Ologies with Alie Ward - Planariology (VERY COOL WORMS, I PROMISE) with Oné Pagán

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

Who cares about flatworms? Guess what: you do. Planarian expert Dr. Oné Pagán shares his infectious enthusiasm for the teeny tiny ribbons of flesh that are helping scientists understand addiction, limb regeneration, stem cells, immortality and maybe aliens though probably not aliens. You’re about to be obsessed. We discuss where to find planarians, serendipitous science, taking risks in life, how these worms regrow themselves when they are cut into 279 pieces, marine flatworms, penis fencing, multipurpose mouth tubes, the Unabomber and more. Dr. Pagán is a gem of a human and you’re about to be smitten with flatworms. And him. Trust me. Follow Dr. Oné Pagán at Twitter.com/baldscientist or check out his blog at baldscientist.wordpress.com His book, “The First Brain” A donation went to NoKidHungry.org More links at alieward.com/ologies/planariology Song at the end is: 9 Animal Phyla Song Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and STIIIICKERS! Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh hey, it's that second hole that you have to carve into a can of pineapple juice in order to get the first one to glob out. Alleyward, back with an episode of Ologies You Better Not Sleep On. You're about to get walloped with excitement and passion and gossip about drugs and dongs and aliens and how it all relates to these tiny, goofy, dick-shaped flatworms. You know what you're going to do tomorrow? Tomorrow, you're going to paint an airbrushed mural on the hood of your car that just says, I goddamn love planarians. But before we get you there,

let's thank the folks at patreon.com slash ologies. They send in as little as 25 cents an episode and they get to ask questions. Thanks also to everyone who is sending this episode to friends and family, despite the fact that it is about worms and it is not safe for work. Thanks to everyone who rates and subscribes and of course reviews, you know, I pick a new one

each week to read. And this week, Obsessed with Science 06 says, Oh, hey, I hate all podcasts, but this one, it's amazing. Thank you, Allie. I hope you read this. Obsessed with Science 06, I did read it. Also, happy birthday. Okay, let's get into it. Planariology, it's indeed a thing. It's the study of planarians, which are a class of free-living, freewheeling flatworms. And the word planaria comes from the Latin for on-level ground, because these things look like if you miniaturized a human penis and cranked it through the rollers of a pasta machine. Flat, phallic, little triangle-shaped head that contains tiny brains to boot. So this ologist has studied them for years, and we met via Twitter, and he is a gem.

So he's an associate professor of biology at Westchester University in Pennsylvania, and author of the popular science book, The First Brain, The Neuroscience of Planarians. He also wrote Strange Survivors, How Organisms Attack and Defend in the Game of Life. And he's working on a new book about drunk dolphins. No joke, due out next year. So he got his bachelor's degree in general sciences and his master's in biochem before heading to Cornell for his PhD. And we talk about what makes a brain, the personalities of clones, the sexiest underwater Olympic sport, limb regeneration, and how these simple little creatures are helping solve medical mysteries with your new favorite, planariologist, Dr. One Pagan. I'm actually going fanboy with this.

I've heard about your podcast for a long time. And it's really cool. When you tweeted at me, I was like a whole episode on planaria. This is, that's amazing. I want to do that. Now, how long have you been studying planariology, if you will? Okay, so I have a confession to make

right off the start. I am an accidental planariologist, as it were. I've never taken a zoology course. My training is mainly biochemistry and pharmacology and neurobiology. And I came to planarians. I don't know. I like to call it fate, if you will.

First of all, I was a non-traditional student. I went back to school at 35 for my PhD. Okay, so I did my bachelor's work for several years. I got married, started having kids when my wife helped, of course. You're welcome. Then I did my master's, working full time. And, you know, I was very fortunate to have very good supervisors. But I always wanted to do the PhD, but I needed to work. Okay. I had a family. So when I was 35, a person who ended up being my PhD advisor came to Puerto Rico.

I'm Puerto Rican, by the way. I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, and I did all my education up until the master's there. So, a collaborator from my advisors in Puerto Rico came to visit and everything, and he just happened to recruit students for Cornell University. So he actively tried to recruit me. I applied. They accepted me. I got a fellowship and well, I packed my family and I went. Oh my gosh. Wow. So before becoming a professor at West Chester University, Oney got his PhD in pharmacology from Cornell University, studying in a biochemistry lab with the brilliant Dr. George Harris, a chemist. At the time, I was studying the dopamine

transporter and its addiction to cocaine. What? Yeah. Cocaine planarians? Yes, cocaine planarians. And later on, we learned that we can do that with nicotine, methamphetamines, and whatever. So, it's really fun. Well, for them.

I'll have what she's having. I knew about planarians, but very peripherally. I knew that if you cut their heads off, they will grow it back and whatnot. So I got very excited. And I went to my advisor, and I went, George, guess what? We can do these experiments in planarians. But, well, of course, he was a physical chemist. You know, something slimy, an animal.

He essentially said no. He said something like in the lines of, well, when you have your own lab, you can do it. And that's precisely what I did, essentially. Oh, my gosh. And how long have you been studying them now? Well, it's been almost 15 years now. I started at Westchester University in Pennsylvania in 2005. They foster research.

