Ologies with Alie Ward - Benthopelagic Nematology (DEEP SEA WORMS) with Holly Bik

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

Weird little mouths! Hairy skin tubes! Demon nematodes! Antarctic explorer and Nematologist Dr. Holly Bik charms us into loving deep sea (benthopelagic) worms in a way you never thought possible. We also cover tiny worm brains, the smell of Antarctic mud, first-generation Ph.Ds, the research workhorse C. Elegans, deep sea mining machines, moisturizers, submersibles and more with a worm lady who has literally traveled to the ends of the Earth to ask: what’s in that mud? We love her. Visit Dr. Holly Bik’s website and lab and follow her on Twitter and TikTokA donation went to EarthjusticeMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: SPOOKTOBER episodes, Maritime Archaeology (SHIPWRECKS), Medusology (JELLYFISH), Toxinology (JELLYFISH VENOM), Vampirology (VAMPIRES), Oceanology (OCEANS), Planariology (VERY COOL WORMS, I PROMISE)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, stickers, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's your basket of yarn that's sad you gave up on knitting. Alli Ward, back with another Farm Fresh episode. We just picked for you, and I hope that you're hungry for worms. So many worms. Why worms? Because before I came down with pneumonia last month, I was at USC Regley Institute on the island of Catalina, teaching a psychom symposium to this group of really enthusiastic and endearing climate scientists and biologists who were just

rare to get up on these mics and I took advantage of their zeal and I asked them all about what they do because it's not every day that you get to sit on two twin beds in a seaside cabin with a warm expert. So I did. This guest has been a research associate in the Department of Zoology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, an assistant professor and the Department of Zoology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, an assistant professor in the Department of Memeatology at USC Riverside, and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia and runs her own lab looking at deep sea ecosystems, and has literally traveled to the ends of the earth to ask, what is in that mud?

I love her. But I also love you, and thank you again, patrons at patreon.com slash allergies for being so supportive. During the break I took to get healthier. We could not do the show without you. And it cost just a buck a month to join and to make your questions before interviews. Thank you all so everyone,

repping the program via allergiesmarch.com. We have cozy sweatshirts and hats and all kinds of ephemera. And thank you to everyone who just tells others about the show. I appreciate that. You can go to oligis.com for a full menu of categorized episodes. And also thank you, of course, for the reviews. I read every single one to hear about folks who have compacted school or rediscovered a love of nature or roadtripped across the continent with us. I love it. This week, thank you for the review, Willow loves dinosaurs who wrote that. Even when an episode drops about a topic I'm ambivalent toward, or even actively uninterested in, as soon as I press play, I'm hooked. This one's for you, and also Fiddler to Be who wrote the review that says, thank you for pre-digesting science for us

and lovingly regurgitating it into our ears, like a mama bird with bad aim. Everyone, it's an honor to be of service. Okay, let's talk worms. So bento means deep, palagic means sea, and nematode comes from the Greek for thread-like. So let's talk skinny little worms at the bottom of the cold, dark sea. What are their lives like?

What do they think about? Are they in love? Curl up my wormies for a talk about weird little mouths, hairy worms, demon nematodes, Antarctic exploration, mud collections, submersibles, moisturizers, deep sea mining, pork chop risks, and more with your new friend, Bentho-Polagic, nematologist, Dr. Holly Bick. Music Music Music Music Music

Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music

Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music

Music Music Music Music Normally people aren't so excited about worms. Yes, pop up. I am Holly Bic. I am an associate professor at the University of Georgia in the Department of Marine Sciences. And my pronouns are she and her. I see you have a deck of worms with you. I do have a deck of worms with me. We're on a deck of worms. Okay. When I saw you holding these earlier, I thought they were business cards. They aren't business cards. They are business cards.

What are they? They are. They are. They are. So I work on microscopic worms that are extremely hard to see. So when I say I work on nematodes or nematodes, I did my patient in the UK. So that's what I say.

People are like, what are those? And often I find it easy to carry around this deck of business cards so that after people meet me, they can always remember. Can I see one? What do they have on them? So, oh, look at that. Is that its face or its asshole? That is its face.

That's its head. Oh, it's beautiful. It's very sphincter-esque. Yes. And then what are, okay, looks like I'm looking at a hose of some sort with a like a claw as a face. And then what are these dingle dangles all around it? I really don't know how to describe this gracefully.

So I'll just be honest, this particular worm looked like a tube of wrinkly skin with a clawed buttole face with a crown of ribbed ponytail. It's just a natural beauty. clawed butthole face with a crown of ribbed ponytail. Just a natural beauty. Those are, so we call them CT, but they're like hairs that project way far out. So that species is special because it has really long hairs all around its head.

And actually the way we describe species is you count. So the hairs occur in circles and you basically count how many rows of circles of hairs there are. And then basically count how many rows of circles of hairs there are, and then you count how many hairs of hairs in that circle. So you literally have to like go on your microscope and count all the hairs.

And if the species has six hairs, it's that species. And if it has 10 hairs, it's that species. And we don't actually know whether that means anything because most people don't get DNA sequences from the worms and sometimes worms will look the same but actually be quite different or vice versa that look really different but they're actually the same. Is this electron scanning microscope or what kind of microscope do you use to see these worms? Yeah, electron microscopy. She showed me another few worm cards. One that looked

like the thick scales of a crocodile, but with a slit for a mouth, and another resembling a cactus wearing a cable knit sock. And these things, they're just living their lives in the mud in Antarctica. They don't give a shit about you, and I respect that. The skin of the nematode can be plate-like, so kind of like armor, and these cuticles.

This one is striated, this one is kind of smooth, this one is like puncture- looks like a sweater. Yeah, this one's like armor, this one has a smooth cuticle, so you can't actually see much, it's really just smooth. Yeah. Okay, worms with scales, but let's talk scale. How tiny are they? Technically, they're like a millimeter to five millimeters long, but the way it's easiest to picture the worms or the size of an individual speck of dust. Oh my god. So you can see them, like if you have a slide and you hold it up to the light, it looks like a little speck of dust, but practically we say that they're microscopic.

And then are they all the cards the same or they different? Nope, they're all different. So this is the next one. Who's this? A fanged orifice rimmed with hair, but wearing cinamon earrings, what's happening? Oh wait, it's got a spiral on the side of it. That's a perfect spiral.

Yeah, it's amazing. So these are actually like princess lea buns on both sides of the worm. What did they do? They are sensory pores called amphids, and no one knows why they're in perfect spirals, but this is my favorite taxonomic feature of the worms. We don't know exactly what they do,

but we think that they are sensory pores, so worms don't have eyes, but they live in mud and environments where there's a lot of stuff going on. They're all out going on right now. Clearly. So the current theory is that it's like sensory poor and it detects chemicals because we know that worms can migrate towards specific bacteria. So maybe they're sending metabolites or they're basically smelling stuff in the mud and that's what

they're using to navigate. And we think it all happens through those pores. What happened when you zoomed in and got to see this for the first time in your life? Were you like, there it is. Yeah, I mean, the spirals are really obvious. Yeah. So they're one of the easiest things to see, but not all the nematones have spirals, just a select subset of groups do, but they are absolutely perfect and they can get really big too. So sometimes when you put them on the microscope, you just see this spiral like a slinky

kind of in the middle of the worm, it's really obvious and it's really cool. So right now, as you drink a horshada or do squats, there are these teeny tiny itty-bitty noodles alive at the bottom of the sea mud with princess layabuns and sphincter faces and very weird mouths, but she loves them and so do I. That's so distracting that I almost didn't notice that there were like kitten claws all around this gaping mom. Yep, those are the teeth. So that's a predatory species. They have retractable mandibles with teeth inside. So it's kind of like a wishbone on a chicken with a spike in the middle. They've three of those. They have tri-radient symmetry, and then they'll extend them out,

and then they grab a worm, or they grab a bacteria or something, and then they pull it back in. Kind of like a sandworm or some weird sci-fi thing. I was going to say that did you ever see like tremors or the pit of Sarlac? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was thinking of the Sarlac. You will therefore be taken to the June sea and cast

to the pit of Carcoum, the nesting place of the old Carcoum Sarlac. Doesn't sound so bad. Starlach. Okay, and this deck of business cards doesn't just have worms on it, but the back bears her contact info in a very short short nematode tiny bio. And now the front of the card, deep sea biology, and arctica nematode worms. In the middle of that is an arctica. Like, there are worms on an arctica. Yes, on an arctica and around the ocean. So nematodes are literally every handful of mud, dirt, sand, soil that you pick up. There's thousands of nematodes in there. The terrestrial species on land are very different

from the marine species. Actually, the terrestrial nematologists don't really talk to the marine ones. So there's some kind of like drama there. Not really. It's really just the taxonomy is very different. I'm creating drama. That's what I'm doing.

