July 2009 Archives

If you haven't already, check out the video Trouble in Paradise. I'll wait.

Okay? Now. Take a deep breath and calm down.

The video is a beautifully filmed and narrated work of fiction. Inspired by real events, but fiction nonetheless. Yes, there are Humboldt squid in the waters and beaches of La Jolla. But is it true that "an undersea earthquake has driven these predators close to the shore"? No. Is it likely that local marine creatures "sense an alien presence"--other than divers shining lights in their nocturnal faces? Probably not. And the most important question of all . . .

"WILL ANYTHING SURVIVE THE NIGHT???"

I'm pretty sure there are still octopuses, horn sharks, and divers in the water, along with the squid, so it would appear that the answer is a dull and unequivocal yes.

Humboldt (a.k.a. jumbo, but not giant) squid have been swimming in California waters and washing up on Southern California beaches every summer for years. The biggest stranding events were in 2002 and 2005 and received abundant media coverage, but minor strandings in the intervening years passed pretty much under the radar. This summer's stranding has (so far) been one of the more modest. So why all the fanfare?

I don't know for sure, any more than I know for sure why the squid stranded in the first place, but here's a plausible scenario. Several squid strand during the week, but not many people notice or think much of it. Come Saturday morning, not only is it the beginning of the weekend, but an earthquake has just jostled people out of bed, so now there are more people on the beach and they're more alert. They notice the squid, and with the earthquake fresh in their minds, they connect the two. The media jump on it. What a great headline!

By the time some responsible reporters decide to interview scientists, the quake has been inextricably tied to the squid. The actual content of the story is now debunking the connection, but the headline still reads Humboldt Squid Wash Ashore in La Jolla After Quake. Even National Geographic asks: Dozens of Jumbo Squid Beached After Quake--Coincidence? Please, Natty Geo, don't make it a question. It is an answer. Coincidence!

Now people are excited about squid, and some recreational divers decide to hang out with them in the water, rather than on the beach. Humboldt squid are active, inquisitive sorts, and sure, sometimes they can be a little grabby. BAM! Now we have a whole new sensational angle on the story. The Associated Press article many news outlets are using is called Jumbo Squid Invade San Diego Shores, Spook Divers and I just can't resist peering through a few scientific holes:

- Folks always want to describe the Humboldt squid beak as "razor-sharp." I really wish they wouldn't. For one thing, it is a classic cliché, and for another, it's plain wrong. Just from handling them, it's quite easy to cut oneself on razors and nearly impossible to cut oneself on squid beaks. Certainly, the squid could break your skin with its beak if it chose to bite--but so could a human with its teeth, and no one ever calls human teeth "razor-sharp."

- It's misleading to describe Humboldt squid as "deep-sea giants" and imply they're not usually seen near the surface. Their natural habit, in both Mexico and California, is to migrate daily between surface and deep waters--most likely following their prey.

- Speaking of clichés, I know I start to sound like a broken record, but really, I have never heard anyone in Mexico refer to the Humboldt squid as diablo rojo (red devil). It's just calamar gigante. Boring but true!

- "Roger Uzun, a veteran scuba diver and amateur underwater videographer, swam with a swarm of the creatures for about 20 minutes and said they appeared more curious than aggressive. The animals taste with their tentacles, he said, and seemed to be touching him and his wet suit to determine if he was edible." Emphasis mine, because I don't know of any evidence that squid get chemosensory input (smell or taste) from their arms or tentacles. Go ahead and quote him saying he thinks they're more curious than aggressive, but not that they taste with their tentacles. The first statement is a valid personal impression, the second is scientific misinformation. Remember, this guy is a diver, not a biologist. In fact, he's the one who made that gorgeous (but fictitious) Trouble in Paradise video.

Now that we've come full circle, I am done being a cantankerous wet blanket of a scientist. So let me tell you my favorite true thing that I learned from all this media coverage:

"According to local news reports, some beachgoers in the city of La Jolla attempted to throw the squid back into the water to save them from circling seagulls."