And that's the best of both worlds because I love teaching because, you know, if we think about it in the same way, I get paid to read about what I like, to talk about what I like. And the students have to listen to me. Okay, so it's awesome. His students, according to Internet Chatter, love this dude. Now, okay, he was working on his PhD and needed a model for research that was relatively cheap. And he was running some controls and found that a compound he used in the controls actually changed the planarian behavior. And he calls this wormy event a serendipitous observation. So as any half-decent scientist does, I ran my controls with just the MSO. And something weird happened to the behaviors of the planarian. So weird.

And the first paper of the lab was about the effect of the MSO in planarians. And, you know, going back a step or two, what is a planarian? I know it is a flatworm, but can you describe it for someone who's maybe never seen one? Like, how big are they? Where do they live? Oh, well, it depends on the type of planarian. So, planarians literally means flatworm, but they describe a wide variety of species. There are marine versions.

They're called polyclats, and they are some of the most beautiful worms in the sea. Oh! So, the ones that I work with are freshwater planarians. And many of those species, they possess a very interesting property. They are the ones that you can cut their heads off. They will regrow any part of their bodies, including their brain, in the right way. How are they even doing that? Oh, well, if you figure it out, you'll get a

Nobel Prize. And I hope you mention me in your speech. Fair enough. Well, I think you've noticed that I'm very enthusiastic about what I do. I love it. Let's say that you wanted to look for a planaria. Where is a good place to look? Are they in puddles? Are they under rocks? Do you need a microscope? No, because it depends on the species.

The typical ones, they're about maybe an inch long, a couple of centimeters long. Every planarian, it's actually a carnivore. They're predators. So they even eat each other happily they're cannibals even so what a very good way to hunt for them as it were you get like a little container you poke holes in the lid put a piece of meat inside of it and leave it in the water and uh with within a short period of time there's going to be a bunch of stuff, including planarian. Wow.

But the ones that I work with, they're available commercially. I can buy them. And that's for lab use, right? Yes. Yeah. And they are used in many schools for demonstration experiments and activities like that. I just throw drugs at them and see what happens. And now what kind of brains do they have? You mentioned they can even regrow their brains.

And obviously, if they're reacting to chemicals and drugs, they have a nervous system. Like, what's their anatomy like? They have a relatively sophisticated brains for a very small invertebrate. They are capable of learning. They have many of the same neurotransmitters that we have. Wow. And probably one of the most interesting anatomical characteristics of planarians is that they have what it's called a bilobar brain, just pretty much like us. Well, not exactly like us, but you know what I mean. With two lobes, okay, joined together. And they, instead of having a single spinal cord, they have two, one per each lobe. And those spinal cords are connected by nerve fibers. They're really cool. They're really, really cool. Wow.

And now if you, let's say, were to injure a planaria, if a planaria were to get bisected, does it matter where they're cut and they can regenerate? Well, you can cut it in any way you want. But that's a very good question because there's a part of the planarian that does not regenerate. And you're going to love this one. Okay. planarian that does not regenerate and that uh you're gonna love this one okay uh planarians eat via the same orifice where they defecate no yes they do yes they do and they extend a tube called the proboscis and that's how they eat like an alien in a movie okay they they stick it in the prey and they suck it dry oh my god and i've seen that in my laboratory they rub themselves around a water fleece daphnia like a snake and they do that oh wow you can cut almost every part of the anatomy of the planarian except the proboscis that part does not regenerate okay quick aside when i hear proboscis. That part does not regenerate. Okay, quick aside. When I hear proboscis, I think like mouth area, I think a nose hose,

but I looked this up and in a planaria, it's on the belly near the back end, kind of like if you had a pool noodle coming out of your navel, but you could shit out of it. And then five minutes later, you could use it to slurp up the body of your uncle like he was a Frappuccino. Now, a lot of freshwater planarians are like a mottled, peachy brown, but fluttering marine ones can be gorgeously brightly colored to kind of advertise that they'll poison the hell out of their enemies. Now, planarians breathe through their skin and they don't have a circulatory system. So their gut kind of acts like a New York subway map to deliver their nutrients. And of course, they have the nubbins of an early brain. All of these parts are under one of the best warranties in the business. Oney continues. You can take a piece of the tail, a piece of the head, a laterally or whatever,

and they regenerate. they need kind of a minimum of about 10 000 cells uh to regenerate that's about maybe uh i think it's 0.08 cubic millimeters or something like that and do they ever do work on the dna to find out if it's the same dna on both half or does it change at all? Well, absolutely. There's a couple of planarian species which have been sequenced. They have their own genome projects. The ones that I use commercially, they are beginning to be sequenced a little bit. But one curious characteristic of any flatworm is that they don't have the exact genetic code as everything else. Apparently, there is something called the Alternative Flatworm Mitochondrial Code that

encodes for different amino acids than most other creatures. Is this a glitch in the simulation? Are they aliens? Nobody knows why, but it's a rather interesting mystery. Yes. And now, how are they responding to different chemicals and drugs that you're administering them? All right. So, the beauty of those is that they also display sophisticated behaviors. Okay? They are very sensitive to their environment.

Of course, if you're small, if you're a centimeter long, okay? You're so little. You're small. You're not venomous, you cannot fly, you're not fast. What do you do? You hide. OK, so for that reason, they tend to shy away from the light. OK, so they go to the proverbial dark side as it were. So they like to hide.

