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Invertebrate superpowers with Drew Harvell · Lightning Strikes Twice

• 0:00
  Speaker: Hello and welcome to Lightning Strikes Twice, the Seattle Aquariums podcast, where we get to spend a little extra time with the experts who appear during our Lightning Talks broadcast.
• 0:09
  Speaker: My name is Cari Gerand and I use She, Her Pronouns.
• 0:12
  Speaker: I'm an interpretation supervisor as well as a diver at the Seattle Aquarium.
• 0:17
  Speaker: And I am here today with Amy Olson.
• 0:20
  Speaker: Amy, how's it going over there?
• 0:22
  Speaker 3: I'm doing great.
• 0:23
  Speaker 3: Just thanks for introducing me, Cari.
• 0:25
  Speaker 3: I also use she, her pronouns.
• 0:28
  Speaker 3: I'm a research scientist also at the Seattle Aquarium, and we will be your co-host today.
• 0:33
  Speaker: I'm really excited to kind of re-introduce our guest today, who is Dr.
• 0:39
  Speaker: Drew Harvell, an affiliate faculty at Cornell University and author of The Ocean's Menagerie.
• 0:45
  Speaker: By the way, an amazing book that we highly recommend.
• 0:49
  Speaker: Please do go get your copy now.
• 0:51
  Speaker: And Dr.
• 0:52
  Speaker: Drew Harvell, we're so happy to have you with us.
• 0:55
  Speaker: Thank you again for carving out some extra time with us today.
• 0:58
  Speaker: How are you doing?
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: I'm great.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Hi, Cari.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Hi, Amy.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Thank you for having me back.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: This is really a great opportunity.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: And I know it's going to be fun to chat with you two divers.
• 1:09
  Speaker 3: Oh, yes.
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: I can't wait to hear more about your history and some of the really fun questions we've received from our audience.
• 1:17
  Speaker 3: We last heard from Drew during our Lightning Talk Spineless.
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: You can check that out along with all of our other Lightning Talks on our Seattle Aquarium YouTube channel.
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: But to sum it up, Drew did talk about invertebrate superpowers and some of the favorites from her book that we mentioned, The Ocean's Menagerie.
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: Now, Drew, I'm sure we only gave you five minutes, which is a ridiculously short amount of time.
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: Were there things that you had to cut back from your talk that you want to share with our audience now?
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: Oh, thanks for that.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Oh, there's so much.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: We could go on and on.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: But but one thing that that's come to me more recently, because I've been doing quite a few talks, is kind of expanding a little bit on the sponge's superpower to make unusual chemicals with biological properties that are useful to humans.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: The example I give in the book, and then I talked about in my lightning talk, was chemicals that disrupt cell divisions and are useful for cancer drugs.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: At one point, the hit rate for discovery of new cancer drugs was highest for ocean organisms among the sponges.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: And the example I gave in the lightning talk was a chemical called mitomycin, which is used for about five different kinds of cancers.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: But in my public talks, I've had people chiming in that they've actually been using, they've actually been prescribed that drug and have talked about what a miracle it is for bladder cancer.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: And so I just want to remind people that this sponge, it's Halochondria panacea.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: It's a green sponge that lives in our waters.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: And so that's kind of amazing to me.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: And then this again is just one example of quite a lot of cancer drugs that have been derived from a sponge.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: And usually the story is that it's the bacterium we now know rather than necessarily the sponge that actually makes the those what we call biologically active chemicals.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: So the benefits of these drugs are clear and they're being used in clinical uses, but the underlying biology that produces them is really not known, nor the evolutionary forces that shape that kind of push-pull between the sponge and the bacterium, who's in charge, how do they come up with that structure, and what governs how much of any one chemical is made.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: And it kind of reminds me that the example, I mean, we would call this symbiosis, which is a cooperative relationship, at least that's what we think it is.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: We don't know.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Maybe the bacterium is actually enslaved in some way.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: But this example of symbiosis or cooperation between life forms is actually a theme that runs through several of the superpowers that identify in the book.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: For example, corals and their algal symbionts, giant clams and their algal symbionts.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: I mean, even sea slugs and algal symbioses.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: So in all of these cases, the actual superpower lies in the cooperative relationship or that whatever that push-pull is.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: And I think it's just super cool and that we have this big knowledge gap in such a basic aspect of the biology.
