Ologies with Alie Ward - Echinology (SEA URCHINS & SAND DOLLARS) with Rich Mooi

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

The hedgehogs of the sea: echinoids are spiky, spiny, pokey, be-toothed, venomous, mysterious, gorgeous evolutionary marvels. And Dr. Rich Mooi of the California Academy of Arts & Sciences is one of their biggest champions. Come stroll through the offices for a face-to-face encounter with this infectious expert. We talk sand dollars, uni, doves of peace, fire urchins, kelp forests, tiny hats, butt placement, foot eyes and how to find your niche, even if it’s miles below the surface on a rotting log. And bonus at the very very end: a chat about the practicalities of owning an electric vehicle with a few sci-comm up-and-comers.Learn More About Dr. Rich MooiA donation went to California Academy of SciencesFollow the California Academy of Arts and Science on TwitterMore episode sources and linksSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, 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, fun fact about this episode. It's all about sea urchins, but at the very end, we put a little bonus episode for you, and it's all about electric vehicles. I've long had a passion for them. I also like to get away from driving fossil fuels. I have an electric vehicle, so I got a chance to talk with an up-and-coming science communicator. He has a podcast called Star Talk, and we discuss electric vehicles and the possibilities around them.

So that's at the very end of the episode, but on to sea urchins. Hi. Hi. It's your best man's brother. Who makes really good kebabs? Allie Ward, let's dive into the sandy sea bottom, shall we? Let's gather some facts about waterhead chogs. This ology is a kind of terms specifically sea urchins and sand dollars.

This is a wild one. Echinos in Greek means head chog, urchin, Latin for head chog, waterhead chogs. So I got into physically the California Academy of Sciences for this one. That's right. It's an in-person interview. Hi, Rich. Hello, Rich. Welcome to Sea Urchin Central.

Oh, I'm sorry. You've had quite a morning. I had just flown up an hour before to San Francisco. I raced to the Academy, and I was balancing a cafeteria coffee and my tiny old Mervin's leather purse with all my sound equipment. I had just gotten a negative PCR. Things were good. We had some face-to-face communication with one of the world's experts in this field.

I hope you're ready to talk to the urchins. Oh, I'm never ready to talk to you. I hate those things. Who we will meet in a sec, but first, thank you to everyone at patreon.com slash allergies for supporting the show and everyone who has ever left a review for the show, which keeps it up in the charts. I've read every single one you've ever left, including one left this week from Lil Philly, who wrote, this podcast is like the best info dump friend you could ask for.

And they write, I love you so much that I can even forgive you for throwing shade on shakshuka. Lil Philly, it's mutual, and shakshuka would be fine without the tomatoes. Other than that, shakshuka, your trash. Okay, so this guest, this ecologist, he has been studying these sea creatures for decades and is now the curator of kinoderms at the California Academy of Sciences, Department of Invertebrate Zoology and Geology. And his brain holds more knowledge about how these creatures have evolved and how they

are related to each other than perhaps anyone else out there. And these critters live on sandy sea floors and rocks from places like Nova Scotia, all the way to Antarctica and everywhere in between. And he has published papers on populations from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Morocco, Florida, and more. And most people, if you ask them, what do you think of a sea urchin? They say, I don't think about sea urchins. Well, get ready for that exchange.

You're about to drag down the freeway just thinking about their butts and hats and aerodynamics, their disembodied teeth, designer sand grains, philosophers lanterns, the best sushi you have ever had, what it's like for your whole damn body to be an eye. So please enjoy these waves of knowledge crashing all around you with human delight, curator, researcher, explorer, evolutionary enthusiast, and new friend, ecologist Dr. Rich Moy. Oh, yeah, it's Rich Moy. That's my published name. I'm Richard John, and it's he, him.

I work on a wide variety of echinoderms, right? So the sea urchins are one little corner thereof. How would you say? I mean, we might as well just start, yeah. Yeah, sure. Well, Echinoid. Echinoid. Echinoid.

The formal name for the group is Echinoidia. Okay. Oidae, the Oidae ending just is a special connotation that it's a larger group within an even larger group. And that even larger group is a phylum. And in this case, we're talking about the phylum Echinodermata. And the Echinodermata is a group that includes all those familiar sort of marine iconic things like starfish, sea lilies.

If you've ever heard of sea lilies, they're actually not plants. They're animals that look a little bit like a starfish turned upside down on a stalk more to the sea bottom. I've never seen or heard of it. Sea cucumbers, you probably heard of those. Heard of them? Yeah. Sometimes they're eaten.

Sometimes they're fished for food. Their poop is mesmerizing. Their poop is mesmerizing. Absolutely. A sea cucumber side note is so polite. It eats buckets of sand and it cleans all the debris out of it. And then at the other end, just imagine a tube of toothpaste, but with sand just on a continuous loop.

It is mesmerizing. And yes, the phylum Echinodermata contains a lot of different animals, but this episode will be zooming in to both the regular, symmetrical, and the irregular ones because those two are his favorites. Would this be echnoidology if we're talking just urchins? Actually it's kind of a made up term. But I call myself an ecologist. Perfect.

That's not a made up term. You're allowed to make it up. I'm allowed to make it up. Yes. You're one of the foremost researchers of this. All three of us call ourselves that. There's actually quite a lot of interest in sea urchins worldwide and there are experts in as far flung places as Austria, lots of them in Russia at the moment.

That's a difficult topic, but I have several colleagues there with whom I'm missing direct contact at the moment. Rich also has colleagues at Scripps and is working via a grant to piece together the evolution and family tree of sea urchins and then cross-cheque with fossils. One of the great things about sea urchins, and I'll tell you a bit more about what those actually are in a moment, is that they fossilize really well because they have this hard structure of skeleton. It's actually a true skeleton, so it gets a special name.

It's called a test. This is a test. Okay. And as I tell my students, don't let me catch you calling it a shell. If I hear you calling it a shell, I'm going to have to hunt you down. But it's actually an internal skeleton. A shell is external. It's secreted by snails and clams and things like that as an external protection.

But the test of sea urchins is actually like your skull in a way. There are internal organs inside that and then the whole thing is covered with skin and there are muscles to operate the spines and all of the other good things that make a sea urchin work in its environment. So it really is a true skeleton. Because it's not the last thing facing the environment. That's correct. There's actually an interface of skin, epithelium, we call it, special name, but it's a skin

layer between that test, the skeleton, and the environment itself. Which makes sea urchins kind of special in many ways because the form of that test tells us a lot about how they live, where they live, because so much of that is reflected in the skeletal structure in the shapes of the things that sea urchins adorn themselves with. That you can actually see a sea urchin in the fossil record and know almost immediately by comparison with what they're doing today what that animal was doing in its environment 10, 10s, dozens, hundreds of years, millions of years ago. So that makes them an ideal laboratory for the study of major changes in evolution, major

evolutionary innovations. I like to say that I study innovation in nature. Evolutionary novelty is my schtick. Well, what about your history though? How did you, if you're talking your evolution, doesn't quite go back as long as the sea urchins, but how did you wind up studying these spiky, sand-dollary, round, flat spiky creatures? Well, the story goes back a long way. I'm one of those nerdy kids that tripped out on all kinds of ancient books and books that

my relatives would send to me because they knew of my interests. And so one of my favorite books was a book by Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us. And I actually had an abridged version and I'm never tired of looking at the pictures in there. So I knew, I guess maybe when I was about eight or nine years old that I wanted to be a marine biologist. Wow, that's so young. That's so convenient for you and your parents and teachers.

It was convenient for me especially, but yeah, I think people saw, oh yeah, marine biology, probably stay out of trouble. But the truth is that marine biology for me in the landlocked city of Toronto was a bit of a challenge. I'm sure. So I lived through a lot of that by reading all of these books and watching the great Cousteau shows and things like that. It is not very glamorous, but it is floating and it is alive.

