
Speaker 2: A translucent slim faced baby. It looks like one of
Speaker 2: those long nosed Russian wolfhounds, but with two little red
Speaker 2: dots snugly close together on its snoop oh spots.
Speaker 5: So those are a celle also known as eye spots.
Speaker 5: And this is a nematode that lives in kelp hold
Speaker 5: fast like when they attach to rock. You have that
Speaker 5: like squiggly massive roots, and you have a nematode that
Speaker 5: only lives in those roots. And for some reason they
Speaker 5: have these eye spots. We don't really know why, but
Speaker 5: a lot of nematodes will have these dark patches of
Speaker 5: pigment that they're not really true eyes, but they're pigmented
Speaker 5: and they're most likely detecting light. So some do use
Speaker 5: light to sense environments, but the majority of them use
Speaker 5: the amfids, the sensory pores on the side of their head.
Speaker 5: Those Princess Leiah buns.
Speaker 2: Does the information that these eyespots gather does it get
Speaker 2: processed anywhere in the worm?
Speaker 5: We don't know, and that's a good question. I do
Speaker 5: more like ecology and evolution research, so I don't necessarily
Speaker 5: study the nervous systems. But I mean, if we're using
Speaker 5: nematodes in like Alzheimer's research, then I'm assuming they have
Speaker 5: some sensory information that's useful.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Ooh, can I keep this one?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: This one is also aldoramble. So if, like patron Curious Cat,
Speaker 2: you're wondering where these flesh tubes store their brains, the
Speaker 2: answer is in a ring around their throats, kind of
Speaker 2: like an airplane neck pillow, full of thoughts and feelings
Speaker 2: and horniness and transgenerational fears of odors. And there was
Speaker 2: a twenty twenty one article out of the University of
Speaker 2: Leeds and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New
Speaker 2: York titled a Multi scale Brain Map derived from Whole
Speaker 2: Brain Volumetric Reconstructions, and it found that there's a network
Speaker 2: architecture of c. Elegan's brains that support sensory computation and
Speaker 2: brain wide coordination and Essentially, our brains may have more
Speaker 2: in common across all kinds of phyla. So if you
Speaker 2: ever meet a worm at a party, you already have
Speaker 2: a lot of similarities you can talk about. Now, what
Speaker 2: about getting it on? How is that happening? Patrons Chris
Speaker 2: Maguire and Sarah King wanted to know, and Sarah, who
Speaker 2: has such a soft spot in their heart for worms, asked,
Speaker 2: do they come from eggs? Please give me their backstory.
Speaker 2: I'm way too emotionally attached, and that's the energy I'm
Speaker 2: looking for. Sarah Ellen Jernal wants to know how the
Speaker 2: heck did they reproduce?
Speaker 5: Okay, that's fun, all right. First of all, I said,
Speaker 5: nematodes have males and females, so sexual reproduction male nematodes
Speaker 5: one of the defining taxonomic characteristics is something called a spicule, okay,
Speaker 5: which I describe as like picture a steak that you
Speaker 5: use to kill a vampire. So like this giant like
Speaker 5: er wooden thing that's pointy at both ends. Male nematodes
Speaker 5: have two of those, and they will eject those and
Speaker 5: then slam them into the female nematode to like pry
Speaker 5: open her reproductive track. And then like throw some sperm
Speaker 5: in there.
Speaker 2: Oh, a bit rude. Does he like vampires? Does it
Speaker 2: have to be invited or is it just like they can?
Speaker 2: And how do they sense a female? Well, how do
Speaker 2: they know that there's a female reproductive track even around?
Speaker 5: That is a very good question. I do not have
Speaker 5: an answer to that. But they don't necessarily Another fun fact,
Speaker 5: they don't necessarily have to put it exactly in the
Speaker 5: right place. There is this reproductive strategy in nematodes called
Speaker 5: traumatic insemination.
Speaker 2: Heard about this bed bugs do it too, right, yep, yep.