You can actually use that to your advantage in behavioral experiments. Also, you can actually measure their gliding velocity because they glide at the bottom of a petri dish or any type of container like that. And they can glide with certain speeds. Many compounds, they actually decrease their velocity. Okay, I looked into this and planaria can glide by beating little cilia projections in a layer of mucus. And kind of like a cop on New Year's Eve, observing locomotion can say a lot about how loaded they are.

Another type of response is a seizure-like response, meaning that, for example, if you give them a certain compound in relatively toxic amounts, they go into what, for all intents and purposes, are seizure-like movements. And you can quantify those. Oh, wow. Yeah, we use all of those techniques in my laboratory. those. Oh, wow. Yeah, we use all of those techniques in my laboratory. And is there one substance in particular that surprised you how they reacted? Well, one would not expect to observe such an anthropomorphizing property as addiction, but planarians can get addicted to substances. All right. So if you give them nicotine or cocaine, for instance, or I don't know, even sugar.

All right. And you allow them to that substance to soak in in the water for a while. Then you take the substance away. They go into something very much like withdrawal. They get the shakes. They start swimming around like crazy. They bop their heads back and forth. And you can quantify that. You can actually train those planarians to respond to, classically, substances that are abused by people. And again, they display surprisingly similar behaviors, again, as if they were

addicted. It's a beautiful model for that. And how many different experiments do you have going on at once? Like what is a typical day in the lifelike of a planariologist? Well, you got to have your students help you out. And that's something that I wanted to say right off the bat. A shout out to all my students. I've had many over the years. Right now, I have to close the lab because of the worldwide reality that we are living in. I miss them terribly. So hello to all the Pagan lab.

If whenever you listen to this, we try of course to run the appropriate controls and to plan ahead very well the experiments that we do and once we obtain the data the fun begins because we can actually analyze it, we can generate graphs, we can do all those type of things and then if we get a baseline of the effects that nicotine does to a planarian, for example, we can actually screen substances that may counteract those effects. And that's what we have done with substances like cocaine, nicotine, and some others. I'm curious, too, if that makes you consider any of your own behaviors in your own life. Like, do you ever see how, like, planarians react to sugar and decide you need to cut back on donuts? Oh, well, I'm addicted to a certain type of beverage that is served in a coffee shop that rhymes with box. Okay. Okay. So, I can relate to that. Okay. But planarians, again, they cannot

use a straw, but they react in ways that will allow us to figure out, well, this planarian is certainly uncomfortable in the absence of certain chemical stimulus. Once we quantify that, we can see the difference that it makes by adding, I don't know, a proverbial antidote. Oney says that the aim of the lab isn't to study addiction per se, but to figure out a way to counteract the toxicity of things like nicotine or cocaine. So working with these worms, a simpler model than a lot of labs, is saving lives. Now, for more on addiction, listen to the molecular neurobiology episode with Dr. Crystal Dilworth or Addictionology with Aaron Parisi. Because addiction is a very complex phenomenon and it's,

we can get addicted to anything, not only chemicals or food. We can get addicted to, Not only chemicals or food. We can get addicted to, I don't know, gambling. Okay? Things like that. So, it's much more complex. But we can study toxicity and the toxicity of such substances using planarians. And we can actually use terms like addiction and withdrawal with an asterisk, as it were.

Because, again, it's very anthropomorphomorphic we don't know what a planarian thinks you see or how it feels and by the way did you know and this is something that i learned literally about a week ago science twitter is amazing because i got a very interesting paper from a colleague in Australia who I met from Twitter. Her name is Shawnee Omon from Trove University in Australia, and she studies sleep in planarians. So Dr. Shawnee Omon's team discovered that planarians do sleep. Now, the study's conclusions read, quote, Despite simplicity, inactive flatworms appeared to be sleeping. Specifically, quiescence was organized in a circadian manner, occurring

largely during the daytime. So, do not invite a planarian to lunch. They will oversleep, they will text on my way before they have even left the house, and your party will not be seated until they arrive. You remember brunch? I don't. So I want to thank her for sending me a paper that I'm geeking all the way about it because I didn't know that planarians sleep. And recently I heard your episode about chronobiology and circadian rhythms and everything.

So you know that about the suprachiasmatic nuclei and all these type of things. I'm pretty sure planarians have something like that. Okay. So, but we don't know. So, anyway, I want to thank Shani for the paper. I'm reading it and enjoying it. That's the beauty of it. I'm telling you, I'm 55 and I feel like a kid learning all this type of things.

Science hero, you didn't know you needed. Now, from a pharmacological perspective, he's able to use simpler animal models, these flatworms, rather than higher vertebrates. But for what kind of stuff? And what about using planarians in terms of addiction or substance, like with opiate issues that are kind of plaguing a lot of the world, is that applicable to them as well? Yes, absolutely. Because they have similar receptors to opiates, like the ones that we have. And other groups, particularly the groups at Temple University, Dr. Bob Raffa, Dr. Scott Rawls, they're working on that. And the thing is that planarians were traditionally used in regeneration and developmental biology. But it was only relatively recently that they have been kind of popular as an animal model in pharmacology. animal model in pharmacology. And that's something that I'm very happy to say that we are one of the few groups that do that, but it's getting even more popular and it makes sense. It's applicable to many areas and to have such a simple yet powerful model. It's really cool.