So I'm one of these guys that was actually inspired by people like Cousteau to go into his field of study. And I think about the age of ten or nine, I was drawing the blueprints of the research vessel that I was going to have someday. That's been slow to come about, but that's not to say that I haven't had an opportunity to do some amazing stuff out on the field. I've been on ships in Antarctica, I've been in submersibles, I've been able to join on expeditions to the Philippines, a ladder of which has been a mainstay of a lot of our

work here at the Academy to study the health of coral reefs and see our trans-integral to that health. And so I'm really honored to have been able to do that work there with all of my colleagues here who are so concerned about the decline of coral reefs today. When I was younger, I had this drive to be a marine biologist, but I ended up doing my undergraduate, my graduate studies at the University of Toronto in Canada, challenged by this distance from the ocean. But I did a lot of work with a professor there, a late colleague of mine, a dearly beloved

man named Malcolm Telford, who introduced me to the world of sea urchins by way of not only helping to teach the marine field course that we had out in New Brunswick in the Bay of Fundy where the tides are 30 feet or more. Just a side note, the Bay of Fundy is fun indeed. It's right above Maine, and I was like, are 30-foot tides high? I don't know. And I did some piddling around, and it led me to the website Bayoffundy.com, which bears a giant font, all caps proclamation, Bay of Fundy Tides, the highest tides in the world.

So apparently, yes, they are a big deal. But marine scientist and author Dr. Malcolm Telford took rich under his watery wing. He was interested at first, at least initially, in these little crabs. There's these tiny little crabs that are parasitic on sea urchins. How small are they? They're really small. They're about a quarter of an inch across at the most. Many of them, a great many of them, are a lot smaller than that.

And they make their life living on the sea urchins, snipping off little pieces of spine and eating those, and just generally kind of making life maybe a little bit miserable for these sea urchins. We got the crabs, but he was interested in those. Very few people had actually done any work on those, and he started studying them. And he realized that people knew a lot more about crabs than they did about the hosts. And he started getting interested in sand dollars. And anybody who's walked on a beach where sand dollars wash up knows that these things

can wash up in huge numbers. Some of them have holes right through them. Some of them are extremely, extremely flat. And he began to wonder what's the relationship between the holes and the flatness. And he got more interested in the hosts than he did in the crabs in the end. And I came along at around the time when he was switching his research program to all of this cool sand dollar stuff, and also fell in love with the sand dollars, because that was a really interesting set of models about how they lived in their environments that

were completely wrong. Really? Yes. There was a supposition that they walked around like little sieves to sieve the sand and get the particles out of the sand to feed on. And I studied studying their functional morphology. I wasn't always an evolutionist. I was, well, we're all always evolutionists.

But I wasn't really studying what the relationships were amongst all the myriad different forms of sand dollars there might be. I was really interested in what's known as functional morphology. So that was a different ology. I was a functional morphologist. And functional morphology is all about asking, why does this part do this? It's the why. Well, evolutionary biology is like the who.

And when Rich's mentor switched from crabs to echinoderms, Rich too was all aboard the echinology train, like tutut in the functional morphology party car. Particularly interested in the tube feed, which are tiny little cylindric, really extensible tubes, fluid filled tubes that all sea urchins have that they can use to extend out into the water or into the environment. And there's a little sticky little pad on the end. Some people call it a sucker, although we're not too sure how much sucking is involved. A lot of people think of them as little plungers or something like that.

But they're very, very tiny on sand dollars. They're so small that they're very difficult to see with the naked eye. And they're much less than the width of a human hair in some of the species. But they're extremely dexterous. They can be very strong for their size. And they actually pick up the sand particles underneath the sand dollar and then pass them to the mouth along these grooves that you can see if you turn a sand dollar over. The mouth is in the center of this disk and the sand dollars are passing using these tube

feed to pass these particles into the mouth. We found out that that was the true feeding mechanism. But a lot of folks had suggested that the holes that you see in what are called keyhole sand dollars, these are things that you find in Florida and some places. And actually along the Mexican coast to the south of California and all through the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of California, you find these animals that have holes punched right through their bodies. How did they?

Yeah. Is one of them their butt? What's going on? No. Well, they do have a butt. But that butt has a very special location on the bottom of this, the flat bottom of the sand dollar. In the holes, there's variable number, but usually five or six of them.

And they occur quite a long ways from wherever you would expect a butt opening to occur. They occur in the rays of the animal. They occur towards the edges. And the supposition was that they shortened the pathway of the food that's sieved on the top of the animal to the mouth. But nothing could be further from the truth. Just nothing goes down through those holes. What are they for?

Buoyancy? Well, turns out through the pioneering work of Malcolm many years ago that when you take these sand dollars and you put them in a wind tunnel, they have some very interesting properties. Someone put them in a wind tunnel. They put them in a wind tunnel to simulate the flow of ocean currents over the body. What he found out was that there was what they call an induced flow up through these holes. Oh, wow.

Okay. So why the heck would they do that? I don't know. Well, if you look edge on at a sand dollar, they have a very flat bottom and a curved top. Yeah. And it should remind you of an airplane wing. Right.

Curved surface, it turns out, induces the flow to accelerate. And when the flow accelerates, it experiences a drop in pressure. So that's what keeps the 747 up in part. And that's called lift. Sand dollars experience lift because when you look at them edge on, they look a lot like an airplane wing. Lift is not so good for a sand dollar. I was going to say, do they want to stay in one place?

They want to stay in one place. They're very, very picky about the types of sea bottom that they live on. And there are a whole lot of problems with just the whole idea of lift and a sand dollar don't go well together. So there are three different ways to counteract lift. One of them is to hold on. Unfortunately for the sand dollars, evolution has given them very, very small tube fees. So there's not much to hold on to.

And they live on sand. So what do you do anyway? So Rich says the second way to counteract lift is just to be heavier, which is why we pay fees when we fly with heavy luggage, he says, and partly why sand dollar skeletons have a thicker rim along the edges, kind of like a crust on a toast. And that's called a peripheral ballast system. But evolution delivered a third option to this type of sand dollar. And that option is called loonules, holy smokes.

The third and I think most interesting way is to reduce this pressure differential between the bottom and the top. You can see that that's exactly what those holes are doing. It's kind of like the same principle at work when anti-aircraft gun shoot holes through airplane wings, right? They don't stay up very well. And the sand dollar is actually exploiting that equalization of pressure helps them stay in place.

Why do we find their skeletons on the beach? And is it lucky or not? It's always lucky to find a sand dollar, I don't care where you are. But the main reason, certainly here in California, where we run into the ones on the beach here, almost literally run into them, they die. They pass away for a variety of different reasons. They reach the end of their lifespan, which nobody really knows exactly how long that is, but it can be probably a couple of decades, which is pretty old for an invertebrate.

Yeah, for sure. There are actually sea urchins that have been estimated to live over a century. I can't. I don't believe you. I want a polygraph. 100-year-old sea urchins with some estimates going up to 200 years. This is a fact you will be telling people at dinner parties, well, for less than a century because you don't live as long as a sea urchin.

Because members of the big sea urchin family, sand dollars that are 20 years old, probably aren't the oldest type of sea urchin that you would run across. So it's even more staggering than that. But if you get a storm, the sand dollars are scoured up. It doesn't matter how much they try to counteract the lift. They get dug basically out by the waves and they get washed up because sand dollars almost universally live in areas of high, what they call high hydrodynamic activity. There's a lot of currents flowing.

There's a lot of currents being generated by wave backwash. Surf's up. And so these various adaptations are truly astounding. When I started realizing that these are really complex animals, in spite of their relatively simple appearance, I am nowhere close to finished with them. And as far as their relatively simple appearance, the globe-shaped test of the sea urchin is just the skeleton. And just like that, any sand dollar that you find on the beach would look way different

alive. Not bony or stony or grayish-white, but alive, it would look darker black or purplish in color with skin over it. And underside, it looks like moving toothbrush bristles. It's so unsettling and very cool. And he could study these things for like 200 more years and still be curious, which again, 200 years, the potential lifespan of a sea urchin. How does he know that?

Do they have diaries? Do they write memoirs? I mean, molecularly, sort of. But the sea urchins that are a century or so old, those are estimates taken by they make little growth rings in certain parts of the little plates that make up this test. And by studying that and doing analytical work to try and figure out what those rings actually represent. And by doing experimental work in keeping these things in captivity, yeah, they can probably

be 100 or more years old. Do you ever eat uni? I do. You do. How do you feel about it? And what is uni? Uni is a very nutritious substance that the sea urchins make. It's basically their gonads.

Really? Yeah. I've heard it referred to as roe, but roe is really just eggs. Yeah. If you eat salmon roe or something like that, that's just the eggs from the salmon. You're not eating the whole gonad. But in sea urchins, you're actually eating the whole gonad, which is why it's okay to eat males as well as females.