Isn't that sweet? Despite all the talk of red devils and carnivorous calamari, here is proof positive of human empathy for other living creatures. Even though they are slimy weird aliens, not cute fuzzy mammals, people weren't out there taunting the squid, stepping on them, or cutting them up. They were trying to save them.

I think that is awesome.

Yesterday I had a snorkeling date with a friend at La Jolla Cove (not to be confused with La Jolla Shores, where I was on Saturday . . . La Jollans really like the name of their town I think) so once again I was off to the beach. This time I cleverly brought my own knife, plastic bags, and measuring tape (newly purchased). I also warned the friend that if there were more squid on the beach, science might interfere with snorkeling.

Yes. Of course there were more squid on the beach. There were also more people on the beach--it was a summer Sunday in sunny SoCal, and there was a concert in the park. It was packed. I wish I had a picture of the crowd that gathered as soon as I started dissecting. My extremely patient friend referred to it, not unkindly, as a squid mob.

Just like the day before, it was wonderful and educational, with lots of curious kids and adults, great questions, and so forth. But the best part by far was one woman who came up to me and asked "Were you at La Jolla Shores yesterday?" I said I was. The woman gushed, "You showed those squid to my daughter and my husband and she told me all about it when she came home, she had such a good time! Thank you!"

This sort of thing does wonders for one's self-esteem, but then she went on:

Beach woman: She said you showed them a penis and she got to see where the sperm comes out! She wouldn't stop talking about it!
Me: Is that . . . good?

Apparently it was okay, or at least this particular mother thought it was a hoot, because she was laughing as she told me. She went on to ask me a bunch of great questions about the squid and the strandings.

All the onlookers were eager to inform me that there were more squid just on the other side of the rocks, so I tromped over there and fell in with a most helpful young lady, maybe in her early teens, who guided me over to the squid, took notes on mantle length, sex, and maturity, and asked lots of great questions. Young lady, wherever you are, you rock very much! As does the French family who gathered around, the father translating my explanations for his children.

Father: Poulpe?
Me: Calamar?
Father: Ah, oui, oui! Calamar!

Finally, I saw one fully intact squid in a tidepool, complete with head, arms, tentacles, everything (all the other squid had been partially pulled apart by seagulls and curious beachgoers). But it had clearly been sitting in that tidepool for a very long time and it was horribly putrid. I had a little game of chicken with the onlookers:

Onlooker: If you're going to dissect that, we'll watch.
Me: I'll dissect it if you'll pull it out for me.
Onlooker: Not me. Maybe my son will do it.
Me: Go for it! I'll open it up and you can see what's inside.
Onlooker's son: Yeah, sure.
Onlooker: Really, you're going to get it out for her?
Son: No way.

So that one didn't get dissected, and it is probably still sitting in the tidepool, slowly and inexorably decomposing into primordial ooze.

Oh, and I did eventually get to go snorkeling. GARIBALDI!

And then I put my stomach in the freezer.

For over a month now I've been living in La Jolla, mere blocks from the beach, without having time to touch the ocean. Yesterday I finally got fed up with being too busy to swim, so I just threw on my swimsuit and board shorts and walked straight down the street and into the water. Joy!

After a swim, I took a little walk along the beach to dry off. As I approached the curve of the beach where wave action piles all of the flotsam--mostly kelp and seagrass--I spotted a small gathering of people pointing curiously at something. I went to find out what it was, and possibly offer my services as a marine biologist.

In fact, I had a sneaking suspicion it might be a Humboldt squid, since I'd heard that divers were starting to see them in the water, and I'd seen photos of one washed up on the beach last week. Lo and behold, it was!

I introduced myself: "It is a squid! Hi, I study these! Yes, I study this particular species, and yes, I will study this specific instantiation of it before your very eyes! Wonder and delight!"

Maybe I didn't say all that; I don't remember.