Yeah, so they are, they're all the way down in Antarctica. There's nematodes in volcanoes, like hot soils in volcanoes. There was a nematode that was found a couple miles below the surface of the earth and like South African diamond mines. And yeah, like literally your garden, your lawn, they're everywhere and everyone ignores them and doesn't really know that they are there.

No one loves worms because they don't know how omnipresent they are, maybe. Exactly. How recently did science figure out, like, oh yeah, there's worms on Antarctica, there are worms in volcanoes. How long have people been looking for worms there? Well, it's been hard to find them in Antarctica

until technology kind of got like modern enough. So maybe mid-20th century, we hard to find them in Antarctica until technology kind of got like modern enough. So maybe mid-20th century, we started to find them down there when people actually went to start sampling and bring back the samples preserved in a way that we could look under microscopes. And Antarctic dry valleys are actually really interesting. So the dry valleys in Antarctica don't get rain. They haven't seen rains since the place to scene.

No. Yeah. So some people call the place to see by its nickname, the ice age. And it started two and a half million years ago up until 11,000 years ago. And you know what? Between you and me, it is fine to have had to look that up. But yes, Antarctica has parts that have been parched since then. And you actually find mummified seals in the Antarctic dry valleys. Because it's so dry, and what happens is the seals will wander up a mountain

from the ocean and then cross over into the dry valley and then freak out, because there's no food there and there's no rain there and then they just die. And then because there's no rain, they become mummified. So when you go to study the worms in those places, you're just trapezing amongst the bodies of mummified seals.

Why doesn't it rain there? It's the climate. I mean Antarctica is just this really unique climate. And parts of Antarctica gets snow and glacier formation, but actually the continent is super dry. So when we went on the boat, I mean the first thing they told you to bring is lots of moisturizer. Really? How many times have you been there? Just once, and I just came back. When did you get back?

So she had been back on unfrozen land for maybe two weeks at the time we recorded this. Oh, that was like yesterday, especially. Yeah, so it's a little bit jet lag. Still tired from the trip. It was a three-month trip. Three months on Antarctica. How would you set an out-of-office reply? Do you, what do you do?

Yes, I had an email reply, so there's no internet down there. We were on a ship around the Antarctic Continental shelf in East Antarctica, so not only were we in Antarctica, but we're in like literally the most remote part of the most remote place on the planet. Where satellites don't really exist. So if you're on a ship anywhere else in the world, normally you have satellite internet and you can kind of check your email and it's fine, but we had, it was

basically like being back in the 90s, so you had like the equivalent of a dial-up modem internet speed and for your ship internet and then you had a landline phone. Oh my God. Did you feel like when you left, I hope nothing goes down, like you mentioned you have kids. Yeah. Did you have to prepare emotionally like, okay, if something happens,

if there's an emergency, they'll tell me, were you able to put that out of your mind or how long did it take to acclimate to the, it's okay, someone will reach me if they need to So I almost made a will before he went to Antarctica Not a bad idea not a bad idea because I was so worried and I was like my husband doesn't know our bank account password like I you know I don't know if he knows where like his birth certificate is like what if he needs that?

So I was over prepping. I felt like an apocalypse prepper in the amount of notes and instructions that I left for him. Yeah, and then things did go wrong when we were down there. So we had a catastrophic bathroom leak in a master bath and the ceiling was pouring with water. So you prep for everything and then stuff still goes wrong unexpectedly. So he was juggling the childcare and also like

calling plumbers and at 3 a.m. to try to get that sorted. I'm glad to be honest. I'm glad it was at your house and not on the ship because at first when he said a catastrophic bathroom issue, I figured it was on the ship and I was like, oh that had to be very smelly. But no, it's just back home. Just back home. Yeah, yeah. I could look, that had to be very smelly. But no, it's just back home. Just back home. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I couldn't do anything about it. Did you learn anything about being so remote?

Did you learn anything that you've taken away? I know you've only been back a couple weeks, but was there anything about that kind of remoteness that made you disconnect now that you've been back home or did it make you appreciate connection more? I would say both. I mean, I think I really didn't miss the internet. that you've been back home, or did it make you appreciate connection more? I would say both. I mean, I think I really didn't miss the internet. I didn't even try.

It was so slow that it wasn't even worth it. So I literally brought Tolstoy novels to Antarctica, because I was like, what is the biggest book that I can possibly find that's vaguely snowy? Ah. 12-hundred-page Tolstoy novel. That sounds great about Russia. Oh, good.

I actually used Antarctica like to pursue hobbies that I always wanted to do. So I bought a really nice Nikon DSLR camera, and I gave myself a project to learn photography, and I just never have time to do that in my everyday life. So I was just up whenever it was sunny, and there were icebergs, I was just outside, and all my polar gear just trying to take pictures and practice my photography.

In addition to doing my science, because a lot of those days were the days that we were transiting. So you just like, you're driving through fields of these amazing icebergs and there's sun and there's penguins, and it's just glorious. And that was just a really special way to kind of unplug and it was really rejuvenating. How much sun was there per day? So we were there pretty late in the season, but it was actually pretty sunny. So we also changed, we went through time zone changes down.

So we were supposed to go through 11 time zone changes. Oh my God. And the captain decides when you change the time zone. No. Yeah, what an ego trip. That's amazing. Father time, captain time, holy shit. Way, it's party time.

And let's go back to nematodes, because a lot of people might be like, okay, what is a worm? Tell us, what is a nematode? Because there's flat worms and there's round worms. And never the train shall meet, right? Yes, flat worms and round worms are different phyla, so there's other types of worms too.

There's like oligokites and polykites, and also there's things that look like worms in the ocean that are not actually worms. Ooh! Nemetodes are roundworms by definition, and I think the easiest one that everyone would know is dog heartworm. So the reason...

Oh! I was gonna say an earthworm. No, earthworms are the wrong kind of worms. Really? What kind of worms are earthworms? Earthworms are anilids, so they're segmented worms. Oh my gosh, okay, so we've got roundworms, which are smooth, non-segmented, and they're round shaped.

Then there's flatworms, and then there's anilids. Anilids aren't a subtype of roundworms, they're just totally different things. Totally different things, separate phylum, like way far away on the tree of life. Yeah. Oh my god. This is news to me. For some reason I would have put an earthworm as a as a nematode. Okay, so dog heartworm. This is something that we have to give our dogs little pills every once in a while for. So do they tend to be parasitic? What do they eat? What they eat varies depending on what type of nematode

they are. The parasitic ones are designed to, well, they evolve to live off the host, so they will essentially rely on the host for their nutrition. I'm not quite sure what they eat because I don't study those ones. For anyone with pooches who has taken heartworm medication, good job.

I just read way too much about these wiggly scoundrels and they're transmitted by mosquitoes and they creep around for six months before your dog shows any symptoms. And without treatment, they may turn its heart into what looks like a dish of glass noodles. And if you are not a dog person, they're not the only species that can be afflicted. So watch out, jackals and beavers and wolves and reptiles and foxes, raccoons, bears, African leopards, sea lions, can get heartworm, coyotes, yes cats and humans.

And there's also human parasites, so guinea worm, you know, that one that lives up your leg, that's anemotode two, oncosurysus, you know, that one that lives up your leg. That's a nematode too. Ancho psoriasis, river blindness, the one that like borrows into your eye. That's a nematode. That's why the parasitic ones are super gross, which is why I don't study them. Oh, pass. Thanks.