There's no other way to say it. Let's just beep, beep, back this up a little to his history. Now, you were interested not in necessarily planarians growing up, but were you interested in how the brain worked? What kind of triggered that in you? Well, there was never any doubt whatsoever that I was going to end up in science. I can give you an example. When I was about maybe four or five years old, I don't remember, but my mom told me that I asked her whether God invented microscopes.

Ask her whether God invented microscopes. That was my question at five years old. Just to give you that idea. And again, I went to college and actually my bachelor's is in general science in part because I couldn't commit. I liked everything. I took biochemistry. I took astronomy. I took genetics. I never took zoology, as I told you. But, you know, what can I tell you? So, science is magnificent. And now, what about your book? Your book, The First Brain, The Neuroscience of Planarians. Why is it called the first brain? Okay, so that's another funny story.

Because when I decided to think about writing a book, it was going to be about planarians and everything. And I like the brain and everything. But I thought about a horrendous title at first. Oh, no. You want to hear what it was? Yes. The neuronal worm. The neuronal worm. Catchy, sexy titles like that just fly off the shelves. But nevertheless, he took the suggestion of an esteemed colleague, Dr. Bob Raffa, and went with the title, The First Brain. Now, phylogenetically, Onay says, the planarian evolved to do its thing before the line that led to vertebrates shot off. But they have cerebral ganglia, a bilobed glob of nerve tissue and two lateral nerves that are connected along the body by transverse nerves, kind of like having a full body tattoo of a ladder, but inside and made of nerves, making them a good simple model for the human brain.

One discusses pain response later, which may ease your mind in terms of their use in medical labs. On the topics of gathering the nerve to use your brain, how about a little pep talk? My philosophy in life is that if I don't ask for something, there's zero percent chance of getting it. So I don't have an agent. I never had an agent. I still don't. But I did my research. I wrote a proposal. I sent it to a few publishers with, listen, I don't have an agent, but this is my preparation. Here's my CV. Would you consider this book? And some publishers will say, thank you. No, thank you. But a rather obscure publisher called Oxford University Press said yes. And the rest is history. Oh, what was it like the day that you found out

that your book was getting picked up? Oh, my God. It was like I read the email and I said something that I shouldn't say in a podcast, but it starts with holy something. Holy fucking shirt. That was my first words. That's what I said. And I said it out loud. And thank, thank God I was alone. As soon as I got that, that i mean i called my wife because you have to understand ali i've always been a bookworm that that comes with the territory of the things that i

do i love books and i realized that for the first time i was going to be on the proverbial other side of the fence people would read me aside from scientific papers, because of course, I wrote a master's thesis, I wrote a PhD dissertation, but nobody, you know, unless it's really interested, read those. But a book will be read by many. And I felt incredibly, after I calmed down, I felt humbled. I felt incredibly happy and proud. I mean, again, I was geeking out as it were. That's so exciting. Thank you. Can I ask you Patreon questions? Absolutely. You ask away. Do you remember Captain America in the movies? Yes.

Okay. So you remember this quote, I can do this all day. Oh, good. But before we get to your questions, as you may know, each week, we toss some cash at an organization chosen by theologist. And this week, Dr. One Pagan asked it to go to no kid hungry.org. 22 million children rely on the meals they receive at school. And for some, it's the only food they'll receive in a given day. So no kid hungry.org works with federal and local governments to support kiddos in need. They give emergency grants to food banks, they make sure that resources go to the most hard hit areas. And despite school closures, and pand, works to make sure every kid gets three meals a day.

So a donation is going to knowkidhungry.org. And that donation is made possible by patrons of the show and sponsors who you may hear about now. Okay, back to your questions. Michelle Krebs, Bennett Gerber, and Jesse Markowitz all had the same nagging curiosity. A lot of people had this very great question. Why are they so popular for school dissections? And where are the schools getting them? Well, the schools can get them from suppliers,

commercial suppliers. And I know that there's some school that actually go, for example, and they go to ponds and they actually catch their own. They are so easy to use because you don't need any special equipment to store them. You don't need an incubator. You can actually put them in a container on a cupboard. Wow.

Okay. And as long as you don't put them in direct sunlight, they'll live. You can feed them liver and they will thrive and again you don't need any specialized equipment you may need a stereoscope microscope to actually look at them nothing specialized and they're so cute because particularly the the water the freshwater planarians the ones that have only two eyes because there's some that have multiple eyes, by the way. The ones that have only two eyes, they're always cross-eyed. Nobody knows why.

So they're really cute. Nobody really knows the physiological relevance of that. Patron Joe Porfido asked, but why are they so cute i mean planarians they do look like your most stone friend pissed off a wizard and got turned into a very very small penis they look like a little chubby arrow with eyes or like if a snake got a branding makeover from hello kitty it's bananas they also look like a banana now patron hayley Haley Hollings said, no question. I just think that they are very, very cute. And I agree. Now, from cute to cut.

A lot of you had a similar question about their science fiction level ability to move on from physical trauma. Like a Terminator, only a Worminator. Eric Gerard, Aaron Unson, Rachel, Ross Owen-Quells, John Sansone. Let's get into it. Along with... Patron Nadine Duke on that note says, what if you cut them in half lengthwise? If they are only halfway cut, do they then develop two heads? I've seen experiments. For example, planarians for decades have been very popular in Japan, of all places.

