The MLML aquarium room was asqueal with coos and baby talk last week – and that was just from the fawning grad students. The brooding efforts of a resident female octopus had paid off, and dozens of little eggs had become dozens of oh-so-squishable baby octopuses. Shaara Ainsley snapped this shot of the photogenic little tykes when they were a few days old.
Sadly, the babies didn’t survive too much longer after their photo-op, despite valiant efforts by student Erin Jensen to get them to eat. It’s a marvel to think how something so seemingly vulnerable, drifting around in the plankton, stands a chance of ever becoming an adult in the ocean.
Here’s a rather low-quality video (sorry!) of the babies doing their bouncy thing (and Mom having none of it):
Now even if you don’t want to admit it, I know you’re dying to ask – where do baby octopuses come from? Well, you see, when two octopuses really… actually it’s probably better that you learn more about octopus dating and mating by checking out this awesome UC Berkeley research, which includes work by Christine Huffard, now a post-doc at our neighbor, MBARI.
Nothing brings grad students together quite like the promise of free food and friendly competition. The MLML community turned out in fine form on Friday for the first ever MLML Chili Cook-off, the brain-child of Ichthyology student Shaara Ainsley. Hungry students, faculty, and staff alike poured out of the woodwork in a celebration of sampling that had nothing to do with statistics or experimental design.
Jahnava Duryea spoons out a sample while Sonya Sankaran ticks off her ballot Rosemary Romero, best vegetarian chili, and Dr. Shannon Bros-Seemann, best meat chili, model their prizes!
Nearly a dozen contestants entered their hearty concoctions, ranging from super-meaty to vegan. The crowd of appreciative “judges” ranked the chilies based on the judging criteria of the Chili Appreciation Society International: aroma, red color, consistency, taste, and aftertaste. Once the ballots were cast and tallied, it appeared that the color-blind community eschewed tradition to embrace an outsider: a delicious white chili submitted by Dr. Shannon Bros-Seemann emerged victorious, despite the fact that it didn’t look like the other chilis in the cookbooks, and its unconvential composition, which included chicken.
Chilipepper rockfish, photo by Milton Love (fishbase.org)
The only thing that could have made the evening even better (and marine) would have been a cameo by the chilipepper rockfish, Sebastes goodei. Well, I guess there’s always next year…
Under the ice of Antarctica, there is a virtually untapped, pristine world just waiting to be explored. For the past several years, Dr. Stacy Kim has made it her goal to explore this world by diving under the ice to document the benthic communities and their changes through time. Her biggest limitation in this research endeavor (up until last year) has been the depth she is restricted to as a human diver. Since divers are limited to depths of about 100ft or less, there is a vast territory that remains inaccessible. Not to mention the hardships involved with drilling holes in the ice for divers, and keeping them from refreezing for any amount of time.
Lowering SCINI under the ice for a dive mission
When Stacy’s husband Bob Zook, a self-proclaimed “Gizmologist”, set his mind to helping Stacy overcome the limitations of her research, SCINI was born. SCINI is the name of the diving robot Bob, Stacy, and a small team of hand-picked engineers designed themselves (from scratch!). The name stands for ‘Submersible Capable of under-Ice Navigation and Imaging’. (Click here to read more about SCINI and see daily logs from the team in Antarctica)
Now in their second year with SCINI, they are reaching new heights (or should I say, depths). Just this Monday they shattered their previous depth record and were able to get SCINI all the way to the seafloor 206 meters (680 ft) below, where they viewed communities of sponges and seastars no one has ever laid eyes on before! Needless to say, this new technology promises to be invaluable for a myriad of uses, and its significance has not gone unnoticed. Just yesterday, our very own Dr. Stacy Kim was interviewed by the Today Show (click to watch) to speak about the impacts of global warming in Antarctica and about the merits of SCINI!