The first people I met were three fantastically friendly and enthusiastic older folk. The women were Ann and Carolyn, and I regret not getting the man's name. They wanted to know everything, and were interested in anything I had to say. They asked if I was going to take the whole squid, and I said no, probably not the whole thing, but I quickly realized I ought to take some samples, to serve both science and outreach. Ann apparently lives right on the beach--even closer than me--and very happily went home to fetch me a knife and some bags.

Meanwhile, I stood guard over the squid. I dragged it up higher so it wouldn't get washed away, and started an informal Q&A with the rest of the curious onlookers. They were mostly young families: kids dragging their parents (oh no johnny that's disgusting) or parents dragging their kids (eww mom that's gross). One kid looked at it and simply observed, "Wow, that's a lot of bait."

Another kid--one of my favorites, whose name I didn't get--wanted to see, touch, and know everything. He begged me to puncture the ink sac. He wanted to know if I had a website (I sent him to the lab's) and if I would post the results of my sample analysis. His mother called to him that it was time to go, and he hollered back, "Can I see the other one too? She's going to do the other one!"

Because there was more than one squid, oh yes indeed. At the second squid our motley troop acquired a new family: Chase, his sister, and his father. According to the father, Chase was something of a squid scientist already. This thrilled me beyond words.

I handed out sucker rings like candy, and extracted the buccal mass, complete with beak. Since there were two squid, I asked Chase and his sister if I could give the first one to Nameless Kid (who'd asked first) and could they share the second one? (They could.) Nameless, whose mother was getting insistent, took his beak and took off. But in just a few minutes he returned and handed it to Chase, with the sad news that he wasn't allowed to take it home. Then he disappeared.

Mother of Nameless is probably cranky now. She woke her son up this morning and discovered that his hands still smell like squid, despite how many times she's forced him to wash. She wishes I had stayed home, never gone to the beach, and never handed her child a smelly icky lump of squid mouth. I'm sorry, Mrs. Nameless! I didn't think it through!

The Chase family, though, were all equally and completely enthusiastic. I love that family. Wherever you are, Chase et al., you guys rock! They had heard there were more squid over in the rocky tidepools, so we headed that way. As we walked, Chase's sister told me, with a big smile, "I've never seen a real squid before, only on TV." Chase's father gallantly helped my loyal assistants, Ann and Carolyn, to navigate the rocks. The ladies were still smiling and enjoying themselves. They had stood back while I was playing with the kids, but seemed to be having a delightful time anyway. They'd already gotten their sucker rings, Carolyn for her grandchildren and Ann for "my baby sister, who's seventy-four going on four".

Chase found two squid sloshing back and forth in a deep pool. As I was trying to accurately gauge the depth of pool to figure out if I would drown while retrieving them, Chase's father simply plunged in to pull them out.

These were much better dissections. They weren't exactly fresh dead, but because they'd been in the water they were clean and less molested by birds. One of them even had a piece of meat (probably another squid) in its beak--its last meal! I love when that happens. More kids and families gathered around. Every single person was fabulous. Without exception. I could have happily talked to them forever. I pulled out a pen, punctured an ink sac, and handed the pen around so all the kids could draw. I popped the lens out of the one intact eye I could find. At Chase's insistence, I cut open a head so we could look at the brain.

The two beach squid and the first pool squid had all been immature females, but the last and smallest was a mature male. I actually squealed in scientific delight, and without really thinking about it, plunged into a full reproductive explanation to a bunch of 4-10 year old kids and their parents. And I mean full. "Here's the spermatophoric complex, where sperm is made. And here's the penis where it comes out. Look, these are spermatophores, little packets of sperm! See how they pop open in my hand? Isn't that cool?"

Kid: "What's sperm?"
Me: "Well, it's what mixes with eggs to make baby squid."

Um, yeah, that wasn't the most well-thought-out explanation, but it wasn't a question I was particularly prepared for. C'mon, how do you not know what sperm is? (That wasn't one of the four-year-olds, by the way.) Some parents seemed uncomfortable, or maybe just quiet, but no one got mad or ran away, and most of them nodded and looked on with interest.