Really? Yeah. And I've seen many books. And actually, I can send you pictures of the books that I have where they keep cutting them and you can actually

make them grow like seven, eight, ten heads. Okay. So, it's kind of a little bit of a hobby. Oh yeah, they're fantastic. How is this even happening? Stem cells, specifically ones that are pluripotent, meaning that they can make any type of cell needed. In humans, only our embryonic and germ cells in the old gonads can do that.

And if researchers can learn more about these type of stem cells in planarians, it might mean better therapies in other animals. Patron Michelle Jacobs asked this very grammatically on point question, into how many segments can you cut one at a time? Michelle, I looked this up and a planarian can regrow its whole damn body out of only one 279th of itself. That is like getting your hand lopped off and it grows a whole new you from it in a matter of about three weeks. I have laundry older than that. But One told me a few fellow planariologists in Japan and Spain discovered a specific gene in these pluripotent cells, and it's called Naudoraki. Which in Japanese means brains everywhere.

Wow. That when you express that genes in a weird place in the planarian, they generate brain tissue. Oh! Yeah. There's so much that we don't know, which makes it so incredibly, frequently interesting. Do you think that when they are cut, do you think that they experience pain? Do they recoil like it?

Or have they evolved so much to be able to do that, that it's not detrimental to them? Well, that's an excellent question because they certainly have the receptors that we usually relate to pain. Okay. But it's very difficult to ascertain that. I know that, for example, any type of stimulus in the water, they get like scrunched, like they recoil away from the stimulus, which serves them well, because if somebody tries to touch them, it will likely try to eat them, and it serves them well to recoil from that. Remember, they are tiny, flat, delicious, flaccid, slimy things, and the best defense they might have is just looking adorable. As far as pain is concerned, I don't know.

That's the best I can do, but I can tell you something. I can cut a planarian head, and the head by itself will keep gliding very happily on the surface of the Petri dish with no

indication that they're suffering or anything like that. I have videos of that. Oh my gosh. Yeah, the rest of the body kind of doesn't know what to do. When Oney says gliding, by the by, he means it. They move through water like figure skaters on a victory lap, only there are very small ribbons of flesh.

Now, Travis DeMello asked, is their ability to regenerate biologically similar to plants ability to grow from cuttings? That's a very good question. That's a very good question, which generally means that I don't know the answer to. However, there's many scientists who are trying to come up with common ground or biochemical pathways between plants and animals. There's a whole very controversial field about plant neurobiology. Okay. So, and that's yet another story that will be the topic of like 10 podcasts for later on. But the point is that, yes, plants do regenerate.

And whether they follow the same specific biochemical pathways is an interesting question. But we don't know that yet. You have the best listeners, by the way. Don't I? Aren't they the best? They are the best. Say hello to everyone. Well, I can say hello by myself. Hello, everyone. You are the best. They are the best. Say hello to everyone. Well, I can say hello myself.

Hello, everyone. You are the best listeners ever. I love that. Mike Monikowski, who always asks great questions, says, where do they come from originally and how big can they get? Well, it depends on the species. It depends on the species. The record of freshwater planarian, I think, is about 60 inches long. What? But they're not very common.

I may be a little mistaken, but they can get really big, the freshwater ones. Somewhere on Earth right now, there is a five-foot-long phallus-shaped flatworm. Now, there are also giant 12-inch land-dwelling ones called bipalium that look like a worm whose head is shaped like a medieval battle axe. Somewhere right now, there's one just eating with its anus, living its best life, not even knowing we're talking about its slimy majesty. They don't care. They are distributed worldwide. Okay, so they are in every single habitat that they can get except Antarctica. Okay, you will find planarians.

You will find planarians. There's actually a planarian that was named, it was named after Puerto Rico, my birthplace. Okay, side note, I looked this up, and there are several genera of flatworms named after Puerto Rican resident, zoologist, and legendary planariologist, Dr. Roman Kank. And his daughter is Dr. Vita Kank, herself a biologist. So some of these Kankia worms can be found in caves and deep lakes. They hang out wherever. Unlike your cousin's second wife, they don't need somewhere fancy. I mean, they're found everywhere. You know, I love science fiction too. And if you remember your Jurassic Park,

life finds a way. And planarians are a premier example of that. Ah, oh, there it is. Planarians are a premier example of that. Oh, there it is. Rob Shepard, patron, wrote in and said, I first learned about flatworms in a science museum when I was a kid, and I've always wanted to see them in the wild with appropriate magnification, of course, but I don't know where to look to be most likely to find them. Where would I look? I wanted to ask about experiments, and, you know, a lot of people are

home maybe with kids. Is there kind of a fun science observation or planarian hunting that you maybe could do if you want to do a science lesson at home? Absolutely. Because they're so easy to maintain and everything. You can, for example, do the preference between dark and light. You can get like a circular Petri dish. You cover half of them with electrical tape and you can actually count over a period of, I don't know, five, ten minutes, how many seconds do they spend in the light and in the dark. That's some of the experiments that we do in the lab to ascertain, for example, to try to come up with anxiety like behaviors.