So you're not throwing away half the catch. The sea urchin fishery in California is very heavily regulated in the South because the one that people really prefer, the big fat red urchins that have big, big gonads. Yeah. Okay. To their own detriment, really. Yeah. You know, size does sometimes matter.

And in this case, it matters for the fishery. And people don't eat the purple ones quite so much. They're the common ones that you find in the shallower water along the shoreline here. But uni is a delicacy. It tastes really, really, really good. I mean, for those of us who, I don't know if you've tried it. Have you tried it? I've tried it.

Yeah. I was scared of it for a long time. Then I was like, oh, this is really good. Did you go back for seconds? I did. There you go. If you have never seen fresh uni, it looks like a golden colored tongue. It looks a lot like a tiny, like a cat tongue, but gold.

And it's kind of globby and buttery and texture. And it tastes like when you pull up to the beach and you open the car door and you say, I am at the beach. It's salty. It's briny. It's the tiniest bit fishy, but mostly it just is like feeling wind on the shoreline. Kind of like if a crab and oyster brine collabed and launched a line of salty pudding. And as famed uni enthusiast and chef Ali Buzari described it to this blended table, sea urchin

gonads being really delicious to predators, which include like otters and fish and humans like us, because sea urchin biology requires them to hang onto water in the salty ocean. So, quote, they stockpile stuff that water likes to attach to. They stockpile sugars, amino acids, and salts, which is incredible for us, he writes, because those are maybe the three most delicious types of molecules in the edible world. Sweet, salty, enumami. They basically brine themselves for us, Ali says. And every time I eat uni, I think, wow, it's so good, but it must be so bad for marine

ecology. I'm fun. And I always wondered, how are sea urchins doing population-wise? How are they doing? Because I see sand dollars, and I think not a lot of people are hunting or seems like are interested in a sand dollar alive. They're like, you're dead, you're skeleton, it's going on my bookshelf. But sea urchins, in general, do they reproduce slowly?

How are they doing? And why? Yeah, I have so many questions. It's like anything. If you think about birds, how are birds doing? Well, if you're a starling in North America or any of a number of house sparrows or whatever, they're probably doing pretty good. But there are other species that are doing pretty badly.

And the same is true for the sea urchins. I would say that the red urchin, which is a deeper water species, is probably doing fine. So it's not an immediate danger of being over-harvested. But there is a Northern Atlantic species called Echinus esculentus. And esculentus means edible. I had to look that up afterward, because contrary to assumption, I could not tell by the name. And as you can tell from the name, it's a very well-known, much, very long-known species of urchin that was harvested for its uni for many, many, many, many years to the point

where it's become threatened. And so that particular species is in a bit more trouble. There are several other species, too, that I would probably put on the threatened list. Because of the way they reproduce, they do reproduce slowly. There's a brooding species that lives in the Caribbean that has become quite rare, because its environment keeps getting disturbed. And it's one of those... There's a conflict there, because of nice, warm, lagoonal beaches.

And people like to use those for things that sea urchins don't really like very much. They're particular about the types of particles and things that they encounter in their environments. It's no different on these beaches where this particular species lives. And so I think its populations are hugely diminished. There are actually laws in places like East Africa along South Africa. There's an animal there called the pansy shell, which is actually a sand dollar. It's got two holes in it. And it's got an outline, a little bit, the shape of a pansy flower when you look straight

on a pansy flower. That's what you see when you look at the sand dollar. And a lot of people have collected those alive, because they are also deep purple. And so people like to collect those, of course, they die, they get a little smelly. People don't think too much about a marine animal's feelings. And so they take them out of the water and they die. There are now laws to protect those. So it depends on which species and more on what kind of uni you should eat in a bit.

Also broadly speaking, the spherical globe-shaped urchins are regular equinoids, but sand dollars and sea biscuits, which look like cookies with a bunch of legs, those are less symmetrical and they're called irregular equinoids, which seems insulting. But honestly, I doubt a single sand dollar gives a shit, what we call them. Well, what about the sea urchins? Sea urchin spikies. What's going on? The opposite of a sand dollar.

Well, you asked me about the name. You started by asking me about the name. And the name equinoid comes from an ancient Latin word meaning spiny. Echin or equino or equinus, any of the variants on that name, means spiky. So if you see that root somewhere, you'll know that it probably has something to do with spikes sticking out. You're a spikyologist. I'm a spikologist.

Yes, I am. Why do they have all those spikes and how hard is it energetically for them to make them? Well, all the sea urchins are characterized by these spikes and they are marvels of engineering. I would start out by saying that because they sit on a little ball and socket joint. So the spine itself has a socket in the bottom of it that fits over this ball on the top of a sea urchin, which is why when you pick up a completely clean sea urchin, you see all these beautiful smooth knobs and balls all scattered all over it and it makes this beautiful geometric pattern.

Some species are prized for that beauty and the aesthetic of having one of these on your coffee table. So each spine is on a ball socket. So when you see an urchin skeleton, you now know why its evolution did such a knobby job. But the spines themselves have a ring of muscle around that base so that they can move forward, backward. They rotate on the socket, but they can swing around kind of like the stick shift in your car.

Oh, good. And so you've got the ability to point this spine at anything that might be approaching. So they use them for protection. Sea urchins that have the really big long spines like the black sea urchin of the tropics that a lot of people have run into. I don't know if you're a diver. I'm not. It's wet.

There are lots of people who are, who consider them kind of the scourge of the coral reef. Oh, really? Yeah, because they have, they've made the mistake of bumping into one. Right. They're the cactus of the sea, I have to be. You have to be pretty careful. Yeah. I mean, it's like the cholla down in San Diego, you know, you don't, you don't want to step

on one of those. And sea urchins are actually, might in some ways be worse because they have this skin over them. And when they pierce your body, that skin also goes with it and that can break down bacteria get in there and you can get an infection. So they're, they're kind of nasty. A lot of people think that those are poisonous. But the truth of the matter is that the big long spines on these black sea urchins are

actually not poisonous, but they have a secret. If you manage somehow through your accidental brush up against the sea urch and to get to an even lower layer of spines, there's a set of shorter spines below that long set of spines that do have little poison glands in the tips. Really? How venomous are they? They hurt like heck. They do?

Do they sting? Do they bird? Do they itch? They sting. I would make it equivalent to a bee sting. Oh, that's, that's pretty hardcore. Yeah. That's pretty hardcore and it lasts for a long time.

I've been hit by some species during my expeditionary work and yeah, you feel it. Just think about 60 bee stings going right into your foot all at the same time and then leaving the stinger in your foot. But Rich says that spines themselves can do different things and sea urchins have gone through a whole bunch of evolutionary steps in diversifying the purpose of all those different spines. So when you look at a sea urchin, you're not just seeing a ball with spikes on it. You're actually seeing a highly evolved organism that has made the best out of the equipment

that evolution handed it. And that ranges from poisonous spines all the way to spines that look like umbrellas, spines that have no skin on them to encourage the growth of other organisms, like clams and things like that or snails, barnacles, tube worms and things like that that disguise the smell of the sea urchin so that they're not bothered by predators because remember they have that uni inside them. Oh, I know. I'm one of those predators.

Yes. And as much as we like that stuff, fish like it even more. Well, when it comes to the food web, whereabouts are they in the oceanic food web? They're everywhere, actually. They're there as prey animals, but they are also top herbivores in a lot of different ecosystems. It's been demonstrated through study that if you remove through overfishing the top herbivore fish in a coral reef, the sea urchins explode in number because the amount of algae

that the fish would be eating is now available for urchin growth. Listen, man, fish are away, algae's on tap, urchin party is raging. It's like on spikes, gonads poison. I got a mouth on my belly, a butt on the top. They got light sensors on 1,500 tube feet. They're like an alive coosh ball. She gets crazy on a coral reef. It's a disco.

The urchins will very rapidly become the top herbivore in a setting like that. So they're not necessarily an indicator of a healthy coral reef, but they do help on the coral side of the battle between this constant battle between algae and coral. A little bit of algae is good, but too much, like in most things, can be detrimental to the growth of the coral. Urchins kind of fill that role of the herbivore fish in some of these environments today. And as mentioned, they're all over the world. Now since Rich loves the phylogeny, the ancestry and the relatedness of equinoids, how many

different sea urchins are lurking out there for us to love on? There are probably about 1,200 known species, but in the fossil record, there's probably about 10 times that number. So remember, we've got a long time to look back. And those are just the ones that are fossilized and that we've discovered. Some of the burrowing urchins help turn over the sediment in the bottom of the sea and do the same sorts of things as earthworms might do in your garden by turning over the sediment and turning over the soil.