Speaker 5: So they may just use those steaks to like stab
Speaker 5: the female anywhere, you know, and just like throw some
Speaker 5: sperm wherever, and then I believe the female will take
Speaker 5: the sperm and then just like migrate it to the
Speaker 5: correct place.
Speaker 2: I don't like it. Oh, Christopher Blabout wants to know
Speaker 2: with your work in Antarctica and then a little flag
Speaker 2: there are there worms that can survive the dry climate
Speaker 2: and extreme salinity of areas like the dry valleys we
Speaker 2: were talking about.
Speaker 4: Yep, yep.
Speaker 5: We have a lot of nematodes there, not a lot,
Speaker 5: so there are many fewer species. The biodiversity is really
Speaker 5: low in the dry valleys. But it's an interesting environment
Speaker 5: because you have very strong connection to like the microbial
Speaker 5: communities and yeah, definitely high salinity, I mean also pollution.
Speaker 5: So once some of the worms I study are like
Speaker 5: in the Port of la where there's all.
Speaker 4: Like gunk and DDT that's buried.
Speaker 5: And one of the things that my work is doing
Speaker 5: is trying to figure out if we have specific nematode
Speaker 5: species that love pollution and they can thrive in environments
Speaker 5: like that. So we're trying to use them as bioindicators
Speaker 5: as habitat a pristineness or impactedness, and we use the
Speaker 5: NA sequencing nowadays for that. But the goal is to
Speaker 5: be like this nematode loves pollution. Well, we were bad yesterday.
Speaker 5: We were about to go snorkeling. We were on the
Speaker 5: dock and I was like, hey, you guys, here there's
Speaker 5: some DDT barrels buried off the coast of Catalina and
Speaker 5: You're like, oh yeah, I'm trying to get some samples
Speaker 5: of it. And I was like, what is a likelihood.
Speaker 2: I'm standing on a dock with someone who's like, oh yeah,
Speaker 2: I got someone number one, Where are those barrels, and
Speaker 2: how do you get access to the gunk that might
Speaker 2: be linking out of them.
Speaker 5: I believe they are somewhere off the coast of San Diego,
Speaker 5: And I mean it's kind of as easy as emailing
Speaker 5: researchers that are going out there. So I actually may
Speaker 5: have an email when you might inbox about the DDT barrels.
Speaker 2: But they're not like right off the coast here.
Speaker 5: Well, they're off the coast of like San Diego somewhere.
Speaker 5: They're not that far off the coast. I mean, you come,
Speaker 5: come in a sailboat and go there. But they're deep, right,
Speaker 5: so you need the deep sea core equipment. You need
Speaker 5: an ROV or something to like go down there and
Speaker 5: gingerly push the PBC tube into the gunky spot world
Speaker 5: the da leaked out woof.
Speaker 2: And so if you can find if there's a higher
Speaker 2: population of certain worms, then you can kind of figure
Speaker 2: out if we get a lot of these worms over here,
Speaker 2: at chances are we got a lot of this gunk.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And one of the things we're also trying to
Speaker 5: do is look at the genome of those worms. So
Speaker 5: the idea is that like, if you can persist in
Speaker 5: such a toxic sludge pool. Then you have certain things
Speaker 5: in your genome, like maybe upregulation of certain proteins or
Speaker 5: certain metabolic pathways that basically help you to survive in
Speaker 5: that environment, and that will help inform research like in
Speaker 5: other extreme places like volcano soils or like Yellowstone hot springs.
Speaker 4: Things like that.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, those are going to be the apocalypse worms. Yes,
Speaker 2: trend forecast. If things keep going poorly, these are going.
Speaker 4: To be really hot. Yep.
Speaker 2: What about the hardest thing about what you do? What sucks?
Speaker 2: What is something that's just hard about worms?
Speaker 4: Or life? Your life?