OK, and it's very strange to talk about anxiety in a planarian. But let's think about something. Remember that they like to be in the dark. They hide. remember that they like to be in the dark. They hide. Okay? So, any type of compound that shifts that preference,

that they don't care too much if they are in the light or in the dark, while keeping the same degree of motility, is an indication of lesser anxiety, as it were. And guess what? Antidepressants cause that effect in planarians. No. Okay, they shift that response. Those are not my experiments, but some other groups have done that. Oh my gosh, that's so fascinating. Wow. P.S. I looked this up, and in a 2018 study titled PLDT, Planarian Light-Dark Test,

researchers found that these critters hid in the dark when they smelled, quote, frog odor, but then they chilled out in the light when administered 1% ethanol, aka that's a booze bath, or what's known on the streets as bath salts, or fluoxetine, aka Prozac, a drug I have also taken

to spend less time in the darkness. I'm gonna guess Planarians had lower deductibles, though. Megan McLean asked, has anyone ever knowingly eaten them? And if so, what do they taste like? And Zoltan Zrozzi says, asking the real questions here. You know what? You're not going to believe this, but that's the strangest question that I've ever gotten about planarians.

But your listener was not the first one. Because when my kids were at school, my youngest is 18 right now. But when my youngest was at school, I used to go to schools all the time, to their school, all the time to show them the worms and whatnot. And one year, a kid asked me precisely that question. When I was, do you have any questions and whatnot? Yeah. What do they taste like? And I was like, okay.

I can honestly say that I've never eaten one. I don't think they will hurt you. But then again, they live in pond water, which is not a sterile environment, as it were. So I wouldn't eat them. But to each his own. And Rachel Weisz wants to know, do worms have individual personalities or do they act kind of like bacteria? No offense, bacteria. I don't know about personality per se, but behavior.

Sometimes that's why we do replicates in experiments. Have you heard about the Harvard's Law of Animal Behavior? No. Okay. So it's not mine. I read it somewhere and I can't find the original reference, but it's something like this

and I'm probably paraphrasing it. Regardless of how carefully your behavioral experiments are designed, your animals will do whatever the heck they want. Okay. Under controlled experimental conditions of temperature, time, lighting, feeding, and training, the organism will behave as it damn well pleases. Writer and scholar Joel Garreau, 2009.

And planarians are a very good example of that because it's just like it's like humans for example in a big enough population let's suppose that three people get a migraine all right one of them may need a certain medication another one may need just I don't know ibuprofen and the third one just may need coffee. Okay? Because despite having the same basic genome, there's enough differences in enough genetic variabilities that may account for, again, pharmacogenetics. That's a whole field of science. This variation in preferences is even true for cloned worms, which is making me have kind of a gentle existential crisis about souls, and if they exist, and where do I go when I die? And if there was another me, would it be wearing matching socks? When we have, there's clonal populations of planarians

that the people over decades, for example, Professor Alejandro Sanchez Alvarado, he's one of the main people who work in planarians. They have a clonal population of planarians that they have been maintaining for decades. And even in a clonal population, which means that they have the same genes, their behaviors can differ. In the same way that two identical twins can differ in their taste. One of them may like coffee and the other one may like tea. Because most people sometimes forget that the environment is as important as the genes. Oh, wow. Okay.

So, yes, I mean, I guess that in terms of personalities, they may display different personalities. But how do you ascertain the personality of a planarian? I don't know. I know I'm very charming, but I don't know how can I ascertain whether a planarian is charming, you know? I guess you have to look and see how many planarians are around them just listening to their stories. Exactly. Exactly. have to look and see how many planarians are around them just listening to their stories exactly exactly now keepers of aquaria may be familiar with planarians as tank pests just loitering around trying to eat your shrimpies but laura stacy asked how harmful can these wormies be are planarians dangerous to humans not the freshwater type because they don't have any specific defense mechanism like, you know, venoms or something like that. But the marine planarians, some of them have nasty toxins in them.

So those can potentially harm a human if the human eats the planarian. Harm a human if the human eats the planarian. So marine planarians are called polyclads, and they look like if you rummaged around a Goodwill bin and pulled out a tuxedo shirt from 1968. But it was made of black and pink velvet, could breathe underwater, ate flesh, and had two dicks. And now, as long as we're talking goss about planarians, Ryan McGregor wants to know, can you discuss penis fencing? Is penis fencing in like saltwater planarians? Is that a thing?

It's just as far as I know, marine planarians. Yeah. And they, that particular activity, it's like exactly what it sounds like. Okay. And they, the thing is that flatworms in general are hermaphrodites. They have both sexes in them. And in the marine planarians, the penis fencing activity,

what happens is that they do what you imagine they do. Katherine Warren, George Farrar, and Annette Kay also asked about this. And I looked up a Nat Geo video showing these sea worms penis fencing. Right before it rolled, I want you to know that a YouTube ad for backyard fencing played. So Google, still not able to distinguish that I want penis fencing, not penis fencing. Anyway, on their undersides, both worms jut out two little nubbins.

They've got these two dicks, but no one said they were giant. And I'll be frank with you. They look kind of like a tiny set of tatas. They can wrestle for an hour, kind of like oceanic dick jujitsu, until one is, in effect, tapped out. Now, getting knocked up is calorically expensive. So let's suppose that one is able to stab the other one. The one who is stabbed is the loser and gets pregnant. As far as I know, freshwater planarians do not engage. No, no. Freshwater planarians are pretty decent organisms and do not engage in

such activities. Julie Bear wants to know, how old do the oldest planarians get? Well, that's a very good question, too, which nobody knows the answers to for a couple of reasons. Planarians are very easy to kill. I mean, you can actually squish them, you can

add chemicals to them, and actually, they will die very dramatically. They just won't die. They die and disintegrate, like in a movie or something like that. Oh, wow. Just poof, gone. Just like ghosting your own funeral. Now, also, this one blew my mind.