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: Now I'm going to be honest, I know very little about sponges, but I do know that they are ubiquitous or they can be found all over our oceans and even in Puget Sound, like you mentioned.
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: Is there anything that people can do to protect sponges or any actions that they can take to keep from harming these sponges that produce these really important or house these really important bacteria for cancer medication?
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's a nice point to think about.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: In the last chapter of my book, I talk a lot about all the things we can do to protect the oceans and these amazingly valuable creatures and sponges are particularly cool since they're some of our oldest organisms on, they're the oldest animal on the planet, just about, you know, well over 700 million years.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: If we're protecting and being careful in high biodiversity areas, places that have a lot of really cool invertebrates, then the sponges will be protected with our other critters.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: Certainly the reminder that these are animals and they're actually pretty complicated in their biology.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: They have a really complex immune system.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: And so don't collect them, you know, leave them in nature.
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: Some of the things that we share at the aquarium, and Cari, please feel free to jump in are, you know, that these creatures really need clean water.
• 5:56
  Speaker 3: And so trying to prevent pollution, whether or not it's say, for example, like if your car is leaking oil, make sure that you get that fixed because that oil can end up in the sound, limiting or not using a lot of pesticides or fertilizers because that can change ocean chemistry as well.
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: And then, of course, the the the catch-all of not littering in general and and picking up trash as you see it on the beach.
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: What other messaging do you share out on the floor, Cari?
• 6:25
  Speaker: Oh gosh, there's there's there's a wonderfully long list of things.
• 6:30
  Speaker: I I have to say, but just listening to you talk, Drew, I like what just kept coming up for me is it's about our relationship with these animals.
• 6:41
  Speaker: And if you are somebody, like you said, like these people who are coming in your talks and being like, I've taken that drug, you know, like that that has helped me.
• 6:50
  Speaker: What an amazing connection for people to literally be tied to the ocean and and what it provides.
• 6:56
  Speaker: And that shows up in so many different ways.
• 7:00
  Speaker: And so I think there's so many ways that we can give back to the ocean and help to foster a really healthy relationship with the ocean and be fantastic stewards of the lands and waters that we're on.
• 7:12
  Speaker: And the clean water thing, Amy, really resonated with me, honestly, when I think about sponges in particular, because Dr.
• 7:18
  Speaker: Drew, you mentioned in the book, it's like the filtration rate of these sponges.
• 7:23
  Speaker: I mean, they're just pulling water through, and you can see that.
• 7:29
  Speaker: Like there's videos of being able to put like dye.
• 7:32
  Speaker: Can you talk a little bit about when you were doing some research?
• 7:35
  Speaker: I think it was back in the 80s, of putting dye into the water and how you can see the filtration process that these sponges having you know clean water is going to be key for an animal that is filtering so much through its body.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, thanks for that question, Cari.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: Because as a professor at Cornell and now affiliate University of Washington, I do teach about invertebrates a lot.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: And, you know, my favorite thing is to try to show students or anybody how alive and vibrant these animals are.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: And the funnest thing is when I can go diving with my students, which we did a lot in Hawaii and other warm places, and bring a syringe of a vital dye down and put it beside a sponge and just watch that sponge suck the dye in, and then it just comes out.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: There's a little, a little, you know, gap in time, and then all of a sudden it shoots out through the main opening of the sponge at a really high rate.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: And as sort of bioengineers, of course, we use the rate at which the water flows to kind of understand the hydrodynamics or how fluid flow works.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: But honestly, it's just kind of a miracle, and it it's always exciting to students to see just the capacity of a sponge to filter water.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: And that also reminds me, since we're talking about water quality, of some of the other research that we do in our eelgrass meadows, we've published several papers now showing that levels of bacteria are lower inside seagrasses, both in Indonesia and in Puget Sound, than just outside.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: And our hypothesis is that those seagrass meadows are actually capable of detoxifying some levels of bacteria.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: And but it's the meadow as an ecosystem, is all we know at this point.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: We don't know the mechanism, but some of the mechanism could be the filter feeders inside, it could be the oysters, the clams, the mussels, and the sponges that are just sucking particulates out of the water and and helping clean it up.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: So probably the biggest miracle in all of these superpowers is just the capability to clean our planet and make it healthier.
