Ologies with Alie Ward - Bovine Neuropathology (HEADBUTTING) with Nicole Ackermans

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

Slamming heads together to impress someone: why does this happen? Let’s ask Dr. Nicole Ackermans, whose current job involves receiving sheep heads and painstakingly counting damaged neurons from headbutting concussions. The Neuropathology episode last week gives all the concussion basics, but this one turns the microscope away from accidents and points it right at intentional behaviors in nature, from bighorn sheep to musk oxen, goats, woodpeckers, and some other animals that will freak you out. Also: questionable helmet ideas and horny hogs.Get all the background on head trauma, including my recent brainwhack concussionCheck Dr. Nicole Ackerman's website and TwitterA donation was made to Society for Women's Health ResearchMore episode sources and linksSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hi. Hey, it's still your brother-in-law who weighs his coffee beans, but in a cool way, Ali Ward. And not only is this a day late, baby, but also this is the bonus episode that I promised you last week. So what? I turned around the neuropathology episode on concussions last week. So fast, it just gave me additional whiplash, so I came to my senses and I said, Ward, go back to bed. Sleep a little more. You bashed your skull, and that's a great excuse. Use it. So here is the crisp, sunny follow-up episode about concussions about MTBI, TBI, CTE, and the natural world in animals. And if you're like, I don't know what any of those acronyms are, they don't make sense. And you're also like, wait, dude, you recently sustained a severe

hospital grade concussion, then you're going to want to beep, beep, mosey back to the neuropathology episode from last week. It's a really, really great one, lots of asides about why I ended up in an ambulance a few weeks ago and consequently why this episode is two days late. TBI's man, no joke. So this all just reached out after mine because she's a researcher in the field and in the lab and because severe neurological damage like CTE can only really be detected on autopsy. Thus, it's a very controversial diagnosis in living people. A lot of folks butting heads about it. So she studies butting heads about it in bighorn sheep and musk oxen and all kinds of stuff. So she got her undergrad degree in the biology of organisms, populations, and ecosystems in France.

She went to Antwerp and Vienna for her master's in comparative vertebrate morphology, and then went and got a ding-dang doctorate in evolutionary biology in Zurich studying tooth wear on animals. And we recorded this a week or so ago and she was rounding out her postdoc in the lab of your favorite functional morphologist, Dr. Joy Ridenberg, I'm out in Sinai in New York City. Great episode. I'll link it on my website. But her postdoc is wrapping up. So use the links in the show notes to also reach out to her if you are hiring someone rad because she is. You can also use the links in the show notes to join patreon.com slash oligies where for a buck a month you usually get to send questions for me to ask ahead of time

except for this one because like a goat brain on a lab slab it was supposed to be all cut up and used for last week's episode but whatever. It was weird and fun and you deserve to hear the whole thing. So for zero dollars also you can support the show and my very fragile sense of self by leaving a review. I read all of them and here's a still moist, freshy one. It's gross. From someone by the name of Rana Maddox who wrote the review, I gobble up almost every episode like a raccoon hits marshmallows. Also thank you to the reviewer who said that their whole family watches brainchild and listen to oligies and to get well soon. They wrote please take care of yourself Allie which was so sweet that made me cry and it was signed huge fangs and I

don't know if they meant huge fans or not but huge fangs honestly better more fitting. Let's talk about while we're on it animals showing off by acquiring brain damage. Let's get into it. We're going to talk about bovid neuropathology. So get ready for the life of a retired ox, the sliced and stained brain, how to build a better helmet using sheep skulls and how not to do that. Twitter, flame wars, wild boar wars, how a bunch of tangled proteins can really mess up a melon. What a melon actually is and see creature gossip and the coolest cooler you will ever crack open with vertebrate morphologist evolutionary biologist and bovid neuropathologist Dr. Nicole Ackermans.

