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Speaker 2: Bonnantma good bugga Onnolu, the haartnir, the holla, the haemena
Speaker 2: a hecl ah ersuenetre orrasloncela dani the tain Knudovshu, the
Speaker 2: wild kil Nakatarhu lahulish humperodes on uderos or raslanse is
Speaker 2: phaser Latgan's throw, Tasha Tapa, siranashka agus nyavl ande erfad
Speaker 2: is fugum more teyrig h i a punk i e
Speaker 2: is collactrilala a on tudoros or raslanse if we Reelta Snaheren.
Speaker 3: Oh hey, it's that second hole that you have to
Speaker 3: carve into a can of pineapple juice in order to
Speaker 3: get the first one to glob out. Alli Warard back
Speaker 3: with an episode of Ologies. You Better not sleep on.
Speaker 3: You're about to get walloped with excitement and passion and
Speaker 3: gossip about drugs and dogs and aliens and how it
Speaker 3: all relates to these tiny goofy dick shaped flatworms. You
Speaker 3: know you're gonna do tomorrow. Tomorrow You're gonna paint an
Speaker 3: airbrush mural on the hood of your car. That just says,
Speaker 3: I goddamn love plenarians. Look before we get you there.
Speaker 3: Let's thank the folks at patreon dot com slash Ologies.
Speaker 3: They send in as little as twenty five cents an episode,
Speaker 3: and they get to ask questions. Thanks also to everyone
Speaker 3: who is sending this episode to friends and family despite
Speaker 3: the fact that it is about worms and it is
Speaker 3: not safe for work. Thanks to everyone who rates and
Speaker 3: subscribes and of course reviews. You know, I pick a
Speaker 3: new one each week to read, and this week, Obsessed
Speaker 3: with Science O six says, oh hey, I hate all podcasts,
Speaker 3: but this one it's amazing. Thank you, Ali, I hope
Speaker 3: you read this. Obsessed with science so six I did
Speaker 3: read it. Also, Happy birthday. Okay, let's get into it. Plenariology,
Speaker 3: it's indeed a thing. It's the study of plenarians, which
Speaker 3: are a class of free live in free wheel and flatworms.
Speaker 3: And the word plenaria comes from the Latin for on
Speaker 3: level ground. Because these things look like if you miniaturized
Speaker 3: a human penis and cranked it through the rollers of
Speaker 3: Aposta machine, flat phallic, little triangle shaped head that contains
Speaker 3: tiny brains to boot. So this ologist has studied them
Speaker 3: for years and we met via Twitter and he is
Speaker 3: a gem. So he's an associate professor of biology at
Speaker 3: Westchester University in Pennsylvania, an author of the popular science
Speaker 3: book The First Brain, The Neuroscience of Plenarians. He also
Speaker 3: wrote Strange Survivors, How Organisms attack and defend in the
Speaker 3: Game of Life. And he's working on a new book
Speaker 3: about drunk dolphins No joke do out next year. So
Speaker 3: he got his bachelor's degree in general sciences and his
Speaker 3: master's in biokam before heading to Cornell for his PhD.
Speaker 3: And we talk about what makes a brain. The personalities
Speaker 3: of clones, the sexiest underwater Olympic sport, limb regeneration, and
Speaker 3: how these simple little creatures are helping solve medical mysteries.
Speaker 3: With your new favorite plnariologist, doctor one Pegan.
Speaker 4: I'm actually going fanboy with this effort about your podcast
Speaker 4: for a long time, and it's really cool.
Speaker 3: When you tweeted it me, I was like a whole
Speaker 3: episode on plnaria This is that's amazing. I want to
Speaker 3: do that now. How long have you been studying plinariology
Speaker 3: if you will?
Speaker 4: Okay, So I have a confession to make right off
Speaker 4: the start. I am an accidental planariologist, as it were.
Speaker 4: I've never taken a zoology course. My training is mainly
Speaker 4: biochemistry and pharmacology. I knew a biology, and I came
Speaker 4: to planarians. I don't know. I'd like to call it
Speaker 4: faith if you will. First of all, I was a
Speaker 4: non traditional student. I went back to school at thirty
Speaker 4: five for my PhD. Okay, So I did my bachelor's
Speaker 4: work for several years. I got married, started having kids
Speaker 4: with my wife helped, of course, You're welcome. Then I
Speaker 4: did my master's working full time, and you know, I
Speaker 4: was very fortunate to have very good supervisors. But I
Speaker 4: always wanted to do the PhD. But I needed to work, Okay,
Speaker 4: I had a family. So when I was thirty five,
Speaker 4: a person who ended up being my PhD advisor came
Speaker 4: to Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican by the way, I
Speaker 4: was born and raised in Puerto Rico, and I did
Speaker 4: all my education up until the masters there. So a
Speaker 4: collaborator from my advisors in Puerto Rico came to visit
Speaker 4: and everything, and he just happened to recruit a students
Speaker 4: for Cornell University. So he actively tried to recruit me.
Speaker 4: I applied, they accepted me, I got a fellowship, and well,
Speaker 4: I packed my family and I went, oh, my gosh.
Speaker 3: Wow. So, before becoming a professor at Westchester University, onnegat
Speaker 3: his PhD in pharmacology from Cornell University, studying in a
Speaker 3: biochemistry lab with the brilliant doctor George Harris, a chemist.
Speaker 4: At the time, I was studying the dopamine transporter and
Speaker 4: its relationship to cocaine, the abuse drug.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: I saw a paper from researcher at Temple University about
Speaker 4: how planarians got showed addiction to cocaine.
Speaker 3: What Yeah, coca planarians.
Speaker 4: Yes, cocae planarians, and later on we learned that we
Speaker 4: can do that with nicotine, metamphetamines and whatever. So it's
Speaker 4: really fun. Well for them, I'll have what she is having.
Speaker 4: I knew about planarians, but very peripherally. I know that
Speaker 4: you cut their heads off, they will grow it back
Speaker 4: and whatnot. So I got very excited, and I went
Speaker 4: to my advisor and I will George, guess what we
Speaker 4: can do these experiments in planary But but of course
Speaker 4: he was a physical chemist, you know, something slimy, an animal.
Speaker 4: What he essentially said, no, he says something like in
Speaker 4: the in the lines of well, when you have your
Speaker 4: own lab, you can do and that's precisely what I
Speaker 4: did essentially.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh. And how long have you been studying
Speaker 3: them now.
Speaker 4: Well, it's been almost fifteen years now. I started at
Speaker 4: Westchester University in Pennsylvania in two thousand and five. They
Speaker 4: foster research. And that's the best of both words, because
Speaker 4: I love teaching because you know, if we think about
Speaker 4: it in the same way, I get paid to read
Speaker 4: about what I like, to talk about what I like
Speaker 4: under students have to listen to me. Okay, So it's awesome.
Speaker 3: His students, according to Internet chatter, love this dude. Now, Okay,
Speaker 3: he was working on his PhD and needed a model
Speaker 3: for research that was relatively cheap, and he was running
Speaker 3: some controls and found that a compound he used in
Speaker 3: the controls actually changed the plenarian behavior. And he calls
Speaker 3: this wormy event a serendipitous observation.
Speaker 4: So, as any half decent scientist does, I run my
Speaker 4: controls with just the MSO and something weird happening to
Speaker 4: the behaviors of the planarian. So weird. And the first
Speaker 4: paper of the lab was about the effect of the
Speaker 4: MZO in planarians.
