by Amanda Kahn, Invertebrate Zoology and Molecular Ecology Lab
Buenos dias, everyone!
I am writing to you from Punta Arenas, Chile right now. For the next six weeks, I will participate in a research cruise to the Weddell Sea near Antarctica. During that time, I will be blogging from another website, so please come check out what we’re up to at a web site created especially for our cruise by MBARI.
For an instant sugar/adrenaline rush, check out these fearsome cupcakes created by Ichth Lab crafter extraordinaire, Diane Haas. Made in honor of shark expert Dr. Leonard Campagno and shark geneticist Dr. Gavin Naylor, who visited our lab last week.
The most ferocious twinkies ever!
by Erin Loury, Ichthyology Lab
Have you ever stared in the mirror and convinced yourself that your eyes are different sizes? Even if they are, or even if one is a little higher than the other, don’t worry, you are still considered symmetrical. That is, you could draw a line down the middle of your body from head to toe, and your left and right sides would be more or less equal to each other, just mirror images. Most animals share this condition called bilateral symmetry, with left and right mirror images – everything from whales to ants. A few animals like sea urchins and jellyfish have radial symmetry, meaning that you can draw many lines through them to get mirror images (they’re symmetrical in a circular way).
Symmetry is so common than nature that scientists get pretty excited to study any animal that deviates from this norm. A bizarre and fascinating example is the asymmetry of flatfish – fish like halibut, sole, sanddabs, etc. – which can’t be divided into equal right and left sides. Instead, they have two eyes on one side of their head – which isn’t such a bad idea if you make your living with your other side buried in the sand. The crazy thing is that these fish aren’t born that way – they’re born with bilateral symmetry just like most other fish!
On our ichthyology class cruise last week, we pulled up examples of both the “before” and “after” flatfish conditions. The picture above is of a larval flatfish we found in the plankton. If you have to look closely at the photo, you can see that it still has only one eye on each side of its head! The fish will eventually undergo metamorphosis, during which its entire skull will twist, and one eye will migrate over to the other side of its head! The whole process takes between 5 days and a few hours, depending on the species of flatfish. This leaves flatfish with a blind side (the one with no eye), which it can keep buried in the sand. Check out the video below to see this metamorphosis in action!
Check out this video from Science News that shows the changes a flatfish goes through as it develops into an adult fish. One eye socket actually grows toward the other as the skull twists, leaving the fish with both eyes on one side of its head! (Video courtesy of Alex Schreiber, the Carnegie Institute of Washington and St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y.)
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by Kristen Green, Ichthyology Lab
January 2009: A mosaic of rock nests that defined the penguin colonies at Copacabana has erupted into a chaos of chicks in the past week. When we arrived in mid-October, each colony had distinct borders, and within a colony, each individual nest was spaced exactly one pecking distance away from its neighboring nest. Three months later, the nests have been almost completely disassembled and thousands of birds have merged into one super colony. Soon, a reddish-pink stain of penguin guano will be all that remains of the colonies until the next spring.
The disintegration of the colonies is simultaneous with the crèching stage of the Adelie and Gentoo chicks. ‘Creche’ is French for ‘day care,’ and is the period when both parents leave the chicks unattended in the colonies while they go to sea to forage for food. The Gentoos will return each day with a full load of krill for their chicks for another month, but most of the Adelie chicks will have molted into their waterproof adult plumage and be on their own in another week. Gentoo chicks have a slight advantage here; they are fed by their parents for much longer, and chicks may also accompany the adults for their first few foraging trips at sea. As a result, the Gentoo chicks are likely to be in better condition and have more experience foraging for krill before winter. Meanwhile, hunger forces the Adelie fledglings into the ocean, where they must rely completely on instinct to catch krill for the first time.
A A gentoo penguin chick scores a meal from mom (photo: L. Asato).
For now though, all the chicks are ignorant in their chunky bliss of these future hardships. They spend most of their time eating, sleeping, or in loosely organized, but highly mobile masses, presumably on their way to either eating or sleeping. Depending on the time and place, Copacabana is either a kind of narcoleptic nursery ground, or brimming with aimless mobs of chicks.