Oh my gosh doctor, Dr. Headbutt hello. Hi Allie. It's Dr. Nicole Ackermans. I go by she, her, but everyone calls me Nikki. Dr. Headbutt it is. So tell me a little bit about how you ended up in I guess would this be functional morphology? Would this be like traumatic osteology? What would you call this field? So I'm in my postdoc I'm combining functional morphology and neuroscience. So the functional morphology part is the skull, horns and head and movement part and the neuroscience part is the actual cellular brain damage part. And how do you even do this work? Do you have to go out in the field? Do you have to find, concussed, bighorn sheep? How do you start? Yeah, so I asked myself the same question because obviously this no one kind of looked at this before. A lot of

people are like bighorn sheep don't get concussions. Turns out no one's checked. So I figured out I should probably go check and unfortunately I started all this in 2020 so there was no field for me but I had about a month where I started in January so I had a few months before the pandemic to call up everyone I could possibly get a number for at Fish and Wildlife in any state where there was a bighorn sheep and say hey if you have a dead sheep can you send it to me? Totally normal. So I can look at their brain and I actually got like six sheep heads from them and they're all like natural deaths or like cougar kills or one of them broke its legs so they had to euthanize it so no sheep were killed for the purpose of my study. Nice. So the neuroscience part they have a big

walk-in fridge full of random animal brains and they happen to have muskox brains in there so I just added those to my study as well. And what have you found looking at those brains? Do you have to put them in an MRI, in a CT scan? Yeah so actually first we did MRI scan them because if you have a very very bad brain trauma you might get regional shrinkage of different parts of your brain. I mean at that point in a human you have behavioral problems but I just wanted to first check okay is the brain intact on the MRI? All of our MRIs were clean. And if you listened to the neuropathology episode last week you might remember that even though I did concuss myself falling down a flat of stairs and then collapsed and then convulsed and then collapsed again

my CT scan was clean and an MRI would have been totally fine looking A plus two. So those hospital machine big boys are helpful for seeing life-threatening emergency brainbleeds but they don't tell the full microscopic story. For that you need rest and you also to see it need either a psychic wizard or a scientist with a hacksaw. Then once we had our pictures I could go cut up the brain and take out a piece where I thought that there would be maybe some trauma if it was even there at all and look at that under the microscope. What did you find? Okay here we go. So it was a very long process I don't want to make it sound like simple like it took me a year to first troubleshoot the technique to stain a bighorn sheep brain because surprise

no one had stained a bighorn sheep brain before and it uses immunohistochemistry we're looking for a certain type of protein that kind of shows up when your brain gets damaged and so I had to troubleshoot this this immunohistochemistry technique for about a year but I figured it out eventually. This paper is actually currently under review so it's a little bit breaking news but it's gonna come out eventually. I found a few neurons actually first in the musk oxen which also but their heads extremely hard and they were dead neurons and there were some sort of clumped up dendrites which are like the neuron tails and first of all I was just excited to see just one of these I mean it's beautiful it's like a big spider web under the microscope it was

perfectly stained I was so happy. Wow it takes a special and divine person to get giddy for musk ox head trauma and we found her and when she described the spider web of dead neurons I was like yes spider web patterns I think I know what she's talking about she's probably talking about these subarachnoid hemorrhages that I read about so I went to go see what they looked like stained under a microscope and it turns out she was not talking about subarachnoid hemorrhages at all those are totally different things they both just happened to look spider webby and the arachnoid layer is a layer under the skull between the brain and there it's kind of webby and it houses fluid that floats your brain she wasn't talking about that at all so a bleed there is what CT scans

are looking for but what Dr. Akramans is talking about is zooming in and in and in way past the scope of a CT scan to see little knots of insoluble tau proteins and then you know after that one single one I kind of went further and did a really large amount of stains and counted them all by hand to see if there was sort of grouping of these dead neurons or dying neurons in in certain areas because if it was just like Alzheimer's it could be sort of more dying neurons on the surface going deeper and deeper as the disease gets worse but if it's traumatic injury the forces that are applied to the head when when there's an injury kind of go into the folds of the brain and rip the cells at the bottom of these folds and I actually found groups of they're called neurofibrillate tangles