Speaker 3: And you know, going back a step or two, what
Speaker 3: is a planarian? I know it is a flatworm, but
Speaker 3: can you describe it for someone who's maybe never seen one,
Speaker 3: Like how big are they? Where do they live? Oh?
Speaker 4: Well, it depends on the type of planarians. So planetariums
Speaker 4: literally mean flatworm, but they describe a wide variety of species.
Speaker 4: There are marine versions, they're called polyplats, and they are
Speaker 4: some of the most beautiful worms in the sea. Oh so,
Speaker 4: the ones that I work with are freshwater planarians, and
Speaker 4: many of those species they possess a very interesting property.
Speaker 4: They are the ones that you can cut their heads off.
Speaker 4: They will regrow any part of their bodies, including their brain,
Speaker 4: in the right way.
Speaker 3: How are they even doing that?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 4: Well, if you figured it out, you'll get a nobel price,
Speaker 4: and you mention me in your in your in your speed.
Speaker 3: Fair enough.
Speaker 4: Well, I think you've noticed that I'm very enthusiastic about
Speaker 4: what I do.
Speaker 3: I love it. Let's say that you wanted to look
Speaker 3: at it, look for a planaria. Where is a good
Speaker 3: place to look? Are they in puddles? Are they under rocks?
Speaker 3: Do you need a microscope?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 4: No, because many it depends on the species. That the
Speaker 4: typical ones they're about maybe an inch loan a couple
Speaker 4: of centimeters long. Every planarian it's actually a carnivore. They're predators,
Speaker 4: so they even eat each other happily. They're cannibals. Even so,
Speaker 4: what a very good way to hunt for them? As
Speaker 4: it were, You get like a little container, You poke
Speaker 4: holes in the lid, put a piece of meat inside
Speaker 4: of it, and live it in the water, and within
Speaker 4: a short period of time there's going to be a
Speaker 4: bunch of stuff, including planarias.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: But the ones that I work with. They're available commercially,
Speaker 4: I can buy them and that's for lab use, right, yes, yeah,
Speaker 4: and they are usedful in many schools for demonstration experiments
Speaker 4: and activities like that. I just throw drugs at them
Speaker 4: and see what happened.
Speaker 3: And now, what kind of brains do they have? You
Speaker 3: mentioned they can even regrow their brains, and obviously if
Speaker 3: they're reacting to chemicals and drugs, they have a nervous system.
Speaker 3: Like what's their anatomy like?
Speaker 4: They have relatively sophisticated brains for a very small invertebrate,
Speaker 4: and they are capable of learning. They have many of
Speaker 4: the same neurotransmitters that we have.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: And probably one of the most interesting anatomical characteristics of
Speaker 4: planarians is that they have what it's called a bilob
Speaker 4: or brain just pretty much like us. Well, not exactly
Speaker 4: that couse, but you know what I mean. With two lobes, okay,
Speaker 4: join together, and they instead of having a single spinal cord,
Speaker 4: they have two, one per each lobe, and those spinal
Speaker 4: cords are connected by nerve fibers. They're really cool. They're
Speaker 4: really really cool. Wow.
Speaker 3: And now if you, let's say, were to injure a planaria.
Speaker 3: If a planaria were to get bisected, does it matter
Speaker 3: where they're cut and they can regenerate.
Speaker 4: Well, you can cut it in any way you want.
Speaker 4: But that's a very good question because there's a part
Speaker 4: of the planarium that does not regenerate and that you're
Speaker 4: gonna love this one.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 4: Planarians eat via the same orifice where they defecate. No,
Speaker 4: yes they do, Yes they do. And they extend a
Speaker 4: tube called the proboscis, and that's how they eat, like
Speaker 4: an alien in a movie. Okay, they stick it in
Speaker 4: the prey and they suck it dry. Oh my god,
Speaker 4: and I've seen that in my laboratory. They rub themselves
Speaker 4: around a water fleece dafnia like a snake and they
Speaker 4: do that. Oh wow. You can cut almost every part
Speaker 4: of the anatomy of the planarian except the proboskis. That
Speaker 4: part does not regenerate.
Speaker 3: Okay, quick aside. When I hear proboscis, I think like
Speaker 3: mouth area. I think a nose hose. But I look
Speaker 3: this up and in a planaria it's on the belly
Speaker 3: near the back end, kind of like if you had
Speaker 3: a pool noodle coming out of your navel. But you
Speaker 3: could shit out of it, and then five minutes later
Speaker 3: you could use it to slurp up the body of
Speaker 3: your uncle like he was a frappuccino. Now, a lot
Speaker 3: of freshwater planarians are like a modeled peachy brown, but
Speaker 3: fluttering marine ones can be gorgeously brightly colored to kind
Speaker 3: of advertise that they'll poison the hell out of their enemies. Now,
Speaker 3: paris breathe through their skin, and they don't have a
Speaker 3: circulatory system, so their gut kind of acts like a
Speaker 3: New York subway map to deliver their nutrients. And of
Speaker 3: course they have the nubbins of an early brain. All
Speaker 3: of these parts are under one of the best warranties
Speaker 3: in the business.
Speaker 4: One continues, you can take a piece of the tail,
Speaker 4: a piece of the head laterally whatever, and they regenerate.
Speaker 4: They need kind of a minimum of about ten thousand
Speaker 4: cells to regenerate. That's about maybe I think it's point
Speaker 4: zero eight cubic millimeters or something like that.
Speaker 3: And do they ever do work on the DNA to
Speaker 3: find out if it's the same DNA on both half
Speaker 3: or does it change at all?
Speaker 4: Well, absolutely, there's a couple of planarium species which have
Speaker 4: been sequenced. They have their own genome projects, the ones
Speaker 4: that I use commercially. They are beginning to be sequenced
Speaker 4: a little bit. But one curious characteristic of any flatworm
Speaker 4: is that they don't have the exact genetic code as
Speaker 4: everything else.
Speaker 3: Apparently there's something called the alternative flatworm mitochondrial code that
Speaker 3: encodes for different amino acids than most other creatures. Is
Speaker 3: this a Glitchens simulation? Are they aliens?
Speaker 4: Nobody knows why, but it's a rather interesting mystery.
Speaker 3: Yes, And now how are they responding to different chemicals
Speaker 3: and drugs that you're administering them?
Speaker 4: All right? So the beauty of those is that they
Speaker 4: also display sophisticated behaviors. Okay, they are very sensitive to
Speaker 4: the environment. Of course, if you're small, if you are
Speaker 4: a centimeter long, okay, so little, you're small, you're not venomous,
Speaker 4: you cannot fly, you're not fast. What do you do?
Speaker 4: You hide? Okay? So for that reason, they tend to
Speaker 4: shy away from the light. Okay, so they go to
Speaker 4: the proverb your dark side as it works. So they
Speaker 4: like to hide. You can actually use that to your
Speaker 4: advantage in behavioral experiments. Also, you can actually measure their
Speaker 4: gliding velocity because they glide at the bottom of a pit,
Speaker 4: tridish or any type of container like that, and they
Speaker 4: can glide with certain speeds many compounds, they actually decrease
Speaker 4: their velocity.