Planarians do not need Botox. Many species of planarians, they don't seem to display the phenomenon of senescence. They don't seem to display the phenomenon of senescence. They don't get old. In other words, the biochemical markers of senescence, they are not present in certain species of planarians. So, potentially, a planarian would be kind of, as long as you keep them and maintain them, could be potentially immortal. Nobody knows exactly how old they live. Not all planarians are able to do that, but many species do. Wow. Okay. Okay. Hold the phone. Planarians slurp up other planarians and either disappear into a poof or they're maybe immortal. So sexy

vampires, kindly step aside. This Halloween, we're wearing full-body spandex worm outfits with googly eyes. I think this is a great question. Nikki DeMarco wants to know, first-time question asker, if they regenerate, do they remember what they've learned, or are they a whole new being? Oh my god, that's an awesome question, and we know part of the answer. In the 1950s and 60s, there were a series of controversial experiments about the retention of memory in regenerating planarians. So what they did was to train planarians

to recoil from an electrical current or something like that, okay? Then they will cut their heads off. Right. They will allow the bodies to regenerate their heads. Okay. And there seems some indication that the tail remembered the stimulus. They were more easily trained to recoil from the stimulus and whatnot.

But for the longest time, those experiments were controversial. They were called the James McConnell experiments because many people criticize him because of, you know, scientists can be vicious at criticizing each other. But then came Professor Mike Levin of Tufts University. He actually replicated McConnell's experiments in a controlled environment, unbiased, using computer observation and everything. And he was able to demonstrate a portion of the McConnell's experiments. He trained planarians to recognize the roughness of the of a surface okay and relate that to the presence of food okay and cuts their heads off and yes the tail did remember the tail did remember

so that part is completely established i mean that could happen wow now let's go back to the 60s. In the 60s, Dr. McConnell trained planarians to, again, recoil from an electrical shock. Then they will grind those planarians, feed those planarians to naive planarians. And he claimed that the planarians who ate the trained planarians got their memories transferred to them. Those experiments have not been replicated yet. Actually, McConnell, Dr. McConnell, was a very controversial figure. He was actually one of the victims of the famous, well, of the infamous Unabomber. The Unabomber sent a bomb to Dr. McConnell, and he was not killed, thankfully, but he was injured and everything because of his controversial brain experiments.

So, the memory transference in planarian death has not been established as far as I know, but that the rest of the body retains at least some capacity to remember, yeah, that's pretty much true. That brings us, opens the, again, pardon the proverbial pun, it opens a can of worms because word to memories are stored in the planarian. It's not exclusively in their brains, you know. So it opens the can of flatworms to figure out if it's a fluke or not? Oh, yeah, that's another good one. Oh, my gosh, this is amazing.

I usually ask ologists about movies or TV shows about their fields, but planarians? I mean, there's not going to be a superhero about a cross-eyed flatworm. There was a comic book about planarians called Planarian Man. No. book about planarians called planarian man no yes that was the brainchild of mr neil overmeyer who is a very gifted editorial cartoonist from nebraska and in the 1990s he created that comic book uh planarian man he was actually very kind to allow me to use uh some of his uh drawings in in the first brain planarianarian Man, what better cartoon? I know!

And it has an origin story very similar to Spider-Man. Side note, I looked this up, and Planarian Man's backstory was that he was dissecting a worm in biology class and nicked his finger and became one with the Planarian. But in true regeneration fashion, when parts of his body would get lopped off in combat, they themselves

would grow a new person. And so his nemesis is mad Dr. Planarian, who is like you, but if you're evil, which is just kind of casually each of our darkest fears. Also, One told me that in a 1939 paper about Planarian head duplication written by one Dr. Hamburger, the fused multi-headed flatworms looked exactly like Battlestar Galactica Raider ships? Really? And when I saw that paper, that looks like a Cylon. And I said another expletive that I shouldn't say in the podcast. But, you know i you can find connections you can find connections everywhere with these topics oh no as amazing as planaria are there must be something annoying about them there must be something that you hate about planaria something that i hate about planarian let me see. Actually, no, I love them.

Ah, this guy. I love Oney like Oney loves worms. But come on, there's got to be something bad. Do they smell? Not that I know of. No, because they come in pond water. And as long as you change the water regularly, they don't smell. They don't smell.

Oh, nice. And they're so cute critters. There's a source of fascination. I mean, it's like playing, really. Really, what I do is play with worms. I just play with worms. That's what I do. Is there anything about your job that you hate? About my job?

No. I love teaching. And of course, I love talking about science. I love reading about science. I love doing research because there's something about you discovering something that you know or you are very sure that you're the very first person that's ever learned uh about that and it's it's an indescribable feeling i i can't for the life of me tell you anything that i don't like about my job that's amazing i don't like administration that much because i i know my limitations and I know that I know that I would be a very bad administrator. That's that's for sure.