Speaker 5: So my answer to this is bureaucracy, because Okay, I
Speaker 5: run a lab, so I'm kind of like seeing myself
Speaker 5: as a CEO of startup company and I'll have to
Speaker 5: do like a lot of this paperwork and it really
Speaker 5: sucks the life out of me if the paperwork is
Speaker 5: not efficient, right, Like I just want to get reimbursed
Speaker 5: for this research trip to the beach, but I have
Speaker 5: to like upload receipts for like fifty cents because I
Speaker 5: bought three cokes. And I don't understand why things can't
Speaker 5: be more efficient sometimes or like forms that don't make sense,
Speaker 5: or you know when you have a PDF form and
Speaker 5: try to fill it and then like, yeah, just like
Speaker 5: it's hard.
Speaker 2: They're so expensive focus wise, and then by the time
Speaker 2: you get to the work you want to do, you're like,
Speaker 2: I spent all my focus filling out receipts.
Speaker 4: Yep, yep.
Speaker 2: What about What do you love the most? What do
Speaker 2: you love about nematodes nematology.
Speaker 5: I love the sense of looking at something that no
Speaker 5: other human on Earth has ever seen before, And that's
Speaker 5: really like what motivates me. And I can pick up
Speaker 5: nematodes from outside in my garden and still like maybe
Speaker 5: there's a new species that no one has ever laid
Speaker 5: eyes on before. So I travel to these remote places
Speaker 5: and it's really hard and expensive, and I don't go
Speaker 5: there often, but I can bring the samples back. So
Speaker 5: when I'm looking at like an Antarctic worm under the microscope,
Speaker 5: I still feel the joy of the travel to those places,
Speaker 5: even though that worm kind of looks the same as
Speaker 5: the one that I get from my garden. Sometimes just
Speaker 5: the fact that like this came from Antarctica and I
Speaker 5: went there and this is amazing, and like life is amazing,
Speaker 5: and that's just my favorite part of my job.
Speaker 2: What does the mud smell like?
Speaker 5: Smells like parts, Yeah, it smells like Yeah, that's good
Speaker 5: to know.
Speaker 2: Let's say that you're a backyard or burgeoning pneumatologist. What
Speaker 2: kind of microscope do you need to see them?
Speaker 5: You don't even need anything fancy. You can get away
Speaker 5: with a cheap stereoscope, even just magnification like ten x.
Speaker 5: If you go to your garden and you put that
Speaker 5: in the petri dish, then you'll be able to see
Speaker 5: like worms wriggling. I mean, you can't see them to
Speaker 5: the stage of what we get on our fancy microscopes
Speaker 5: that cost fifty thousand dollars, but you can see them
Speaker 5: wriggling and you be able to experience it's the joy
Speaker 5: of them thrashing around. And then iPhone cameras mounted on
Speaker 5: the microscope, you can even take some videos.
Speaker 2: You can share the world of worms. Doctor Pick just
Speaker 2: got tenure, which is a huge deal and has explored
Speaker 2: Antarctica and has a robust mud collection and well moisturized skin.
Speaker 2: What else is on her agenda?
Speaker 5: I'm doing things like experimenting with tiktoks to tell stories
Speaker 5: or just like even more thoughtful tweets and not some
Speaker 5: science writing, So just having kind of like an artistic
Speaker 5: side of my scientific career that's focused on communication and
Speaker 5: just like spreading that joy and getting everyone excited about worms.
Speaker 5: I'm feeling really excited about doing that.
Speaker 2: The sea just swimming with so many souls of tiny
Speaker 2: and giant creatures. Maybe there's water ghosts. Who knows. A
Speaker 2: beautiful thing to think of? What a party it is?
Speaker 5: Yeah, and actually I want to be buried in the
Speaker 5: deep sea.
Speaker 4: Do you really?
Speaker 2: How do you do that?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 4: I don't have a.
Speaker 5: Concrete plan yet, but I definitely want my remains to
Speaker 5: be like fit back into the ecosystem. So maybe maybe
Speaker 5: like scattering of the ashes, Like I don't know if
Speaker 5: they could just like throw my body over the side
Speaker 5: of the boat, Like I'm sure there's rules on that,
Speaker 5: but definitely like scattering the ashes, and then my ashes
Speaker 5: will be marine snow and it will feed the worms and.