Speaker 3: Okay, I looked into this, and plenaria can glide by
Speaker 3: beating little sillier projections in a layer of ukis and
Speaker 3: kind of like a cop on New Year's Eve. Observing
Speaker 3: locomotion can say a lot about how loaded they are.
Speaker 4: Another type of response is a sea Shure like response,
Speaker 4: meaning that, for example, if you give them a certain
Speaker 4: compound in relatively toxic amounts, they go into what, for
Speaker 4: all intents and purposes are Sei Shure like movements, and
Speaker 4: you can quite defy those. Oh wow, yeah, we use
Speaker 4: all of those techniques in my laboratory.
Speaker 3: And is there one substance in particular that surprised you
Speaker 3: how they reacted?
Speaker 4: Well, one would would not expect to observe social anthropomorphizing
Speaker 4: property as addiction, but planarians can get addicted to substances, right,
Speaker 4: So if you give them nicotin or cocaine for instance,
Speaker 4: or I don't know, even sugar, right, and you allow
Speaker 4: them to that substance to soak in in the water,
Speaker 4: for a while. Then you take the substance away, they
Speaker 4: go into something very much like withdrawal. They get the shakes,
Speaker 4: they start swimming around like crazy, they bomp their heads
Speaker 4: back and forth, and you can quantify that you can
Speaker 4: actually train those planarians to respond to classically substance that
Speaker 4: are used by people. And this again they displace surprisingly
Speaker 4: similar behaviors again as if they were. It is a
Speaker 4: beautiful model for that.
Speaker 3: And how many different experiments do you have going on
Speaker 3: at once, Like what is a typical day in the
Speaker 3: lifelike of a plenariologist.
Speaker 4: Well, you've got to have your students help you out.
Speaker 4: And that's something that I wanted to say right off
Speaker 4: the better shout out to all my students. I've had
Speaker 4: many over the years. Right now, I had to close
Speaker 4: the lab because of the worldwide reality that we are
Speaker 4: living in and I miss them terribly, So hello to
Speaker 4: all the Pagan lab whenever you listen to this. We try,
Speaker 4: of course to run the appropriate controls and to plan
Speaker 4: ahead very well the experiments that we do, and once
Speaker 4: we obtain the data, the fund begins because we can
Speaker 4: actually analyze it, we can generate graphs, we can do
Speaker 4: all the type of things. And then if we get
Speaker 4: a baseline of the effects that nicotine does two planarium,
Speaker 4: for example, we can actually screen substances that may counteract
Speaker 4: those effects. And that's what we have done with substances
Speaker 4: like cocaine and nicotine and some others.
Speaker 3: I'm curious too if that makes you consider any of
Speaker 3: your own behaviors in your own life, Like, do you
Speaker 3: ever see how like plenarians react to sugar decide you
Speaker 3: need to cut back on tona?
Speaker 4: Oh well, I'm addicted to a certain type of beverage
Speaker 4: that it's served in a coffee shop that rhymes with bogs. Okay, okay,
Speaker 4: so I can relate to that. Okay. But planarians, again,
Speaker 4: they cannot use a straw, but they can they reacting
Speaker 4: in ways that will allow us to figure out, well,
Speaker 4: disciplinaria is certainly uncomfortable in the absence of certain chemical stimulus.
Speaker 4: Once we quantify that, we can see the difference that
Speaker 4: it makes. By adding I don't know a proverbial.
Speaker 3: Antidote, one says that the aim of the lab isn't
Speaker 3: to study addiction per se, but to figure out a
Speaker 3: way to counteract the toxicity of things like nicotine or cocaine.
Speaker 3: So working with these worms, a simpler model than a
Speaker 3: lot of labs, is saving lives. Now for more on addiction,
Speaker 3: listen to the Molecular Neurobiology episode with doctor Crystal Tilworth
Speaker 3: or Addictionology with Aaron Precy.
Speaker 4: Because addiction is a very complex phenomenon and well, we
Speaker 4: can get addicted to anything, not only chemicals or food.
Speaker 4: We can get addicted to I don't know, gambling, okay,
Speaker 4: things like that, So it's much more complex. But we
Speaker 4: can study toxicity and the toxicity of such substances using planarians,
Speaker 4: and we can actually use terms like addiction and withdrawal
Speaker 4: with an asterisk as it were, because again it's benyanthropomorphic.
Speaker 4: We don't know what a planarian thinks you'll see or
Speaker 4: how it feels. And by the way, did you know?
Speaker 4: And this is something that I learned literally about a
Speaker 4: week ago. Science Twitter is amazing because I got a
Speaker 4: very interesting paper from a colleague in Australia who I
Speaker 4: met from Twitter. Her name is Shawnee Hmond from Troue
Speaker 4: University in Australia and she studies sleep in planarians.
Speaker 3: So doctor Shawnie Amand's team discovered that plenarians do sleep
Speaker 3: now the studies conclusions read quote. Despite simplicity, in active
Speaker 3: flatworms appeared to be sleeping. Specifically, quiescence was organized in
Speaker 3: a circadian manner, occurring largely during the daytime. So do
Speaker 3: not invite a planarian to lunch. They will oversleep. They
Speaker 3: will text on my way before they haveing been love
Speaker 3: the house, and you're party will not be seated until
Speaker 3: they arrive. You remember brunch. I don't.
Speaker 4: So I want to thank her for sending me a
Speaker 4: paper that I'm geeking all the way about it because
Speaker 4: I didn't know that planarian slip. And recently I heard
Speaker 4: your episode about chronobiology and circadion are reading and everything,
Speaker 4: so you know that about the super chismatic nuclei and
Speaker 4: all these type of things. I'm pretty sure planarians have
Speaker 4: something like that. Okay, so but we don't know. So anyway,
Speaker 4: I want to thank Seanny for the paper. I'm reading
Speaker 4: it and enjoying it. That's the beauty of it. I'm
Speaker 4: telling you, I'm fifty five and I feel like a
Speaker 4: kid learning all these type of things.
Speaker 3: Science hero. You didn't know you needed. Now from a
Speaker 3: pharmacological perspective, he's able to use simpler animal models these
Speaker 3: platforms rather than higher vertebrates. But for what kind of stuff?
Speaker 3: And what about using planarians in terms of addictionary substance,
Speaker 3: like with the opiate issues that are kind of plaguing
Speaker 3: a lot of the world. Does that are they Is
Speaker 3: that applicable to them as well?
Speaker 4: Yes? Absolutely, because they have similar receptors to Opis that
Speaker 4: like the ones that we have and other groups, particularly
Speaker 4: the groups at Temple University doctor Bob Rafa, doctor Scott Roles,
Speaker 4: they're working on that. And there's the things that planarians
Speaker 4: were traditionally used in regeneration and developmental biology, but it
Speaker 4: was only relatively recently that they have been kind of
Speaker 4: popular as an animal model in pharmacology. And that's something
Speaker 4: that I'm very happy to say that we are one
Speaker 4: of the few groups that do that. But it's getting
Speaker 4: even more popular and it makes sense. It's applicable to
Speaker 4: many areas, and to have such a simple yet powerful model,
Speaker 4: it's really cool. There's no other two other way to
Speaker 4: say it.
Speaker 3: Let's just be be back this up a little to
Speaker 3: his history and now you were interested not in necessarily
Speaker 3: plenarians growing up, but were you interested in how the
Speaker 3: brain works? What kind of triggered that in you?