but pathological neurons at the bottoms of these folds and so that showed for sure that it was brain trauma actually so after a life of headbutting or tackling or just thumping your skull on stuff like I guess like me those tiny tube filled towels ball up and Nikki says that she's finding them kind of like you would necklaces at the bottom of your purse just these delicate clots of problems but why why and how do you think evolution kind of selected for this behavior in especially breeding males even though it might lead to brain trauma yeah this is my question to myself as well I have some theories um I guess you know the goal of life this is going to seem really simple but the goal of life is just sex it's reproduction right yeah okay maybe not you personally but

mother nature is just a tunnel vision horny ghost inside each and every one of us so once you get to that point if you're able to reproduce and pass on your genetic material if you have dementia or if you're a bit you know damaged in the brain it doesn't really matter anymore so one of my theories is just that well it doesn't they don't live that long anyway they might not develop dementia or Alzheimer's like we do in relation to these kind of illnesses and I'm sorry I know you just got a concussion so I want to freak you out although I'm sure the other experts you talked to freak you out enough already but yeah my my theory is that maybe first of all maybe they don't live long enough to actually have really bad side effects and second of all maybe it just

doesn't matter because like their life is not really really complex I mean no no disrespect to bighorn sheep I love them but they eat they you know evade predators and they reproduce so you know they don't need to do puzzles and memory games what about how do you think that those type of neurological impacts how do you think it does affect them do you think that there's any loss of coordination or balance you know I would love to know it's we barely have a behavioral scale for mice like it's established in mice but almost no other species has a scientific behavioral scale so we don't have a baseline to say this is normal behavior and then based on that what is different behavior the only sort of hint that I have that something might be different is when I

talked to the folks at the muskox farm in Alaska they have a bull muskox who's like 27 years old which is like twice his normal lifespan and apparently he just hangs out in his field and stares into the distance all day are you okay buddy so I'm guessing there might be a little bit of something going on there but I would love to have you know someone go out into the field and observe and see if they're you know over the years if they act differently I assuming it would it would show like in humans you'd kind of have memory issues you'd have yeah loss of coordination um but one thing is for sure is that if they had a human head they would not survive uh it's it is actually their big skulls and horns that help even though they do get brain trauma it helps protect them

for long enough so horns and skulls ultimate helmets for hoofed and cudd chewing pugilists who are motivated by sweet love making are there animals that aren't ruminants that do that oh my god yes okay this is so exciting it's really exciting okay you're this is going to blow your mind so I actually wrote a little bit of a review about this last year during quarantine so whales whales headbutt what we're pretty sure yeah and like almost every group of whales has been either observed or just written about headbutting the review that I published has a picture of two bottlenose dolphins jumping out of the air and headbutting each other mid-air what the fuck so that blew my mind that had just suffered a blow so a little more on that what other ocean

animals being each other with their literal melons a melon apparently is a squishy part of a whale head and we're gonna get to that in one second but first we're gonna take a really really quick break from our sponsors who allow us to donate to a cause of niki's choosing and she selected the society for women's health research and she said as a biologist I'm constantly running into illnesses that are poorly researched in women if even studied at all concussions fall into that category so I hope it's fitting so the society for women's health research promotes research on biological sex differences in disease to improve women's health through science and policy and education so thank you for helping us slam some cash into their hands there's more at swhr.org

and I'll link down the show notes so thanks sponsors okay back into it dolphins and whales who butt each other in the head like they're in a Vin Diesel movie so in her paper Dr. Ackerman's cites that the ramming behavior has been observed in sperm whales, narwhals, humpback whales, bottlenose whales, bottlenose dolphins, and orcas and she writes quote in pilot whales unusual skull structures may even act as a form of antlers inside the head what so we need so many cytology episodes given that these things evolved out of the water to dry land hung around on dry land hoofed around romped around munching on grass and maybe like eating birds Michael ate a bird and then they bounced back to the water and they modded

they're already modded fins from legs back to flippers and dolphins have bigger brains than us four to five times larger than we'd expect them to be for their size which by the way did you know that dolphins can be like 11 feet long I feel like no one has ever told me that anyway relative to that body size they are the second most encephalized animals on the planet which is a sentence I read recently that was written by the most encephalized species on the planet but yes why the headbutting why why why why and one of the ideas is that this is maybe a conserved practice between all of the arduodactyls because whales you know are part of the arduodactyl hoofed animal family so that's super exciting why do you any idea why they might do that

