Posts Tagged ‘Woods Hole’
“Purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous”*…
Doug Muir on one of Nature’s more striking creations…
There’s been a a certain amount of negativity floating around lately. So, let’s talk about a toxic, venomous freak of nature and the parasite that afflicts it.
Biology warning, this gets slightly squicky.Let’s start with the toxic, venomous freak of nature: the Portuguese man-o’-war…
… So it’s a jellyfish. Except it isn’t really: it’s several jellyfish, smooshed together. And here’s where the “freak of nature” part kicks in.
I mean, yeah, strictly speaking nature has no freaks; every species that exists, belongs; everything is a product of evolution and Life’s Rich Pageant, yadda yadda. But the Portuguese man-o’-war — Physalia physalis, for you biologists — is honestly kinda freaky. Because Physalia is a colonial organism.
What this means: a single Portuguese man-o’-war is composed of four or five separate animals. (We’re not actually sure how many.) One animal is the balloon-sail-thingy on top; another is the stinging tentacles; another is the digestive system; another is the gonads. And they’re completely distinct organisms.
How this happens: when a Physalia egg is fertilized, it starts dividing, like every other fertilized egg. But pretty quickly it breaks apart into two and then more distinct embryos — genetically identical, but physically separate. And those embryos develop into completely different creatures. Then, later in development, those creatures re-attach to form a single Frankenstein organism. The various parts have their own nervous systems, which don’t seem to connect.
Here’s an analogy: imagine that before birth, you are identical twins. But instead of growing into two babies, one twin grows into a bodiless head, the other into a headless body. Then just before birth they stick together, but they don’t actually merge back into one. No, going forward you are a bodiless head glued on top of a headless body, ever after. It’s kind of like that.
Now, colonial animals aren’t unknown in nature. But most of them are either dinky (Volvox, don’t ask) or they’re big, but it’s basically cut-and-pasting the same creatures over and over. So, some corals are colonial, but all this means is that the individual polyps have grown into each other to produce a sort of living carpet interlaced through their stony skeleton. But the man-o’-war is a respectably large animal — they can grow as big as a large house cat — and so are its colonial components. And the components are extremely specialized: the float-animal part of it looks and acts nothing like the tentacle-animal part.
Physalia is by far the largest complex colonial animal. And — this bit is odd — it doesn’t have any relatives. It’s the only genus in its family. Put another way, within the jellyfish it has no siblings and only a few very distant cousins. (One of which is the ridiculous creature known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster Jellyfish, but never mind that now.) It’s a very successful organism! There are millions and millions of them, found all over the world in tropical and subtropical oceans. So you would expect to see speciation, different relatives — big ones, little ones, a bunch of variations on a theme. More on this shortly.
But meanwhile, the whole “colonial animal” thing looks like evolution’s first attempt to figure out, you know, organs. I mean, the first multicellular animals were probably sponges, and sponges don’t actually have organs. But more complex animals have distinct and differentiated organs, modules of specialized tissue performing particular functions, because those turn out to be super useful. Physalia and other colonial animals look like a beta-test platform for this new “organ” technology. Most of the animal kingdom moved on to “oh wait, why don’t we just have one single creature that grows the different modules inside it”, but a few colonial animals stuck with Plan A and made it work.
Okay, so that’s the “freak of nature” part. What about the “toxic and venomous”?…
Read on to be astounded: “Occasional Paper: Four Hidden Species of Portuguese man-o’-war,” from the always-illuminating @crookedtimber, via Ingrid Burrington‘s exquisite newsletter, Perfect Sentences.
* “The purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war was floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind in the water.” – Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
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As we tangle with tentacles, we might spare a thought for Columbus Iselin; he died on this date in 1971. An oceanographer, he taught at both Harvard and MIT, and was a long-time Director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which grew materially in both scope and impact under his leadership.
His own work included both the invention of the bathythermograph and other deep-sea instruments responsible for saving ships during World War II and foundational scholarship on the oceanography of the Gulf Stream… where, of course, one can find the Portuguese man-of-war.