My hat's off. Oh, yeah. My hat's off to people who can do bureaucracy and all this type of things. I'm pretty bad at it, too. What about your very, very favorite thing in terms of work or these critters? I love data. I love when I get I'm able to get some numbers and then graph them and analyze to try to find a particular phenomenon that I can ascertain from that. I love my data.

I love my data. I love analyzing data. I'm intending to learn a lot more microscopy than I know. So I can apply to, for example, applying some fluorescent compounds to planarians so they can tag specific receptors and we can actually trace nerve cells, all these type of things. I want to learn how to do that because we have all the equipment at the university to do that. But I hope we can open soon

so we can do that. I hope so, too. Are you keeping busy at home at all? Can you be working on your data at home? Actually, I have a bunch of data that I'm writing up. As you can imagine, the university went all online. I was furiously converting my class to online mode. In every semester, I have an average of about 600 students, depending on how many courses I teach. So it's a big undertaking to do that. And I want to say again, hi to all my fellows, faculty members, and my students at Westchester, because I mean, we're all in this together and we're going to get through this. But it's been an uphill. Let's say let's put it in academic terms.

It's been a steep learning curve to do everything online. I bet. Yeah, because one of my techniques to teach is that I tell very bad jokes. That's amazing. I am a dad. OK, so I love doing that jokes. But the real reason why I teach bad jokes in class is that we are all conditioned to a few minutes of close attention, followed by distractions, okay? Commercials, you know, whatever, a cell phone or a text or whatever. So when I see that a significant fraction of my class is not quite there, Bueller, if you know what I mean, I crack a stupid joke,

I get a courtesy laugh or a pity smile or a groan or an eye roll. But at any rate, I reset their attention and bring them back to me. So I cannot do that online. So a big part of my technique I cannot use right now. But I'll make do. Meanwhile, you can find him at his blog, baldscientist.wordpress.com and on Twitter at baldscientist. I love his tweets. He's got his pronouns and his bio. It is just a warm, wonderful person to add to your timelines. Trust me,

we love to see it. I love answering questions. I love meeting like-minded people. As I said before, I love science Twitter. That's where you can find me. Oh my gosh, this was so fun. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for the opportunity. I really appreciate it. And well, you cannot fake this. I'm enthusiastic about these things.

Thank you. I know, I could tell. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So you know the drill, whether it's by FaceTime or whispered over a landline or bellowed through the muffle of a mask from six feet away. Ask smart people stupid questions because we're all going to be dust one day. And who gives a rat's ass? It's cool to know stuff. All right. Now, if you are besotted with friendly worm expert, again, you can follow Dr. Pagan on Twitter at bald scientist or at his blog, also bald scientist at wordpress.com. I'll link both of those in the show notes alongside sponsors

of the show and no kid hungry. There are more links and research up at alibar.com slash ologies slash plenariology. And that link will be in the show notes to your cat may be on your lap, you probably don't have a pen. It's fine. Come be friends with us on Instagram or on Twitter. We're at ologies on both. And I'm on both as Allie Ward with one L and for ology sweatshirts and hats and totes and stuff. You can head over to ologiesmerch.com. Thank you, Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltes for that.

They host the comedy podcast. You are that. Thank you to every single patron that supports the show on patreon.com slash ologies. Aaron Talbert admins the ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to every single patron that supports the show on patreon.com slash ologies. Aaron Talbert admins the ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you, Emily White and all the ologies transcribers for making transcripts available. And Caleb Patton for bleeping episodes to make them kid safe. Good luck with this one. Transcripts and bleeped episodes are up at aliborn.com slash ologies extras.

There's going to be a link in the show notes to that. Thank you, Noel Dilworth for scheduling and so much other help. Kelly Dwyer for web mastering. And congrats on the brand new babe. Also, you can check out her husband, Matt Dwyer's podcast, Conversations with Matt Dwyer. It's so, so good. I happen to be his guest this week, but check out his back catalog. It's so good.

Jarrett Sleeper of Mindjam Media also hosts My Good Bad Brain, a mental health podcast. Thank you, Jarrett, for assistant editing. This one took so many extra hours because we had a lag in the remote recording service that we use, and it was just a nightmare to edit, and he and Steven did an amazing job. So thank you, of course, to the Be Mustached, Steven Ray Morris, who hosts the podcast, The Purrcast, and C. Jurassic Wright edit and he and Steven did an amazing job. So thank you, of course, to the be mustached Steven Ray Morris, who hosts the podcast, the per cast and see Jurassic right for lead editing. And if you stick around until the end, you are rewarded with a little bonus truth nugget. And this week, I finally figured out that I might be a little more snacky and sluggish at home, partly because

I'm just not drinking enough water because I never use my insulated water bottle at home. That's usually like a leave in the house thing. And that thing keeps shit ice cold. And a little fun fact about old dad ward, room temperature water is disgusting to me. And water that's been sitting out a while that might have dust in it is also gross. And I think that's from seeing signs by M. Night Shyamalan in the theater 20 years ago. But I just started filling my insulated water bottle with ice water to drink. And I think that's helping. Just a little fun tidbit. So stay hydrated and raise a glass to all the planarians who bravely underwent research and are saving other animals' lives. Thanks, planarians. Not to end on a sad note. I mean, I meant that in a good way, but thanks, Planarians. All right. Bye-bye. I'm the king.