Speaker 4: Well, there was never any doubt whatsoever that I was
Speaker 4: going to end up in science. I can give you
Speaker 4: an example. When I was about maybe four or five
Speaker 4: years old, I don't remember, but my mom told me
Speaker 4: that I asked her whether God invented microscopes. That was
Speaker 4: my question at five years old, Just to give you
Speaker 4: that idea. So and again, I went to college, and
Speaker 4: actually my bachelors is in general science, in part because
Speaker 4: I couldn't commit. I liked everything. I took biochemistry, I
Speaker 4: took astronomy, I took genetics. I never took zoology, as
Speaker 4: I told you. But you know what can I tell you?
Speaker 4: So science is magnificent.
Speaker 3: I know what about your book, your book, The First Brain,
Speaker 3: The Neuroscience of Plenarians are How why is it called
Speaker 3: the first Brain?
Speaker 4: Okay? So that's another funny story because when I decided
Speaker 4: to think about writing a book, it was going to
Speaker 4: be about planarians and everything. And I like the brain
Speaker 4: and everything. But I thought about a horrendous title at first.
Speaker 4: Oh no, you want to hear what it was, Yes,
Speaker 4: the neuronal worm.
Speaker 3: The neuronal worm. Catchy sexy titles like that, just fly
Speaker 3: off the shelves. But nevertheless, he took the suggestion of
Speaker 3: an esteemed colleague, doctor Bob Rafa, and went with title
Speaker 3: the first brain now follow genetically. One says the plenarium
Speaker 3: evolved to do its thing before the line that led
Speaker 3: to vertebrates shot off. But they have cerebral ganglia, a
Speaker 3: bilobed glob of nerve tissue, and two lateral nerves that
Speaker 3: are connected along the body by transverse nerves, kind of
Speaker 3: like having a full body tattoo of a ladder, but
Speaker 3: inside and made of nerves, making them a good simple
Speaker 3: model for the human brain. One discusses pain response later,
Speaker 3: which may ease your mind in terms of their use
Speaker 3: in medical labs. On the topics of gathering the nerve
Speaker 3: to use your brain, how about a little pep talk.
Speaker 4: My philosophy in life is that if I don't ask
Speaker 4: for something, there's zero percent chance of getting it. So
Speaker 4: I don't have an agent. I never had an agent.
Speaker 4: I still don't, but I did my research. I wrote
Speaker 4: a proposal. I sent it to a few publishers with listen,
Speaker 4: I don't have an agent, but this is my preparation.
Speaker 4: Here's my CV. Would you consider this book, and some
Speaker 4: publishers will say thank you, no, thank you, but a
Speaker 4: rather obscure publisher called Oxford University Press said yes, and
Speaker 4: the rest is history.
Speaker 3: What was it like the day that you found out
Speaker 3: that your book was getting picked up?
Speaker 4: Oh my god, it was like I read the email
Speaker 4: and I said something that I shouldn't say in a podcast.
Speaker 4: But it starts with only something.
Speaker 3: Working shirt.
Speaker 4: That was my first words. That's what I said, and
Speaker 4: I said it out loud, and thank thank god. I
Speaker 4: was alone. As soon as I got that, I mean,
Speaker 4: I called my wife, because you have to understand, Ali,
Speaker 4: I've always been a bookworm. That comes with the territory
Speaker 4: of the things that I do. I love books, and
Speaker 4: I realized that for the first time, was going to
Speaker 4: be on the proverbial other side of the fence. People
Speaker 4: would read me aside from scientific papers because of course
Speaker 4: I wrote a master's thesis, I wrote a PhD dissertation,
Speaker 4: But nobody, you know, unless it's really interested, read those.
Speaker 4: But a book will be read by many. And I
Speaker 4: felt incredibly After I calmed down, I felt humbled, I
Speaker 4: felt incredibly happy. I'm proud. I mean again, I was
Speaker 4: geeking out, as it were.
Speaker 3: That's so exciting. Thank you. Can I ask you patroon questions?
Speaker 4: Absolutely? You ask away? Do you remember Captain America and
Speaker 4: in the movies?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 4: Okay, so you remember this quote. I can do this
Speaker 4: all day.
Speaker 3: But before we get to your questions. As you may know,
Speaker 3: each week we talked some cash at an organization shows
Speaker 3: and buy the ologist. In this week, doctor one Pagan
Speaker 3: asked it to go to No Kid Hungry Dot Org.
Speaker 3: Twenty two million children rely on the meals they receive
Speaker 3: at school, and for some it's the only food they'll
Speaker 3: receive in a given day. So No Kid Hungry Dot
Speaker 3: Org works with federal and local governments to support kiddo's
Speaker 3: in need. They give emergency grants to food banks. They
Speaker 3: make sure that resources go to the most hard hit areas,
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Speaker 3: Okay, back to your questions. Michelle Krabs, Bennett Gerber, and
Speaker 3: Jesse Markowitz all had the same nagging curiosity. A lot
Speaker 3: of people had this very great question, why are they
Speaker 3: so popular for school dissections and where are the schools
Speaker 3: getting them?
Speaker 4: Oh? Well, the schools can get them from suppliers, commercial suppliers.
Speaker 4: And I know that there's some school that actually go,
Speaker 4: for example, and they go to ponds and they actually
Speaker 4: catch their own. They are so easy to use because
Speaker 4: you don't need any special equipment to store them. You
Speaker 4: don't need an incubator, don't You can actually put them
Speaker 4: in a container on a cupboard. Wow. Okay, and as
Speaker 4: long as you don't put them in direct sunlight.
Speaker 3: They'll live.
Speaker 4: You can fit them liver and they will thrive. And
Speaker 4: again you don't need any specialized equipment, and you may
Speaker 4: need a studioscope microscope to actually look at them. Nothing specialized.
Speaker 4: And they're so cute because particularly the water, the freshwater planarians,
Speaker 4: the ones that have only two eyes, because there's some
Speaker 4: that have pontiple eyes. By the way, the ones that
Speaker 4: have only two eyes, they're always cross eyed. Nobody knows why,
Speaker 4: so they're really cute. Nobody really knows the physiological relevance
Speaker 4: of that.
Speaker 3: Patron Joe Porfito asked, but why are they so cute?
Speaker 3: I mean planarians, they do look like your most stone
Speaker 3: friend pissed off a wizard and got turned into a
Speaker 3: very very small penis. They look like a little trouby
Speaker 3: arrow with eyes, or like if a snake got a
Speaker 3: branding makeover from Hello Kitty, It's bananas. They also look
Speaker 3: like a banana. Now, Patron Haley Howlings said, no question.
Speaker 3: I just think that they are very, very cute, and
Speaker 3: I agree. Now from cute to cut, A lot of
Speaker 3: you had a similar question about their science fiction level
Speaker 3: ability to move on from physical trauma like a terminator
Speaker 3: only a worminator Eric Gerard, Aaron Unsen, Rachel ross, Owen, Quells,
Speaker 3: John Sansone let's get into it, along with Patron Nadine
Speaker 3: Duke on that note says, what if you cut them
Speaker 3: in half lengthwise? If they are only halfway cut, do
Speaker 3: they then develop two heads?