Moss Landing Marine Labs researcher Dr. Stacy Kim talks to the Today Show live from Antarctica about collapsing ice shelves, “skinny” robots and exploring the “last ocean!” Aired Tuesday, November 18, 2008.
by Amanda Kahn, Invertebrate Zoology and Molecular Ecology Lab
In our Ask a Grad Student page, Leeanna asked a bunch of really good questions, and all revolve around bivalves. Now, maybe you think you don’t know bivalves well enough to have them over for dinner, but I expect that many of you actually have had them FOR dinner! Bivalves include clams, mussels, oysters, scallops, and other generally clam-shaped animals with two shells. Class Bivalvia is within Phylum Mollusca, and its closest neighbors on the evolutionary tree are Classes Monoplacophora (extinct, snail-like animals), Polyplacophora (chitons), Gastropoda (snails and slugs), Scaphopoda (tusk shells), and Cephalopoda (octopuses and squids). Too much information? Too much information. Sorry. On to the questions!
Q: How do bivalves pump out water?
A: On each side of the foot inside of the bivalve (let’s say, for example, a clam), there are two big hollows, called mantle cavities. On one end of the bivalve’s shell, there is an inhalant and exhalant siphon, which the clam uses to pump water in and out of the mantle cavities.
There is some heavy-duty pumping going on...water pumping, that is! From Mutts comic strip by Patrick McDonnell
Juan Manuel (Manny) Ezcurra has a job many would give their right pectoral fin for – he works with elasmobranchs (read: sharks!) at the Monterey Bay Aquarium!
Manny acknowledges that the getting a job at an aquarium can be tough (lots of competition for few resources) – but it helps if you can find a specialized niche. For Manny, that niche is diet. He helps decide what type of food, and how much of it, to feed the sharks on display – which is important to keep them from eating their tank-mates!
Manny helps capture a young white shark in a holding pen in southern California to transport it to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Manny shares: “At times you need to take opportunities that aren’t quite what you had in mind: the first job I had at the Monterey Bay Aquarium was dressing up as marine creatures for the outreach education programs. But I was able to get a commercial license to drive to the schools in our Aquarivan, and the driving lessons still help me today while I’m driving on the freeways with a tank of water weighing over 3,000 lbs. in the back of our trucks after a collection trip.” Read more of his interveiw by clicking here!
Thank you so much for everyone who came out to our Science Cafe featuring “The Drop-In” this week! We really enjoyed talking to all of you, and we appreciate your great questions – which we will work on answering on the blog in the near future! We also unveiled the latest feature of the blog, our “Ask a Grad Student” page that you can use as your go-to place to ask those burning questions about marine science, anywhere, anytime! We may not answer right away, but be patient and we will reward you with a shiny new post featuring your very own question.
Thanks to Andy Stiny, who wrote a nice article about us in the Monterey Hearld (click here to read). Now that the word’s out, we look forward to connecting with all of you and chatting up the topic we love most – the wet, weird, and wonderful world of marine science! Stay tuned for more great updates from The Drop-In, and join the conversation!
Because tonight, November 12th at 7 pm, the Science Cafe at MLML (hosted by Friends of Moss Landing Marine Labs), features none other than – us!
That’s right, “The Drop-In” team is being turned loose in a public setting, and the result should be a fun exploration of this site’s many features, and a discussion about what you want to see on it.
And we’re on the map – science cafes are springing up across the country, bringing you exciting science in a welcoming, conversational atmosphere. Come grab a toasty warm piece of the action!
We are part of a nation-wide movement. Click here to find a Science Cafe near you, including the one at Moss Landing Marine Labs!
Over the last couple of years I’ve learned that certain grants have been difficult to get because some people don’t consider Marine Geologists (or Geologic Oceanographers…the terms are interchangeable, one just seems to roll off the tongue better) as “actual” geologists because they don’t consider us to be “field scientists.” While there is a certain amount of truth in that, due to advances in software technology (much of our work involves computers and mapping programs), we still need to go outside to collect the data in the first place! Even the oceanographers who focus on the creation of habitat maps need to spend years surveying in the field before they can sit down in front of a computer and decide how best to play with the numbers.