• 9:53
  Speaker: I feel like you you tapped in to the reason why I am here today doing this work, Dr.
• 9:58
  Speaker: Drew, is because I was so amazed at invertebrates in general when I started to really dig deep and learn about them.
• 10:04
  Speaker: I was like, these seemingly little blobs in the ocean, really simple creatures, are doing so much and they're so intricate and so complicated.
• 10:16
  Speaker: And my mind was blown and I was hooked.
• 10:19
  Speaker: I needed I needed to learn more about all of our spineless wonders.
• 10:24
  Speaker: I I truly am an invertebrate person, so I'm really excited to be giving invertebrates their spotlight today.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: Well, thanks for that, because it's a lifelong passion for me for sure.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: I adore whales and uh invertebrates and super cool fish.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: I do love them, but really when it comes to the functioning of the ocean, the gears that are being turned are often run by the very much smaller things.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: And a lot of these invertebrates are in fact running the economy of a and the balance of nature.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: And that brings me to another topic that I kind of touched on in our five-minute lightning talk, but I do like the chance to expand a little bit.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's a reason I'm back here living on San Juan Island and working at Friday Harbor Labs after 30 years as a Cornell professor.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: Our waters house some of the highest biodiversity in wonderful spineless animals.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: Eugene Kozloff's key, which kind of is a listing of everything you could find in our waters of invertebrates, offers the possibility there are 80 species of sea stars in our waters.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: Some of them are rare or too deep to see often, but that's pretty staggering.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: That's some of the highest biodiversity in the world for temperate seas.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: And quite a few of them are actually what we call endemic species.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: They only live on our west coast or in our waters.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: And when I go to the inner tidal, which I do every chance, I routinely see five to six common species of sea stars.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: Now that used to include the sunflower star, which, in addition to having some of the highest biodiversity of animals, we have some of the biggest ones.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: So the sunflower star is the biggest one in the world.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: Some of the chitins are the biggest in the world.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: And so, to get back to the sunflower star, I think probably most of your listeners know that we've had a major epidemic that's taken down billions of species of sea stars, and about actually 20 different species were affected by this disease outbreak in the last 12 years.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: But the most susceptible was the sunflower star.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: And we quickly, by 2016, became really worried about its extinction possibilities, and that triggered a whole effort for a sunflower star recovery program led by the Nature Conservancy that involves about 70 scientists.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: But a linchpin of that whole program is the work that Dr.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: Jason Houghton did at Friday Harbor Labs to develop captive breeding methods.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: Now he's brilliant, but he also was building on the strengths of Friday Harbor Labs and invertebrate embryology.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: We're one of the leading places in the world that knows how to breed an incredibly large number of marine invertebrates.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: And so he was able to quickly develop those methods.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: And the cool thing is, these methods have been exported to most of the major West Coast aquaria as part of a large sunflower star recovery program.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: And recently, Jason's team has been releasing some of his captives into the wild just to see how, you know, to make sure the captive ones are strong enough and they're doing really well.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: So I'm excited about that.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: That pathogenic microbe is still in the water.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: We do still every year get periodic outbreaks in both the ochre stars as well as any sunflower stars that are remaining.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: So in another breakthrough, our microbiology team, led by Alyssa Gaiman at Hack Eye and Melanie Prentiss, has discovered the bacterium that's causing the deaths.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: And this discovery, I mean, for me, it's the discovery of the decade, really.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: And it's a real game changer.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: We're going to be able to monitor water and potential reservoirs to find out where that bacterium lives and thrives and use it to do conservation breeding of the sunflower stars.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: And it also allows us to test products that we ship across state lines, which previously we weren't allowed to do because of the danger of, you know, maybe shipping an infectious agent.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: It's really a pretty exciting advance.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: And you might ask, well, why does the nature conservancy care so much to lead this big program?