The groups of creched chicks form a security-in-numbers daycare. The skuas still shop the colonies for dinner, but they focus their efforts on chicks that are alone and small. The easy pickings of eggs and tiny chicks in early summer will be over soon, but the skuas are no less determined; they have chicks of their own to feed now. Yesterday, I saw a skua pair (the same pair that fought successfully for control of the lower penguin colonies) bullying a late-breeding Gentoo that was still incubating two small chicks. The skuas attacked with impressive synchrony; one flustered the Gentoo from the front and other worked the rear.
The Gentoo, extremely agitated and trying to fend off an attack from multiple directions, was soon outmatched. One skua found a quick opportunity to nab one of the tiny chicks. This chick was swallowed whole in seconds, while the second chick was pulled out with the same effective technique. The skuas enjoyed a brief tug of war with the second penguin chick, and each gulped down its share. One skua stayed just to harass the Gentoo defending its empty nest for a little while longer. The other skua flew back to the nest to regurgitate the penguin chick to her own chicks; irony is an anthropogenic invention. It pays in nature to be doing the same thing as everyone else; the few tiny chicks that still have weeks before creching are an easy target for the skuas. I watched all this with awe and a little bit of horror, but above all with the feeling that biology has a way of letting you know exactly where you stand in the world.
by Erin Loury, Ichthyology Lab
The swell was up and the rain in and out on Tuesday, but our ichthyology class braved it all for our class cruise in Monterey Bay. The Point Sur, MLML’s largest research vessel, was loaded with our class, an invertebrate zoology class from San Jose State, and various scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (incluing Kyra Schlining, featured in our alumni profiles!). We were all on a treasure hunt of sorts – ready to dip our big nets in the water and see what kind of fish and invertebrates would come up. It was anyone’s guess.
Like most cruises, there was a lot of downtime – waiting to get to our trawl location, waiting for the net to go out (about half an hour to reach our desired depth of 900 m!), waiting while the net dragged along catching things, waiting for it to come back in… But just trying to hold on to your balance (and your lunch) can be keep you plenty occupied on a rolling boat. It was a rough day for the faint of stomach, which I’m sure left many pondering Amanda’s timeless question: “Can I still become a marine biologist even if I get seasick?” The short answer is yes – but it’s certainly not always fun. Or pretty, for that matter.
Our first trawl came up empty, because the net didn’t make it to the sea floor where it was designed to sample. But our second trawl of the midwater brought up a whole slurry of things to pick through and distract us from our queasiness. We huddled around tubs sloshing with a bright red soup of krill, the choice food of many whales, birds and fish. These little critters like small shrimp and are called euhpausiids. Lots of other interesting things were floating in the mix – the visiting scientists scooped up some squid, little jellyfish, and other gelatinous blobs. The fish class picked out the various myctophids, or lanternfish, which are little, black, deepwater fish that have a line of glowing photophores along their sides.
We sifted though the animals that lived in the water that surrounded us, down at depths we could scarecly comprehend. It was a rare chance to pluck them from their hard-to-access homes and bring them to our world of the surface, where we could poke, stare, and try to understand.
by Erin Loury, Ichthyology Lab.
Grab your favorite sister species and take her for a twirl – it’s Darwin’s 200th birthday today, and the science commuity is celebrating in style! Many people begin their journey into the natural sciences by simply marveling in awe at the colorful and diverse bounty of life on our planet – from the flashy fish of a teaming coral reef to the jewel-toned butterflies of the rainforest. A multitude of species exist in all shapes and sizes, each the product of successful genes passed on over millennia.
Today we raise our beakers to toast the man who took the time to understand what could bring about such diversity, without even knowing that genes existed. We celebrate the man who grounded our understanding of evolution by describing it’s underlying mechanism of natural selection, as published in his famous book The Origin of Species, which also marks it’s 150th anniversary this year. Surely that’s a reason for a party if there ever was one, and celebrations are happening around the world (find one near you!). There’s even one in our backyard at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, where several Moss Landing scientists and MLML graphic artist Lynn McMasters have helped create a beautiful exhibit in honor of Darwin.