“The only kind of seafood I trust is the fish stick, a totally featureless fish that doesn’t have eyeballs or fins”*…
A minority opinion, it seems… we’re consuming more seafood than ever, and increasingly from farmed sources, which have overtaken that of wild-caught fish for the first time in history…
At the latest count, the average American was eating ~5 lbs more seafood per year than they had been in the 1990s, and globally the consumption of seafood has been outpacing population growth since the 1960s. But where exactly is all of that shrimp, tuna, and salmon coming from?
When we think of fishing, it’s easy to romanticize weather-beaten boats helmed by wizened sea captains. But, on a global scale, much of modern fishing looks very different. In fact, increasingly, the contents of a seafood tower or “catch of the day” is more likely to have been farmed rather than caught in the wild.
That’s the latest conclusion from The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture, an annual report published earlier this month by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which revealed that — for the first time in history — the majority of the world’s seafood came from fish farming rather than wild catching in 2022.
The practice of aquaculture — rearing fish and sea plants in controlled ponds, pens, and pools — produced more than 94 million metric tons of seafood in 2022 and is being hailed by some as a means of sustaining seafood production in the face of depleting wild fish stocks. The 2022 tally was double the production figure from 2006 and reflects decades of investment and innovation in the aquaculture industry, which 30 years ago accounted for just 15% of total seafood.
Note: Total aquaculture production, which includes algae and aquatic plants like seaweed, overtook wild fishing efforts more than a decade ago (the more recent milestone excludes sea plants).
Asia, which has long been at the center of the world of commercial fishing and seafood more generally, is driving much of the aquaculture boom. In fact, the FAO attributes more than 90% of total global aquaculture production (including aquatic plants) to the continent, helping to secure fish farming’s spot as the “fastest-growing food production system in the world”…
Read on for more about aquaculture– it’s history and practice– and for the rise of U.S. seafood imports and the fall of shrimp: “We now farm more fish than we catch,” from @sherwood_news.
* Dave Barry
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As we reach for the ketchup, we might send aquatic birthday greetings to Frank Rattray Lillie; he was born on this date in 1870. A zoologist, he was an early pioneer of the study of embryology (making key discoveries about the fertilization of the egg (ovum) and the role of hormones in sex determination).
But he is probably better remembered for his role in building the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Lillie formed a lifelong association with the laboratory, eventually becoming its director in 1908, then turning it into a full-time institution.
Sadly, Lillie was also involved in the American eugenics movement at several levels: he was member of Chicago’s Eugenics Education Society; he was a committee member of the Second International Eugenics Congress; and he served on the advisory council for the Eugenics Committee of the United States. His status as a leading scientist likely helped to legitimize the movement.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be”*…
There is just something obviously reasonable about the following notion: If all life is built from atoms that obey precise equations we know—which seems to be true—then the existence of life might just be some downstream consequence of these laws that we haven’t yet gotten around to calculating. This is essentially a physicist’s way of thinking, and to its credit, it has already done a great deal to help us understand how living things work…
But approaching the subject of life with this attitude will fail us, for at least two reasons. The first reason we might call the fallacy of reductionism. Reductionism is the presumption that any piece of the universe we might choose to study works like some specimen of antique, windup clockwork, so that it is easy (or at least eminently possible) to predict the behavior of the whole once you know the rules governing how each of its parts pushes on and moves with the others…
The second mistake in how people have viewed the boundary between life and non-life is still rampant in the present day and originates in the way we use language. A great many people imagine that if we understand physics well enough, we will eventually comprehend what life is as a physical phenomenon in the same way we now understand how and why water freezes or boils. Indeed, it often seems people expect that a good enough physical theory could become the new gold standard for saying what is alive and what is not.
