Science Friday - Alcohol Study, Cephalopod Week, Coral Oasis. June 22 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: June 22, 2018

Last week, the National Institutes of Health cancelled a $100 million study of alcohol and health after an internal investigation found “early and frequent” engagement with none other than the alcohol industry, to an extent that would “cast doubt” on the scientific results. But prior to the cancellation, the research was setting out to answer an ongoing question about alcohol and our health: Are moderate drinkers actually better off than nondrinkers? Study after study has found that light or moderate drinkers have a slight health advantage, especially in avoiding nonfatal heart attacks, but is that because they drink, or is it due to some other factor like wealth? Cephalopod Week 2018 has been a worldwide cephalo-bration of octopus, squid, cuttlefish, nautilus, and other undersea friends—but like a fast-jetting octopus, it goes by too quickly. As we wrap up Cephalopod Week this year, squid biologist Sarah McAnulty joins Ira to talk about her research into a symbiotic bacterial relationship in the Hawaiian bobtail squid, a lime-sized beastie that likes to bask on the Hawaiian sand. And Science Friday web producer Lauren Young joins the party to tell the story of a 19th-century self-taught French naturalist, Jeanne Villepreux-Power, who investigated the shell of the paper nautilus—and helped shape the design of early aquariums in the process.   Worldwide, corals are suffering from bleaching events due to rising ocean temperatures and human activity. The Great Barrier Reef has had bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, and the Pacific and western Atlantic ocean is currently experiencing a bleaching event that began in 2014. But in these tropical areas, there are pockets of coral that are surviving these events while neighboring coral die out. A study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology described that “coral oases” provide a “glimmer of hope,” according to marine biologist Ilsa Kuffner. She talks about how these corals might be surviving and how it could be used for conservation.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. Coming up a little bit later in the hour, how to resolve the question of, is it drink a day okay? Is it helpful? And then we bring our celebration of Sepulopod Week to a close. But first, according to United Nations estimates, more than 60 million people around the world are in some way displaced from their homes. And roughly 30 million are either refugees or seeking asylum in another country. As U.S. and European countries fight politically over how to treat these migrants.

One of the big arguments against welcoming them is money. How does an influx of new people affect the nation's economy? New research published in the journal Science Advocates found that countries that welcome migrants often see a boom. And within as little as two years, here to explain that research and other short subjects in science is Maggie Kerth Baker, senior science editor. at 538, he joins us, as always, from Minneapolis. Hi there, Maggie. Hi, how are you? So how do you go about measuring the economic impact of something like immigration? Well, so what these researchers did was they looked at 30 years' worth of migrant and economic data from 15 countries in Western Europe. And what they found is that, you know, when you accept migrants and refugees into these

countries, it didn't harm the economies. And in fact, what they found is that the more stability the countries offered immigrants, the better off the economies were. So, for instance, if you had an influx of migrants who were, you know, giving some kind of permanent residency status, that was associated with increases in national economic health and reductions in the unemployment rate. And these changes happened on average within just two years of the migration. And in contrast, when you had an influx of people who were coming in under a less stable situation, so for instance, if they weren't allowed to work, if they weren't sure they

were going to be given permanent asylum. It took more than twice as long for economic benefits to appear, and the benefits weren't as large. And basically, the experts think that that's just because stability means putting down roots. People take on jobs. They increase local demand for products and services. They increase the tax space.

They start businesses that create jobs for others. When they have stability, economies benefit. Yeah. Should economies alone then to motivate countries' decisions about how to treat people? rye from other countries? Well, obviously not. We know that there are already lots of good moral and ethical reasons to help people find a safe haven, at least of all being, what would you want people to do for you?

But this is one of those things that can sort of help to put that in the context for, you know, people who are concerned about economic impacts of large-scale migration, is that it is not a bad thing for economies. Let's move on to another topic, and this is a dilemma for you. U.S. recycling thanks to China. It's about plastics in China? Yeah, so you might have missed back in December when China announced that it would no longer open its doors to plastic waste from the rest of the world. And it turns out that when you put plastic in the recycling, it was usually cheaper to send that across an ocean for processing in China than to do the actual recycling domestically.