And they eat it as well, and through their feces, their poops, contribute organic material to the sediment as well. So they're pretty important just about everywhere you look in any given environment. Can I ask you questions from the listeners? Sure. But I have to warn you, one question often leads to another. Oh, I know. I know.

And there's sometimes no simple answer. The answer, it depends, is probably the most popular answer. It's my favorite one. It's my favorite answer. Oh, my gosh. We have so many. Are you ready? Amazing.

Okay, first though, we're going to scatter some money into the hands of science and people who need it. So each episode, we donate to a cause of theologist's choosing. This week, we're sending it straight back to the California Academy of Sciences. I went there as a kid and inspired by Love for Science. Also, Cal Academy is a really powerful voice for biodiversity research and exploration, environmental education, and sustainability across the globe. Thank you, Cal Academy, and donation went to them.

So here are words from sponsors that make giving fromologies around the year possible. And thank you, patrons, who support the show and send in just the best questions ever, including a brainy one that was also asked by Christian Krupp and Jessica Cuddy. Lee wants to know, do sea urchins have a brain, and how do they walk with those spikes? Ah. Okay. Well, that's actually two questions, but let's start with the brain thing. The sea urchins do not have a brain.

In fact, it's probably stretching the definition of a ganglion, to say that they have ganglia. They have little nerve clusters here and there, and there's a ring that kind of acts as central processing unit, a ring of nerves that go around the esophagus just inside the jaw apparatus. But sea urchins either have no brain at all, or they are all brain, because there's nerve tissue underneath that skeleton everywhere. There's nerve tissue through all of the skin that covers all the spines and all of the rest of the body. There's so much nerve tissue you can't help but think that if there's not thinking going

on, at least there's some coordination. We don't understand exactly how all of that coordination happens, but it's pretty clear, and this gets to the second question, that there is coordination happening because those nerve cells are talking to each other and telling each spine when it should swing, when it should move in the sea urchins that have the really big tube feed. They're using those tube feed as well for locomotion and for holding themselves in place. So yes, that brain, it'd be almost like if you could tell each individual hair which way to move on a given morning.

You could have all kinds of new hairstyles. I would be seriously compromised, but a lot of other more hairy humans would have a great time with all of that hair. But yeah, basically the sea urchins can tell each of the spines which way to move, and I mentioned earlier that the spines can be pointed at things, so they can actually sense pressure waves in the water. There's probably also some ability to sense the chemicals that fish give off, and so the spines can point in the direction of an attack, and they coordinate that as well.

There's also some evidence that sea urchins can see. I was going to ask, yeah, what's their sensory situation like? Patrons who also wanted to know, Robin Kuhn, Ali Barg, Harper Thomas, and Al Lopez, and researchers found that we share about a third of a sea urchin's 23,000 genes. And Bronte May wants to know, what is it like to be a sea urchin? What are they able to sense compared to humans? It's mostly chemo-sensory. They mostly, by sensing chemicals in the sea water, they have a very sophisticated set

of receptors for detecting different, for want of a better word, smells in the sea water. They can feel vibrations. They can use their tube feet to taste things. And it's been shown that there's some of these nerves that are spread all over the outside of the test can actually sense light. And by the way the light is falling on the spines and on the tube feet and on these different cells, they can actually form a rudimentary image. So they can tell a person between a large black spot on a white background or a small

one. They seem to be able to tell the difference between a square and a circle. So they are actually seeing things as well. And a lot of sea urchins respond to light. Oh my gosh, does that keep them in the right depth of water? I'm not so sure it's about the depth. It's probably more about finding a place to hide. So sea urchins, they can be 200, like a wizard.

They have a butt on their face. They taste with their spines. They see with their feet and their whole body is a brain. And a lot of them are very active at night. So there are nocturnal urchins that come out as the sun goes down. And they do feeding at that time. Some of them reproduce at that time. Sea urchins, the sexes are separate.

The males and females are separate. And the females will release eggs from their ovaries. The males will release the sperm from their testes. And the sperm and the eggs will mix in the seawater. So it's kind of a hit and miss sort of unromantic situation that has to be kind of coordinated through group activities. They'll get together for this. Oh my god.

Or they'll release at a certain time when they can sense that somebody else upstream might have the right set of gametes for them. That's also done through chemo sensory and maybe a little bit of tactile, maybe, because some of the sea urchins do sidle up to one another and release eggs and sperm at the same time. Which is very cute. Which is very cute, of course.

You know what's not cute? Well, depending on who you ask, they're teeth. Let's talk about it. First time question askers, Emily Burke and Casey had questions. As did Lenny Oslith, Kimberly Hoffman, Natalie Gertz Young, Gerald Thompson, maritime archeologist, Chanel Zap, and Francesca Huggins, who asked with admirable frankness, what is up with the sea urchins' hell mouth?

Cassandra Grafstorm wants to know, or rather demanded, please talk about sea urchin teeth and teeth is all caps. Which makes me wonder, is the thing in a sand dollar when you rattle it around, is that a tooth? Several question on that. It's several teeth. It is. If you have sand dollars, for example,

have the doves of peace inside, people hear the legend of the sand dollar. And one of the parts of the legend is that there are five doves of peace inside. Well, each of those five doves of peace is actually a jaw that holds a tooth. Woo. I love the idea of being like a disembodied jaw

versus a dove of peace. Like, very different. Not quite the, you know, poets are amazing. Yeah, good work. They do have such amazing imaginations. But sea urchins, in general, not all sea urchins, and there's a remarkable group of sea urchins that do not have a jaw apparatus.

But the vast majority of sea urchin species, particularly the globos ones with the big spines, and the sand dollars, as it turns out, have a five-part jaw apparatus. It's actually a very complicated structure. The general name for it is Aristotle's lantern. OK, casual. So I'm going to shed light on Aristotle's lantern for you.

And the lantern is kind of like the chuck of a drill, except instead of having three pieces that come together to hold the drill bit, there are five. Oh, OK. And just a little etymological trivia. Aristotle described the urchin test as looking like a five-sided lantern. But then that story just morphed into talking

about the jaw parts. Also, just to say, I never knew that the little claw part on a drill was called a chuck. Maybe we could call it Chuck's lantern. But yes, jaw parts. And there's a set of very complicated muscles that open and close that chuck so that the teeth will come together and chew and retract again for the next bite.

There is a set of muscles that allow the lantern to protrude out through the mouth to chew onto the sea bottom. And they do that to chew on algae and things like that. And then pull it back in again. It can be rotated, swiveled a little bit to go in different directions once it is protruded. So it's a really complicated thing. The teeth themselves are set inside the five pieces

of this chuck. And they're a little bit harder than the rest of the skeleton. They have a higher magnesium content. Magnesium makes calcium carbonate, which is what the skeleton is made of. It's basically limestone, but in a special form. It's tough, and it's hard and resistant to cracking. But the teeth are really, really hard

because of this magnesium content. And so they will chew on the rock to remove algae for their food, but they wear out. And so they're constantly being replaced at the other end. So they're constantly being added to at the inside of the animal, and they move down this slide. It's actually called a tooth slide very carefully and slowly over time as the business end wears out.

Well, when, say, a sand dollar dies, do the teeth, are they smaller than the whole? So they just kind of are out there scattered? That's exactly what happens. So if you look at the globose surgeons, their mouth is really huge. And so when one of those dies and falls apart, the test itself is more loosely held together

so it falls apart. But one of the first things to happen is for the lantern to get lost through that big mouth. But in the sand dollars, the mouth is much smaller than the lantern. But the teeth aren't, as you say. And when the decomposition of the lantern happens, it falls apart into the doves.

But the teeth themselves also fall out of those. And just usually they're lost out through the mouth by the time you find them on the beach. Just lost at sea, a bunch of teeth. Yeah, lost teeth. He has returned to owner. Five teeth. Remember, they have to have five teeth, a full set.

Orthodontistry is very expensive for them. I mean, luckily it's fewer to brush. It is fewer to brush. And they're eating stuff that's good for them. So and heck, if they get a cavity, they just keep growing. What about, Hannah Roy wants to know, in your opinion, what is the coolest sea urchin?

