Week seven of the program, week two of August, and I can say with confidence that summer has finally arrived in Coos Bay. I'm wearing shorts and short sleeves most days of the week and sunburn has become a genuine concern at lunchtime. I think that the strangely stable weather bubble we're in here has added to the unreality of time that I and some of the other REUs keep noting in these blogs, but it seems like summer has finally broken through the fog.
I am missing the summer storms and temperamental Virginia weather, though. I did experience a super heavy fog that felt almost like rain one evening at the beach with Randi and Riley (I wore my $3 Goodwill rain jacket for the first time - the pocket ripped within an hour), though the locals tell me you have to wait until the cooler months for real rain. My larvae seemed to weather the nutrition drought that we accidentally put them through by flooding their diets with Dunaliela (weather...drought...flood...I'm working with the theme here). Since switching them to a diet of Rhodomonas (red algae) alone, they've grown significantly and I was able to start a new feeding trial with treatments: Tiarina (the cilliate), Rhodomonas, Tiarina + Rhodomonas, and a starvation treatment as a control. I put 20 larvae in each treatment and thought that 100 tiarina daily would be enough to call it an "ad libitum" diet, but I was surprised to come in the next day to see all of the tiarina eaten. This potentially poses an issue for the feeding experiment since we haven't been able to culture tiarina in the lab. Instead, I've had to sort through plankton tows multiple times a week to get enough to use. Like the weather, plankton composition is both seasonal and temperamental, and we're starting to see tiarina less and less frequently. Because of this shift in the plankton and the surprising voracity of the acinotrochs, we may have to *pivot* again if I'm not able to consistently find enough tiarina to feed my larvae to reliably tell whether they are growing on this diet or not. I also have a new roommate. I'm watching Pigg while Randi is on their research cruise, so we've been getting used to each others' habits and routines this week. I figured if I'm already taking care of thousands of pet actinotrochs, what's one pug? Plus, Pigg is much cuddlier than a microscopic baby worm and easier to take care of in some ways. Notably, that I don't have to go fishing for his dinner.
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As the weeks pass, time seems to speed up here. It becomes increasingly difficult to remember what I did each week and the days start to blur together as we all begin to slip and slide on the downhill slope of the program.
Temporal landmarks are helpful though, and a big one was last weekend when we went to Eugene for 24 hours. We saw the sights, ate the food, swam in the rivers, and zoned out on the highways with our local tour guides Randi and Madison. It was nice to get away from our small town of Charleston and to see a new side of Oregon that we hadn't before. Things came back into focus in lab on Monday when we realized that all of the actinotroch cultures I've been keeping weren't actually growing on the algal diet we'd been feeding them. We'd been feeding them a mix of green and red algae (Dunaliela and Rhodomonas, respectively) but by taking a closer look at the larvae, it seems like they can't actually digest the green algae, and they were basically just filling up on these cells but not actually getting any nutrients from them which impeded their growth. I sort of imagine it like eating a bag of cotton balls or something - lots of volume with nothing to it. Additionally, all of the oldest actinotrochs have gone through catastrophic metamorphosis. This is the actual scientific term for the way they change into their adult forms, but with these larvae it was REALLY catastrophic. I'm not sure why, but they all sort of just degenerated after reaching what seemed like maximum larval development without actually succeeding in forming a juvenile body. So I'm left with a bunch of grotesque looking larvae...some with more parts than