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: I bet you everybody listening knows already that sunflower stars can control the balance of nature by curbing numbers of sea urchins.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: And when sunflowers were removed, California kelp beds and some of ours collapsed because the hungry urchins exploded.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: We're seeing really record numbers of urchins now in the San Juan Islands.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: And it is really fun to watch these little Jasons captively bred, even the little sunflower stars will just gobble up, they vacuum up whole.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Lots of little baby urchins.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: And a big sunflower star, oh my god, it just can swallow huge urchins whole and spit off the spine.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: So that was the new biology we learned about through this captive breeding effort.
• 15:43
  Speaker: That definitely paints quite the picture, I have to say, uh of little juvenile baby sunflower stars voraciously hunting the tiny urchins.
• 15:53
  Speaker: And thank you, Drew, for helping to answer.
• 15:56
  Speaker: That was one of our audience questions that came up too, wanting to know a little bit more about what's going on with the sunflower sea stars and how those populations are doing.
• 16:04
  Speaker: It's really exciting to hear about that work being done in our own backyard here in the Pacific Northwest.
• 16:11
  Speaker: And that you gotta be part of that.
• 16:13
  Speaker: And I'm really excited to learn more of like the these discoveries that that were on the precipice of because when when this first kind of tidal wave of of sea star wasting happened, that was it was over 10 years ago.
• 16:27
  Speaker: It was 2013, I think, if I remember when.
• 16:30
  Speaker: Yep, I'm getting the I'm getting the thumbs up when that first happened.
• 16:33
  Speaker: So it's been a long time and they're they're they're slow growing animals as well.
• 16:39
  Speaker: So I know we've been just starting to see, you know, just how impactful it is when you take that that keystone predator that creates so much balance in their ecosystem.
• 16:48
  Speaker: When you remove them from their ecosystem, it can take some time to really see the impacts of that and what that will be long term.
• 16:54
  Speaker: So I'm just gonna keep my little fingers crossed for our little baby sunflower stars.
• 17:00
  Speaker: That makes me really excited.
• 17:01
  Speaker: So thank you for sharing that update.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you're welcome.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: And it reminds me also, I mean, my group does a lot of research into sustainability of marine ecosystems, also through studying the eelgrass and the health of the eelgrass as well as sea stars.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: But you know, the taking on trying to identify the causative microorganism was a pretty risky project.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: And I really applaud the Hackeye Institute and our colleagues there for that sort of cooperative effort to plunge in on a very risky project we didn't know we could solve.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: And so we kind of designed the work to both study the immune system of the animals that were being challenged with the agent as well as trying to identify the agent.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: And so to me, it's really hopeful and it's a reminder that sometimes our risky science really pays off.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: And it's funders like the Nature Conservancy that are willing to tackle some of these projects we really need to do.
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: It also highlights the need for more people to get into this field because there's just still so much that we don't understand or know about our oceans.
• 18:12
  Speaker 3: And so, any of you listeners out there that are thinking about studying marine biology, there's still a lot of avenues.
• 18:19
  Speaker 3: And you might not become a whale biologist, but maybe you'll study, you know, these sponges or nudibranch or sea stars.
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: And so there's a lot of really interesting avenues to pursue.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: We just taught a workshop course at Friday Harbor Labs on disease ecology.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: So don't forget the chance to come through the University of Washington in the summer as part of the Friday Harbor Labs summer programs.
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: Great.
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: Let's see.
• 18:48
  Speaker 3: We do have a couple of questions specific to your lightning talks presentation that I'd like to get to before we pause for a quick outbreak.
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: So the first question is: are the stinging cells that Neudabranx absorb from sea anemones the same as the stinging cells of jellyfish?
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: Well, that's a really good question.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: Stinging cells are an amazing topic all on their own.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: They're called nematocysts or nidocytes, and they're produced throughout the whole group of animals that includes jellyfish corals and sea anemones.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: But the thing is, they're not the same.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: There's, I'm not going to have the numbers right because I wasn't sort of ready to think about this, but there's probably hundreds of different forms of those stinging cells.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: They they almost always include a harpoon that can penetrate skin.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: And sometimes they're really fierce harpoons that can actually penetrate skeletal tissue, certainly human skin, and can also involve injecting a toxin.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: And so the C anemones, some of those are not as sort of dangerous and toxic as some of the ones that the jellyfish have.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: The jellyfish are known for really lethal, actually fatal stinging cells.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: I think it's the Oracongi cubaminucin in Australia that can just kill you dead.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: They're a really exciting organelle, and it is very cool that Neuterbranchs have found a way to ingest them from many of these Nidarians and then turn them into their own defense in the projections on their back.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: And I would like to point out that there is a pelagic nudibranch that preys on the Portuguese man of war.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: So those are very dangerous pneumaticists, and it is able to uptake and reuse those.