You can celebrate by reading some interesting Darwin tidbits here, and just for fun try checking out your local plant and animal life with the keen eye that Darwin must have had. What are the details he might have picked up on? Maybe you’ll develop some truly “original” thoughts!
by Kristen Green, Ichthyology Lab
Being surrounded by hundreds of penguins can sometimes make you feel like you’re losing your mind, but luckily, we also work with other bird species. The first of these are skuas, predatory birds that have conveniently timed their arrival to the island just as the penguins start to lay their eggs. The skuas harass the penguin colonies relentlessly, and with greedy success. Today I saw a pair of skuas working the colony, one swooping on a nest, scattering a skittish penguin, while another one grabbed the egg. Skuas pair up, often with the same mate season after season, and patrol and defend their territories. Each of us is responsible for covering a set of territories throughout the season to record skua sightings and track the reproductive success of breeding pairs.
I like my skua rounds; our work is solo, and one of the few times you get to be alone here. My route takes a few hours and follows a circuitous route over hills and moraines with incredible views of the island and the bay. This is an island that can completely reinvent itself from day to day, and sometimes even hour to hour and I have yet to get tired of seeing a different view each day. My route ends near the beach, at a huge rock formation aptly named the Sphinx. Near the Sphinx, the tiny Antarctic terns cry and swoop to defend their nests.
I like these birds because they are beautiful; when silhouetted against the sky, their white bodies look almost translucent except the flash of orange beak. Also, weighing in at just over 100 grams, this is a bird that cannot hurt me. The penguins (with good reason) rail at my shins, inflicting flipper-slapping bruises, and tear up my hands with rapid fire pecking. The skuas (I’ve heard) hurl themselves at intruders to defend their territory once they have laid eggs.
by Erin Loury, Ichthyology Lab
Classes are back in full swing here at Moss Landing, which partially explains the sporadic nature of our blog posts (my apologies!). BUT! I am very excited about the coming few months because, despite being a member of the Ichthyology (or fish-geek) lab, I am just now taking a basic ichthyology class for the very first time. Which just goes to show that you can be a late-bloomer in your study interests and still make it to grad school!
In any case, I will have lots of fascinating little tidbits to share with you about our fishy friends, and will hopefully be able to convince you why they (and the world thy live in) are just so cool. Take this, for instance. If I asked you where fish live, you would (hopefully) say, “In water, obviously.” But take a minute to think about what that means – and how very different life would be compared to our air-filled, land-based existence. On our first day of class last week, Dr. Greg Cailliet, our fearless lab leader and class instructor, shared with us this quote from an ichthyology text by Karl Lagler (1962):
“Water is highway, byway, communications medium, nursery, playground, school, room, bed, board, drink, toilet, and grave for a fish.”
Phew! All of that happening in the same interconnected space. Greg added that students at MLML may very well have the same attitude towards our lab – all except for the grave part, we can only hope. (I mean, a thesis is hard, but that’s just asking a little too much). In any case, I thought the comparison was very fitting.
So how do fish do it? How do their lives work when every basic function, from breathing to eating to growing to mating to sleeping to escaping all have to happen in water? I hope you’ll stay tuned to find out the answers and more. For now, this little fish is going to get out of the school room before it turns into a bedroom!
National Pie Day is January 23rd (it’s true! honest!), but here at Moss Landing we operate on a, shall we say, more flexible calendar. Pie lovers gathered from across the lab yesterday to observe this most solemn occasion with a lab-wide bake off, featuring pies ranging from the sweet of apples, blueberries and chocolate, to the savory of eggs, bacon and tamales. Kudos to the judging committee for creating such creative prize categories to accomodate the potpourri of entries, including “Most likely to raise your cholestorol” and “Most likely to taste better than it looks.” Congrats to Zea Walton for her grand-prize winning lemon tart, that was also voted “Most Dreamy,” and to runner up Mike Gordon, whose blueberry pie was voted “Most likely to be made by a grandma.”
No marine organisms were harmed in the making or eating of these pies.