others, some dead, some still swimming weakly, and others dissolved into a little pile of goo at the bottom of the dish...it's not a pretty scene. So we pivot. That has seemed like the buzz word of the week around here. I started new cultures of larvae using only Rhodomonas so hopefully those will grow quickly enough to start a new feeding trial soon. In the meantime, I'm still taking data from the preliminary feeding trial for practice and using the younger larvae left over to create images of the ciliary flow patterns around actinotrochs to see how they draw in algal cells and other prey from nearby in the water. Outside of lab, my evenings have had a surprisingly ritual feel to them: dinner, walk with Randi and Pigg to the beach, shower, make tea, watch Twilight with Randi and Madison. It somehow came up that I had never seen any of the Twilight movies, which was unacceptable and has been amended this week, as we've watched all five of them in five consecutive nights. I want to share some lessons I've learned from watching the Twilight series for the first time at age 20, 14 years after the release of the original Twilight film: 1. Things are more enjoyable if you don't take them seriously. Maybe this isn't always true, but it's probably true most of the time. Once I let myself get past the awful CGI, the insane plot, the bad acting and worse dialogue, I found myself genuinely enthralled by the movies and counting down the hours until we would rendezvous in the dining hall with our projector and snacks for the next installment. Most things in life are meant to be enjoyed simply, not dissected or obsessed over. Tacky is beautiful, campy is Shakespearean. Vive la bad taste. I'm learning to enjoy things as they are, not as they could be. 2. #TeamBellaAlone Neither Jacob nor Edward were good for Bella and it's a shame she didn't see that. They both sucked honestly. This is probably a lesson in independence. I saw Bella's happy ending with Edward as more of a "what not to do" guidebook to life (afterlife?) than something to emulate. Spoiler alert: she's immortal! Why does she need to get married and have a baby at 18 when she'll live forever?? Anyway. Randi said something this week along the lines of "you only have you for the rest of your life," which I think is good advice. Especially for Bella who is immortal. And for the mortal, maybe it reminds us that our short lives are ours alone, and we should be picky about who gets to live it with us. 3. It's never too late. For Bella or for me. For Bella, I like to imagine a future where she gets to live on her own and get a hobby or a job or an individual personality maybe. She has eternity, so I hope she doesn't spend it believing she's really tied to Edward till death do them part. As for me, this movie marathon was a bit of a redemption for childhood Chloe. I never saw the Twilight movies when they were all the rage in my various friend groups and I felt like I probably never would, having missed the boat by over a decade. All the cool girls liked Twilight. I wasn't a cool girl and I didn't want to be. But, as I pointed out in Twilight Lesson #1, I'm getting over taking myself too seriously. I did like Twilight, and I think I would have liked it even better when I was 12. But thanks to Randi and Madison, I get it now. Now I can talk about it with the girls who were cool when they were 12. So I'm learning it is never too late to do something. You're never too old, and actually, you're only ever getting older (unlike Bella) so you might as well do that thing now, whatever it is. Now that I have sufficient evidence for macrophagous planktotrophy in actinotroch larvae, I've started to shift my focus to feeding trials to see how different diets impact larval growth. I'm setting up larval treatments with three diets: phytoplakton alone, phytoplankton plus tiarina, and tiarina alone - I've labeled them "vegetarian," "omnivore," and "carnivore" larvae. I'm realizing those aren't the best treatment names though since tiarina is a protist (not an animal) and somehow the diet names make me feel like I'm anthropomorphizing my larvae...anyway....