It's very important for them to know. Thank you in advance. It is very important to know what your coolest sea urchin is. And of course, every scientist will say, oh, they're all my favorites. I can't make a choice. But for me, it's got to be the sand dollars. But that's a bit of a cop out, because it's a big group.

And there are close to 200 different species of sand dollars living today. And they all exhibit weird structure. This is one of the reasons I like them for the study of evolutionary novelty, the holes themselves. That doesn't happen in all of the sand dollars. It's a small subgroup. Let me see.

I've always been fascinated by the deep sea. And there are some, ironically, not sand dollars, but some sea urchins that live in the deepest parts of the ocean that are truly spectacular. And one of them, they don't have a common name. Really? No, unless you want to call them fire urchins. Fire urchins?

Yes. That's a shallow water representative of this group of about 60 species, which are actually soft-bodied sea urchins. What about their skeletons? They have skeletons, but they're loosely all the plates. Skeleton of a sea urchin is made up of basically 20 different rows of plates.

So there are 10 rows of paired plates. And those plates come apart when the animal dies, because they're held together by connective tissue. But in these deep sea ones, the ratio of connective tissue to skeletal pieces is really, really high. And so they're basically floppy things. So I dove into some video to gaze upon them, because when a world-renowned acknowledges

says they have a favorite specimen, you got to look. And I was transfixed by video of what appeared to be a velvet beret in stunning oranges and reds and purples, but with spiked fringe along its lower rim. But don't let that elegance deceive you. And you get these photos of these deep sea urchins. And they look like sea urchins. They're nice and domed and rounded.

They have probably the most toxic spines of any sea urchin. I've been hit only once or twice by those, and I don't want to repeat the performance, because it took probably about six hours for the pain to subside. It was like putting your finger in the electric socket. Oh, wow. Where was this? It was in Florida.

It was actually on one of the submersible trips. And several of these fire urchins live in that area. And when they're collected live and kept nice and cold, like the deep sea is, they're still very much active and ready to do their thing. But there's very, very little known about what these animals are doing down in the deep ocean. They can live four miles down, maybe more.

Floppy creatures named after fire four miles under the sea. And yet they seem to be pretty common. And it's hard to take a bottom photo without seeing one of these things. It's certainly hard to go on any given submersible ride or expedition. They're doing a lot of these things with remote operated vehicles now.

And on nearly every single dive, they're going to see some of these. Well, how come it's your favorite if it did you so dirty? How come it's not your sworn enemy? Because that sting represents the accumulated brilliant activities of natural selection that has turned up an organism that just leads you to want to know more.

That's spoken like a true functional morphologist, psychologist indeed. Well, and their place in the evolutionary history of the sea urchins is also not very well known. At one time, they were thought to be primitive remnants of ancient sea urchins that we do know were probably fairly floppy bodied. Me too.

So back 300, 400 million years ago, most of the sea urchins living at that time were relatively soft bodied. So to see that in a modern group made everybody excited. Oh, we've got the living fossil. But it's a representation of a convergence, what we call a convergence in evolution. Different organisms will meet the same problem

with a very similar answer. How many times has that problem been solved in very similar ways? And the soft bodied, the technical name for these things is the kinothereoida. Thereoida. What does thereoida mean? Well, I don't know.

The closest I've been able to get is thurus, which means ugly. But I don't think these things are ugly, spiny things at all. I'm hoping that there's a different name. I'm hoping. A different meaning for that word. But they're fantastic colors. They can also be very fast. Some of them have little hooves on the bottoms of the spines.

You had somebody asking about spines. And they're little hooves, little white hooves, that keep them from sinking into the mud. And these things run across the sea bottom. Oh, my god. They actually can move at, well, for a sea urchin. Incredible speeds. Yeah, what is that?

Is that like a one mile an hour? I would say several meters a minute. That's pretty good. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's pretty good for a little guy. That's pretty good for a sea urchin. For a coosh ball? Yeah, and these guys are not small.

Some of them are at least the size of a basketball. The size of a basketball? And they're called fire urchins. Fire urchins? Yes, the kind of thurioids. There's only about 65 known species of them. But the other thing that is cool about them, there are structures that occur in between the spines

that have jaws on them. And they're called pedicillarii. So I'm a pedicillariologist as well. These are stalks that terminate in three things like ice tongs. Wow. They can be also very poisonous. They can be used to clean the test,

because it's very important to keep the skin clean. Some of them are used to scrape bacteria off. And there are, interestingly enough, there are single celled organisms that live inside, commensally, inside the pedicillarii that eat the bacteria. So there's a whole system working there. There are other types of pedicillarii

that do all kinds of different things. And we don't even know what those are. The reasons for their differences in morphology haven't yet been fully understood. Why are they soft-bodied? I don't know. I don't know either. Although there's a pretty good supposition

that an animal that large is having a little trouble with getting enough calcium carbonate in the deep ocean. The reactions for extracting calcium carbonate from seawater to make your skeleton don't run very well in high-pressure areas. So these weak-bodied stunners, clearly his favorite genus, and now yours, are the size of a dang basketball. They live under incredible pressure.

They have more spines, like ice tong trident hands. And it's just too much to make bones in the cold, inky depths of the ocean. And they're going to hurt you about it. Which reminds me, a lot of you asked for advice in case you ever get smote by nature's pinhead Hellraiser. So here's some advice, since you asked. Rachel Murdock, Mackenzie Sire, Kate Waters,

Rose Scherer, Avin, Chasmore, Grace Robichaud, Jules Kingsland, Yakin Yang, and Evie Sanchez. So according to the 2021 paper, Sea Urchin Toxicity, you have to remove the spines, ASAP, like you would an emergency splinter, because they can keep releasing venom even after they become disembodied. So quick is good.

And that venom contains toxins and compounds with very scary names, like glycosides and hemo-licens, proteases and histamine, bradykinin. I don't even know what that is, but I don't want it in my foot. So try to get them out and soak the wounded area in hot water for about an hour. That might also help loosen them.

You can take a Tylenol or ibuprofen if you need to. Make sure you have a tetanus shot and see a doctor if you start to notice any signs of infection or if you're immunocompromised and some neosporine on the wound can help too. And if a dot remains, that might be pigment from the sea urchin skin. Which side note to patrons who asked?

Brittany Corrigan, McKellroy, Heidi Wright, Ren, Emma Luck and first time asker, Julie Miller. I spent a few hours trying to get a straight answer on why sea urchins can be such beautiful colors. And the best answer I could find was online in a paper that said, quote, ecological significance of color morphological variation remains unclear. Which I imagine was more frustrating to write

for the researchers who studied it for three years than it was for us to hear it. But if you have an animal embedded in your alive flesh, you don't need to pour candle wax on it. Alia Myers, who asked, or wait until the full moon to drizzle oil on it. Like first time question asker, Rachel Hazlett asked about, or even take a whiz on your wounds.

As much as you might want to, Amy Naramatsu, Breck Boathrath, Ben W, Jesse Moses and Jesse Dragon, most of whom likely saw the 2007 classic animated feature surfs up in which a penguin unleashes just a torrent of urine on another penguin. And I don't want to ruin any penguin pee parties, but as you may know, in your heart of hearts, birds do a buy one get one on excretory hybrids.

So your first aid kit need not contain a penguin on diuretics. They don't even pee like that. But yes, there was a wonderful cameo by a fire urchin in that film. Fire urchins, your witches, we love you. You know what, let's stay on them. A passion for fire urchins has been ignited.

Which I think dovetails nicely with the reason for why they have such virulent toxins in the spines, because if you don't have a hard test and stiff big spines to protect yourself, you're gonna resort to some other, you know, the nuclear option. Yeah, yeah. You're gonna go for toxins to help protect you

from whatever fish predators there might be there. Well, speaking of protection, a lot of people, including Susie Newby, need to talk to you about hats. Sea urchins and hats. Oh, that's hilarious. Do they really wear shells as hats, or is that an internet lie?