Speaker 2: The circle of life. Would you want it to be
Speaker 2: an Anarctic in particular.
Speaker 5: No, I'm not picky any deep sea, any deep sea,
Speaker 5: and the coast of California gets pretty deep pretty quickly,
Speaker 5: and I love California so warm food.
Speaker 2: I think that's beautiful Thank you so much for talking
Speaker 2: to me.
Speaker 5: You're welcome. This was fantastic to meet you and join
Speaker 5: you on your first ever snorkling trip.
Speaker 2: Do you think I have Nemo toads in my hair
Speaker 2: from yesterday I rinsed my hair?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 5: Probably, well, I hope again, I hope not, but maybe yay,
Speaker 5: But your hair looked amazing anyway.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you so ask warm experts wiggly questions about
Speaker 2: cold mud, because there is no question that is too
Speaker 2: on smart. Look at how much weird info our brains
Speaker 2: now have. Thank you doctor Hollybick for being on and
Speaker 2: you can find links to her TikTok website and so
Speaker 2: much more, plus a link to Earthjustice dot org in
Speaker 2: the show notes. More links are up at aliwar dot
Speaker 2: com slash ologies slash neumatology. We also have smologies, which
Speaker 2: are kid friendly shorter versions of episodes that are classroom safe.
Speaker 2: Those are linked in the show notes or at aliwar
Speaker 2: dot com slashmologies, and a full list of full length
Speaker 2: episodes is organized by category. That's up at ologies dot
Speaker 2: com and you can stay tuned for a full month
Speaker 2: of Spooktober episodes starting next week. They're so so good
Speaker 2: and creepy and cozy. Thank you to Zeke Rodriguez Thomas
Speaker 2: You're as Sleeper, and Mercedes Maitland for editing Smologies, Aaron
Speaker 2: Talbert for admitting the Oologies podcast Facebook group, Emily White
Speaker 2: of the Wordery for making our professional transcripts. Noel Dilworth
Speaker 2: is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale is our managing director,
Speaker 2: also handles merch. Kelly Ardwire handles our website and she
Speaker 2: can design yours. And someone who should not eat worms
Speaker 2: because she is well liked is lead editor Mercedes Maitland
Speaker 2: of Maitland Audio, who assembles a show. Nick Thorburn made
Speaker 2: the theme music And if you stick around till the
Speaker 2: end of the show, I tell you a secret. And
Speaker 2: maybe you're like, why hasn't the handsome man shared Sleeper
Speaker 2: been editing for a bit? And the answer is is
Speaker 2: that I adore him so much and he will always
Speaker 2: be your pod mom. But I lovingly released him from
Speaker 2: his husbandly podcast duties so he could pursue what he
Speaker 2: really loves, which is writing and acting, and boom, within
Speaker 2: two weeks he got two parts in movies which are
Speaker 2: beginning to shoot soon, especially now that it looks like
Speaker 2: the strikes are coming to an end, so I'm very
Speaker 2: excited for him. And also it's nice to not have
Speaker 2: to talk to your spouse about work all the time
Speaker 2: and you can just sit around goofing and doing thousand
Speaker 2: piece puzzles on a Sunday. I'm loving this. I think
Speaker 2: he is also, so thank you again everyone, just for
Speaker 2: the patients. As I was out for August, retraining in
Speaker 2: my brain to not fear things like shaking Petrie dishes
Speaker 2: or mysterious odors, and I can say I think I'm
Speaker 2: the happiest worm I've ever been. And it's just only
Speaker 2: making these episodes more fun to make. It's just a
Speaker 2: delight to be back. All right, that's enough sincerity out
Speaker 2: of your dad for one day, or is it? Is
Speaker 2: it okay?
Speaker 4: I Love you?
Speaker 2: Byevie Spooktober. Let's get it on you creeps. Pacodermatology, homeiology,
Speaker 2: ydo zoology, lithology, new technology, meteorology, paratology, nthology, seriology, selenology.
Speaker 4: A worm at the bottom of the motion