So there's terrestrial in marine. So the majority of nematodes that we don't know anything about are free living, and they eat anything from like plant roots and fungi on land to like bacteria and diatoms. And in case you're not familiar with diatomes, if you visit the very pro diatomes site, diatomes.org, you will learn that diatomes are algae and that they live in houses made of glass. They are the only organism on the planet with cell walls composed of transparent opalene silica.

So they look like woven crystal baskets, but tiny, tiny, and they are a microalgae that contribute 20 to 50% of the oxygen on our planet. We need to survive. And the biggest ones are maybe the size of a width of human hair. And they live in dirt and of course oceans and nematodes, they snack on them, probably for the salty crunch.

And actually some nematodes eat other nematodes. So the ones I did my PhD on are this group of predatory nematodes and they have teeth and jaws and they're really physically big and they're active predators. So I have microscope images of worms ripping other worms apart. You can find a predatory nematode with another smaller nematode like hanging out of its mouth sometimes.

Oh, oh, what a slog. I love it. I picture me eating like a chili dog and just covered in beans, just like a cat's power. How did you get into the field of nemetology? Because you were in the department of nemetology at the university. So did you ever introduce yourself as an e-metologist? I mean, you must, right? I mean, I study worms, so I guess I'm technically a nemetologist.

Yeah, being in a department of nemetology is kind of like, okay, yeah, fine. If you're not a nemetologist, I don't know who is. Also, anyone who studies something is technically anologist of it. So if I were to be cracking open a book and studying, I would technically be a person who studies it. You're definitely a nemetologist. Okay. And a nemetologist. You're both in those things. But now when it comes to how you got into this field, especially deep sea nemetology. That is a niche that is so, so teeny.

How did you find yourself there among tiny worms in the most remote place on the planet? Right, so there is a story here. Actually, there's multiple stories. So yeah, I get into science because I wanted to be a deep sea biologist. You did it. I grew up in Massachusetts, right? And so we have Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute there. So I'm also first generation college student.

So like, not in my family or scientist. And I'm the weird one that likes the ocean. And my family actually hates the beach, which I discovered last year. How did you discover it? Because we went to the beach and everyone was like, oh, yeah, we hate the beach. We don't want to go for a walk. I'm like, what? I never knew this. How far away from the beach did you grow up? Like an hour in Massachusetts. Yeah, I would go with my friends in high school. And yeah, so we would go down to the beach all the time. But I also used to go on field trips to the ocean because your school will always bring you to the beach.

Yeah. And I remember we went at one point to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. So they have like school tours that they host and they have the submersible Alvin down there. Oh my God. And then I remember also going to, they would run these museum events at the Museum of Science in Boston,

like ship to shore. And so you'd sit in this auditorium, they like beam in the satellite connection from the ship. It was usually Bob Ballard. Oh, that's the one that discovered the Titanic, right? Wow. And I was like, Oh my God, deep sea biology. I want to do that. So I get into science like really more for the travel and the exploration. I thought I wanted to be like an underwater archaeologist, but then I realized, I don't like dead bodies. And that's kind of creepy. Dead worm bodies, not as creepy. So I what didn't't like dead bodies and that's kind of creepy dead worm bodies not as creepy

So I what didn't start with dead worm bodies. I actually started with jellyfish because they are pretty But getting into jellyfish research is actually really hard really they're like the whales of the Invertebrate world And like everyone wants to study them Because they're so pretty two people who wanted to study them Medusology guest Dr. Rebecca Helm, and a toxicologist who studies jellyfish venom, Dr. Anna Klompen. Links are floating around in the show notes, and for more on sunken treasures, soggy boats, and watery graves, you can see the maritime archaeology episode.

I'm going to link in the show notes because it's so good, but back to Holly and her worms. So when I was looking for a PhD, I had three criteria. I wanted to study something deep sea invertebrate. I wanted to get molecular biology skills because I really was attracted to genomics and DNA sequencing in my college courses. It did really well in those courses, and I was obsessed with DNA.

And then my third criteria was that I wanted to keep living in London, so I did my undergrad in London, and I was like, I'm a really a city person, I love the city, and the fashion, and the theater, and I wanted to stay there. So the three things that ticked all those boxes was a project on deep-sea nematodes at the Natural History Museum in London.

Oh my God. That's a beautiful museum. What did your parents think when they saw you going further and further toward a PhD? What do they do? And was this this was rare for your family? Yeah. My dad is an HVAC technician. So he repairs like oil burners and heating and cooling systems. And then my mom was a secretary and kind of town government. She stayed home with me for a while, but they just think I'm really weird. I don't think they understand why I do what I do.

I mean, they're really supportive of it. And they connect most of the travel aspect, I think, because working class families, travel is basically an indicator of success. If you can travel the world and go to these places, and so the fact that I somehow get into a job where my work pays me to go to Antarctica and Japan and tropical islands, they are just astounded by that.

And also kind of worried for me, they're like, can you just stop traveling? I'm like, no, I can't, it's my job. Do you think there's any good nematodes in HVAC systems? I know. No. No. No. There are nematodes in HVAC systems? I know. I know. Cold air. There are nematodes in drinking water, which is really disturbing. Cool. Really.

Even tap water. Yeah. So, when I was processing my samples at the Natural History Museum in London, right? I work with deep sea samples, so all the worms I ever saw were dead and preserved. But occasionally, when I'm picking through my sample at the microscope, there would be like a thrashing live nematode there. And I would ask my taxonomist mentor, why?

Why is this worm alive? Where did it come from? He was like, oh, yeah. The piping systems, there's nematodes that come up occasionally from there. And actually, recent studies of drinking water, they do the environmental DNA sequencing, and they look for DNA barcodes of things. And yeah, you find signatures of nematodes in drinking water, they do the environmental DNA sequencing and they look for DNA bar codes of things.

And yeah, you find signatures of nematodes in drinking water. Worms, worms, worms everywhere. Which makes sense, right? Because our drinking water comes from reservoirs and it's put through pipes and stuff, but yeah, it's not completely sterile. Don't worry about it. It's fine. Now, when it comes to it, I'm going to say nematodes and nematodes is whole thing and I'm going to think I say it wrong every time,. It's fine. Now, when it comes to, I'm going to say nematodes and nematodes

this whole thing, and I'm going to think I say it wrong every time, but that's fine. When it comes to their life cycle, what are they out there doing? How are they fitting in with their environment? Are they cleaning things up? Are they changing the pH of systems? Like, what nematodes? Why? Why are they?

I will talk about marine systems, because that's what I know best. And I'll mention a little bit about terrestrial ones too. I mean, they kind of are like earthworms in the marine system, but just like on a microscopic scale. So thank you have this patch of mud on the beach at low tide. And you just have all these microscopic nematodes kind of wriggling around. And so they're doing things like the biotation, right, on a microbial scale. They're also eating lots of bacteria. So a lot of nematodes have specific little mouth parts that just suck up bacteria. They can have species specific feeding preferences.

So like one nematode eats a very specific type of bacteria and you have some separation there. They eat things like diatoms, so larger microbial eukaryotes. Don't be scared of all those celibals. So microbial eukaryotes are just tiny organisms like fungi or single-celled little blobby things or algae or other little creatures with eukaryotic cells. That is cells with nucleus, and usually organelles and some DNA. You are a eukaryote,

many of the animals living inside of your body also are, because we're never alone. And everyone living in you mostly loves you. They are predatory, so they're kind of like the base of the food chain. So you have the bacteria, and then you have the nematodes and then the bigger things like polyketworm,

larger worms would eat nematodes or amphipods or crustaceans and they are the base of the food chain, probably also important for carbon cycling because there's a lot of them and they do some of them do deposit feed like CQ cumbers so you have like miniature kind of CQ cumber like species that are just ingesting the sediment, pooping it out and turning stuff over.

