This Week, Deep

This week I'm a little late, but I do have a few nuggets to share, in no particular order:  

1) The New York Times is teaming up with one of my favorite science communications projects - Creature cast. This article explains the collaboration, and features an awesome video about an incredibly strange sex strategy found in a marine worm (scroll to the bottom to skip right to the spoonworms. 

2) Like hearing about science as its being done from sea? Follow the current Schmidt Ocean Institute cruise to Axial Volcano (one of my field sites) here. They are investigating life beneath the sea floor. I mentioned a similar blog last week, but this site has more information. 

3) The BBC reports here on the new IPCC report on climate change and mentions the role the ocean may be playing in the current slow down in warming that has climate change skeptics all in a tizzy.

4) Curious what we know about radiation and fish following the terrible Fukushima earthquake? Lots of info here. 

5) A friend of mine who write for the Sick Papes (as in papers) blog, wrote a fun post about an very cool paper in PNAS written by two awesome grad students in my lab. The post is about their paper, which involves using a robotic submarine to put snails in a deep sea blender, as well as what its like to do research as sea. Definitely worth a read! 

6) This one  isn't from this week, but I hope you agree it it worth sharing. It is the story of a recent discovery about a small pufferfish which solved a longstanding mystery about circles on the sea floor. There is also a cool video showing the fish in action here.

And there you have it, this week - er last week - deep!

This Week, Deep

I often come across things during the week that I think would make great posts for 80percentdeep. However, I can't write about it all, so I thought I would start a weekend round up of the 5 or so most compelling "deep" things I found interwebs. I'll try to make this a weekly post (TRY being the operative word), and I will try to have a good mix of news, new discoveries, humor, and the generally awesome. So, here are 5 things for this week.

This week in the deep: 

1) A huge molasses spill in Hawaii causing significant environmental harm. I wrote about this already here.

2) The largest volcano on earth was discovered. That's all. No big deal. Its name is Tamu Massif. Its only about 13,000 feet tall, but it covers about 120,000 square miles. You can read more here.

3) A new study shows that elevated carbon dioxide may cause tiny plankton to bloom, which could wreak havoc on marine food webs. Just another example of how complex carbon cycling is, and how we are still just beginning to understand the implications of climate change. Disclosure: I haven't read the actual study yet, but you can read the news story I read here.

4) For something a bit lighter, I thought I would include a video clip relevent to a paper we are reading this coming week in the Deep Sea Biology class I am TAing at Harvard Extension School. The paper is about how certain Yetti Crabs at hydrothermal vents were found to farm bacteria on their claws my moving them through hydrothermal flow as if they were dancing. This video shows the amazing dancing behavior.

5) This one is old, but I just came across it this week. A group of sperm whales apparently took in a deformed bottle nosed dolphin representing a very rare cross-species bonding! Read more from National Geographic here.

6) Finally, if you're interested in science at sea (and clearly you are if you're actually reading this), there is a group out at Axial Volcano (one of my study sites) off the coast of Washington state. They are using the ROV Jason to investigate hydrothermal vent microbes (among other things) - something I'm particularly fond of. You can follow their blog here.

like an oil spill... but sweeter

A thick brown substance spills into a harbor killing thousands of animals... nope its not oil, its not even toxic, this environmental disaster is brought to you by molasses - yes, molasses. 

Some reports are calling it the worst environmental disaster that Hawaii has seen. It is too early to tell for sure, but the roughly 230,000 gallons of molasses that recently spilled into Honolulu Harbor, just a few miles from Waikiki Beach, have already caused thousands of fish and other marine organisms to die. This is apparently the largest number of fish deaths ever recorded in this area. Unfortunately, this may just be the start of the problems.

Two of the most informative online reports I found were from nbcnews and abcnews. The molasses, which should have made its way safely to a ship in the harbor for transport across the pacific, apparently leaked through an old section of pipe that was supposed to be shut off. It is, however, unclear exactly why this happened. And, it seems that there is nothing to be done as far as clean up other than wait and let the ocean clean itself up.

As many of the reports point out, the molasses itself is not toxic, and will eventually dissolve and disappear. It is also unclear how long "eventually" is. It will depend on various factors including the temperature of the water and size/shape of the bay which controls how fast water from the outside ocean gets in and out. One thing we do know is that that much sugar is an all you can eat buffet for many types of bacteria. While most bacteria aren't harmful themselves, when they have that much food they tend to grow very rapidly and use up all the oxygen in the water suffocating all the animals in the area. This is the same basic thing that can happen when too much fertilizer from our lawns or even sewage runs off into rivers or lakes. The process is called eutrophication. Hawaiian officials were also warning surfers and swimmers to avoid the area as the massive fish kills could attract sharks.

So, what should we expect? Short answer - more animals will likely die as microbial populations bloom and use up precious oxygen in the water. The longer answer is that we really don't know. In much the same way that the bacterial response to the recent Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was unpredicted and surprising, we really have no good way of knowing exactly what the outcome will be. I'm guessing that no one has ever dumped tons of sugar into a harbor to see what would happen. We certainly have a marine microbial drama (not to mention an incredibly unfortunate environmental disaster) to keep our eyes on.