I took images of last week's fixed and stained larvae using the confocal microscope to get images of the musculature and cell boundaries in larvae at various stages. We found that the tentacles of the larvae have non-beating cilia coming from collar cells that line each of the tentacles and that the hood lacks these structures. This leads us to think that the tentacles of the larvae are important sensory organs that can detect prey in the water and that the hood likely responds to information from the tentacles but can't actually sense prey in the same way. My oldest actinotroch larvae have developed blood which is a cool feature of this specific larval form. Their blood contains hemoglobin which is the same oxygen-carrying protein that makes human blood red, so it's pretty identifiable in the otherwise clear-bodied larvae. It's also sort of rare to see such analogous structures to humans when studying invertebrate biology, so maybe that's adding to my temptation to anthropomorphize the little guys. Or maybe I'm just spending too much time looking at them and now I'm starting to go crazy. Who knows! This week was also an interesting one for me personally. Not necessarily in a concrete, tangible event kind of way. I've just sort of had this realization slowly creep into the back of my mind that I am more free than I thought I was. I'll try to explain. When I got my driver's license it was a similar feeling and I felt it again when I moved into my first apartment away from home. I think it's something like contentment with being on my own, with realizing that home is anywhere you make it. As I've gotten to know the people here and fallen in love with Oregon, I think I've realized that I could live here. That I could be home here. And although I love Oregon and the people in it, I think it's more to do with me than it is with where I actually am. I believe that the fact that I feel this about Oregon means that I could feel this about anywhere, which makes the world feel a lot smaller to me. I am free-er than I realized because now I know that I'm not like a tube worm. I don't have to make my home in one place in the mud and stay there forever. I can carry home with me more like how a snail carries its shell. And unlike any invertebrate, I can buy a plane ticket and get places much faster than with snail-power alone. Now I'm feeling too earnest and self-conscious as I read that paragraph back so I'll end it there. I've been listening to Big Thief a lot this week, and this line from their song "Vegas" really seemed to resonate with these thoughts of home: "Tell me when we grow up do we ever go home? / You said home becomes the highway" Maybe that reads a little more rock-and-roll than how I interpret the song, but it'll do. For your listening pleasure: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAy7MVYmDD0 As the halfway mark for our research projects approaches, this week I started trying to answer some of the questions that I outlined in my research proposal. Now that we have a better idea of the types of prey that actinotroch larvae frequently eat in the lab, we’re starting to focus in on how they actually capture and swallow their prey and hopefully we’ll see how this process changes throughout larval development. I used high speed video to record young larvae capturing algal cells and older larvae capturing ciliates to compare how the process of prey capture changes with the development of tentacles. At this point it appears that tentacles act as a sensory organ and functionally help with ingestion by trapping prey in the hood and moving it towards the mouth. However, it seems like the hood is still the star of the show throughout development. It can suck in water to create a current which draws in nearby prey it detects and manipulates prey with surprising dexterity. It can also cinch itself to a certain extent to trap prey within the hood (with the help of the tentacles) until the prey is swallowed. It's exciting to think about how much (we think) we understand about actinotroch feeding now versus just a few weeks ago and how much I’ve learned just from observing the larvae in action. To get a better idea of what’s changing in an actinotroch larval body during development, we fixed a couple hundred actinotroch larvae at different stages of development and added dyes that will bind to DNA and actin so that we can visualize cell boundaries and muscle fibers in the larvae. We haven’t taken images of the larvae yet, but hopefully when we do we’ll see how things are changing during development of tentacles in early larval stages. I was surprised this week when I found one of the actinotroch larvae beginning to settle and metamorphose into its adult form. It seems like it found a tiny bit of dead algae in the bottom of the dish that it latched onto and began to evert its metasomal sack. If this larva was in the wild, it likely would have been looking for some adequate substrate on the sea floor to settle down and build its adult body and tube to live in, but in the lab it seems like a little bit of dead algae was enough to do the trick. To give you a better idea of what’s going on, the metasomal sack looks kind of like an arm extending from the larval body now but it will eventually move all of its organs into that arm and elongate it to turn it into its adult body. Now I’m curious if the other actinotrochs are also ready to settle and are just waiting for a substrate cue that they aren’t getting in an empty glass bowl. Actinotroch development is crazy! They say you win some you lose some, and unfortunately it wasn’t all wins in lab this week. Either through a computer glitch or some mistake on my part I ended up recording over my best actinotroch predation video that I’ve been able to capture so far. So that wasn’t great. But that’s science, I guess! Nevertheless, I shall persist in my actinotroch recording endeavors. Aside from lab work, this weekend we visited the city of Coos Bay and visited some of the cool shops in town. There were a lot of vintage and thrift stores to check out, a coffee shop where I tried a sparkling espresso at Randi’s recommendation (it’s just an iced Americano with sparkling water – it was good!), and some souvenir shops with art from local artists. Afterward, we went to Seven Devils Brewery to see another local band perform. It was fun to explore the city (small as it is, it definitely feels like a city compared to Charleston). We also got to host interns and students from Oregon State University this weekend. We showed them around our labs and explored the Charleston Marine Life Center with them! It was fun to get to meet other students who are interested in marine research and get to share some of our own research with them.