same as with the big horn sheep and the other male animals it's fighting for females and showing like which male has the superior genetics to be able to survive that basically it's wild there's a type of wild forest hog that headbutts and it makes a crazy loud noise and there are uh horn bills they fly into each other's heads in midair so I wanted to name those guys because it's pretty cool so nicky's 2021 paper is titled unconventional animal models for traumatic brain injury and chronic traumatic encephalopathy and in it she notes that this clash has been described by other researchers watching hogs and it produces a loud cracking sound and she even included and cited a youtube link and naturally I clicked it as fast as my fingers allowed and let me set the

scene okay we open on a springtime hillside serving as a verdant arena for two shaggy tusked contenders they look like a cross between a farm pig and a warthog but also wearing a ghillie suit and they scratch at the soil beneath them and then run at each other's skulls over and over and the weirdest part is that their tails are wagging so much and I don't know if that just means they're excited or amped up or if they love it whatever they're relentless and in her paper nicky writes quote on rare occasions these head clashes can result in skull fractures and even death raising the question of the cost that these fights take on the hog's neuro anatomy perhaps she continues similarly to the thick fat pad found between a sheep's horns the giant forest

hogs facial pads serve both as a means of protection and as a sexual signal so in the wild with a fatty sexy brain cushion and some bony helmets individuals prove their merit before a hopefully receptive and I guess ovulating audience so next time you're out there and you're witnessing a soggy, beer-soaked kerfuffle at a bar just be glad no one in there is growing knives out of their temples can get real gnarly I mean is it so impossible for you to watch like a boxing match or like a UFC match with friends and not yes I cringe every time something happens and because every time you get a concussion or a brain injury it's an exponential curve towards potential future problems like dementia, Alzheimer's, PTSD, seizures it's like why doesn't anyone fight

by just bumping butts together you know why can't they do it where we've got so much flesh and no brain there might be some species of sea slug that does that I don't know do any animals pierce each other's heads with their fallacies in dick-to-dick combat you ask of course they do this is earth but just be glad that it was twilight and not the 2015 paper cephalotraumatic secretion transfer and a hermaphroditic sea slug that inspired 50 shades of gray because slugs are out there and they are stabbing each other in the head with their dicks and putting secretions in there babies is there anything that you have to kind of cross reference at all with human impacts or is it just impossible to even extrapolate this information into oh yeah yeah a lot of the cellular

stuff is really similar to humans and honestly that's all I have to work off of because like I said not a lot of other people are looking at this there's a lot of artificial induced traumatic brain injury and sheep to study the development but it's really hard to study in humans too because a lot of the data comes from post-mortem brains you can't really take a brain biopsy while someone's alive so we're developing new techniques as you know as as technology gets better but the actual overall data out there is not a lot but I do use a lot of the human stuff to try and compare and and prove that that is indeed what's going on do you have to put a call out on like the worldwide sheep brain web where you've asked more people do you think the more that your information becomes

public or when this paper gets published you'll be able to get more samples first of all I think we need to trademark that because I I need a worldwide sheep web because I wish it was that easy to get samples I I don't know I don't think there really is a system to get samples like that I just called fish and wildlife because I happen to be in the US but I don't know it's really interesting for this topic because it's something that everyone internally thinks oh yeah big horn sheep headbutting concussions like that totally makes sense but it's not something that a lot of people are willing to investigate because there's not a huge like financial gain behind it I mean part of it is for me is like understanding headbutting in all animals helps the human science and maybe

we can learn from big horn sheep to help humans but it's not like I'm gonna sell a helmet to the NFL right off the bat I mean NFL please call me but like I don't know if that's gonna happen so I'd love to get more samples uh if there are people out there with big horn sheep samples send them to me but it's uh it's that's the hardest part yeah but do you find that there's a lot of controversy when it comes to concussions or tbi or mtbi or cte I didn't I was not plugged into that subculture at all before I ate shit down the stairs but yeah like what is there a lot are there a lot of differing opinions based on what is making money I have opinions yeah um I know there's a lot of sort of pseudoscience people that freak out about it actually on our twitter