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: And in fact, surfers that run into that nudibranch can run into a bigger dose than they were expecting.
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: Who knew the sea slugs?
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: No, they're they're pretty tough customers.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: And of course, it's one of my favorite examples in the book because actually, again, it's still a mystery how the nudibranch actually handle those toxic explosives.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: And not only that, their ability to pass them through their entire system, but they actually mature them, they ingest the immature ones, and so then there's a process of allowing development of that organelle inside their own storage organs on their backs.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: And that part about how the immune system doesn't mess with that and the nudibranch are able to get around a problem with transplantation immunity, I think is really exciting for biomedical issues too.
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: And they're so unassuming.
• 21:39
  Speaker: This is why I love them.
• 21:41
  Speaker: I just feel like those invertebrates never cease to amaze me, the things that they're doing.
• 21:47
  Speaker: And we're gonna dig into even more.
• 21:49
  Speaker: We have more questions and more time with Dr.
• 21:52
  Speaker: Drew Harvell, but in just a little bit, because we are gonna take a little bit of pause before we dig into answering those after.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: Anyway, like what you hear, but you'll love it even more in person.
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: Visit the Seattle aquarium to connect with the ocean and the amazing creatures who live there.
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: Come face to face with thousands of animals, including local favorites, like sea otters and harbor seals, plus sharks, stingrays, and other animals found in the tropical coral triangle.
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: Get your tickets today at Seattleaquarium.org.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: And now we're back to the show.
• 22:34
  Speaker: And we're back.
• 22:35
  Speaker: So let's go ahead and take a look at some of those audience questions.
• 22:39
  Speaker: I know we have a few more for you, Drew, about sea stars.
• 22:43
  Speaker: I think sea stars are a hot topic.
• 22:45
  Speaker: People love sea stars.
• 22:46
  Speaker: Wonderful to see them on our shores.
• 22:48
  Speaker: Getting into some of the nitty-gritty about them.
• 22:52
  Speaker: When we touch a sea star, and I was just talking to some guests at the aquarium about this the other day at our tide pools, believe it or not, but they were noticing that they feel different and that sometimes, like in touching them, they almost notice a difference from them maybe being a little squishy to all of a sudden they're very stiff.
• 23:10
  Speaker: When that happens, like when they feel really stiff, is this what is this what the collagen is doing?
• 23:18
  Speaker: You talked about this mutable tissue that sea stars have.
• 23:22
  Speaker: You tell us a little bit more about the collagen and how it works its magic with the sea star skin.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: I mean, our skin doesn't do this like when we touch it out, just like we touch it.
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: Um, but that's how a sea star opens a clam because you know it can move its arms around, get a grip, get its shape, and then start to pull.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: And when it starts to pull, it also stiffens all its skin so that it doesn't really cost it anything to hold that pull.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: And the way it stiffens its skin is just an electrical impulse causes crosslinking across the collagen, the little fibers in its skin, and it all becomes really stiff, like little girders in its skin.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: And the cool thing is one that it's under what we call electrical control.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: So that means it can become stiff instantly when those fibers just all link right up.
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: And then it can also become slack instantly when those fibers release.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: And so what the sea stars do is there's a big word, it's called autotomize, and that was one of the questions.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: And that's when a sea star drops its arm.