It is not a lie. They don't do it in nature. Okay. And for anyone that missed this because they had a busy 2020, there was a post on Reddit that made all the internet rounds and it featured a home Aquarius explaining that their pet urchins like to cover their domes,

but the shells that they kept picking up were harming other critters in their aquarium, so they 3D printed these festive little hats for their urchins, which was visually a sight to behold. And patrons Robert Foster, Harper Thomas, Quinn Newman, Adam Weaver, Asia Yeager, Seguany Dana, first-time question-asker Lizzie Carr, Dirty Donnie, Matt Thompson, Mel Castellung,

and Stephanie Broches, all asked. And Susie Newby, it is not a lie that sea urchins do this, but in the wild, they are not so stylish because. Because they're very few 3D printers, four miles down in the ocean, but they will pick up anything in the environment. Some species, okay, sand dollars, of course, don't. They have different ways of protecting themselves,

but there are some species, including some species that are named for that behavior called collector urchins, that will use the tube feet to pick up things in the environment and wear them. That looks amazing on you. Oh, like a little hat. Like a little hat. So if you present them with nothing else

than one of these 3D printed hats, they'll wear it. They're styling, they look great. Right now, as we sit here and talk about them somewhere, there are possibly thousands of urchins out there wearing a clamshell, like a fedora. Absolutely. God, that's a beautiful thought. Yeah, long before there were fedoras,

this sea urchins were wearing stuff. And they tend to do that to protect themselves maybe from sunlight, because I mentioned earlier that they do react to light, and so they might be protecting themselves a little bit from UV radiation and shallow water. But I think mostly they do it to hide. I think mostly they are picking these things up,

putting them on tops of their, well, they don't have heads, but they're putting them over their upper surfaces to make it harder to detect them. And that works in two ways. One is visually you can't see them and for visually hunting predators like fish and things like that, it makes them harder to see. But I think they also use it

because a lot of these things are actually still alive. Sea urchins will put pieces of algae on top of themselves, and of course algae has a smell. So they're masking their own scent. I mentioned earlier that there's types of sea urchins that encourage other organisms to grow on themselves. That's another way of solving the same problem again, right? Masking your own scent by allowing others,

so you become a little ecosystem and you smell like that ecosystem instead of a sea urchin. The covering response, though, it can extend to some pretty weird stuff. They'll pick up other dead sea urchins and put those on top. Yeah, they'll wear those too. I have lots of photos of that.

So an echinoderm is hiding from a killer by covering itself with its friend's corpse and it's just another Tuesday in the ocean. Also, I should note that their butthole is at the top. So it's kind of wearing a hat that's also pants, patron Jade Walker asked, do the shells they put on interfere with their feeding? And Jade, again, butthole up top, mouth at the bottom.

But it's a great query, and somehow it landed me an hour later, deep into a PDF of a study called defecation behavior of the hairy urchin, during which I learned that yes, urchins poop from the crown of their not head, but usually the tide and the water currents flush it away, just like an automatic toilet at the mall

that sometimes flushes while you're still on it. But on non-windy days, the urchins are like, I'm no fool. This water's too still. I don't want this all over my eye feet. And researchers observed that these hairy urchins just casually tip themselves over at about 30 degree angles to let the poop drop because there's not enough current.

And I love this information. And I hope that these scientists' families appreciate the work that they have done as much as I do. But that did not answer anything about the hat situation. So I found the original Reddit thread and nestled in the awe of the comment section, was a nugget from the original poster of Vanilla Bean 5813 who said, quote,

the funniest part is that they move the hat to the side so they can poop. But what street fashion has Rich observed? Anything that's there, I've seen them wearing grocery lists. I've seen that fall into the ocean. I've seen them wearing bits of plastic wrappers, even a coin.

That's styling. That's looking good. Well, you know, they don't have pockets, but you can still carry the change. Keep it changed. Evolutionary change. How about that? When you see something like that,

do you gently pick it off or do you say like, you're using this? I don't want to out you. No, I usually don't out them. Yeah. I'll take a photo, you know. It's always good to have an urchiny instead of a selfie to remember.

A spiky. An eckey, yeah. What about the biggest flimflam that you'd like to debunk? What is a myth that you'd love to bust about a sea urchin or a sand dollar? Oh, I wasn't anticipating that question because I'm debunking myths all the time, but it's usually coming from my fellow scientists.

Let me see a myth about sea urchins. Well, there is a myth. It's not so much a myth as an opinion. There are people out there that see urchins, see sea urchins, sea squared urchins, as evil. How dare? Well, yeah, that's kind of my response.

There are people actively smashing sea urchins, probably as we speak, in places where the kelp forests have been severely harmed. Now, I understand why people feel that way. For a lot of people, sea urchins do just a spiky nuisance. I would urge them to get to know them better, but the urchins that they're smashing are actually native species.

So if I need to go out and collect some sea urchins from my own research, I have to get permits out the wazoo, but there are people out there advocating for the wholesale destruction of a native species. And again, I understand why. I understand the economic reasons for wanting to do this. And it's very simple. And that is that the urchins have chewed up

and basically destroyed the kelp forests in which a lot of other organisms that people want to encounter, use, harvest, make their homes. And the sea urchins are vilified. And I don't think it's upon us as humans to vilify anything in the first place that's a natural product of millions of years of evolution. That's hubris that kind of goes beyond the pale.

But I do think that there is a solution to this that goes a lot deeper than destroying the sea urchins. Not that we can harvest them and use them for uni. There are people who have said, oh, these purple urchins, not the red ones, but the purple ones that are the most visible culprits, if you will, in the destruction of the kelp forests by chewing them down.

Those purple urchins are hunting down the last vestiges of what was a once plentiful algal resource. The kelp forests were once in good shape. And the real culprits in this are the people who have made it hard for kelp forests to regenerate over time by removing the top predators of the urchins, by changing the climate,

by doing all of the things that pollutants, things that kelp can't tolerate to build these magnificent ecosystems that once existed in huge abundance up and down the coast. So the vilification of the urchins in this picture is, I think, a little bit misplaced. Right. And scientists have found that although kelp

is one of the fastest growing organisms on earth, it just can't compete with the purple urchin explosion, which has grown 10,000%. According to Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Scientists, which blame rightfully warming oceans and a drop in starfish, plus a huge sea otter decline due to toxic runoff and rabid hunting in the early 1900s.

So if you're in an area with rapidly declining kelp forests, like California, hello, belly up to some free uni. It's almost free. A fishing license is less than 50 bucks a year, and you can grab up to 35 purple urchins per day. 35 a day is the limit. That's how many are out there.

And in some areas with the worst kelp reduction, there's no limit to hand harvesting. Speaking of hand harvesting, wear gloves. So enjoy the uni if it's purple urchin and don't blame the urchins. They are just making the best out of a situation that we made bad. And you know, I was gonna ask,

I always ask the hardest part about your job. I imagine that must be difficult. Is there anything annoying about being an echinologist, help me out. Echinologist, yeah. Echinologist, is it the spikes? Is it being in submersibles if you have claustrophobia? What's the, is it emails?

What's the one thing that you're like, uh, I love this job and I hate this part of the job? Well, I don't think there's, well, there are very few scientists of which I'm aware that like going to meetings. But I also think that in all of the things that we don't like doing, there are occasional opportunities and gems of moments

when the importance of what you're doing can really take hold. So it can be in the form of talking to people like yourself, doing a public outreach in the Philippines to talk to people about the importance of coral reefs, to reach out and talk to someone who is with a funding agency to show that the work that we do on a daily basis in a museum setting like this,

surrounded by the wonders of nature represented in the collections here, that this is a resource that helps us to understand the place of all of these organisms in this interconnected planet. You can't do anything on this planet without touching one of the things that we make it a point to study every day of our lives.

So for me to complain about any aspect of being able to do a job that I've dreamt of doing since I was nine years old would be, that's a crime of some sort. I love this is maybe the first pass I've ever had on that which is beautiful. But what about your favorite thing? My favorite thing is probably making a discovery.

And it can be a discovery of any type and it can be tiny or it can be huge. But making a discovery about the interconnectedness of life on the planet. I'll give you a good example. I was really happy to be able to help lead an expedition in 2011 to the Philippines. And one of the components of that expedition

was a deep sea dredging expedition where we set records for the depth off of the Philippines where we dredged, made discoveries of all kinds in this environment. And on one of the dredge halls, there was a piece of wood. And on that piece of wood was a tiny little white sea urchin. No bigger than your pinky nail. Well, your pinky nail is pretty big, but small,

very, very small, inconspicuous. Didn't give it much of a thought at the time except to wonder what the heck it was. Until I discovered some months later that this was a member of a group of sea urchins that specializes in eating wood in the deep sea. What? A mile down.