Speaker 4: They will develop two heads? And actually I've seen experiments
Speaker 4: for example, planarians for decades are have been very popular
Speaker 4: in Japan of all places. Really yeah, and I've seen
Speaker 4: many books and actually I can send you pictures of
Speaker 4: the books that I have where they keep cutting them
Speaker 4: and you can actually make them grow like seven, eight,
Speaker 4: ten heads. Okay, so it's kind of a little bit
Speaker 4: of a hobby. Oh yeah, they're fantastic.
Speaker 3: How is this even happening? Stem cells, specifically ones that
Speaker 3: are pluripotent, meaning that they can make any type of
Speaker 3: cell needed in humans. Only our embryonic and germ cells
Speaker 3: in the old bonats can do that. And if researchers
Speaker 3: can learn more about these type of stem cells in plenarians,
Speaker 3: it might mean better therapies and other animals. Patron Michelle
Speaker 3: Jacobs asked this very grammatically on point question into how
Speaker 3: many segments can you cut one at a time, Michelle,
Speaker 3: I look this up, and a plenarian can regrow its
Speaker 3: whole damn body out of only one two hundred and
Speaker 3: seventy ninth of itself. That is like getting your hand
Speaker 3: lopped off, and it grows a whole new yew from
Speaker 3: it in a matter of about three weeks. I have
Speaker 3: laundry older than that. But one told me a few
Speaker 3: fellow plenariologists in Japan and Spain discovered a specific gene
Speaker 3: in these pluripotent cells, and it's called now draki.
Speaker 4: Which in Japanese means brings everywhere. Wow, that when you
Speaker 4: express that genes in a weird place in the planarium,
Speaker 4: they generate brain tissue. Yeah, there's so much that we
Speaker 4: don't know, which makes it so incredibly freakingly interesting.
Speaker 3: Do you think that when they are cut? Do you
Speaker 3: think that they experience pain? Do they recoil like it?
Speaker 3: Or are have they evolved so much to be able
Speaker 3: to do that that it's not instrimental to them?
Speaker 4: Well, that's an excellent question, because they certainly have the
Speaker 4: receptors that we usually relate to pain. Okay, but it's
Speaker 4: very difficult to ascertain that. I know that, for example,
Speaker 4: any type of stimulus in the water, they get like
Speaker 4: scrunched like they recoil away from the stimulus, which serves
Speaker 4: them well because if somebody tries to touch them, it
Speaker 4: would likely try to eat them, and it serves them
Speaker 4: well to recoil from that.
Speaker 3: They are tiny, flat, delicious, flaccid, slimy things, and the
Speaker 3: best defense they might have is just looking adorable.
Speaker 4: As far as pain is concerned, I don't know that's
Speaker 4: the best I can do. But I can tell you something.
Speaker 4: I can cut the planarian head, okay, and the head
Speaker 4: by itself will keep you gliding very happily on the
Speaker 4: surface of the petri dish with no I don't know,
Speaker 4: no indication that they're suffering on anything like that. I
Speaker 4: have videos of that.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The rest of the body kind of doesn't know what
Speaker 4: to do.
Speaker 3: When one says gliding by the bye, he means it.
Speaker 3: They move through water like figure skaters on a victory lap,
Speaker 3: only there are very small ribbons of flesh. Now. Travis
Speaker 3: Damello asked, is their ability to regenerate biologically similar to
Speaker 3: plant's ability to grow from cuttings.
Speaker 4: That's a very good question. That's a very good question,
Speaker 4: which generally means that I don't know the answer to. However,
Speaker 4: there's many scientists who are trying to come up with
Speaker 4: common ground or biochemical pathways between plants and animals. In
Speaker 4: there's a whole very controversial field about a plant neurobiology. Okay, so,
Speaker 4: and that's yet another story that would be the topic
Speaker 4: of like ten podcasts for later on. But the point
Speaker 4: is that, yes, plants do regenerate, and whether they follow
Speaker 4: the same specific biochemical pathways is an interesting question, but
Speaker 4: we don't know that yet. You have the best listeners,
Speaker 4: by the way, don't I Are they the best? They
Speaker 4: are the best? Say hello to everyone? Well, I can
Speaker 4: say hello myself, Hello everyone, You are the best listeners ever.
Speaker 3: Mike Manikowski, who always always asks great questions, says, where
Speaker 3: do they come from originally? And how big can they get?
Speaker 4: Well, it depends on the species. The record of a
Speaker 4: freshwater plannarium, I think is about about sixty inches long.
Speaker 4: But they're not very they're not Yeah, they're not very common.
Speaker 4: But I may be a little mistaken, but they can
Speaker 4: get really big. The fresh water ones.
Speaker 3: Somewhere on Earth right now, there is a five foot
Speaker 3: long ballast shaped flatworm. Now, there are also giant twelve
Speaker 3: inch land dwelling ones called Bipallium that look like a
Speaker 3: worm whose head is shaped like a medieval battle axe.
Speaker 3: Somewhere right now, there's one just eating with its anus,
Speaker 3: living its best life, not even knowing we're talking about
Speaker 3: its slimy majesty. I don't care.
Speaker 4: They are distributed worldwide, okay, so they are in every
Speaker 4: single habitat that they can get except Antarctica. Okay, you
Speaker 4: will find planarians, you will find plnarians. There's actually a
Speaker 4: planarian that was named It was named after Puerto Rico,
Speaker 4: my birthplace.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, side note, I looked this up and there
Speaker 3: are several genera of flatworms named after Puerto Rican resident
Speaker 3: zoologist and legendary planariologist doctor Roman kenk and his daughter
Speaker 3: is doctor Vita Keank, herself a biologist. So some of
Speaker 3: these kank you worms can be found in caves and
Speaker 3: deep lakes. They hang out wherever. Unlike your cousin's second wife,
Speaker 3: they don't need somewhere fancy.
Speaker 4: I mean they're found everywhere that were You know. I
Speaker 4: love science fiction too, and if you remember your Jurassic part,
Speaker 4: life finds a way and planarians. Planarians are a premier
Speaker 4: example of that. Oh, there it is.
Speaker 3: Rob Shepherd. Patron wrote in and said, I first learned
Speaker 3: about flatworms in a science museum when I was a kid,
Speaker 3: and I've always wanted to see them in the wild
Speaker 3: with appropriate magnification, of course, but I don't know where
Speaker 3: to look to be most likely to find them. Where
Speaker 3: would I look? I wanted to ask about experiments, and
Speaker 3: you know a lot of people are home, maybe with kids.
Speaker 3: Is there kind of a fun science observation or plenarium
Speaker 3: hunting that you maybe could do if you want to
Speaker 3: do a science liston at home.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, because they're so easy to maintain and everything. You can,
Speaker 4: for example, do the preference between dark and light. You
Speaker 4: can get like a circular Petri dish, you cover half
Speaker 4: of them with electrical tape, and you can actually count
Speaker 4: over a period of I don't know, five ten minutes,
Speaker 4: how many seconds do they spend in the light and
Speaker 4: in the dark. That's some of the experiments that we
Speaker 4: do in the lab to ascertain, for example, to try
Speaker 4: to come up with anxiety like behaviors. Okay, and it's
Speaker 4: very strange to talk about anxiety in a planarian but
Speaker 4: let's think about something. Remember that they like to be
Speaker 4: in the dark. They hide, Okay, so any type of
Speaker 4: compound that shifts that preference that they don't care too
Speaker 4: much if they are in the light or in the dark,
Speaker 4: while keeping the same degree of motility is an indication
Speaker 4: of lesser anxiety, as it were. And guess what anti
Speaker 4: the presence, anti the presence cause that effecting planarians? Okay,
Speaker 4: they shift that response. Those are not my experiments, but
Speaker 4: some other groups have done.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, that's so fascinating.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Ps I look this up and in a twenty eighteen
Speaker 3: study titled PLDT Plenarian Light Dark Test, researchers found that
Speaker 3: these creators hid in the dark when they smelled quote
Speaker 3: frog odor, but then they chill out in the light
Speaker 3: when administered one percent ethanol aka that's a booze bath
Speaker 3: or what's known on the streets as bath salts or
Speaker 3: fluoxetine aka prozac, a drug I have also taken to
Speaker 3: spend less time in the darkness. I'm gonna guess plenarians
Speaker 3: had lower deductibles, though Meghan McLean asked, has anyone ever
Speaker 3: knowingly eaten them? And if so, what do they taste
Speaker 3: of Dulton's rugby started asking the real questions here, you know.