A microscope view of glauchonite - that's fish poop you're looking at!
Case in point – early one Saturday I was out on the beach, hunting not for shells like so many tourists, but little green rocks. Another student from Moss Landing needed to find iron-rich rocks to see how iron affects the growth rates of various species of kelp. I offered to help him out and so I grabbed my rock hammer, hand lense, field notebook and we meet up at a beach just south of Santa Cruz. It was early in the day but we still needed to weave our way through a plethora of tourists to find a good exposed cliff-face. We were on a hunt for Glauchonite, a green, rounded rock that is formed in shallow marine sediments by the compaction of iron ore and…..well…….fish poop! (Or ‘fecal pellets’ as they are very scientifically called.) Small samples of Glauchonite can be found all over the Purisima formation I wrote about earlier, and they are rich in iron, so would provide a good test for the kelp experiment.
Traveling down the beach and climbing up cliffs, I guided my kelp-loving friend through thousands of years of history until we found a promising exposure of rock. Hacking away at it may have drawn some questionable looks from the beach-patrol, but humans are agents of erosion anyway, so we were just doing our part! We found some good samples of the green rock and took a moment to enjoy the day before heading out. I think it was a smart move to pick a profession that would let me spend most of my life on a beach, and Saturday’s “rock hunt” was a perfect example of why I love the science. Marine Geology IS Geology……now if we could just get that grant we could buy a new cappuccino machine!
Trying to tie scurvy-plagued sailors of yore to the field of marine biology might be a bit of a stretch, but I had such an awesomely geeky “Ah-ha!” moment regarding this classic maritime disease that I just had to share. (Plus I was reminded recently that we are fast approaching the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birthday next year, so what better time to start with the throw-backs to 19th century explorers?).
Thank your lucky oranges for preventing scurvy
My light bulb moment went something like this. Any school child could probably tell you that the disease scurvy (causing bleeding gums, spotty skin, and general nastiness) is caused by a vitamin C deficiency. We’ve all heard how things finally got better when those historic mariners sat around sucking limes. (Where is the team mom with those orange wedges when you need them?) But I never really understood how Vitamin C actually saves the day – until I came across the write-up of a biomolecular archaeology symposium in Science magazine (a U.K. researcher is finding some evidence for scurvy by looking at the proteins in 17th and 18th century sailor skeletons), and which explained the basic connection.
The answer, it turns out, is collagen – the most abundant protein in the human body. Twisted collagen fibers are in our hair, our tissues, even our bones. Anything that messes with this protein signals is bad news for the body – and scurvy is just that type of news. Collagen is chock full of proline, one of the of the amino acid building blocks that make up all proteins. So it stands to reason that anything that messes with proline messes up collagen, and before you know it, it’s a scurvy mess.
Your dime-a-dozen proline molecule
So what goes wrong? Well, some proline molecules need hydroxyl groups added to them to help reinforce structure of the whole protein molecule. A hydroxyl is simply an oxygen and hydrogen hanging out and sharing electrons. These hydroxyl groups don’t just appear on proline, enzymes have to put them there. And one of the cofactors (helpers) that these enzymes need to stick on the hydroxyl groups is – wait for it – Vitamin C!
There you have it – without the right tools (Vitamin C) to help you construct proper nuts and bolts (proline), your beams (collagen fibers) won’t be structurally sound.
Proline rocking an extra hydroxyl (OH) group - work it!
And without a good framework, whatever you try to build is going to have some serious problems (like say, a human body). The builders of the Titanic should have known better than to go against this string of logic, just to throw in another maritime example…
So now when mom tells you to drink that orange juice, you can thank her for saving you from gum disease and further misery – and you can tell her how. Those poor sailors eating things like hardtack (which by all accounts, had the nutritional value of thinly disguised cardboard) didn’t stand a chance. But in scurvy’s defense: without it, Shakespeare would have been deprived of some of his choice insults. What do you say to that, you scurvy jack-dog priests?