The tidepool female may not have had nice ripe orange eggs for me to compare with the sperm, but she had her own new biology lesson: she was full of tapeworms! They were quite large enough to pull out and watch squirming in the palm of your hand--which many of the kids were delighted to do.

Around this time I happened to glance at my watch, and it was 5:30, a time at which I was supposed to be somewhere else, and preferably not dressed in a swimsuit and board shorts. Even more preferably not smelling like dead squid. Well, such is the life of a marine biologist, I thought philosophically. Fortunately the dissections were winding down, the audience was fading, and it seemed like the right time to wrap things up.

I couldn't thank Ann and Carolyn enough, but they insisted they'd had the better part of the bargain. Wherever you ladies are, I want you to know that you're the most awesome impromptu assistants I've ever had! Edit: Right after posting this, I got an e-mail from Carolyn, who had cleverly tracked down my address, as I was much too scatterbrained to provide it at the time. She sent all of the pictures that now appear in this entry, which deserves another huge thank-you!

On my way back, carrying my bag of goodies, I saw some people checking out one of the squid I'd already dissected. I stopped to chat with them, then reluctantly excused myself: "I have to go put my stomachs in the freezer."

Beach guy: "That's something you don't hear very often."
Me: "Well, if you're me, actually . . . you do."

Also, if you're me, it pays to keep using your squid-ink-stained clothing as everyday clothing, because every day could turn out to be a squid ink day. See, yesterday I was wearing my wonderful board shorts that I bought in NZ, then immediately took on a research cruise and stained with squid ink. This bummed me out for a while, so I kept them in the bottom of a drawer. Then I got used to it and just started wearing them again. Then I started to think I really should buy nice new board shorts for normal times, and keep the inky ones for, well, inky times. But it turns out to be good that I did not do that, because yesterday was a normal time, when I would have been wearing normal shorts, and then they would have gotten ink on them and I would have had two pairs of inky shorts. And who needs that kind of redundancy?

The moral: You never know when you might run into dead squid. Then you'll have to dissect them. And teach the whole beach about squid. And really, that is the reason you became a marine biologist.

In May, I went to this science writing workshop in Santa Fe. It was an utterly amazing experience in every way. Many conversational threads wound through the week; one that particularly caught my fancy was "found science." Rather than writing about science as it is done by scientists, you focus on the science of everyday life, and pop culture in particular. You can start with the obvious--science fiction--and write The Physics of Star Trek, or you can grab onto something extremely popular but not obviously scientific, and dig until you find the science. Then you end up with The Physics of the Buffyverse, a delightful book by Jennifer Ouellette, who incidentally was my instructor at the Santa Fe Workshop. She rocks, and as far as I can tell, found science is her whole mission in life.

I came home from the workshop, considered quitting grad school (don't worry, it's normal), and started thinking: what is popular right now? What is hot? Where can I challenge myself to find science? Since I have always known what cool is (not), I settled on the Twilight phenomenon. This slice of pop-culture has been thoroughly devoured by precisely the demographic that science (and math and engineering) are still losing.

I gave it a whirl. I wrote about the environs of Twilight, the two towns of Forks and Phoenix: why is one green and the other brown? Despite being an all-out marine invertebrate person, I have always been rather taken with photosynthesis, so I ended up rhapsodizing about things like stomata and crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM). Jennifer, who had generously invited all her workshop students to guest for her blog, improved my rambling with a few judicious edits and posted it.

Yay!

However, since then, the research demon that lives in my head has been nagging me. "You've only read the first book of the series, and you never saw the movie. You didn't do your homework," it scolded.

"I know," I admitted. "But I'm not quite determined enough to purchase the books. And I've been an academic for so long that I don't remember how to deal with public libraries."

"YOU ARE AN EMBARRASSMENT!" screamed the demon.

"I do have a Blockbuster card, though," I said timidly. "Look, I'm renting the movie right now."

So I watched Twilight. Oh. My. Did I ever feel stupid.