Speaker 4: What, you're going to believe this, But that's the strangest
Speaker 4: question that I've ever gotten about planarians. But but your
Speaker 4: listener was not the first one because I when my yeah,
Speaker 4: when my kids were at school. My youngest is eighteen
Speaker 4: right now, okay, but when when my youngest was a
Speaker 4: school I used to go to schools all the time,
Speaker 4: to their school all the time to show them the
Speaker 4: worms and whatnot. And one year he asked me precisely
Speaker 4: that question. When I was do you have any questions
Speaker 4: about that? Yeah? What do they taste like? And I
Speaker 4: was like, okay, I can honestly say that I've never
Speaker 4: eaten one. I don't think they will hurt you. But
Speaker 4: then again, they live in pond water, which is not
Speaker 4: as sterile as steril environment as it were, so I
Speaker 4: wouldn't need them.
Speaker 3: But to each his own, and Rachel Weisce wants to
Speaker 3: know do worms have individual personalities or do they kind
Speaker 3: of like bacteria no offense bacteria.
Speaker 4: I don't know about personality per se, but behavior sometimes
Speaker 4: that's why we do replicats in experiments. Have you heard
Speaker 4: about the Harvard's Law of Animal Behavior. No, okay, so
Speaker 4: it's not it's not mine. I read it somewhere and
Speaker 4: I don't I can't find the original reference. But it's
Speaker 4: something like this, and I'm probably paraphrase in't it. Regardless
Speaker 4: of how carefully your behavioral experiments are designed, your animals
Speaker 4: will do whatever the heck they want.
Speaker 3: Okay, under controlled experimental conditions of temperature, time, lighting, feeding,
Speaker 3: and training, the organism will behave as a damn well,
Speaker 3: pleases writer and scholar Joel Garrel two thousand and nine.
Speaker 4: Planarians are a very good example of that, because it's
Speaker 4: just like it's like humans. For example, in a beginning
Speaker 4: of population, Let's suppose that three people get a migraine.
Speaker 4: All right, One of them may need a certain medication,
Speaker 4: another one may need just I don't know, I beeprofen,
Speaker 4: and the third one just may need coffee. Okay, Because
Speaker 4: despite having the same basic genome, there's enough differences, enough
Speaker 4: genetic variabilities that may account for again, pharmacogenetics.
Speaker 3: That's a whole feeling of science, this variation in preferences.
Speaker 3: It's even true for cloned dorms, which is making me
Speaker 3: have kind of a gentle existential crisis about souls and
Speaker 3: if they exist? And where do I go when I die?
Speaker 3: And if there was another me, would it be wearing
Speaker 3: matching socks?
Speaker 4: When we have there's clonal populations of planarians that the
Speaker 4: people over decades. For example, a professor Alejandro Sanchez Alvarado,
Speaker 4: it's one of the main people who work in planarians.
Speaker 4: They have a clonal population of planarians that they have
Speaker 4: been maintaining for decades. And even in a clonal population,
Speaker 4: which means that they have the same genes, their behaviors
Speaker 4: can differ in the same way that two identical twins
Speaker 4: can differ in their taste. One of them may like
Speaker 4: coffee and the other one may like tea. Because most
Speaker 4: people sometimes forget that the environment is as important as
Speaker 4: the genes. Oh wow, okay, so yes, I mean, I
Speaker 4: guess that in terms of personalities, they may display different personalities.
Speaker 4: But how do you ascertain the personality of a planarian?
Speaker 4: I don't know. I know I'm very charming, but I
Speaker 4: don't know. How can I ascertain whether a planarian is charming?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 3: I guess you have to look and see how many
Speaker 3: planarians are around them, just listening to their stories exactly exactly. Now,
Speaker 3: keepers of aquaria may be familiar with plenarians as tank pests,
Speaker 3: just loitering around trying to eat your shrimpies. But Laura
Speaker 3: Stacey asked, how harmful can these worms be? Are plenarians
Speaker 3: dangerous to humans?
Speaker 4: Not the fresh water type because they don't have any
Speaker 4: specific defense mechanism like you know, venoms or some like that.
Speaker 4: But the marine planarians, some of them have nasty toxins
Speaker 4: in them, so those can potentially harmon human if the
Speaker 4: human eats the planarios.
Speaker 3: So marine planarians are called polyclads, and they look like
Speaker 3: if you rummaged around a good Will bin and pulled
Speaker 3: out a tuxedo shirt from nineteen sixty eight, but it
Speaker 3: was made of black and pink velvet, could breathe underwater
Speaker 3: ate flesh, and had two dicks. And now, as long
Speaker 3: as we're talking goss about planarians, Ian McGregor wants to know,
Speaker 3: can you discuss penis fencing? Is penis fencing in like
Speaker 3: saltwater planarios? That thing?
Speaker 4: It's just as far as I know marine planarians. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and that particular activity, it's like exactly what it sounds like. Okay,
Speaker 4: And they the thing is that flatworms in general are hermaphrodite.
Speaker 4: They have both set, both sexes in them and in
Speaker 4: the marine planarians. The penis fencing activity. What happens is
Speaker 4: that they do what you imagine they do.
Speaker 3: Kathy Warren, George Ferrar, and Annette Kaye also asked about this,
Speaker 3: and I looked up a nat Geo video showing these
Speaker 3: seaworms penis fencing. Right before it rolled. I want you
Speaker 3: to know the YouTube ad for backyard fencing played, so
Speaker 3: Google still not able to distinguish that I want penis fencing,
Speaker 3: not penis fencing. Anyway. On their undersides, both worms jut
Speaker 3: out two little nubbins. They've got these two dicks, but
Speaker 3: no one said they were a giant. And I'll be
Speaker 3: frank with you, they look kind of like a tiny
Speaker 3: set of tatas. They can wrestle for an hour, kind
Speaker 3: of like oceanic dick jiu jitsu, until one is in
Speaker 3: effect tapped out. Now, getting knocked up is calorically expensive, so.
Speaker 4: Let's suppose that one is able to stab the other one.
Speaker 4: The one who is stabbed is the looser and gets pregnant.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: As far as I know, freshwater planarians don't engage. Now, no,
Speaker 4: freshwater planarians are pretty decent organisms and do not engage
Speaker 4: in such activities.
Speaker 3: Juliver wants to know how old do the oldest planarians get.
