It roams the ocean floor, always ravenous, always ready to kill. When it finds its prey, it pulls it apart with hideous strength and then eats it while the prey is still alive. What is this fearsome beast? Is it a shark? A kraken? The Loch Ness Monster? Nope. It’s a starfish. The most common starfish species on both the East and West coasts, beloved by millions of beach-going children, are actually mighty predators.

More here!

Good news, dear readers: your fearless blog-star Miriam has been spotted on the surfside Scripps campus. I imagine she’s currently drafting her “never again on my watch” speech to assure the traumatized in the audience that I’ll not be allowed to make dumb music, football, and psychology references under the auspices of TOG ever again. (Total disappointment was my original goal, but I could certainly be more parsimoniously disappointing and save everyone the hassle.)

Figure 1. OMG, that explains everything!

If you’re still bummed about dead coral babies and me getting electrocuted, well, thank you, and I’m sorry, and I have good news for you. The sun came back out today, so I can blog you goodbye on a positive note. True, my explanatory variable—one day of sunshine—sounds kind of trivial, but it’s all about shifting baselines. We’re so serotonin-addicted here in San Diego that when a cloud rolls in, instantaneous Seasonal Affective Disorder has us all muttering miserably like Milton in Office Space. Imagine what a whole month of May Gray does to our sunny disposition. You can refer to Figure 1 (originally from here) to see how treacherous it really gets this time of year. (This would easily be the funniest graph I’ve seen all year if it weren’t for this fad.)

So things are looking better (10% sunnier, to be precise-ish). In other words, “I’ve got 99 problems, but only 59% of possible sunshine hours isn’t one.” You just have to read enough science news on a sunny enough day—and finish worrying about the deleterious effects of everything in the world on every one of your body parts—to uncover things that you don’t have to worry about. Here they are, distilled from this week’s science news, in no particular order but in Jeopardy format:

Q: It’s a regular headache, but you don’t get one, because you’re not eligible.

A: What is space headache?

Q: You don’t have to spend your entire life doing this, and acting like a total poser, because you’re not a tropical wasp.

A: What is fighting inside a fig?

Q: Luckily, the reproductive strategy of this newly-discovered species of palm is very unlike yours.

A: What is self-destructing tree?

Q: You narrowly escaped having to do this for a living, by virtue of being just 1% different genomically from chimpanzees.

A: What is trading tokens for cucumbers?

There you have it. Being a scientist is way better than trading tokens for cucumbers (at least when it’s not foggy). Now I just have to sit in my office near the squirrels to finish up a quick letter to my committee, and, um… also my dissertation. I heard once you turn it in, they throw you a party and give you food. And I heard there would be enough cake for everyone.

I’m up outta here/This has been a Kristen service announcement. ▮

From my old A-town stomp-ing ground comes a high-profile example of the option offense, as executed by marine organisms. Chemists and biologist at Georgia Tech collaborated to study the secondary metabolites on the surfaces of marine algae using a new technology called desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry. (Can this please be the name of a new hair product, too?) The tool allows scientists to map the chemical properties of an intact biological surface to determine where on the organism a chemical is being used, not just that it’s “in there somewhere, doin’ something.” (This had long been standard protocol in chemical ecology.)

Does anybody make real bromophycolides anymore?

The scientists studied two morphotypes of a red alga from Fiji called Callophycus serratus (Note the extremely wise choice of sampling location. It’s no coincidence that I study coral reefs… “I learned it from watching y’all, okay?”) and found together they produce a total of 28 closely-related chemicals that can each fight off a pathogenic marine fungus called Lindra thalassiae. It’s the marine equivalent of the option offense: you’ve got the quarterback, A-back, B-back, or ten different diterpene-benzoate macrolides to get the job done, depending on which fungus you’re trying to brush off your shoulders. The results highlight how little we tropical biologists know about the complex chemical cocktails that marine organisms put on their surfaces and in the water. Rather than observe the air and ground attacks, ecologist have typically found it easier to just check the scoreboard at one point in time, and assume they know how the game unfolded.

For similar reasons, the chemical diversity and pharmaceutical potential of tropical ecosystems has been the subject of a lot of big talk with only rare examples of “walking the bio-activity walk.” In this study, however, one of the ecologically-important compounds also showed anti-malarial properties in early tests. The researchers will start tweaking the molecule to improve it’s performance in a game setting. If the compound is eligible (for drug development), it may someday return to the tropics in a form harder, better, faster, stronger.