So yes, in this world, stuff eats stuff, that eats stuff. And bacteria at the bottom of that chain, they really get the shaft. So bacteria, they're just trying to exist. And then nematodes come and gobble them up like kettle corn. Nematodes are acting like the compost bins of the deep sea mud. So thank you for the recycling service, bento-pologic roundworms. But as a thank you, the nematodes get slurped up by polychute worms, which are bristly segmented things that look like aquatic centipedes. They just come and eat up the nematodes like pesquetti.

How small and how big do nematodes get? The smallest nematodes are the deep sea ones, because when you get into the deep sea, the food quality and the amount of food is really poor, and there's just not much there, so that leads to reduction in body sizes. And those can be like a tenth of a millimeter. Ooh, I'm a little baby. Really tiny. Yeah.

And the largest one, so the largest nematode that we've ever found is actually a parasite of a sperm whale placenta specific So specific. Yes, and that one is about 30 meters long. No, yeah, yeah, wait 90 feet. Yeah, so at the Natural History Museum We actually have it in a jar. So it's like this giant glass jar, which is like coiled worm all up. And yeah, from a sperm whale. But placenta of a sperm whale.

Specific. How do they reproduce if they have such small niches? So I mean, they reproduce sexually just like a lot of organisms. You actually have males and females species. So fun fact, see elegans is actually like the worst nematode. What? No. Okay, so sea elegans, I know just enough to know that this is a study species for a lot

of scientists across a lot of different platforms. Why do they pick sea elegans? And is it an elegant worm? It is a boring worm and it's a hemapherdite. Oh, love that. But scientists can get a little flummixed in the lab. Most nematodes are not hemapherdites. Most nematodes have males and females

and they are sexually reproducing. So we need the males and females. See, all of you guys is a hemapherdite so we can fertilize itself, but also it has no body parts. Like, it's literally just a tube that's pointy at both ends and it has no discerning features and obviously according to my cards,

there's a lot of stuff on the worms. So most of them don't look like that. And the reason we pick the elegans is because we can freeze it and unfreeze it and it will survive. So yeah, you have frozen worms and they're kind of hibernating and then you'll just unfreeze them and you'll do your experiments. They found it from rotting fruit, like it lives on apples,

rotting apples in orchards, and someone found it and brought it into the lab one day, and now that's our model organism. What is this worm? Who is this worm? Okay, first off, it is elegant, and its name means recent, rod-like, and elegant, which is an app description for a teenage supermodel in the 90s. And just like one, it was discovered mining its own business in an Algerian orchard by Worm Scout and amateur biologist

Emil Mellpass around the year 1900. And Mellpass just loved science and noodled around on worm projects and other stuff as a hobby, eventually getting published multiple times and being honored with a doctorate and knighted for his contributions to science. Proud even. Now, in 1965, there was this guy named Sidney Brenner, and he ushered this tiny, one-millimeter sea elegans onto the science scene.

And from there, sea elegans fame exploded. It's usage rose. And yes, I will link to a publication called Worm Book, which has an extensive table of studies in which C. elegans was instrumental. But a few highlights are the discovery of cell death in 1983, the first complete wiring diagram of a nervous system in 98, insulin pathway genes, why naps help after physical stress, sea elegance was the first multicellular organism to have its whole genome sequenced. Also,

sea elegance nematodes survived the spatial Columbia disaster in February of 2003. How do they do that? Nobody knows. Also in researching this, I learned that there was a conference called the International Worm Meeting, and apparently folks folks we just missed it a few months ago in Glasgow Scotland. But luckily you can catch up on what happened via the hashtag Worm23. Also fortunate it's annual and they gather in different places around the world to talk sea elegans which has been called nature's gift to science. So a lot of people love the worm. Others, well, kind of a big, begrudging sigh. Has anyone ever said, hey, what if we switch up the worm, people?

Or no, it's over, it's the elegans, that's it. We gotta see elegans tattoo on our back and there's no going back. I mean, they're sort of like, what if we get the worm that's most closely related to see elegans and we work with that too? And from my perspective, that's like literally related to C.E.L. agains and we work with that too. And from my perspective, that's like literally the same thing because it's on this tiny

part of the nematotree of life. It's very distant from the marine species because those are like the most ancient lineages of nematodes and C.E.L. agains is just a completely different part of the tree. So it's, yeah, I'm not bitter, not like not throwing shade at C.E.L. agains. It's important. You can order it on the internet with whatever gene knocked out that you want. So it plays an important role,

but it's not representative of the crazy diversity of nematodes that we have in the environment. Are you not mad, but just disappointed? My one and my good friends says that I'm motivated by injustice and spite. Well, that's those are good things. Those are good fuels. What about at the age of

Neumatose? How can you even find fossilized ones? Are they so gooey that they just kind of melt? For the most part, we do not have fossils. The oldest fossil that I recall is from the Devonian Age. And I don't remember how ancient that is, but I don't think it's actually pretty ancient. The Devonian Age was 400 million years ago, just so none of us have to Google. So we have like this one fossil of a plant parasitic nematode and some tree sap, but that's it. There's no fossil record. So yeah, we're working at a disadvantage compared to most other phyla, and that's

why DNA and genomics is really important, because a genome is basically like a time machine or the equivalent of fossil record and that's what we use. And what about the ones in Antarctica that you're studying? Do they freeze or does it just not freeze in the deep sea mud? It does not freeze. Okay. So the ocean water in Antarctica is super cold, but because of the salinity, it's so salty,

it does not typically freeze. The surface will, so you'll get sea ice, but the nematose that I work with live in the sediments. So the sediments will typically never freeze, and if they do, it's like near glacier, and then you've got other problems, like the scraping of the glacier, killing all the worms on the sea floor. Oh, I forgot to ask what moisturiser you did bring, by the way. Oh, that is a good question. I brought a giant tub.

I want to say it's like, first aid beauty, something I got a giant tub of ultra healing from the moisturizer, smart. Holly wrote me later to say, not only did this cream keep my skin fabulously moist in the coldest and dryest place on earth, but this product lasts forever. She says, I bought the 6 ounce tub back in February before Antarctica, and I am still using

the same one with a quarter of the tub left, so 100% recommend for your listeners, especially if you have combo to oily skin like me because this face cream isn't greasy at all. So there is her tip, and she is a world class scientist, and because of that, she also included a helpful citation, and by that I mean a link. And it's called Ultra Repair Cream by First Aid Beauty. You're welcome. And no, they're not paying us even one worm for the mention.

But when you use it, you can think of worms. It does not contain any worms though. Let's change the subject. Now, what about glaciers? You mentioned glaciers. When we think of glaciers, I think of melting, and I think of, oh, no. And it may get hotter. Do you find out anything about climate from studying deep sea worms? Do you see anything change over time? Like, are there more or less of them? That is one question that I have. I would say there's not enough people studying worms

and there's not enough data on the worms to be able to tell that. And that's kind of what we're trying to do, so we are trying to get a baseline of the biodiversity. Most places in the ocean, we just don't even know what's there. So how can we track change if we don't have that data set to start from? So a lot of my work is really just a race against time to get a baseline of knowledge. God, if you watch things going hotter and hotter and hotter, you must be like,

I needed to get this information like in the 50s or something, right? Yeah. Well, we know we know nematose are really sensitive to temperature shifts. So the thing that kills all the deep sea worms, when you bring them up on deck, the deep sea is like two degrees Celsius. That's 36.5 degrees Fahrenheit to your after-americans. So it's like living in a refrigerator and when you bring that sample onto the deck of a boat, even if you just go into the lab and it's like 60 degrees, like 60 degrees for deep sea worm is like the Arizona desert. Like the mouth of hell for them. Yeah, so most people ask me if the pressure changes,

kill the worms, but they're fine with the pressure. Like it's the temperature shift. So we could infer in a changing ocean where the climate is causing temperature increases. A lot of the species that are really sensitive to temperature are not going to do so well. And I think that's a similar thing that we see with corals and other invertebrates is that you have very species specific responses to temperature change. So some species just will completely die

and never be able to adapt in other species and more resilient to fluctuations in temperature. So, you know, the worms will survive the apocalypse. I'm never worried that they will go away because there will always be nematodes there. Like, come on, if they can live in volcanoes, they're gonna be able to live in an ocean. But it's just the species composition is gonna be completely different because the ones that are sensitive are gonna go away. And my worry is that we don't really know what they do in the ecosystem. So, maybe the sensitive worm eats a bacteria that's like a keystone species. And then if that worm goes extinct, then the, you know, bacterial populations will completely change. So it's kind of like the butterfly effect, where messing with things maybe that we don't want to mess with. What's their lifespan usually?