Did they evolve since shipwrecks or off of the coast of places where it's brackish? Oh, no, they evolved long before they were shipwrecks. Just the same way as, you know, shipworms didn't evolve when they were ships. They were around a lot longer. What happens is that in the forests of the Philippines, you have tree falls.

They fall into the rivers that wash down the river. They slide out into the ocean at the deltas of these rivers. They float out at the surface for a while. Then they become literally waterlogged. The logs will sink. And these sea urchins find them and settle on them. And they are symbiotic with microorganisms that help break down the cellulose in the wood.

Wow. Very, very specific. Kind of like termites. And that's how they make their living. So for every type of organism, there is a specialty. And these sea urchins specialize in eating wood. And what each log represents is this huge injection of food energy.

It's almost like a stepping stone to these incredible whale fall communities that you read about. Whale dies, it becomes the center of action for, you know, it becomes the world's biggest safeway for all kinds of worms and things like this. And these sea urchins are doing the same thing. And they're probably living for a long time.

Nobody knows how they find this stuff. Nobody knows how they find the wood. Nobody knows how they reproduce in such a way that their larvae can live long enough until they find a piece of wood. The mysteries go on and on. But all I can tell you is that this connection between a mountain forest in the Philippines

and a deep sea community two miles down just fills me with awe. Oh, that's amazing. Wood, you believe it. Wood, you believe it. You do have to branch out a little bit in studying these things, but... I gotta leave this one alone.

And I love that, like that urchin, there's a few of you that do something very specialized and you're just perfect for the job. Well, I shudder to think sometimes about how many opportunities have been lost to make a discovery because you didn't have the right person at the right moment. Being prepared helps a lot.

And so we populated the expedition with people who were likely to make those sorts of discoveries. And I think we need to keep doing that. Places like this where the guy next door is an expert on food webs or the guy two doors down is an expert on coral distribution and reproduction. The person three doors down knows everything there is to know about soft corals.

And the guy beyond that knows everything there is to know about nudibranchs. So when you put a team like that together and throw them out in the field, it's incredible the synergies that can grow out of that. I once found a small sand dollar that had picked out of the sediment some weird star-shaped things

that were about sand grain, large sand grain size. And I didn't know what they were, but the person sitting next to me happened to know that it was a species of foraminiferin. It's a single-celled, almost like an amoeba with a shell that lived in the sand. And it lived in large enough numbers that this species of sand dollar

had specialized in feeding only on those. Unbelievable. I would never have known that. I might have cleaned that stuff off to make the specimen ice. But she was able to tell me, you know, hey, wait a minute, that's interesting. That is one of the delights of the work that I do.

I will not have regrets as long as I can work with people and organisms that never let me down when it comes to something cool. Well, I hope there's more ecologists out there. Econologists? Ecologists. There are, well, I hope there are more now. That are coming up too. Yeah, get out there.

Start drawing your deep sea research vessel. So ask aquatic people some fiery questions and you can follow the California Academy of Arts and Sciences on Twitter. I love them and on Instagram, they're at Cal Academy. We are at oligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm on both at Ali Ward with 1L. You can say hi, show us your oligies merch.

Say hello to my dog. So there are links to a bunch of stuff we talked about and more info on the wonderful Rich Moy is at the link in the show notes. It's aliward.com slash oligies slash ecology. Hello to the oligies subreddit and the oligies podcast Facebook group, which is admin by Erin Talbert.

Thank you to Shannon and Bonnie of the podcast. You are that for helping with the adminning. Thank you to everyone at patreon.com slash oligies who supports the show. Always, Susan Hale works on so much behind the scenes as does Noel Dilworth. Emily White of the Wordery makes our professional transcripts and Caleb Patton bleeps them.

Those are available for free at aliward.com slash oligies dash extras. Zeke Rodriguez, Thomas of Mind Gem Media heads up the small and cheese efforts and those are truncated and defilthed episodes that come out every few weeks. They are suitable for all ages. Stephen Ray Morris helps with those.

Kelly Dwyer manages the website. She can pull you in too. And big thanks to lead editor and best dressed but Jared Sleeper of Mind Gem Media. Nick Thorburn made the oligies theme song. He also made serials. He's in a band called Island, great band. Anyway, if you listen to the end of the episode,

I tell you a secret and great news. I did not seem to have contracted COVID. It appears that my immune system and three shots put on a good fight and two rapid tests and a PCR later, I'm negative. So I'm all clear to go see my folks this week again. And thank you all for all the warm wishes and the good vibes.

It's really appreciated. It just is, this was really nice of you. And thanks Innovation Nation for letting me take a leap of absence in order to be present where it matters most. And another fun fact, we put up an owl box in the yard today. So please tell the barn owls of LA to report to my yard

so I can admire them. Okay, give yourself a hug. Take it easy. Bye bye. Okay, I'm done. Thank you. Looks like you stepped on a fire, Richard. Stepped on me.

Stepped on me. Are you kidding? This guy was dancing on me. I mean, just look at this. Broken. Broken. Gone. Gone.

Broken. Broken. Broken. This is pretty bad. And just as a little bonus, if you wanted to stick around and hear my thoughts about electric vehicles and some knowledge exchanged, I had a discussion with a few guys from StarTalk

about electric vehicles. Here we go. Hey, StarTalk fans. This next segment of our episode with Algae's host, Ally Ward, is sponsored by the all-electric Chevrolet Bolt EUV, the everyday electric vehicle for everyday people. That's you. The all-electric Chevy Bolt EUV has so many cool features,

including the ability to engage in conversations hands-free with the industry's first hands-free driving assistance technology. You can find out more at chevrolet.com slash electric slash bolt dash EUV. All right, let's get back to the show. We're back, StarTalk Cosmic queries. And for this segment, we're going

to actually devote this to a discussion about electric cars. Chuck, what do you think of that? Yes, that's awesome, because I know you don't like the word awesome. But in this case, I think it is awe-inspiring. But just to be clear, I love the word awesome, but when properly applied, like when you discover

a new universe or something. When people say, it would be awesome if you could pass the salt. That is not a good use of the word awesome, OK? Here is a good use of the word awesome, because electric vehicles actually do so much to help the environment. And I care about the environment. I know you do.

People don't think I do. But this segment, we're doing in partnership with the Chevrolet Bolt EUV. So I'm just over the moon, because we get to talk about electric vehicles, man. And that's our future. All right, so this EUV, is that like SUV except electric? Is that how we're going to talk about that?

Yeah, man, yeah, exactly. Doesn't it sound better though? Doesn't it sound better to be like EUV, you know? EUV, ooh, ooh, ooh. So yeah. Let's get back to our guest here, Allie Ward, from Allergies, who basically did a land grab on all Allergies in the universe.

Nice, all of them. That's a straight power move. That's total gangster right there. It's like, if it's an Allergie. Once you get that handle, you're sitting on it, and it's yours. But yeah, this would be electric vehicle technology, I suppose, the segment. The Allergies?

Right, there you go. You just crammed that Allergie in whether or not it was. That's what I do. Someone mentioned something in casual conversation, and I tell you what Allergie it is. But this one is really exciting to me. I've been excited about electric vehicles since I was a kid.

My dad is really into alternative sources of power and solar power, and so I have been watching for years and seeing how EVs come on the market. So I'm really excited about the Chevrolet old EV. I think EV is a good move, too. I like the way it sounds. Cool, and Chuck, but is it like 100 grand like other electric vehicles?

Like what's going on there? That's the great thing about it. Otherwise, it's not for everybody. You can't take that Chevy to the levy. If it's cost that much, nobody's no good old boys are doing that. So what's the price point on this? That's why they drained the levy was to pay

for your very expensive, which this is not. Actually, when I said it's accessible, that's what I mean. It's, you know, this is a car that allows people to enter into this realm. And if you're a conscientious person. As a first to foray. Okay, very good, very good. Yeah, so Ali, do you have a question?