The abstract of their paper claims this is “among the first examples of natural product imaging on biological surfaces.” I’ll assume the authors conveniently forgot ESPN camera crews, whiskey, and footbal fans when they considered the kinds of imaging of natural products on biological surfaces going on at Tech any any given time. Our work hard/play hard is never over.

I went to Curacao last month to help start a new multidisciplinary research project. As suggested by my trip nicknames— “Microbe Girl” and “K-Party”—it was my job to spend the entire trip inside a container lab doing obscure microbiology tasks while everyone else was scuba diving, and then it was my job to not complain about it later on because it was time to drink beer and watch an amazing sunset. Yay…sunsets are way better than scuba diving?

Unfortunately, microbiology involves a lot of elaborate water filtering schemes to separate bacteria from viruses, animals from bacteria, particulate carbon from dissolved carbon, you from your sanity… and this requires water pumps and vacuum pumps and other small appliances, not to mention a lot of time spent not going scuba diving. This was all part of my job as official Microbe Girl. Which brings me to Why you didn’t really want my job, Reason #2: Electrocution. You know those stickers on hair dryers that tell you not to drop them in a bathtub? A really good way to get small appliances wet is to USE THEM TO FILTER WATER.

Dude, at least your dystopian torture-clock wasn't electrified and soaked in seawater (from Fritz Lang's Metropolis)

So anytime a water pump or vacuum pump got wet in the lab (which was every time I used one, and for hours a day), its surface picked up the current from somewhere in its little electrical inner working guts and transferred it to my hand, which isn’t a very long distance from my fragile little heart. !!BZZZZZZT, followed by me yelling, “AHHHHHH!” “WHAT?” and “I HATE MICROBES!” in quick succession. Dude, the only things allowed to re-program my heartbeat are really loud rock shows and really cute boys, definitey NOT Masterflex peristaltic pumps from the ’80s. (You give lab a bad name.)

You would think an electrocution would be easy to learn to avoid (right, BF?). Touch the machine with a non-conductive thing, right? A roll of electrical tape, maybe? Guess what happens when the tape gets wet? YOU GET ELECTROCUTED AGAIN. Here’s some scientific data I recorded during the trip: it literally only takes TWO electrocutions to completely change my behavior. (If Maslow was wrong I’ll drive straight off the edge.)

When I tried to have this problem solved, ahem, last year, the engineer at our research station tried out the vacuum pump, didn’t get electrocuted, concluded that I did not have “the touch” and then left. End of repair. Awesome…I love islands, you know, because of the sunsets. So, if you’ve ever dreamed of being a marine biologist and really making a difference in the world, imagine the long hours, the bad pay, a cheesy consolation-prize sunset, and then imagine getting electrocuted a few times. What’s that? You still want to make a difference? Perfect, because I’m looking for a lab assistant.

(Thanks JeByrnes!)

Crocheting the coral rubble is extra-tedious

If you’re an artist, there’s a beautiful symmetry here: why not make something slow-growing out of something slow-going? Yesterday, Eric saw a nice review of the Coral Reef Crochet Project, an art exhibit about corals, by crafters (AC/BC?). Then he remembered something about me and corals. Handicraft handoff.

"Stop Haeckel-ing, we're growing as fast as we can"

Currently on exhibit in Scottsdale, AZ, The Coral Reef Crochet Project is sponsored by IFF: The Institute For Figuring, which I think has the best name of any organization, ever. They’re testing how variations in stitch number yield a diversity of hyperbolic shapes in a final piece of crochet. It’s a geeky math thing, inspired by science, executed with art, often yielding surprising results. (Actually, so is my cooking.) Tiny variations in growth and branching patterns also happen to be what give corals such a diversity of forms. Add a stitch here or a dissolved inorganic carbon gradient there, and you get a totally different sweater/coral.

Just as you can deploy yarn and needles to make a hideous sweater, an ironic hat, or a super cute scarf, the IFF coral project has spawned a number of variations on the original crochet reef theme: the Anemone Reef, the Toxic Reef (made of trash), and the heartbreakingly demure Bleached Reef. The latter two are displayed alongside the depressing stories that motivated their creation. The final message: Art is hard. So is growing the largest biological structures on earth. So please, nobody yank on that string.