If varies, usually the marine species I work with are, they can live for a couple months to a couple years. Oh wow. Yeah. The idea of a millimeter long worm in a deep sea just being like, I'm five, that's nuts, you know? Well, but deep sea species, a lot of them live for a really long time and we don't know why. That, you know, they slow down their metabolic rates

because like, there's just not a lot of food. So think of it kind of like hibernation. They're just really slow and that like extends their lifespan. Again, we don't know if this happens with worms because there's not a lot of data and we can't really easily do experiments, but the trend is that the deep sea is just a place where time is very slow.

And that's how I think about it. What about how you're getting your samples? How deep are you going and you're on this ship? Are you sending an ROV down? Are you going down in a submersible? Are you sending a core, like a big PVC pipe and seeing what you can stretch off the large straw, a spike in it? Accurate actually, PVC pipes are pretty much the cutting edge technology in DC science. I took a, I thought that that was hyperbolic, but that's amazing, okay. Yeah, I mean slightly fancy PVC pipes, so we use what's called a multi-core or megacore. It's like a circle of pipes.

And they're just really long tubes, and then they have some sort of mechanism at the bottom which will kind of seal it and bring up the mud. So yeah, you send down, we call it a rosette, because it's a ring, send that down, it pushes into the sediment, the tubes get sealed off, and then you bring it up, and you can preserve the sediment water interface. So it's actually like a really sensitive way of sampling the seafloor, and then we slice little pancakes of mud off the top of the cores, and we put them in the freezer to bring back to the lab to

work on the worms. How much product do you get to take home? Like your luggage back? Is it a Pelican case full of mud or is it only like we really only can take a couple cores because it's going to take us 10 years to figure out what's in one little slice. So I have a problem with hoarding mud. This has been a problem. I have faced for a decade now. It's very important. Technically, we only need, like most of the worm biomass lives in, I would say the top five centimeters of mud, but you do have vertical distribution. So you have some nematose that borrow really deep,

and the species composition will change as you go in the core So we tend to collect everything because we don't know what we're gonna find and we don't process it on the boat We put it in the freezer and then we send it back to the lab on dry ice and I just I am always just like all of the mud Let's bring it all back and I have a problem saying no if someone hands me like a bag of mud Let's bring it all back. And I have a problem saying no, if someone hands me like a bag of mud. What about, is there a respiration? Is it, are they anaerobic? Are they aerobic?

Do they breathe through their skin or through their pit of starleck? So she pulled out another card and, oh boy, wow, this one, this one really got me. So imagine a thick long beard, beard hairs sprouting from a garden hose made of skin that also has awkward bald patches, if you can picture that, or maybe like a weasel with bore bristles that escaped in the middle of a grooming. So this is what we call the Chubaka nematode.

Oh my God. But I would say so in this funny story behind this photo. So this nematode is basically like Chubak's leg, and all those little hairs that you see are bacteria. So they're symbiotic bacteria that live attached to the worm. But in this photo, we actually, we like shaved it because the electron microscope made most of the bacteria

like fall off, and there's only just one little part remaining. So it kind of looks like a poodle tail, which I always laugh at. And my graduate student would like, kill me if she knew I put this on a business card. So yeah, you've got, it looks like some of it is shaved. And then you've got like, if you were to forget a patch of a very hairy leg, as you shaved it, that's amazing. It's normally covered.

Normally covered. Yeah. So several nematode groups will have bacteria attach to them. This one is filamentous bacteria, so they're really stringy bacteria that completely cover the worm. And these are sulfur-utilizing bacteria. So we don't quite know what they do,

but the worms that are covered in bacteria tend to live deep in the sediments. In sediments, the reason why it smells is because there's a lot of sulfur. Mudfarts, we're talking a mudfart. Sulfur is actually really toxic to invertebrates. So the species that can live down in that anoxic mud are, they need special adaptations to be able to repel the toxicity.

And the theory is that these bacteria on this Chubacca nematode are using the sulfur or physically protecting the worm body from the effects of the sulfur because the bacteria, that's what they use for their metabolism. So the bacteria love the stinky mud and the nematodes use the bacteria like a mink coat in January. How did you shave this worm? So when you prep stuff for the electron microscope, you need to like spray it with gold particles and that I guess just like that, the bacteria fell off when you did that. Where you get the gold particles, can you reharvest the gold particles?

Or is it just like, bye bye gold, you served your purpose? I think it's good by gold. Yeah. I think it's gold. I'm not the one that does my cross-cafe. This is my graduate student, Maryanna, that does all this. So she's amazing on what she does. And I know she was not happy with this because she shaved the worm.

Wait, so you're telling me that you work with a grad student who works in deep sea biology, whose name is Mariana? Yes. Is that not the name of a trench? Um, Mariana. So she's Brazilian. Okay, just wondering, I was like, did she get into it for the trench?

Like, heard about a trench and was like, I'm a shoe in for this. I have never asked her that. I might ask her when I go home. I mean, if there were a trench called the Alley Ward Trench, I think I'd be like, all Google that, you know, like, that's exciting. I emailed Holly later and she said that Meryana grew up in Southern Brazil right next to a glorious tropical beach,

so that is probably why she became a marine biologist. And that she is definitely more of a warm weather person and the deep sea is very cold. Still, I think it's cool and that she should tell people it's named after her. They let him wick a pediaid later. Also, if you must know when someone has a name that seems to correlate to their job,

that's called an aptronym. Let's hear a few good ones such as weatherman, Dallas Reigns, an in-house technology firm lawyer named Sue U, British hydrologist, Dr. Andrew Drinkwater. Dr. Ted Stankovich is someone I've wanted to have on the show for a while. He studies skunk glands, and there's a Russian herdler by the name of Marina Stepanova. She's a herdler, Stepanova. Coincidence or nominative determinism.

That means that people choose careers subconsciously because they're kind of already a big name in them. We may never know. Also this interview was in the wake of the ocean gate, Titan submersible implosion, so all eyes were really at the bottom of the sea. Oh, can I quickly talk about deep sea mining? Yes, yes. So deep sea mining, if you are not aware of this issue, there are these polymetallic

nodule fails in the equatorial Pacific. And it's basically like the rainforest of the deep C. And if you are at all inspired, you know, by the biodiversity of the deep C, or you're concerned about climate change, like deep C mining is the worst thing that we can possibly doing right now. Because we don't even know if we're going to need those minerals, we don't even know what's in those nodules and battery technology is changing. And people want to go and basically bulldoze the microbial rainforest in this beautiful region on earth. And you even have like worms living in the metal nodules.

And it's just like this incredible source of biodiversity. And it really is not getting enough press coverage and it's upsetting because the payoff is not gonna be worth it. These ecosystems take tens of thousands of years to recover. And who is in charge of the green light on that? Who's saying yes or no? The international sea-bed authority,

which is part of the UN, I believe. There has been this clock that is triggered because certain nations want to pursue deep sea mining and there's this policy, and I don't even quite fully understand the policy, but it's complicated. So there is a ticking clock right now to develop a policy that oversees deep sea mining

and scientists are not happy about it. And the mining companies are using these machines that look like these horrible, like, I don't know, think of these machines in superhero movies that roll over cities. Like they're like, they look terrible. It's like, like, could you make a machine that looks more evil?

No. I was like, how evil could it be? And it was more evil than I thought. Picture a steam roller covered in giant Mad Max spikes. It makes my crotch hurt looking at it. Also, Holly mentioned some great activists in this area, including a marine biologist and the director of species, diva amen, and woodhole scientist and ocean explorer Julie Huber and senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory Beth Orkut.