Until next week :) This weekend our REU cohort ventured out to camp at Sunset Bay for two nights. We explored the tide pools in the morning, hiked along the cliffs during the day, made s'mores at night, and celebrated Shreyaan's 20th birthday! It was a lot of fun getting to spend time with everyone away from OIMB and to explore a new area of the coast. We made a lot of new friends in the tide pools - the gumboot chiton, sculpin, red and purple urchins, and leptasterias (a six-legged sea star) to name a few. There were also so many species of marine plants and algae that I kept bugging Riley (our REU liason and TA for the seaweed course being taught at OIMB this semester) to help me identify all of the new ones I came across. Coming from an area where our marine life is mostly subtidal, it always amazes me to have such a close look at life under the sea. The actinotroch larvae in lab have been happily gobbling up a variety of prey items we offered them this week. Our most popular menu items include the spindle-shaped, shelled ciliate Tiarina fusus and shockingly...their own siblings! Well, at least their younger conspecifics. And perhaps it's not so shocking either, as the larger actinotrochs are likely just identifying a tasty "ciliated blob" as George puts it, and likely don't actively seek out or even frequently encounter conspecifics naturally in the plankton. However, under lab conditions they take these prey frequently enough that it is very likely that zooplankton do make up an important part of their diet in larval development. Moving forward with this research project, we're planning to focus on a few key aspects of actinotroch diet and predation to help us understand the role that carnivory plays in phoronid larvae: 1. Capture - how do actinotrochs take their prey items? 2. Swallowing - how do actinotrochs ingest prey that seem to be bigger than their esophagus? 3. Digestion - how long does it take actinotrochs to digest different kinds of food? 4. Growth - how well/how quickly do larvae grow on different diets? I'm also planning to investigate how capture method changes throughout larval development and to try to determine when larvae are able to take prey as opposed to just single-celled algae. This week was a lot of chasing some pretty speedy larvae around on camera, and I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of the lab equipment and the actinotrochs' swimming behavior which makes it a little easier to capture predation events. Since this is mostly qualitative research (i.e. we're not really measuring anything here), most of my work for this project will mainly focus on recording larvae in real time and with a high-speed camera mounted to a microscope to try to capture all of the nuance that is involved in catching dinner as an actinotroch and to fill in the knowledge gap about life as a phoronid larva. That's all for now! See you next week! Hi everyone! This week the sun came out just in time for our day at Hall Lake. We took kayaks and paddle boards across the lake and climbed the giant sand dunes on the other side. After a week of getting used to the overcast weather and freezing Pacific water, no one was expecting the lake to be warm enough to swim in, so when it was, we all jumped in wearing whatever combination of clothing and bathing suits we had with us. It was great getting to see more of the natural resources that Oregon has to offer inland. As a note: it turns out the sun burns just as hot in Oregon and I got an awful sunburn on my back to prove it – I’d say it was worth it though. We also spent the Fourth of July in Coos Bay, where we got to watch fireworks over the water! One of the questions that the von Dassow lab has been looking at (and that I'll be working on this summer) is whether the large, betentacled, large-stomached, actinotroch larvae of the phoronids (a tube-building marine worm) eat more than just the single-celled algae that is currently documented in literature about their diets. In other words, whether these comparatively ferocious-looking larvae may want to eat meat in addition to their veggies. In lab this week, we took more plankton tows and filtered out just the smallest zooplankton to offer to the phoronid larvae as prey. We’ve started to see the larvae taking larger prey items and are beginning to develop a menu of items that the larvae are taking regularly. With observation and video recording, we hope to determine whether these larvae really mean to eat these plankton, and if so, how they catch and swallow them. We also