Biology is complicated, but most experimental design isn’t. Thanks to the t-test and its descendants, we scientists end up telling a lot of binary “less vs. more” stories and it ends up being hard to tell what really matters in the grand scheme of stuff. (Flu from animals? Hate on food from animals.)

So I was delighted this weekend when one of my favorite “less vs. more” laboratory results—interesting but of questionable relative importance—turned out to be substantiated by surveys of the larger human population, and was therefore applicable to my everyday life of not eating meat, waiting for football season, and judging things by how they smell.

The major histocompatibility complex (“It’s just major right here, y’all know what I’m sayin’?”) is a region of human chromosome 6 that codes for a bunch of cell-cell recognition capabilities involved in reproduction and immunity (finding cells that your cells like, or don’t like, and responding accordingly). I’ve long been a fan of what came to be known as “The Sweaty T-Shirt Study,” which demonstrated that women prefer the smell of sweat from men whose MHC regions are least similar to theirs, the implication being that the resultant offspring from such a scent-match would have the most “go-getta” immune systems. To me, the study approach—”Here, smell.”—seemed kind of anachronistic, but the conclusions were revolutionary enough to start a whole field of sniff-and-tell research. Scientists later showed that there was no significant preference (p>0.05 = T-Pain) for the smell of outcast-MHCs among women using hormonal birth control; they preferred the smell of men with the most similar MHC.

Andre3000 loves roses, veganism, GT football, and probably also p<0.05

I love these studies for their place in science history. (“It was right under our, uh, noses.”) Arguing about whether humans have the working anatomical structures for pheromone-based communication has been popular for a long time. It was only recently that we actually bothered to study the kinds of information humans subconsciously receive through the air, be it through pheromone receptors in the vomeronasal organ or just in, like, parts of the nose.

Now, I know more than one woman who actually uses the “Does he smell good and am I on birth control?” rubric to score how her relationship is going. But that’s sort of a special case; most single ladies aren’t reading scientific literature and then making dating decisions according to p-values therein. So for me, the question remained: is the the sniff-test informative, compared to, say, whether a guy can dance, or whether he’s in the running for the Heisman?

Imagine my delight to read that the speculation about mate preference from the original stinky tee-test is actually reflected in human population data (not that I’m dropping the other criteria). On Sunday, scientists reported that married couples in Brazil were more likely to have differences in the MHC region than would be expected in randomly-paired couples. Yeah, your boyfriend may smell (tee-pain), but it’s useful information.

I wonder if the utility of the stinky tee-test helps explain why women can still detect sweat when it’s masked by a number of other scents, while the same is not true for men. Whatever the mechanism, it seems my college roommate’s advice after a long game day but before a night out—”grrl, just change shirts and put some perfume on”—was exactly the right call, but only for us girls. (I guess I should expect that kind of efficiency from an engineering school…well, that and the Heisman.) The guys can’t smell us, but we can definitely smell them, and we’re judging their MHC polymorphisms along with their fancy footwork. So, guys, show us your moves and how good you smell doing them. Wait, what’s that you say? You have season tickets? Yeah, that’ll work.

Savin' the Coral Reefs?

Hi there, blog land. Huge thanks to Miriam for the amazing (scary?) opportunity to guest blog while she is off exploring Eastern California, and for the introduction asserting that I am both credible and cool. I hope to slowly disappoint readers on both counts as the week goes on, ensuring Miriam’s return is met with maximum fanfare and relief.

As Miriam mentioned, I’m studying corals in the Caribbean for my dissertation. With that job comes the obligation to not only save the coral reefs, but have a good time doing it, because after all, everyone wants to be a marine biologist when they grow up, and coral reefs are the coolest things in the ocean, hands down. No pressure, right? During my blog-stint, I’ll expose some behind-the-scenes stories from my job so that you feel better about yours. I’ll reveal whether I am actually saving the coral reefs. I’ll also offer up some of my favorite recent stories from science land in general. I particularly love when things turn out to be way more complicated than we thought they were, which conveniently applies to about 99 percent of discoveries in science.

So, thanks for the welcome, and sorry in advance.

PS: I thought my picture would be kind of unique, and then I pulled out the New York Times Magazine this morning and found this. Apparently, leaping irreverently into gorgeous bodies of water is now a fad and, because it has been discovered by the New York Times, no longer cool. Like I said.

PPS: Dear dive safety officers, I promise to giant stride from now on.