And yes, they are all linked in my website for this episode, which is linked in the show notes. So do follow them. We need more press coverage about the horrors of deep sea mining, and we need the UN to hear our voices and just elevate the voices of the scientists and find out more about those issues. And we need renewable technology.

We need to convert our energy sources, but it's just, it's not worth it for destroying the deep sea. Have you ever gotten to go down? Would you ever want to go down to those depths? Like, what's the difference when it comes to research between like R-O-V-A-Ds and submersibles? Do deep sea biologists want to get down there or not? Yes, we do. Going to Alvin is my next bucket list thing. And Tarte2go is my first. And so I kind of check that off. And deep sea submersibles are my next thing that I want to do. So yeah, I totally want to go down there. And I think the research submersibles, the safety procedures are incredible. I mean, they would never send down a human if they thought there was anything wrong with the engineering. And every time they do upgrades to Alvin, you know, they do a lot of test

dives. And by the time you're going in it, like, there's not really any question about safety. I mean, like, it's always a risk. And I think I would worry about it in the back of my mind, but typically scientific submersibles are one of the safest things that you can do. I was like one of the safest things you could do, Holly, really. I sat on my ass and did a thousand-piece puzzle this past weekend, and I felt pretty safe doing that. Then again, an hour ago, I was eating yogurt out of a Pyrex measuring cup because all the bowls were in the dishwasher, and I sliced my pinky finger. I bled on my shirt, so I don't know. I don't know what safety is. But I looked up some stats, and this deep sea submersible has completed more than 5,000 dives since the mid-1960s. No deaths, but if you get in a car and go buy some granola, you have a one in

10 million chance of meeting the Reaper, which is not zero. So, less dangerous than buying granola. Also, how many bones are we talking to board Alvin? Okay, well, between renting the mothership that it's attached to, it's like 45,000 a day easy. Also, why Alvin? What does Alvin stand for? I think it's like aquatic life supporting vessel investigating nautical exploration. So I looked it up,

because I knew it stood for something bonkers. But no, it's just named Alvin because a guy named Alan Vine convinced Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to build it in the 60s. Thanks, Alan. Sadly, he ventured to the great beyond at the age of 79 in 1994, but not in a submersible. But either way, Holly can't email him and ask him for a favor.

How do you get onto an Alvin or something like that? What kind of research do you have to do? How do you plead your case? Who do you get onto an Alvin or something like that? What kind of research do you have to do? How do you plead your case? Who do you have to know? It's really hard, I would say. I think there's a lot of people that want to go down in Alvin and it's difficult to get onto those cruises. So, I mean, I could get on in one of two ways.

I could beg someone to get on their cruise and maybe get on Alvin or I could write a grant to include Alvin in my research. I have been trying to do that. I have not been successful so far, but even for scientists it's hard. How many scientists could go on it? I would say, I mean, a team of scientists on a boat is maybe 20 people and you have multiple cruises

per year that go. Sometimes it's the same people that go over again, but I think in the actual sub itself, it's too scientists and a pilot. Your odds are not zero. They're not zero, but it's a pretty hard. You'll get on there. Anyone listening to this who has an in? Can I ask you some questions from listeners? Yeah, sure. Okay, they know you're coming on. Get her on that album. Someone pull some strings or some ship ropes or air hoses or what have you.

And we donate to a cause of theologist choosing this week, Holly said, I would love it if you could support earthjustice.org. They are a wonderful nonprofit legal organization that tackles environmental issues related to public health, preservation of wild spaces, clean energy, and climate change. And you can find out more about them at earthjustice.org. So thank you to sponsors of the show for making these donations every week possible.

Okay, let's dig deep. Let's crack open a cold can of worms with your questions, including this one that was also asked by Bell. Brittany Ruiz has a question, would you still love me if I was a worm? I'm gonna get the answers yes on that, right? I mean, I, I, obvious yes. I'm gonna see if that's a song lyric, but it might be just a good question for anyone. Of course it's a meme. Of course your dad, me, did not know this,

but according to the research library, knowyourmeam.com. Would you still love me if I was a worm originated from a tweet by Shut Your Hell that depicted a scenario of a woman crying at 3am asking her husband if they were both born as worms if he would still like her. Would they even have married? Who hasn't wondered this honestly? Probably worms, but if you have a few minutes and you want to hear someone with a fabulous accent recite their original poem about being loved as a worm, look no further than Instagrammer

Miss Pony Penny. Would you still love me if I were a worm? And many of you, a shocking number, including Sam, Issa Brillard, Emily Staufer, Laser Intralegator, Cleb and Slayer, needed to know, Doon do neomatologists cut their worms into pieces? Is this their lab research? Sam wants to know, if you cut a worm in pieces, will each of those pieces become new worms or is that only certain worms? That is only certain worms.

That is flat worms, not nematodes. Although we do have one nematode that can regrow its tail. Actually, that worm is really cool because it's basically like a tube filled with bacteria. So it's basically like a tube filled with bacteria. So it's lost its gut, and it's just like packed its former gut with these symbiotic bacteria, and it's lost its mouth, and it just hangs out.

And if it loses its tail, it like regrows it and seals the bacteria back in. And we have nematodes in us, right? I hope you don't. Really? I mean, if you ate dirt, you might. But we would not. I mean, if you ate dirt, you might. But we would not. I mean, if you had a parasite, you would.

But for you, like, drink some drinking water with a worm, you might, but yeah, you should not have nematodes in you. OK, just checking. I wasn't sure if that's one of those things. Like, of course, you have a bazillion nematodes. Or it's like, if you do, you better call 911 or something. Or you've, like, eaten some uncooked pork. You know, nematodes are the reason why we cook pork

to whatever degree temperature because Trichanella is the pork parasite. Yeah, that would be bad. So if you eat these undercooked pork worms, they start their journey in your guts, and then they move to your muscles to make babies. You might experience such sensations as nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, fever, fatigue, and abdominal discomfort. Before it escalates to headaches,

fever, chills, cough, swelling of the face and eyes, aching joints, and muscle pains, as well as itchy skin and constipation. And according to the beach read, the textbook of medical microbiology and taric nematodes are among the most common and widely distributed animal parasites in humans. And in 1946, apparently, they had a worm meeting via the American Society of Parasetologists, and this one expert gave a lively lecture titled, This Wormy World, and estimated a truly gargantuan number of all kinds of Neematoid infections in humans.

But if you don't want pork-sist infections specifically, the CD says to cook those chops at 130 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes or at 140 for one minute. That's like 55 to 60 in Celsius, if you're concerned. Also, please wash your porky hands before eating finger foods. Your body will thank you, your toilet will thank you. One person asked, Jennifer Mocken asked, jumping worms? They don't got no legs. Have you ever heard of jumping worms? There is a jumping nematode. Yep. Okay.

Zed Shiragane. How come marine worms get crazy adaptations to make them look like wild little aliens while terrestrial worms are normal and boring? Well, that is not accurate because terrestrial worms basically like have harpoons in their mouths. The terrestrial nematodes, I said they eat plant roots and fungi juice, so they have evolved like a harpoon in their mouth that they will stick out and puncture a plant root and then suck out the juices. So I would argue that the threshold adaptations are even crazier than some of the marine ones. Holy smokes. Sam wants to know what's the wigglyest worm species.

Is there a way to quantify that? Who wigls the most? I mean, my answer is always going to be nematodes. Yeah, okay, I take it. They thrash around in an S-shaped because that's the only way they can move because they're lacking some key muscles for wriggling. Oh my God.

When you are a worm, you just whip your worm back and forth. Craig Collins wants to know, would love to know about the research surrounding worm memory. I recall that if you teach a worm a maze and then grind them up and feed them to another worm, that worm will know how to solve the maze. Is this true? This sounds like a very far outside my area of expertise. Yes.