went out into the field to a couple of different spots this week to collect more adult phoronids plus another tube-building worm called owenia, a variety of colorful nudibranchs, and a different genus of flatworm, notocomplana. Once they all spawn, we’ll have lots of larvae to feed and lots of larvae to feed to other larvae – it’s a larva eat larva world it seems. El and I also learned how to use the microinjector to inject tiny sea star eggs! We injected the eggs with a mix of synthetic RNA, one encoding Ect2 (a Rho activator) and the other a probe that detects active Rho. The goal is to simultaneously excite and visualize contractile movements on the egg surface during development. To give you a little behind-the-scenes view into the von Dassow lab, George uses a CRT TV as a monitor for the microinjector. A mix of old and new technology, science of the past vs. science of the future…maybe there’s something poetic here. Anyway, it was new technology for me all around. Last night (at the recommendation of George & Svetlana) a bunch of us went out to the 7 Devils Brewery in Coos Bay to see the semi-local Hot Damn Scandal band perform. They’re an awesome band! Kind of a vintage, folk-y, travelling circus, stomp-and-holler, semi-spooky vibe with a killer lead singer and a musical saw! I followed them on Spotify and bought a sticker at the show. Would recommend. That’s all for this week! See you in the next one. Hi everyone! My name is Chloe Goodsell and I'm from Richmond, Virginia. I go to William & Mary where I'm a Biology & English double major. At school, I'm a student in Dr. Jonathan Allen's marine invertebrate lab where I study the oyster flatworm, Stylochus ellipticus. I was super excited to join Dr. George von Dassow's lab this summer after reading his publications about planktonic larval carnivory as part of my own research with Dr. Allen. I'm still feeling out potential projects I might take on for the summer, but I plan to continue George's work with larval carnivory and hopefully learn more about cellular biology while I’m here! This week I’ve been getting to know Charleston, OIMB and the students and faculty I’ll be working with for the summer. Research-wise, this week was about getting familiar with some of George’s many microscopes, practicing lab techniques, and meeting some of the critters I’ll be researching at OIMB. Since George’s lab studies embryology and larval biology, we looked at eggs from sand dollars, flatworms, and barnacles to observe and record embryonic development and practiced capturing feeding behaviors of developed larvae using a high-speed camera. There are lots of precise adjustments on both the microscope itself and the processing software that can make a big difference in the final image you can produce – so far, it’s all a little intimidating but hopefully with practice I’ll get more confident in my microscopy skills! We also went out into the field a couple of times to collect adult Phoronopsis harmeri (a tube-building marine worm), barnacles, and flatworms, and to sample the plankton at the marinas nearby. After lab each day, I’ve been exploring the Coos Bay area with some of the other students here. We’ve gone on lots of walks through the woods, along the beach, and into the town of Charleston. Along the way, we’ve met some local celebrities like Pat from the ceramic shop in town (who has been making pottery in Charleston for 23 years!) and even some biological celebrities like the infamous rough-skinned newt. The Oregon coast is so beautiful and completely different than Virginia’s coast. The rocky intertidal ecosystem is home to an amazing diversity of marine life which we're only just scratching the surface of. I’m constantly impressed by the giant evergreens here, and even the life on the side of the dock is so colorful and diverse that it looks beautiful too! I’m still adjusting to feeling cold in June (and jealous about the 80+ degree weather at home in Virginia), but the fog has started to grow on me. I can’t wait to see what else Coos Bay has to offer both on land and underwater and to start focusing in on my research for the summer! See you next week :) |
AuthorHello! My name is Chloe and I am from Richmond, Virginia. I am a rising senior at William & Mary studying Biology & English. This summer, I'll be working in Dr. George von Dassow's lab studying larval carnivory. I am excited to learn lots about larval biology and the coastal Oregon ecosystem at OIMB this summer! ArchivesCategories |
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