thread I think that happened it was weird it was weird and we had one tweeter keep popping up in the replies like a fucking marmot with comments about how football should not take the blame for any cte and that all the impact athletes with postmortem evidence of cte likely just happened to get it elsewhere like coincidentally this person also had the emoji of a football in the bio anyway Dr. Ackerman's Nicole a wonderful person to follow on twitter so you can tweet and ask her about how woodpeckers have more accumulations of tau proteins compared to non-pecking bird species and Dr. Ackerman's will even do things like treat her followers to a 25 part thread on how to deflesh a skull should you need to but I try to avoid that I like stick to my sheep so I

don't have to deal with the human part I understand why people freak out it's scary um there are some people for me it's really frustrating as the biomechanics area where they use this sort of bio inspired materials they think like I said bighorn sheep don't get concussions because sheep are amazing and like they are perfect and then they don't actually look at the biological background but they create devices based on this without you know looking at the basic science one example is the cue collar I don't know if you've looked into this yet um so do take a look at the controversy behind the cue collar it's this collar that goes around your neck and sort of tightens around your veins and arteries and it's supposed to okay the basic idea is that it's supposed to increase the

pressure in your head similar to the arterial pressure of a bighorn sheep because they live in altitude and they have higher pressure and this causes less concussions in theory if you didn't know any biology this would be a great idea unfortunately no one's arterial pressure increases that high even if you're on the top of Machu Picchu um I guess they didn't google that oh no I mean yeah so the problem is this made it to the popular science and the actual paper got a lot of traction and without people you know thinking this could actually be dangerous to football players and youth athletes because it's based on a faulty premise although I will have a sort of other thing to say about this is that it may work for other reasons including maybe a sort of placebo

effect that you feel protected because you have this on and that but we don't know they're like testing it but there's a I don't know this really frustrated me because it could be dangerous and people didn't bother to look at the real science behind it this is my own personal vendetta yeah every time I see a paper where they say bighorn sheep don't get brain trauma I'm like no shake my computer but to their credit I haven't published yet so and how are they when when people say that bighorn sheep don't get brain trauma obviously you know from looking at it firsthand that that's false but also from what I understand concussions have to be clinically diagnosed so unless you're a bighorn sheep's doctor asking about symptoms you can't diagnose a bighorn sheep with a concussion

because you can't have them fill out a form right Ali that is exactly correct and you know sometimes in humans they get up and walk away and you think they're perfectly fine so how would you even tell in a sheep where yeah they look fine but like I don't know what does a fine sheep look like I yeah oh yeah yeah you can't ask them if they're experiencing any dizziness or tingling in the limbs necessarily you know yeah what do you think is the hardest part or the most frustrating part about the work I mean we've just talked about you know flim flam and making helmets and face safety gear that are not sound but anything else that's just gets your goat I get really impatient when it comes to writing grants because you don't always have a success rate and it takes a really

a lot of time and people kind of think that your ideas are dumb because like for my stuff it's not immediately saving the world so obviously no money is coming my way and the job market kind of sucks when you're an academic I know you've covered this with a lot of other guests before ah yes the broken system of academia do you suffer and help change it or do you take care of your mental and physical well-being let's look at the bright side what about the stuff that gets you really excited about your work oh I'm I'm obsessed with evolution I think it's so crazy like that it works like basically that the world is just random chaos and eventually if you throw enough pasta to the wall it like sticks and that makes an animal like that's so cool and every day even actually

from your podcast every time I listened to a different expert I found out some weird thing that I think I wasn't going to care about about like spider claws or something and then it's a whole new world of awesome things that are going on so I'm just excited about it every day and animals are awesome it's just so cool to think that we're just a collection of successful mutations you know yeah it's just like something mutated it happened to work for the time and the place we're at and go you know I always think about that when you think about luck or or success it's just a lot of mutations on mutations on mutations and then when you look at something like comparative evolution where you have like a Tasmanian tiger compared to a dingo and they look exactly the