Speaker 4: Well, that's a very good question too, which nobody knows
Speaker 4: the answers to. For a couple of reasons, planarians are
Speaker 4: very easy to kill. I mean you can actually squish them,
Speaker 4: you can add chemicals to them, and actually they will
Speaker 4: die very dramatically. They just won't die. They die and
Speaker 4: disintegrate like in a movie or something like that.
Speaker 3: Wow, just poof gone, just like ghosting your own funeral. Now. Also,
Speaker 3: this one blew my mind. Planarians do not need botox.
Speaker 4: Many species of planarians. They don't seem to display the
Speaker 4: phenomenon of senescence. They don't get old in other world
Speaker 4: all day biochemical markers of sentences they are not present
Speaker 4: in certain species of planarians. So potentially a planarium would
Speaker 4: be kind of as long as you keep them and
Speaker 4: maintain them, could be potentially immortal. Nobody knows exactly how
Speaker 4: old they live. Not all planarians are able to do that,
Speaker 4: but many space species do.
Speaker 3: Wow, okay, okay, hold the phone. Plannarians slurp up other
Speaker 3: planarians and either disappear into a poof or there may
Speaker 3: be immortal So sexy vampires kindly step aside. This Halloween,
Speaker 3: we're wearing full body spandex worm outfits with googly eyes.
Speaker 3: I think this is a great question. Nikki DeMarco wants
Speaker 3: to know. First time question asker, if they regenerate, do
Speaker 3: they remember what they've learned? Are they a whole new being?
Speaker 4: Oh? My god, that's an awesome question, and we know
Speaker 4: part of the answer. In the nineteen fifties and sixties,
Speaker 4: there were a series of controversial experiments about the retention
Speaker 4: of memory in regenerating planarians. So what they did was
Speaker 4: to train planarians to recoil from an electrical current or
Speaker 4: something like that. Okay, then they will cut their heads off, right,
Speaker 4: they will allow the bodies to regenerate their heads, okay.
Speaker 4: And there's seemed some indication that the tail remembered the stimulus.
Speaker 4: They were more easily trained to recoil from the stimulus
Speaker 4: and whatnot. But for the longest time those experiments were controversial.
Speaker 4: They were called the James McConnell experiments because many people
Speaker 4: criticize him because of you know, you know, scientists can
Speaker 4: be vicious at criticizing each other. But then came professor
Speaker 4: Mike Levin of Tought University. He actually replicated McConnell's experiments
Speaker 4: in a controlled environment UnBias, using computer observation and everything,
Speaker 4: and he was able to demonstrate a portion of the
Speaker 4: McConnel experiments. He trained planarians to recognize the roughness of
Speaker 4: the of a surface okay, and relate that to the
Speaker 4: process of food okay, and cut their heads off. And yes,
Speaker 4: the tail did remember, the tail did remember? So that
Speaker 4: part is completely established. I mean that could happen. Wow.
Speaker 4: Now let's go back to the sixties. In the sixties,
Speaker 4: doctor McConnell trained planarians too again recoil from electrical and
Speaker 4: electrical shock. Then they will grind those planarians, feed those
Speaker 4: planarians to naive planarians. And he claimed that the planarians
Speaker 4: who ate the train planarians got their memories transferred to them.
Speaker 4: Those experiments have no been replicated yet. Actually, McConnell, Doctor
Speaker 4: McConnell was a very controversial figure. He was actually one
Speaker 4: of the victims of the famous well of the infamous
Speaker 4: UNI bomber. The UNI bomber sent a bomb to doctor McConnell.
Speaker 4: And he was not killed stankfully and real, but he
Speaker 4: was injured and everything because of his controversial brain experiments.
Speaker 4: So the memory transference in planaria that has not been
Speaker 4: established as far as I know, but that the rest
Speaker 4: of the body retains at least some capacity to remember. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's pretty much true. That brings us opens the again,
Speaker 4: pardon the proverbial pond. It opens a can of worms,
Speaker 4: because where two memories are stored in the planaria, and
Speaker 4: it's not exclusively in their.
Speaker 3: Brains, you know, So it opens the can of flatworms
Speaker 3: to figure out if it's a fluke or not.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, that's another good one.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I usually ask ologists
Speaker 3: about movies or TV shows about their fields, but plenarians,
Speaker 3: I mean, there's not going to be a superhero about
Speaker 3: a cross eyed flatworm.
Speaker 4: There was a comic book about pallinarians called Planarian Man.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 4: Yes, that was the brainchild of mister Neil Obermeyer, who
Speaker 4: is a very gifted editorial cartoonist from Nebraska, and in
Speaker 4: the nineteen nineties he created that comic book a planariumn
Speaker 4: He was actually very kind to allow me to use
Speaker 4: some of his drawings in the first brain Plenarian Man.
Speaker 4: What better cartoon I know, And it has an origin
Speaker 4: story very similar to Spider Man.
Speaker 3: Side note. I looked this up and Plenarian Man's backstory
Speaker 3: was that he was dissecting a worm in biology class
Speaker 3: and nicked his finger and became one with the planarian.
Speaker 3: But in true regeneration fashion, when parts of his body
Speaker 3: would get locked off in combat, they themselves would grow
Speaker 3: a new person. And so his nemesis is mad doctor Plenarian,
Speaker 3: who is like you, but if you were evil, which
Speaker 3: is just kind of casually each of our darkest fears.
Speaker 3: Also Onate told me that in a nineteen thirty nine
Speaker 3: paper about plenarian head duplication written by one doctor Hamburger,
Speaker 3: the fused multi headed flatworms looked exactly like Battlestar Galactica raiderships.
Speaker 4: Really and when I saw that paper, that looks like
Speaker 4: a sylum and I said, another explain if that I
Speaker 4: that I shouldn't say in the podcast, But you know,
Speaker 4: you can find connections. You can find connections everywhere with
Speaker 4: these topics.
Speaker 3: Now, as amazing as plnaria are, there must be something
Speaker 3: annoying about them. There must be something that you hate
Speaker 3: about Planaria.
Speaker 4: Something that I hate about Planarian? Let me see, Actually, no,
Speaker 4: I love them.
Speaker 3: Ah, this guy I love like loves worms. But come on,
Speaker 3: there's got to be something bad. Did they smell?
Speaker 4: Not that I know of, not, because they come in
Speaker 4: pond water and as long as you change the water regularly,
Speaker 4: they don't smell. They don't smell nice. And they're so
Speaker 4: cute creators. There's a source of fascination. I mean, it's
Speaker 4: like playing. Really really, what I do is play with worms.
Speaker 4: I just play with worms. That's what I do.
Speaker 3: Is there anything about your job that you hate.
Speaker 4: About my job?
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 4: I love teaching, and of course I love talking about
Speaker 4: science about I love reading about science. I love doing
Speaker 4: research because there's something about you discovering something that you
Speaker 4: know or you are very sure that you're the very
Speaker 4: first person that's ever learned about that, and it isn't
Speaker 4: an indescribable feeling. I can't, for the life of me
Speaker 4: tell you anything that I don't like about my job.
Speaker 3: That's amazing.
Speaker 4: I don't like administration that much because I know my
Speaker 4: limitations and I know that I know that I would
Speaker 4: be a very bad administrator. That's for sure, my heads off.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, my heads off. Two people who can do
Speaker 4: bureaucracy and all these type of things.
Speaker 3: I'm pretty bad at it too. What about your very
Speaker 3: very favorite thing in terms of work or these critters.
