Alien Worlds on Earth - a course in progress

I'm teaching a January "mini-course" called Alien Worlds on Earth. In it we will be taking a tour of some of the most hostile and strange ecosystems on the planet. It is always so easy to get people excited and engaged when I tell them I study underwater volcanoes, so I thought I would leverage that excitement as a way of teaching about  geology and biology interacting to form ecosystems that have nothing to do with the sun. It also seemed like a great excuse to learn more about the other bizarre ecosystems on the planet that I am less familiar with. I don't want to lecture straight for an hour and a half each class, and being a non-credit class I can't really count on people doing the readings and being ready to discuss material. So, I'm going to be using documentary films as virtual field trips. I also created a class pinterest board that students can pin images that represent what they find most interesting about these environments. "Alien Worlds on Earth" is something I might like to develop into a full length course or even a mooc some day. For now, I am collecting as many resources on the course website as possible, so if you're interested, check it out. I would love to know if you find any of the resources useful.

This Week (ok month) Deep

Not too long ago NPR did a story about how plastic in the ocean is contaminating Seafood . Many people are familiar with the dangers associated with mercury consumed by potential seafood, but this is another thing we should probably all be aware of.

And for something even more depressing… The Guardian covered a recent study predicting that the deep sea is going to be hit hard by climate change. Many assume that the deepest habitats on earth would be safe from climate change, but that is likely not the case. The study published in Global Change Biology (open access) looks at 50 years (!!) of abundance data for two copepod species from the NE Atlantic and finds they they are not adapting to keep up with changing sea temperatures. These are key food sources in the area, and it looks like the range of the cold water species is dramatically decreasing as the warm water species increases. Many had thought (hoped?) that individual species would adapt to changing temperatures over time, but this study shows that may not be the case.  

Environmental microbiologists are interested in is how microbes move, particularly anything that might enable microbes to move long distances relative to their microscopic size. Anyone interested in climate change is interested in methane from the ocean and how it does or doesn’t make its way to the atmosphere. This article from live science caught my eye because it describes new finding presented at a conference in early december that deal with both of these things. Apparently methane-eating microbes may be riding along on methane bubbles that leave the seafloor as they travel through the water column, and they may be consuming that methane before it reaches the surface. The results are preliminary, but the group doing the research has a webpage describing this “bubble shuttle”. 

And for fun some - weird fish. Back in November, Australia’s News.com published this list of the 10 weirdest fish in the world. About a month later this list of 10 even weirder fish popped up at the most excellent Southern Fried Science blog. Enjoy!

Like a Kid in a Candy Store

As a relatively young scientist, one of the most exciting parts of my job is the moment I first get some new data. In a few months I may very well be sick of looking at it, and annoyed that it isn't more clear.  But, the anticipation of the first look at something that I know contains the answer to an important question reminds me why I am a scientist. It has the power to offset weeks of frustration or tedium and reinvigorate the scientific process. Today I had one of those moments. 

It doesn't happen with all new data. Some data come gradually as you gather time point after time point. Other data come quickly. Neither of these are as exciting as something that you had to wait for, that you weren't sure would work, and that you knew you would only get one shot at. When you work in the deep sea you don't always get to re-run an expreiment if it doesn't work. When you work in the deep sea, and you build your own sampling devices from scratch, you pretty much keep your fingers crossed from the time you deploy to the time you retrieve. My fingers have been crossed for two years. 

The strange looking thing in the picture above is a titanium pressure housing that we designed to hold a small battery-powered temperature logger called an ibutton. It protects the ibutton from the crushing pressure and toxic chemicals found at hydrothermal vents. It has lived inside an experiment of mine at a site on the Juan de Fuca Ridge in the eastern Pacific for the last two years. Its time sitting in a hydrothermal vent is why it looks white and crusty, and also why it smelled like something between rotten eggs and death. (What can I say? Dirty smelly science is, in fact, the best kind.) I was supposed to get it back, along with two others like it, over a year ago. But, changes to research cruise schedules prevented that. Luckily, we had programmed it to take readings slowly enough (every 9000 seconds or 2.5 hours) so that the battery would last a few years... just in case.

Today I got these little guys back, via FedEx, from a collaborator who was awesome enough to pick up my experiments for me while they were out at sea. I didn't know whether the pressure housings would successfully protect the temperature loggers. I didn't know if the temperature logger's batteries would last as long as they were supposed to, or if they would work properly on the bottom of the ocean. I didn't even know if my experiments would still be there after 2 years. So today when I went to download the data from the temperature loggers, and I saw strings of thousands of temperature measurements, I got excited. Kid in a candy store excited. There may have been dancing.

These temperature data are not groundbreaking. They will not cure cancer or help solve climate change. What they will do is provide a picture of how temperature fluctuates at one deep sea hydrothermal vent. It is a small piece to a big, complicated puzzle - one of those thousand piece puzzles with no edges or corner pieces that consist entirely of repeating shapes and similar colors. These sites are hard to get to, so most of the data we have consists of brief snapshots collected during research cruises years apart. These temperature records will provide environmental context for biological data I am slowly gathering from the experiment of which they were a part. 

It is a long way from these data to a better understanding of what microbes are doing in vent environments, and even farther to how those activities fit into global biogeochemical cycles, which is what I am ultimately shooting for. However, today was a small step, and therefore it was a good day in science-land.

This Week, Deep

I'm feeling the need for good news this week, so this week is going to be intentionally light on gloom and doom with the exception of one follow up from last week. 

I really like this description of how much better our knowledge of global climate change and climate models have gotten in the 25 years since the IPCC formed. The video at the bottom sums it up very well visually. While there is rarely good news in climate change, I love seeing effective communication about how scientists know what we know.

So ocean goodies from this week... 

1) The Shed Aquarium in Chicago held a celebration to mark 80 years of residence for one Australian Lungfish. They even made him a fish-friendly cake, the description of which is worth a read in itself! Check it out.  Thanks to my dad for emailing me this story.

2) Government agencies in Costa Rica are attempting to regulate their tuna fishery by reining in international fishing. Read more here. 

3) An exciting fossil discovery (described here)  of the oldest known organism with a face (a 419 million year fish) offers new insights into how animal life may have evolved in the oceans by placing the appearance of jaws earlier than previously thought. Even more interestingly, this fossil shows, for the first time, one animal with skull features from a group of fish thought to have gone extinct along with other features from a lineage of fish that are still around today. This new knowledge may change how scientists reconstruct the history of fish evolution. You can't read the article without a subscription, but you can see a video showing a 3D reconstruction of the skull here.

4) A paper published in PNAS this week tells the story of a Blue Whales life through chemical analyses done to a 10 inch ear wax plug! This sentence from the abstract subs it up pretty well " These unprecedented lifetime profiles (i.e., birth to death) were reconstructed with a 6-mo resolution for a wide range of analytes including cortisol (stress hormone), testosterone (developmental hormone), organic contaminants (e.g., pesticides and flame retardants), and mercury." Read the actual paper here or a decent summary here.  This maybe isn't warm and fuzzy good news, but its pretty cool that researchers figured out how to do this, and it opens up a new line of research that can be done on deceased whales. They mention that this tool can be applied to ear plugs that were collected in the 1950s, which would provide context of how toxin exposure may have changed for these animals over time.

5) This one isn't explicitly marine, but I couldn't help sharing. It hopefully comes as no surprise that nature, and parks in particular, are good for us. But, this has been confirmed with science. Apparently a walk in the woods (or presumably by the ocean) has positive effects on emotional well being that can be measured by EEG in real time. You can learn more here. So, do your self a favor and get out into Nature some time soon.