This is the first shot of Bella. Her introduction, if you will. Do you see? It is pixel-y, so let me explain: She is holding a trowel and a cactus. She has obviously just dug up the cactus from her mother's backyard in Phoenix. She will proceed to carefully carry this cactus all the way to her new home in Forks. A cactus, people. One of those CAM plants that is brilliantly adapted to life in the desert by only opening its stomata at night to take up carbon dioxide and storing it to use during the day, when the sun helps it carry out the light reactions of photosynethsis. How could I not have used this as the lede for my story? LAME!

(Another thing that is lame: The first dramatic googling scene I have ever seen in a movie. Way to keep up with the technological times, Hollywood!)

Okay. Deep breath. Moving on from how I missed the best lede ever, let us now discuss how the biology teacher at Forks High School is cool.

Every single class is a lab, it seems, and a pretty nifty lab at that. Planaria behavior? Awesome! Planaria are the cutest little cross-eyed flatworms you ever saw. Of course, it's always frustrated me that "planaria" is the common name for all flatworms in the family Planariidae, because Planaria is also a specific genus within this family. And it isn't the genus that you usually use in high school biology labs--that's Dugesia. But because Dugesia is in Planariidae, it can be called planaria even though it is not in the genus Planaria. Confusing much? I don't know if Mr. Molina knows about all this taxonomic nonsense, but if any high school biology teacher did, it would be him. He's on top of his game! Even the obligatory mitosis lab is capped with the prize of a golden onion for the fastest group to finish. Sure, it might be more appropriate for younger ages, but it's still cute, and more effort than a lot of teachers would make. And then, a field trip to a greenhouse, complete with compost and worms! This is already way cooler than anything I remember from my high school biology class. But it's more than just content. Mr. Molina has the enthusiasm to sell biology.

Basically, biology is lucky that I was already committed by the time I got to high school, because my high school biology class was . . . not memorable. That's all I can say about it, because I honestly don't remember. I think it is the class's fault, because my amnesia is not blanketed over all of high school. I have vivid memories of Physics, in which I learned eagerly about wectors and wariables. Even apart from the poor teacher's hilarious-to-teenagers accent, the class totally rocked. (This may be in large part because I already loved calculus--see earlier sarcastic comment about how I have always been cool.)

Physics and biology were my only high school science classes, because I managed to avoid chemistry completely between 1995 and 2005. I took it in middle school and didn't touch it again until my first year of grad school, by which time I had started to feel guilty. I don't know if this explains why I'm not a chemistry person, or if the fact that I'm not a chemistry person explains the decade-long hiatus. I have this theory that every biologist likes either chemistry or physics, but never both. I'm definitely a physics person.

Annnyway, what was I talking about? Oh, how my high school bio class wasn't so great. That memory, or lack thereof, was spurred by my newfound admiration for the fictional Mr. Molina (by the way, in the book, his name was Mr. Banner, and I don't remember if he was as cool). This all makes me want to teach high school biology when I grow up. So there.

Annnnnnd, as the cherry on top of all these disjointed, poorly connected ideas: a list of new Twilight Biology topics to blog about!

• What makes vampire skin sparkle in direct sunlight?
• Why do vampire eyes change color depending on how well-fed they are?
• Carlisle turned Edward into a vampire when he was dying of the 1918 flu, a pandemic that fascinates me because I feel like I never really learned about it in school--it got completely overshadowed by WWI. This'll be a hot story when flu season comes around. 
• Sure, now everyone know Forks as the Twilight capital of the world, but long before that it was the logging capital of the world. There's some fun and controversial conservation biology to, ahem, sink my teeth into.
• Call it what you will--falling in love, infatuation, limerence--it actually makes your brain chemically crazy. The language Bella uses to describe her emotions in the book could be spliced into an almost textbook description of these physiological changes.
  
• Finally, the developmental biology of a vampire-human hybrid would be a fun tangent to explore. I mention this because I hear there's some kind of hybrid-baby in the final book.
  

Which, obviously, I am nowhere near reading. Guess I'd better go re-learn public libraries. That will make my demon happy.