same they have almost the same tooth pattern the same size the same limbs and they're not related at all once a mammal like a placental mammal and once a marsupial and meanwhile they look almost exactly the same and proof that evolution is pretty cool I don't know it's like formed by the different habitats but I don't know it's just fascinating oh and one more question when someone sends you a sheep head what kind of box does that come in I'm so glad you asked usually it's in a cooler filled with ice and really tightly duct taped it actually worked really well I got it FedEx over a night last time and it was still fresh when I got it because um brains have an expiration date you want them fresh if you freeze them the crystals can kind of damage your sample

depending on the technique you're doing so under 36 hours is best what so I got it shipped overnight and it worked so that's what I do know it was a whole head by the way did the fish and wildlife department just say like we happen to have like a freshly dead one like right here I just gave them all my number and I said when the sheep guys call me and then they did and I was at the Met at the time I think it I was like okay uh send me the sheep oh my god this is exciting I love the idea that the FedEx person has it on a dolly just getting it up to your floor it yeah that's I mean we have a pretty wild zoo of brains that come in and out we work a lot with whales as well as you know joy is a whale specialist and the problem with that is the 36 hour time frame because

once they die and they beach it's usually quite soupy in there so we're looking at explosions for brain trauma and whales too but it's really hard to get good samples for those guys oh my god never use whale in explosion in the same sentence again so ask big horn experts big horny questions about why they destroy their brains for sex the big horns do that not the experts but honestly the experts love talking about it so learn more about Dr. Ackerman's at NicoleAckerman's.com which is linked to the show notes learn more about systems biology guest Dr. Emily Ackerman not related whose episode is also linked to the show notes uh Nicole's Twitter handle is Ackerman's Nicole where she goes by Dr. Sheep which should definitely be Dr. Headbutt whatever she also has a monthly

podcast interviewing older folks about their unexpected life stories and it's called Granny Stories you can find out more about the Society for Women's Health Research at SWHR.org we are on Twitter and Instagram at oligies I'm at Ali Ward with 1L on both thank you Erin Talbert who admins the LNG's podcast Facebook group with help from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis of the URI That podcast thanks Noel Dilworth and Susan Hale for all the behind the scenes help from social media wrangling to scheduling and merch thank you to Emily White of the Wurdery for making our professional transcripts Katelyn Patton for bleeping them thanks to Kelly R. Dwyer for making my website she can make yours too and to Stephen Ray Morris and of course the Rodriguez Thomas for helping edit

Smology's episodes which are short classroom safe versions of the classics we just posted number nine which was Lidology with Dr. Jane McGonagall so that is up in your feed in case you have kiddos or you don't like asides there's fewer asides in it anyway of course thank you to lead editor and fresh mullet haver and Jared Sleeper of MindJet Media for stitching it all together every week sometimes many times a week often on a tight deadline happy birthdays to Dr. Sarah McAttack McAnulty you can listen to her episodes on squids you can tell her you love her on the 16th happy birthday McCurns and Sofaloaf as well Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music and if you stick around until the end of the episode I'll tell you a secret and this

week it's that when it comes to doing skincare routines I'm horrible at it I hate it I resent it I don't like it oftentimes I don't remember what order to put things in you got to use a toner and a serum and a moisturizer I don't know what goes on when what about retinol I guess you don't use the sunscreen and I anyway I don't know and I was just thinking it would be dope to have a sticker kind of like the ones that go on bananas and with like a sun and a moon on it and you can write a number so at a glance you could just remember what things go and what orders at what time of day anyway it's only a secret at the end because I will either never do this and I just wanted to tell someone about it or I will do this immediately and maybe I'll put it in the merch store if

other people are like I could use those I don't know also thanks for bearing with the lateness last few weeks as I readjust to life when things are expected of my bruise brain totally feeling better I'm just kind of slow moving so maybe algae will begin to coat my hair like a fine mossy halo we can only hope okay bye you saw my headbutt huh