That country was accepting more than 45% of the plastic waste from around the world, and that's over now. So a new study came out this week that found that it could mean these huge quantities of plastic that have nowhere to go, grinding recycling programs to a halt worldwide. By 2030, the U.S. alone could have an extra 37 million metric tons of plastic to contend with. And a lot of that is probably just going to end up in the trash. The Washington Post is reporting that some states like Massachusetts and Oregon are already lifting restrictions that used to prevent plastics from going to landfills. Going back to the 60s. In some ways, yeah. And there's a couple things that we can do.

One thing you can do is do a better job of sorting and cleaning your recycling because China is still accepting plastics that don't have a lot of food contamination on them. The other thing is that we're just going to have to use less plastic. So plastic bags, plastic straws, all those things that are already on, the regulatory chopping block in a lot of places. Maybe we can make biodegradable plastic a little more useful. Right. Next up, non-stick skillets are even worse than you think they are. Yeah, there's a toxicology report that came out this week,

revealing that this whole class of chemicals that they're used in non-stick skillets, but also in things like firefighting foam. And they can be dangerous at levels that were seven to times lower, seven to ten times lower than the standards that have previously been set by the EPA. So in many places around the country, these chemicals are in the drinking water at, levels above what the new report recommends, and that's putting everybody, especially fetuses and newborns, at risk of a range of possible problems from decreased fertility all the way

up to things like cancer and liver damage. How old is this report, and why haven't we heard about it? Well, this report has been actively suppressed by the Trump administration. There's memos that came out revealing that the administration knew about the report at least as early as January and was sitting on it because of its potential to be a PR nightmare. It was only released this week after several Congress people had drafted an amendment to a Pentagon spending bill that would have forced the publication. So there's a lot of things sort of going on with this. It's going to cost a lot of money in cleanup.

There are corporations that have made these chemicals that have already paid out huge settlements for fixing water supplies and dealing with the damage caused by release of this chemical into the environment. So are they saying everybody to throw out their non-stick skillets? The bigger thing is this water issue. The bigger thing is probably more to do some kind of charcoal filter on the water that you drink because that's going to clean up some of this stuff. I already have mine firmly in place. But a long last, we're going to try to clean up some space junk. There is an awful lot of it, isn't there?

There is an awful lot of it. NASA is tracking more than 500,000 pieces of space. chunk. And that's just the stuff that's big enough to track. So that's everything bigger than a marble. 20,000 of those pieces are larger than a softball, and they all move at speeds capable of damaging the International Space Station, damaging spacecraft, creating plots for hit movies, all of that kind of thing. So what are they going to do? How do you get a garbage truck into space to collect all this stuff? Well, the largest satellite ever deployed from the ISS launched on June 20th. It's called Remove Debris.

and it is the first real-life experiment that's kind of aimed at eliminating this space junk from orbit. So what it's going to do is basically test out this system kind of like skeet shooting in space, where it's going to release a couple of cubesats from itself, and then try to pull those things back on board using a harpoon and net system. And then if that is successful, it will de-orbit itself using a drag sail. So normally a satellite of this size would take a couple of years to fall out of orbit, With the drag sale, it'll take eight months. I think we need some fishermen astronauts up there with their nets and stuff.

Yeah, apparently. The white whale is now going to be space junk. Maggie Hurth Baker, Senior Science Editor at 530, it always good to have you. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you. Now it's time to play Good Thing, Bad Thing. Because Every Story has a flip side. Now, you know that coral reefs worldwide are dying due to climate change and human activity,

the Great Barrier Reef has seen bleaching of, events two years in a row. The Pacific and Western Atlantic Oceans have been suffering from a bleaching event that started in 2014. But listen, there might be a glimmer of hope because researchers documented what they're calling coral oases in some tropical areas. Their results were published in a recent study in the Journal of Applied Ecology. Ilsa Kuffner is an author on that study and a marine biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey based out in St. Petersburg, Florida. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me.

So are we talking about bad losses in the Pacific and Atlantic? Yes, it's estimated around 50% of the world's coral reefs are now considered degraded, which means they've lost a lot of the hard corals that produce the reef habitat that other inhabitants of the reef and humans depend upon. Sorry, go ahead. But I'm saying that you have some hopeful news for us, though. Yes, so there were 18 of us on. Powell Center Working Group, coral scientists from around the world. And over the years we had observed in our studies, as would people who had general experience

on reefs, that there always seems to be pockets of reefs that are doing better than others. And we all have our favorite spots. So for this study, we wanted to see if these anecdotal observations held up in the existing long-term data sets that exist out there, meaning sites that have been visited. by scientists for at least 10 years. And we found that, yes, there does seem to be sites that persist over time, doing better than expected than their neighbors. And we categorized these Oases into three different types.