I mean, that may have been apocryphal. That may not be true. I mean, I know sea elegans is used in Alzheimer's research because one of the reasons it's a useful model is because it has some of the same proteins and neural pathways that for human diseases. So like Parkinson's and I believe Alzheimer's, yes, we have a lot of proteins in common with the lowly nematode. Can you feed a worm to a worm? All right, I looked into this,

but because there are thousands upon thousands of C.Elegant studies, and I have to bathe and eat at some point, my goose was cocked here. I'd never find this study. I did find one titled, Principles for Coding Associate of Memories in a Compact Neural Network

about worms' memories to avoid stinky stuff. did find one titled, Principles for Coding Associate of Memories in a Compact Neural Network, about worms memories to avoid stinky stuff. And there was this other study with this effusive name, an elegant mind, learning and memory in sea elegans, which detailed worm plasticity of the tap with drawl response, which is just a fancy term for worms doing the backstroke in response to tapping the

Petri dish containing the worm. They're like, dang, earthquake. I'm out. There was also a very recent study, likely the talk of worm 23, about how descendants of worms trained to fear a certain odor also got stressed out by that odor, and that fear was transmitted to the offspring's cells nucleus via sperm, but not oocytes. So, paternal odor trauma affected future generations as a way of a warning system. And just when I felt dazzled and overwirmed by info, I finally stumbled upon that holy grail

of worm research I was looking for. I thought I'd never find it, but I found it, folks, my goose was not cooked. So, in 2021, there was a study out of Princeton, and it was called the role of the Sir-One Transposing in horizontal transfer of transgenerational memory, about which Dr. Colleen Murphy, who was the principal investigator on this, explained, we found that one worm can learn to avoid a pathogenic bacterium if we grind up that worm or even just use the media, the worms are swimming in and give that media or the crushed worm to naive worms. These worms now learn to avoid the pathogen as well. Dr. Murphy explained. Snare you have it. It's true, one millimeter tiny nematodes transfer warnings, memories, and I suppose trauma to each other

by swimming in the same goop or eating each other or being, I guess, fed each other by scientists. And yes, this information about worms is interesting, but I hope it opens your heart to the possibility of more empathy for just every living creature you ever encounter, including the bitchy receptionist at my dentist's office. You don't know what her great-grandparents went through. Neither do I.

Now, if you'd like to know more about worms on drugs, you can check out the Plenaryology episode, which is a stunning and charming one with Dr. One Pagan, who we love. So you have more in common with the rest of the world than you ever thought possible. So welcome, welcome to Unity with worms. I mean, we share so much DNA even with yeast.

Alex Ertman wants to know, what is the deepest underground a worm has been found? Also maybe the sound strange, but do landworms have community like are they down their building nests or networks of tunnels together, or do they just occasionally bump into each other, say a quick eye and move on? Do worms acknowledge the presence of other worms in marine environments? And yeah, like, how deep do you think worms go? I believe that deep, and I'm going

to talk about nematodes specifically, the deepest that we found is that one in the South African diamond mind. And I believe it's like three kilometers. It's pretty deep. How did they find a, were they looking for worms? I may be because there's a lot of like subsurface microbiology research, but mostly what they find down there is just bacteria and fungi and

so, but then they found a nematode and then it was a science paper. Did that person have to name the nematode? I think they invoked vampires, but I can't remember the exact name. Okay, I got you. So this worm was found in 2011 in a gold mine over two miles below the surface of the earth. And the geoscientist who first saw it described them as half-millimeter, black little swirly things that, quote, scared the life out of me when I first saw them moving. So you can read more about their discovery in the paper,

Neumatoda, from the terrestrial deep subsurface of South Africa. But the long and short of these teenies is their genus and species is Hallicevolobis Mephisto, named after the underworld demon, Mephistophalis, whose name itself means he who loves not the light. And if this vibe of darkness intrigues you, please find the link in the show notes

with all of our Spuktober episodes, including a two-parter on vampire lore with expert Jeff Holdman, a demonology episode, bats, spider webs, bones, body farms, catacombs, forest creatures, we got one on cultures, mortuary makeup, pumpkins, and more. But yes, worms named after demons. What a world, what a beautiful world. Have you gotten to name any nematodes? Not yet, but we are trying to do that with the Antarctic samples that's on the radar. It's just

really hard to name nematode species because you need some ridiculous amount of individuals from the same species. What are we talking? You need like five females and five males and then some juveniles. And usually sometimes we never find more than one nematode from a given species. So like just getting the checklist of things

you need to describe species is actually really hard for nematodes because there's all these rules written in the 1800s that don't make sense anymore. Do you have a mentor or someone that you really admire that you would want to name or would you name would you name it like a chibaka nematode or something like that. That's a good question. I haven't actually thought about that. And I don't know how I feel about naming nematodes after people, because there's been some pretty big press about how, like, why we name species after people, and why that may or may not be a good thing. Maybe I would name one after Buddha,

because, well, that was still a fan, some people. But I feel like that's what I would be comfortable with. But that's a problem that you're're gonna have to catch a lot more worms to even have that problem. Curious cat wants to know, do worms have a nervous system, or is it species reliant? They don't seem to have eyes,

but are they like jellyfish and able to detect light? So what kind of sensory organs are we looking at? So I'll give you this card. A translucent slim-faced baby. It looks like one of those long-nosed Russian wolf hounds, but with two little red dots, snugly close together on its snoop. Oh, wait, do we have these two little spots? So those are a cell-eye, also known as eye spots.

And this is a nematode that lives in kelp-hold fast. Like when they attach to rock, you have that squiggly mass of roots, and you have a nematode that only lives in those roots. And for some reason, they have these eye spots. We don't really know why, but a lot of nematodes will have these dark patches of pigment that they're not really true eyes, but they're pigmented and they're most likely detecting light.

So some do use light to sense environments, but the majority of them use the amphids, the sensory pores on the side of their head, those princess layabuns. Does the information that these eyesbots gather? Does it get processed anywhere in the worm? We don't know, and that's a good question. I do more like ecology and evolution research, so I don't necessarily study the nervous systems, but I mean, if we're using nematodes in like Alzheimer's research, then I'm assuming they have some sensory information that's useful. Yeah. Woo! Can I keep this one? Yeah, it's also andromal. So if like patron curious cat, you're wondering where these flesh tubes

store their brains. The answer is in a ring around their throats, kind of like an airplane neck pillow full of thoughts and feelings and horniness and transgenerational fears of odors. And there was a 2021 article out of the University of Leeds and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York titled, A Multi-Scale Brain Map derived from whole brain volumetric reconstructions. And it found that there's a network architecture of sea elegance brains that support sensory computation and brain-wide coordination, and essentially our brains may have more in common across all kinds of phyla. So if you ever meet a worm at a party, you already have a lot of

similarities you can talk about. Now what about getting it on? How is that happening? Patrons, Chris McWire, and Sarah King wanted to know, and Sarah, who has such a soft spot in their heart for worms, asked, do they come from eggs? Please give me their backstory. I'm way too emotionally attached. And that's the energy I'm looking for, Sarah. Ellen Dernall wants to know, how the heck do they reproduce?

Okay, so this is fun. All right, first of all, I said, and nematodes have males and females. So, sexual reproduction. Male nematodes, one of the defining taxonomic characteristics, is something called a spicule, which I describe as, like, picture, a stake that you use to kill a vampire. So, like, this giant, like, er, wouldn't thing,

that's pointy at both ends. Male nematodes have two of those, and they will eject those and then slam them into the female nematodes of like pry open her reproductive tract and then like throw some sperm in there. Oh, they have been rude. Does he like vampires? Does it have to be invited or is it just like, they can, how do they sense a female?

Well, how do they know that there's a female reproductive tract even around? That is a very good question. I do not have an answer to that, but they don't necessarily, another fun fact, they don't necessarily have to put it exactly in the right place. There is this reproductive strategy in nematodes called traumatic insemination. I heard about this. Bed bugs do it too, right?

Yep. So they may just use those stakes to stab the female anywhere, and just throw some sperm wherever, and then I believe the female will take the sperm and then just migrate it to the correct place. I don't like it. Oh, Christopher Blaba wants to know, with your work in Antarctica, and then a little flag there, are there worms that can survive the dry climate and extreme salinity of areas

like the dry valleys we were talking about? Yep, we have a lot of nematodes there. Not a lot, so there are many fewer species, the biodiversity is really low in the dry valleys, but it's an interesting environment because you have very strong connection to the microbial communities. And yeah, definitely high salinity.