I do, actually. I wanted to know. Wait, wait, wait. Actually, that's not fair, because you are our guest and we usually take questions from the audience, from our fan base, but you know, you seem so into it. Maybe we'll give you the occasion to ask the question

with the permission of our fan base. I think they'll allow it. So the floor is mine. I have the Cosmic Query Conch right now and can launch a question. Okay, so I wanted to talk about whether or not electric vehicles are good for the environment. How much good do they do over a car

that runs on fossil fuels? What are your thoughts on it? Oh, yeah, yeah. So I mean, I don't claim to be the world's expert on that, but I can get you a lot of the way towards an answer to that question. So here's the problem. Transportation today, you know, cars and trucks

and things that move commerce. I guess even trains, but some trains are electric. So let's just stick to the ones that have sort of engines that burn fossil fuels. The problem is, if you have a car that takes gasoline, it can only run on gasoline, right? So if you run out of gas, you gotta go to gas station and fill it up with gasoline.

So, you know, we all know how much gas costs and we know where it comes from in the world and we know if a pipeline gets shut down and we know if a war breaks out and we know if an oil well is on fire and we know if there's new regulation related to it. So oil has become a strategic commodity simply because we need it to run our transportation grid.

So now in comes an electric car. So an electric car, of course, it still uses power. All right, so what's up with that? Why is it good rather than sort of neutral or bad or equal? Right, so here's what happens. You got your car and it's at home and you plug it in. Okay, now it's getting electricity from your power plant. There's a chance your power plant is using coal.

There's a good chance of that, all right? So that's not really much better. All right, coal burning coal and burning gasoline. There's still this carbon footprint. Okay, however, the power plant is not limited to just coal. If they wanted to and many have, they can put in, if they have sunlight where you are, a solar farm or a wind farm and if you're near water

you could be hydroelectric. All of these sources of power can be generated by your power company and show up in your wall socket. So you don't need 12 different engines in your car to use 12 different kinds of energy. You just need a plug that gives you access to the thing that's generating the energy 12 different ways. So if you electrify the transportation grid

you are future-proofing our path into a culture and a civilization that can wean itself off its dependence of fossil fuels. And so that's why it works. That's why it's good. Not to mention, if you go solar on your house you essentially have a solar powered car which is a car powered by the sun.

Oh yeah. There you go. Eggs, exactly. There's gotta be a bumper sticker for that. Like solar powered. But that wouldn't work in place like Seattle where the sun never comes out or upstate New York. But yeah, it would be believable

if it's in a place where the sun is prevalent. So that's why electric is good. Now, the problem is I can have a gallon of gas over here and I can move it over there where you need it, okay? You can't do that with electric, you can't carry electricity with you. Oh, sorry, you can charge a battery and then I can move the battery over there.

No, the battery is in the car, okay? So one of the problems with electricity as it's generated is it can only, you can't sort of store it outside of the battery that's in your car. So to run your lights, to run most of the things that civilization uses electricity for,

it doesn't come out of a storage battery. It's generated on the fly as you need it from the power station and delivered by the high tension lines. I was gonna say, like I'm glad you said that because there's a lot of people who are, you know, electric vehicle hesitant, I will say, because they're worried about how far they can drive.

Like because of what you just said and the cool thing about the industry, but more importantly about the Chevy Volt AUV is the, because I know this because I got to take a tour of the car with GM. The cool thing is this car has nearly 250 mile range on a full charge, okay? That's good.

Right, and then- That'll get you between any adjacent cities. I mean, New York City is 250 between Boston and Washington. And you're in LA, Ali, what cities with it? San Diego is easy. If you need to make a getaway, that's Palm Springs, that's Joshua Tree, that's Santa Barbara,

that's, yeah, up the coast. Oh, excuse me, Joshua Tree. Oh, excuse me. Okay, these are different hangouts. Excuse me, I'm about to take my Chevrolet Bolt EUV down to the Joshua Tree. I mean, I've got an- Perhaps you'd like to meet me there.

Sometimes you need an EUV, but you need to get in your boat. I love the EUVs. I think if you like a hatchback with a little bit higher profile, I, yeah, I love that. And the range is great. They call it range anxiety.

People who are afraid to go EUV because they think they're gonna be stranded. But once you drive an electric, it's kind of like once you become a birdwatcher, you start seeing all these charging stations, just like you would see birds. You didn't realize we're there before, but once you drive an EUV, it's like,

oh, there's a charge sign everywhere. You can charge in parking lots at the mall. You can charge next year, gross restore. You can charge at hotels. It's just like, it's really easy. Wait, so the birdwatcher and analog there is, if you've never looked for a bird, you would never know it was there

until you knew what to look for. And then they're everywhere. I got you, okay. So that's just like a psychological effect. Once you know what to look for, but yeah, there's EUV charging stations everywhere. Yeah, there's about 40,000 birds to look for when you're traveling.

Okay. Is that how many EUV stations are there? Really? Yeah, yeah, there's about 40,000 public charging stations. So, you know, you can- Okay, so Chuck, which goes faster down the road? A Chevy Bolt or Usain Bolt? You know, I'm gonna say that the Usain Bolt

is faster out of the blocks, but the Chevy Bolt is gonna ultimately smoke them. Don't tell him that. You don't need as many carbs for your Chevy Bolt. You don't have to run it on pasta, protein, anything. I think range better range. Oh, I got you. There you go.

So is that your only question you have? That was my main question about it. I think people who are considering going from a fossil fuel car to something that is electric, I think tend to be people who are environmentally conscious. And so they really wanna know how much better is this for the environment, but knowing that you can use-

I agree. And those are the people who do it first, but ultimately, if you get the right price point, people just do it because it's the right price point. Not to mention- Oh, wait, so then speaking of what you just said, before we actually got on the show today, Allie was doing something on your computer

where you were looking at the savings. So when you talk about price point, there are hidden savings in every electric vehicle, but I don't know, do you have, what were you doing? Well, there are fewer moving parts. Can I back up real quick? We're running out of time. I don't wanna take up the whole thing,

but Michael Faraday, go back 150, 60 years. When you said back, I thought you meant back in the show. No, no, no. Can I go back? Michael Faraday. So Michael Faraday, an English scientist, a physicist, he basically is responsible for figuring out

how to generate electricity, right? And he invented the concept of an electric field, by the way, because that's not a thing you can touch, right? It's just this thing there. So he can draw it and calculate, you can calculate with it. So he realized that if you move a wire through a magnetic field,

it induces current in that wire, and it'll show up on a meter. And so, whoa, well, that's kind of, it was a little novel at the time, but what would you do with this? This is kind of a stupid toy. And then people figure, oh my gosh, this is the birth of the electrification of the world.

Point is, the way we do that now is we have a tightly wound, what's called a turbine, a tightly wound wire coil that spins in a magnetic field and an electric current is induced in that wire. Ever since the beginning of electricity, we've known how to spin things. That's what we do best.

We've been doing it for 150 years. And what is a car, if not electricity, spinning things? So the acceleration on an electric vehicle can be excellent because of this fact. And that's why the Chevy Bolt, I didn't check the acceleration numbers. They might actually accelerate out of the blocks faster than Usain Bolt,

now that I'm thinking about it. Also, I was checking on price point stuff just to see how much would I save per year driving an EV. And my parents live about 400 miles away. So I go up a couple of times, obviously, like every month or two. And I would save $10,000 over five years on gas, just based on that,

which is, yeah, if you're calculating how much. Not to mention how much CO2 that is. I know, so a little karmically, and then pocketbook-wise. But yeah, they have a number cruncher for you, so you don't have to pull out your spreadsheets. They have it for you, but yeah. And yeah, the acceleration is better.

I see what you did when you say karmically. You like that? Yeah, see what you did. Electric, the puns are electric. So guys, we got to land this plane or park these parks. So Allie's been delighted to have you on this show. I can't believe we haven't had you ever on before. We got to do this again with your permission

and talk about some of the oligies that you've discovered, or I think you're inventing some of those oligies. Maybe bending some words. I think you're pulling them out of, I don't know where. I do look for them in the literature first. I promise. But yes, so many oligies to cover. I'm here whenever you need me.

And so little time, yes. Okay, excellent. Thanks for being on Star Talk. You can catch her on her ology podcast, and it goes everywhere. I mean, every ology you can ever imagine. It's even the ones you haven't imagined because she made them up.

They're there. All right. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Hey, Neil, before we wrap up, I just want to let the viewer know that if you're ready to make the electric future part of your present and do some good for the environment, which is what it is all about,

check out the Chevrolet Bull EUV at chevrolet.com slash electric. Chevrolet.com slash electric. Do some good, people. Come on. All right. This has been Star Talk, Cosmic Query. It's Neil deGrasse Tyson here.

As always, keep looking out for him.