Hawaii News Now has a video clip which includes video taken by a diver of the molasses coated bottom and the death it is causing, here if you care to see what the brown muck and dead animals look like.

20 Biggest Questions in Science...

A friend pointed me to this article in The Guardian about a new book looking into the current biggest questions in science. My friend pointed out that I'm working on #16 (what's at the bottom of the ocean). Its pretty cool to see that question make this list. However, as I looked through the rest of the list I relized the type of work I do is also relevant to numbers 2, 3, 9, and 12. Here's why: 

#2 How did life begin?

One of the hypotheses about where life began on earth is that it started at hydrothermal vents. There are certainly competing ideas, but some scientists like this one because many of the most ancient microbes are heat-loving (as in they do best in extremely hot environments), so seems logical that the first organisms may also have been heat-loving, and hydrothermal vents are a pretty great location if you are a heat-loving microbe! 

#3 Are we alone in the universe?

Life requires an energy source, and it likely also requires liquid water or at least a liquid media in which molecules can diffuse. There are various other locations in our solar system that are thought to have a liquid ocean and geological activity which could satisfy the energy requirements. Anywhere that has underwater volcanic activity could, in theory, have life similar to what we have at hydrothermal vents. Because of this, NASA (and others) are very interested in learning more about life at vents on earth on the hopes of informing our search for extraterrestrial life. I did a short talk for a science communication competition about this, which you can see here.

#9 where do we put all the carbon?

The deep sea has been proposed as a potential location to store excess carbon in an attempt to mitigate climate change. However, before we do that we need to understand what deep sea microbes will do with that carbon. For this reason it is important to study carbon cycling in the deep sea. My first scientific paper looks at how fast microbes from vent chimneys turn inorganic carbon into organic carbon.

#12 How do we beat bacteria?

This one might be a bit of a stretch, but microbes that live at hydrothermal vents can be physiologically very different than other microbes because they have adaptations to exist at high temperatures, pressure, and levels of toxic chemicals. Because of this, they are potentially valuable sources of new compounds for use in industry or even medicine. The next important antibiotic? Who knows!

And finally - #16 What's at the bottom of the ocean?

Every sample of water or mud or rock from the bottom of the ocean (and most other environments for that matter) contains a huge number of previously unknown microbes. Advances in genetic sequencing technology are dramatically increasing the rate at which we find these microbes, but we still have no idea what many of them are doing. Hopefully my work will hall start to figure that out. I'm guessing they weren't thinking of the microbes when they made this list though, it is also true that the larger organisms are very poorly studied.

I'm not sure how the authors of the book came up with this list (maybe I should, you know, read it), but it seemed a good framework to put out there some of the reasons I think the type of work I do is so interesting.

Want to hear more about any of these topics? Let me know in the comments and ill see what I can do. 

A Dissertation Defense Day

Yesterday a student in my lab defended her dissertation. She had completed 5 years of experiments, classes, research cruises, lab work, data analysis, and writing that were at times full of frustration, excitement, stress, relief, anxiety, pride,  and yes even fun. Her journey through grad school consisted of waves of successes punctuated by a healthy number of minor failures, all of which culminated in this day - the presentation of what she had been doing all that time. 

I have seen others defend over the last few years, but no one with whom I was as familiar as this friend. No one whose research I had seen and participated in, often completing my work along side her. 

Unlike my 4 years of undergraduate education, graduate school did not come with a road map. There was no clear list of requirements informing me exactly what I needed to do in a set period of time in exchange for a degree that felt inevitable. Grad school might take 4 years or 6, or even 10, or maybe you just wont finish. There is no set curriculum you need to master. Well, I suppose there is, but that's just step one. To successfully complete grad school in the sciences, you have to make a contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. You need to discover something new and convince your committee that it is worthy of PhD-ness. However, there is no syllabus that tells you when, how, or even if, your discoveries will happen. In some ways you're on your own - your progress depends on how much work you put in, how good your ideas are, how well you plan and execute your experiments, how thoroughly you are able to analyze your data, whether you can craft a meaningful story, and of course a bit of luck. 

For all these reasons, it was incredibly exciting and inspiring to watch the polished version of my friend's competed story unfold. She was able to  link microbial community composition (who is there) to genetic potential (what can they do) to metabolic activity (how fast they do it) to environmental factors (what comtrols those rates). I was reminded of my favorite thing about my lab. We work across the disciplines of chemistry, geology, microbiology, and engineering to answer questions about how marine microbes influence and are influenced by their environment in an integrated and compelling way. And, we do it in a pretty unique way, if i do say so myself.

My friend painted a beautiful picture through her defense talk that illustrated this and showed how her discoveries have enriched the field. She also managed to avoid jargon, keep people laughing, and convey that her years in graduate school hadn't dampened her enthusiasm for the amazing systems we work in one bit. The bar has been set high, and I now have a better idea as to where I will need to be at the end of this grad school odyssey. I'll get there... some day, but it won't be nearly as fun without this partner in grime by my side.