I mean, also pollution, so once some of the worms I study are in the port of LA where there's all like gunk and DDT that's buried. And one of the things that my work is doing is trying to figure out if we have specific nematode species that love pollution and they can thrive in environments like that. So we're trying to use them as bioindicators as habitats, pristineness or impactedness. And we use DNA sequencing nowadays for that.

But the goal is to be like, this nematode loves pollution. Well, we were at yesterday, we were about to go snorkeling, we're on the dock, and I was like, Hey, you guys, you guys here, there's some DDT barrels buried off the coast of Catalina, and you're like, Oh, yeah, I'm trying to get some samples of it. I was like, what is it like that I'm standing on a dock with someone who's like, Oh, yeah, I got someone. Number one, where are those barrels and how do you get access to the gunk that might be linking out of them?

I believe they are somewhere off the coast of San Diego and I mean it's kind of as easy as emailing researchers that are going out there. So I actually may have an email waiting you might embark on the DDT barrels. But they're not like right off the coast here. Well, they're off the coast of San Diego somewhere. They're not like right off the coast here. Well, they're off the coast of San Diego somewhere. They're not that far off the coast. I mean, you could get in a sailboat and go there, but they're deep, right? So you need the deep sea, quarry, and equipment.

You need an ROV or something to like go down there and gingerly push the PVC tube into the like gunky spot where all the DDT leaked out. Woof. And so if you can find if there's a higher population of certain worms, then you can kind of figure out if we get a lot of these worms over here, chances are we get a lot of this gunk. Yeah.

And one of the things we're also trying to do is look at the genome of those worms. So the idea is that like if you can persist in such a toxic sludge pool, then you have certain things in your genome, like maybe up regulation of certain proteins or certain metabolic pathways that basically help you to survive in that environment and that will help inform research like in other extreme places like volcano soils or like Yellowstone hot springs, things like that. Oh my God, those are gonna be the apocalypse worms.

Yes. Trend forecast, if things keep going poorly, these are gonna be really hot. Yep. What about the hardest thing about what you do? What sucks? What is something that the hardest thing about what you do? What sucks? What is something that's just hard about worms or life, your life?

So my answer to this is bureaucracy because okay, I run a lab, so I am kind of like see myself as a CEO of a startup company, and I'll have to do like a lot of this paperwork, and it really sucks the life out of me if the paperwork is not efficient. Right?

I just wanna get reimbursed for this research trip to the beach, but I have to upload receipts for 50 cents because I bought three coaks and I don't understand why things can't be more efficient sometimes or forms that don't make sense. Or when you have a PDF form and try to fill it and then like, yeah, just like, it's hard. They're so expensive, focus-wise. And then by the time you get to fill it and then like, yeah, it's hard.

They're so expensive, focus-wise. And then by the time you get to the work you want to do, you're like, I spent all my focus filling out receipts. Yeah. Yeah. What about what do you love the most? What do you love about Neumatode's Neumatology? I love the sense of looking at something that no other human on earth has ever

seen before. And that's really like what motivates me. And I can pick up nematodes from outside in my garden. And still, like, maybe there's a new species that no one has lever-lead eyes on before. So I travel to these remote places. And it's really hard and expensive. And I don't go there often.

But I can bring the samples back. So when I'm looking at like an Antarctic worm under the microscope, I still feel the joy of the travel to those places. Even though that worm kind of looks the same as the one that I got from my garden sometimes, just the fact that like this came from Antarctica and I went there and this is amazing and like life is amazing

and that's just my favorite part of my job. What does the mud smell like? Smells like farts? Yeah, it smells like, yeah. It's good to know. That's good to know. Let's say that you're a backyard or burgeoning nemetologist. What kind of microscope do you need to see them? You don't even need anything fancy.

You can get away with a cheap stereoscope, even just magnification like 10x. If you go to your garden and you put that in the Petri dish, then you'll be able to see like worms wriggling. I mean, you can't see them to the stage of what we get on our fancy microscopes that cost $50,000, but you can like see them wriggling and you be able to experience the joy of them thrashing around. And then iPhone cameras mounted on the microscope, you can even take some videos. Ah, you can share the world of worms! Dr. Bick just got tenure, which is a huge deal, and has explored Antarctica, and has a robust mud collection and well-moisturized skin. What else is on her agenda? I'm doing things like experimenting with TikToks,

to tell stories, or just like even more thoughtful tweets and some science writing. So just having kind of like an artistic side of my scientific career that's focused on communication and just like spreading that joy and getting everyone excited about worms. I'm feeling really excited about doing that. The sea, just swimming with so many souls of tiny and giant creatures. Maybe there's water ghosts. Who knows? A beautiful thing to think of. What a party it is. Yeah.

And actually, I want to be buried in the deep sea. Do you really? How do you do that? I don't have a concrete plan yet, but I definitely want my remains to be fed back into the ecosystem. So maybe scattering of the ashes, I don't know if they could just throw my body over the side of the boat. Like I'm sure there's rules on that.

But definitely like scattering the ashes. And then my ashes will be marine snow and it will feed the worms and the circle of life. Would you want to be an inarcticum particular? No, I'm not picky. Any deep sea, any deep sea. And the coast of California gets pretty deep pretty quickly. And I love California, so. Warm food. I think that's beautiful. Thank you so much for talking to me.

You're welcome. This was fantastic to meet you and join you on your first ever snorkeling trip. Do you think I have nematodes in my hair from yesterday? I rinsed my hair. Oh, probably. Well, I hope, well again, I hope not, but maybe. Yay!

But your hair looked amazing anyway. Well, thank you. So ask warm experts wiggly questions about cold mud, because there is no question that is too unsmart. Look at how much weird info our brains now have. Thank you, Dr. Holly Bick. For being on, and you can find links to her TikTok, website, and so much more, plus a link to earthjustice.org

in the show notes. More links are up at alliword.com slash allergies, slash ne nematology. We also have smallages, which are kid-friendly, shorter versions of episodes that are classroom safe. Those are linked in the show notes or at alliwar.com slash smallages. And a full list of full-length episodes is organized by category. That's up at alliages.com. And you can stay tuned for a full month of spooktober episodes. Starting next week, they're so so so good and creepy and cozy. I thank you to Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas, Jared Sleeper and Meshadees-Mateland for editing small-a-g's, Aaron Talbert for Admining the Allegis Podcast Facebook Group, Emily White of the Wordery for making our professional transcripts.

Noel Delworth is our scheduling producer, Susan Hale is our managing director, also Handle's merch, Kelly Arduire, Handle's our website, and she can design yours. And someone who should not eat worms because she is well-liked is lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, who assembles a show, Nick Thorburn made the theme music, and if you stick around until the end of the show, I tell you a secret. And maybe you're like, why hasn't the handsome man Jared Sleeper been editing for a bit? And the answer is that I adore him so much, and he will always be your pod mom. But I lovingly released him from his husbandly podcast duties,

so he could pursue what he really loves, which is writing and acting. And boom, within two weeks, he got two parts in movies, which are beginning to shoot soon, especially now that it looks like the strikes are coming to an end. So I'm very excited for him. And also, it's nice to not have to talk to your spouse about work all the time, and you

can just sit around goofing and doing thousand-piece puzzles on a Sunday. I'm loving this. I think he is also. So thank you again, everyone, just for the patience, as I was out for August. Retraining my brain to not fear things like shaking petri dishes or mysterious odors. And I can say I think I'm the happiest where I've ever been. And it's just only making these episodes more fun to make. It's just a delight to be back.

All right, that's enough sincerity out of your dad for one day. Or is it, is it, okay, I love you, bye bye. Spooktober, let's get it on your creeps. Hackadermy College, Ammiology, CryptoZoology, Litology, Danosing Technology, Meteorology, Neuralectology, Nephology, Serialogy, and Solidology. A worm? I...