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: And partly in that process of dropping its arm or autotomizing, that's the collagen fibers go slack, that creates really sort of flaccid skin that's easily kind of dropped that way.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: It's a pretty cool thing, and then it's of great excitement to biomedical folks that are interested in doing transplantation surgery, for example, of tendons in knees or Achilles tendons.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: And it turns out that smart materials are very exciting because they're under electrical control.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: And when something's under electrical control, you could also swap in light as the trigger.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: So, in general, there's a lot of excitement in the smart materials in invertebrates, whether it's the skin of sea stars or the skin of octopus are also smart materials that are under electrical control.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: And how hybrid biomaterials can be assembled from these invertebrate models to be used in humans, in tendons and ligaments following surgery.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: So it's pretty cool to think about.
• 25:45
  Speaker 3: And whoever discovers a way to make our skin able to do that is gonna make millions in the beauty industry.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: What you want to have collagen fibers making your skin stiff?
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: Maybe not, maybe not.
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: Maybe not.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: I don't want to feel like a sea star.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: No, there's other things in their skin.
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: So there's the reason their skin is also stiff is they have those little calcareous spicules in the skin.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: And so partly that's what makes it work.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: And I don't think we want calcareous spicules in our skin for our color.
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: No, no, no.
• 26:19
  Speaker 3: No, thank you.
• 26:22
  Speaker: That's where we're gonna take inspiration from the spineless wonders, maybe not exact, exact transferable things.
• 26:30
  Speaker: I like that.
• 26:31
  Speaker: I you make a good point though, Amy.
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: Who knows?
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: Many innovations to come in future generations.
• 26:37
  Speaker 3: So, zooming out a little bit, we've talked a lot about Nudibranx and stinging cells and sea stars and how amazing they are.
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: Generally, when we're thinking about the creatures that have spines versus not having spines, do you have an estimate for our audience to give them a sense of the ratio of creatures that don't have spines?
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: Well, we estimate that about 97% of the animals worldwide are spineless.
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: So the vast diversity of creatures on our planets do not have spines.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: And digging a little bit deeper, if you look at the number of groups, the animals with spines are the vertebrates.
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: That's one small group of animals in the chordates.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: And there are 34 other groups like the jellyfish, the octopus, the snails, the sea stars, and on and on, and a lot of really minor groups people have never heard of that are whole whole phyla that have, you know, completely distinct properties.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: And so, you know, when when we think about when we think we understand what animals are, but we're basing our understanding on terrestrial mammals like dogs and cats and horses and goats and pigs and cows, which I do love, that's all just one body plan.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: You know, those animals all have four legs and a spine, but the invertebrates just cover such a vastly huge range of weird biology that just defies any rule that you thought you understood from studying terrestrial mammals.
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: You speaking about the kind of farm animals and domestic animals reminded me that most of my toddler's books are all about those cows and horses and chickens.
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: And so I'm actively going out of my way to find those marine creature books so that he can get a little bit more of introduction to the wide world of spineless invertebrates as a small child.
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: So, any other parents out there, there are books out there that aren't just about cows and chickens and dogs and cats.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I that's totally true.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: Even this book would be great reading aloud to a young child.
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: Uh, I don't think I think the whole concept of superpowers of the spineless is something that's very engaging for children.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: And I will certainly be reading parts of it.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: And actually, my daughter already is to our granddaughter.
• 29:10
  Speaker 3: So I love that.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: I I'm with you on that pursuit of really great invertebrate-themed books.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: I love that.
• 29:18
  Speaker: Well, I am looking at our time and cognizant that we need to start wrapping things up.
• 29:23
  Speaker: But Drew, we cannot let you go without having you tell us just a little bit more about one thing you just mentioned briefly in your talk.
• 29:33
  Speaker: And that is that you lived underwater, which is something I think very few people have done that live in this world.
• 29:43
  Speaker: And what an amazing opportunity, formative opportunity that you mentioned.
• 29:48
  Speaker: And personally, I'm just really jealous.
• 29:51
  Speaker: That sounds like just the coolest thing to be able to do to, you know, truly open your door in a sense and have the ocean just right there.
• 30:00
  Speaker: You know, I it's probably hard to answer this.
• 30:03
  Speaker: Like, is there a story or two or just a really vivid memory you have from that time that you'd like to share about being able to live underwater as an aquanaut?
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: Thanks, Cari.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it I mean, I was lucky enough as a graduate student at Friday Harbor Labs.
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: I was a diver then, and a team came through and they said, Would you be willing to join our group to do a saturation diving mission in St.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: Croix?