Speaker 4: I love data. I love when I get able to
Speaker 4: get some numbers and then grab them and analyze to
Speaker 4: try to find a particular phenomenon that I can ascertain
Speaker 4: from that. I love my data. I love analyzing data.
Speaker 4: I'm intending to learn a lot more microscopy and that
Speaker 4: I know, so I can apply to for example, applying
Speaker 4: some fluorescent compounds to planarians so they can tag specific
Speaker 4: receptors and we can actually trace nerve cells all these
Speaker 4: type of things. I want to learn how to do
Speaker 4: that because we have all the equipment at the university
Speaker 4: to do that. But I hope we can open soon
Speaker 4: so we can do that.
Speaker 3: I hope. So too, Are you keeping busy at home
Speaker 3: at all? Can you be working on your data at home?
Speaker 4: Actually, I have a bunch of data that I'm writing up.
Speaker 4: As you can imagine, the university went all online. I
Speaker 4: was furiously converting my class to online mode. In every semester,
Speaker 4: I have an average of about six hundred students depending
Speaker 4: on how many courses I teach. So it's a big
Speaker 4: undertaking to do that. And I want to say again
Speaker 4: hi to all my fellows, faculty members, and my students
Speaker 4: at Westchester, because I mean, we're all in this together
Speaker 4: and we're going to get through this. But it's been
Speaker 4: an uphill. Let's say, let's put it in academic terms,
Speaker 4: it's been a steep learning curve to do everything online.
Speaker 3: I bet yeah.
Speaker 4: Because one of my techniques to teach is that I
Speaker 4: tell very bad jokes.
Speaker 3: That's amazing.
Speaker 4: I am a dad, Okay, so I love doing that jokes.
Speaker 4: But the real reason why I teach bad jokes in
Speaker 4: class is that we are all conditioned to a few
Speaker 4: minutes of close attention followed by distractions Okay, commercials, you know, whatever,
Speaker 4: a cell phone or a text or whatever. So when
Speaker 4: I see that a significant fraction of my class is
Speaker 4: not quite there puller, if you know what I mean,
Speaker 4: I crack a stupid joke. I get a courtesy laugh
Speaker 4: or a pitty smile, Yeah, a pitty smile, or a
Speaker 4: groan or an eye roll. But at any rate, I
Speaker 4: reset that attention and bring them back to me. So
Speaker 4: I cannot do that online. So a big part of
Speaker 4: my technique I cannot use right now, but I'll make
Speaker 4: do meanwhile.
Speaker 3: You can find him at his blog Baldscientist dot WordPress
Speaker 3: dot com and on Twitter at bald Scientist. I love
Speaker 3: his tweets. He's got his pronouns. It is bio. It
Speaker 3: is just a warm, wonderful person to add to your timelines.
Speaker 3: Trust me, we love to see it.
Speaker 4: I love answering questions. I love meaning like minded people.
Speaker 4: As I said before, I love science Twitter. That's where
Speaker 4: you can find me.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, this was so fun. Thank you so
Speaker 3: much for doing this.
Speaker 4: Thank you for your opportunity. I really appreciate it. And well,
Speaker 4: you cannot fake this. I'm enthusiastic about these things. Thank you.
Speaker 4: Oh I know, I thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3: So you know the drill, whether it's by FaceTime or
Speaker 3: whispered over a landline or load through the muffle of
Speaker 3: a mask from six feet away, ask smart people stupid questions,
Speaker 3: because we're all going to be dust one day, and
Speaker 3: who gives a rats ass. It's cool to know stuff
Speaker 3: all right now. If you are besotted with friendly worm
Speaker 3: expert again, you can follow doctor Bragan on Twitter at
Speaker 3: bald Scientist or at his blog also Baldscientists dot WordPress
Speaker 3: dot com. I'll link both of those in the show notes,
Speaker 3: alongside sponsors in the show and no Kid Hungry. There
Speaker 3: are more links and research up at aliwar dot com
Speaker 3: slash ologies slash Plenariology, and that link will be in
Speaker 3: the show notes too. Your cat maybe on your lap.
Speaker 3: You probably not have a pen.
Speaker 4: It's fine.
Speaker 3: Come be friends with us on Instagram or on Twitter.
Speaker 3: We're at ologies on both and I'm on both as
Speaker 3: ali Ward with one l and for Ologies sweatshirts and
Speaker 3: hats and tots and stuff. You can hoad it over
Speaker 3: to ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Bonnie Dutch and Shannon
Speaker 3: Felts for that they host the comedy podcast You Are That.
Speaker 3: Thank you to every single patron that supports the show
Speaker 3: on patreon dot com slash Ologies. Aaron Talbert admins Theologies
Speaker 3: podcast Facebook group. Thank you Emily White and all the
Speaker 3: Ologies transcribers for making transcripts available, and Caleb Patten for
Speaker 3: bleeping episodes to make them kids safe. Good luck with
Speaker 3: this one. Transcripts and bleeped episodes are up at aliwarn
Speaker 3: dot com slash Ologies extras. There's going to be a
Speaker 3: link in the show notes to that. Thank you Noel
Speaker 3: Dilworth for scheduling and so much other help. Kelly Dwyer
Speaker 3: for webmastering and congrats on the brand new Babe. Also,
Speaker 3: you can check out her husband, Matt Dwyer's podcast Conversations
Speaker 3: with Matt Dwyer It's So So Good. I happened to
Speaker 3: be his guest this week, but check out his back
Speaker 3: catalog It's so good. Jarrett Sleeper of mind Jam Media
Speaker 3: also hosts My Good Bad Brain, a mental health podcast.
Speaker 3: Thank you Jarrett for assistant editing. This one took so
Speaker 3: many extra hours because we had a lag in the
Speaker 3: remote recording service that we use and it was just
Speaker 3: a nightmare to edit, and he and Steven did an
Speaker 3: amazing job. So thank you, of course to the be
Speaker 3: mustached Stephen Ray Morris who hosts the podcast The Percast
Speaker 3: and Sea Durassic Right for lead editing. And if you
Speaker 3: stick around until the end, you are rewarded with a
Speaker 3: little bonus truth nugget. And this week I finally figured
Speaker 3: out that I might be a little more snacky and
Speaker 3: sluggish at home, partly because I'm just not drinking enough
Speaker 3: water because I never use my insulated water bottle at home.
Speaker 3: That's usually like a leaving the house thing, and that
Speaker 3: thing keeps shit ice cold. And a little fun fact
Speaker 3: about old dad word room temperature water is disgusting to me.
Speaker 3: And water that's been sitting out a while that might
Speaker 3: have dust in it is also gross. And I think
Speaker 3: that's from seeing signs by m Night Shamalam in a
Speaker 3: theater twenty years ago. But I just started filling my
Speaker 3: insulated water bottle with ice water to drink and I
Speaker 3: think that's helping, just a little fun tidbit. So stay
Speaker 3: hydrated and raise a glass to all the plenarians who
Speaker 3: bravely underwent research and are saving other animals lives. Thanks Planarians.
Speaker 3: Not to end on a sad note, I mean I
Speaker 3: meant that in a good way, but thanks Planarians. We're
Speaker 3: Pacaderman College, Bombiology, Zoology, Lithology, Technology, Meteorology, theology, technology, seriology,
Speaker 3: helmet bet don't.
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