However, this approach fails to acknowledge that our own role in giving names to the phenomena of the world precedes our ability to say with any clarity what it means to even call something alive. A physicist who wants to devise theories of how living things behave or emerge has to start by making intuitive choices about how to translate the characteristics of the examples of life we know into a physical language. After one has done so, it quickly becomes clear that the boundary between what is alive and what is not is something that already got drawn at the outset, through a different way of talking than physics provides…
Physics is an approach to science that roots itself in the measurement of particular quantities: distance, mass, duration, charge, temperature, and the like. Whether we are talking about making empirical observations or developing theories to make predictions, the language of physics is inherently metrical and mathematical. The phenomena of physics are always expressed in terms of how one set of measurable numbers behaves when other sets of measurable numbers are held fixed or varied. This is why the genius of Newton’s Second Law, F = ma, was not merely that it proposed a successful equation relating force (F), mass (m), and acceleration (a), but rather that it realized that these were all quantities in the world that could be independently measured and compared in order to discover such a general relationship.
This is not how the science of biology works. It is true that doing excellent research in biology involves trafficking in numbers, especially these days: For example, statistical methods help one gain confidence in trends discovered through repeated observations (such as a significant but small increase in the rate of cell death when a drug is introduced). Nonetheless, there is nothing fundamentally quantitative about the scientific study of life. Instead, biology takes the categories of living and nonliving things for granted as a starting point, and then uses the scientific method to investigate what is predictable about the behavior and qualities of life. Biologists did not have to go around convincing humanity that the world actually divides into things that are alive and things that are not; instead, in much the same way that it is quite popular across the length and breadth of human language to coin terms for commonplace things like stars, rivers, and trees, the difference between being alive and not being alive gets denoted with vocabulary.
In short, biology could not have been invented without the preexisting concept of life to inspire it, and all it needed to get going was for someone to realize that there were things to be discovered by reasoning scientifically about things that were alive. This means, though, that biology most certainly is not founded on mathematics in the way that physics is. Discovering that plants need sunlight to grow, or that fish will suffocate when taken out of water, requires no quantification of anything whatsoever. Of course, we could learn more by measuring how much sunlight the plant got, or timing how long it takes for the fish-out-of-water to expire. But the basic empirical law in biological terms only concerns itself with what conditions will enable or prevent thriving, and what it means to thrive comes from our qualitative and holistic judgment of what it looks like to succeed at being alive. If we are honest with ourselves, the ability to make this judgment was not taught to us by scientists, but comes from a more common kind of knowledge: We are alive ourselves, and constantly mete out life and death to bugs and flowers in our surroundings. Science may help us to discover new ways to make things live or die, but only once we tell the scientists how to use those words. We did not know any physics when we invented the word “life,” and it would be strange if physics only now began suddenly to start dictating to us what the word means.
The origin of life can’t be explained by first principles: “Why Physics Can’t Tell Us What Life Is.”
See also this interview with Jeremy England, the author of the article linked above (and of the book from which it is excerpted): “The Physicist’s New Book of Life.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
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As we live and let live, we might spare a thought for Ernest Everett Just; he died on this date in 1941. A pioneering biologist, academic, and science writer, he contributed mightily to the understanding of cell division, the fertilization of egg cells, experimental parthenogenesis, hydration, cell division, dehydration in living cells, and the effect of ultra violet rays on egg cells.
An African-American, he had limited academic prospects on his graduation from Dartmouth, but was able to land a teaching spot at Howard University. Just met Frank R. Lillie, the head of the Department of Zoology at the University of Chicago and director of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole, Mass. In 1909 Lillie invited Just to spend first one, then several summers at Woods Hole, where Just pioneered the study of whole cells under normal conditions (rather than simply breaking them apart in a laboratory setting). In 1915, Just was awarded the first Spingarn Medal, the highest honor given by the NAACP.
But outside MBL, Just experienced discrimination. Seeking more opportunity he spent most of the 1930s in various European universities– until the outbreak of WW II hostilities caused him to return to the U.S. in late 1940. He died of pancreatic cancer on this date the next year.
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