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: I hadn't been to coral reefs at that point, so I'm like, absolutely, I'm in.
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: And this meant that we were going to be living underwater in an underwater laboratory on a coral reef, but it's 60 feet below the surface for the entire week and never going back to the surface.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: It's called saturation diving because even though you your tissues become saturated with the nitrogen and the compressed air that you're breathing, as long as you don't go to the surface, you're fine.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: And so you stay down, and at the end you have 36 hours to decompress.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: But the magic of that is with me to this day.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: And and I actually did subsequently do three other missions.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: So I've I've been I'm four times an aquanaut, and I feel like I legitimately do almost have gills, but the cool thing was to kind of live underwater and watch the day night change.
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: So, you know, as day is wrapping up, the sun is setting, all the fish that have been out foraging in different places come back to their homes on the reef, and you can just watch them stream back to be hiding on the reef for the night.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: We were working at nighttime as well as during the day.
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: So we would go out for a night dive.
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: And at night on the reef, well, it's a little bit spooky because you don't know there could be sharks or scary things, but there's also weird, funny things like fish sleeping.
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: You can they it's like little condominiums on the coral.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: The fish just go in there, they tuck in, they make a little sleeping bag out of mucus, out of mucus, and they literally lie down and sleep.
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: And so if you pick one of these fish up, it doesn't move until slowly it wakes up, shakes itself off, and swims off.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: And so, I mean, that was pretty amazing.
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: And then it's kind of spooky at night because as a saturation diver, you cannot, if something goes bad, you cannot go to the surface.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: And so if a big current or a storm comes up when you're out at night and your mask gets knocked off and you can't see anything, you cannot go to the surface.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: And so the way this was designed by Noah is there are ropes on the bottom that would lead to all our study sites, and they would have little metal metal arrows that would point back to the habitat.
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: So you could actually find your way back by feel if if something like that happened.
• 32:58
  Speaker: Safety first.
• 32:59
  Speaker: I like that.
• 33:00
  Speaker: And I was gonna ask if you got to see like the parrot fish that make their little mucus sleeping bags, and that's really exciting.
• 33:08
  Speaker: I've never seen it, but I'm still it's it's on my bucket list to see fish in their little sleeping bags.
• 33:13
  Speaker: I think that's that's pretty special.
• 33:15
  Speaker: All right.
• 33:18
  Speaker: Well, I think that you know, we could probably talk about living underwater for at least another another entire podcast.
• 33:26
  Speaker: However, we we do need to wrap things up and bring things to an end.
• 33:30
  Speaker: Drew, I wanted I I was wondering if maybe you could do that for us.
• 33:35
  Speaker: You have this really lovely quote that I think really sums up so much of what we've been exploring together today.
• 33:40
  Speaker: Would you mind sharing that with with with us and everybody listening?
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: The most precious resource on our planet is not oil or metal, it is the deep secrets that string our web of life together.
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: Nowhere is life's frontier greater or the potential riches more valuable than in our oceans.
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: And that really is the theme of this book is to celebrate that biodiversity and the wonder of the strange biology in these groups and the value of it.
• 34:10
  Speaker: Well, I can't say it any better.
• 34:13
  Speaker: Well, that is it for this episode of Lightning Strikes Twice.
• 34:18
  Speaker: Drew, thank you so much for being here.
• 34:21
  Speaker: If people do want to learn more or connect with you and the amazing work that you're doing, where should they go?
• 34:26
  Speaker: Where would you like to point them?
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: Oh, well, they can find me on probably my website's the best, drewharvell.com.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: Pretty active this summer on Instagram at DrewCoral.
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: I'm also on Blue Sky and X.
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: And I can even be reached by email, which you can find if you just do a search.
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: So I would love to hear from you.
• 34:51
  Speaker 3: Great, thank you.
• 34:52
  Speaker 3: And thanks so much to you, the listener, for joining us today.
• 34:56
  Speaker 3: Keep an eye out for our next regular lightning talks.
• 34:59
  Speaker 3: And remember, you can watch past episodes on the Aquarium's YouTube channel.
• 35:04
  Speaker 3: And until then, stay curious.