We categorized resist Oases, meaning Oases that experience stress, but the corals didn't succumb there. And then we had escape Oases, like the community existed in a place where, where the stress was less severe for some reason. And then the third category, which unfortunately only a few reefs fit into, were the rebound reefs where the community was killed off, but then was able to recover. So what's the future?

Can we learn from these reefs to make the coral healthy again? Yes. So, I mean, I think there's some very hopeful news here. I think Oasis exists because the ocean is a very dynamic. and complex system, especially near shore where shallow corals live. And these are patchworks, mosaics of microhabitats, where everything has a ton of natural variability, even over short distances, in things like water chemistry, temperature, and even in the corals themselves.

A slide I like to show during the talks I give is a photograph I took on a reef during a bleaching event, showing two corals growing size. side by side. They're the same exact species experiencing the same exact environment, but one is completely bleached white and one appears completely unfazed. So what this means is despite the diabaks we've been seeing, there's still a considerable amount of genetic variability out there for natural selection to act upon. And this is a great source of hope. Yeah. Before you go, I have to ask you one question. The L.A. Times is reporting that a new director from the Trump administration and instructs federal scientists like yourself with the U.S. Geological Survey to get

approval before agreeing to most interview requests from WE reporters. Did you have to get permission to do this interview? No, I wouldn't say I had to get permission. I just notified my supervisor and my chain of command, but they were supportive of it. That's good. It's good to hear. And we'll be following your research. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. Good luck to you. Well, thank you very much. Yes. Thank you. Neil Sukhner is a marine biologist with the U.S. geological survey based out of

St. Petersburg, Florida. After the break, a story about NIH pulling the plug on a major study about, well, is moderate drinking good for us or not? We'll talk about what the details of that story is after the break, so stay with us. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato. We all think we know more or less what a healthy lifestyle looks like, right? Don't smoke no hard drugs, get some amount of exercise, eat your fruits and vegetables. But what about alcohol? That one glass of red wine you've heard about, you know, one glass a day or your beverage of choice now, for that matter? Studies dating back to as early as 1924 have found an association with greater health for moderate drinkers than non-drinkers, especially where the heart is concerned.

And that's what one huge NIH-funded study was setting out to test. would participants ask to drink one drink per day in a 10-year clinical trial prove healthier than those who didn't drink at all? Well, we'll have to wait a bit longer for that answer because last week, NIH Director Francis Collins pulled the plug on a study led by researchers at Harvard because of its strong ties with the alcohol industry. Five companies, including Anheuser-Busch, chipped in tens of millions of dollars to fund the research, An internal NIH investigation also found

that companies had frequent contact with the research team throwing into doubt the validity of any results and oh by the way there is some questions about the studies design also so where does that leave us in the bid to understand how alcohol affects our brains that's what we're going to be talking about if you'd like to join us gives our call 844-724-8255 let me introduce my guest Ronnie Rabin is a health reporter for the New York Times her reporting was instrumental and exposing flaws, and then it's now canceled research trial.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Glad to be here. Richard Saitz is a public health professor and chair of Boston University's Department of Community Health Sciences. That's, of course, in Boston. Welcome, Richard. Good afternoon.

Thank you. So let's talk about this study. Let's start with the canceled study. And some of your most recent reporting, you noted that they almost called it cheers. They almost caught it cheers. They like to come up with these acronyms that are acute names for studies. And that someone came up with that. I don't know if it was a joke or not.

It was in an email. Cardiovascular, health, ethanol, something randomized study. So what lines were crossed here? Journalistic lines were crossed here? Journalistic lines or scientific lines? Both. I mean, in terms of, oh, let's talk about the scientific lines first. In cooperation between the scientists and the alcohols.

companies? Well, first of all, the trial, there's some questions about the trial's design, but I think the biggest problem was that NIH research is supposed to be funded by NIH money, which comes from taxpayers, and it should be very, it should be research we have no doubts about, have no qualms about. They do have a foundation called the foundation for NIH that's allowed to raise money for there for studies. And that's what we were told initially had happened.

And in a sense, it did, but it happened after the fact. They had already been scientists who wanted to do this study, including the Harvard professor, and members of the top brass at the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, who actually lobbied the industry directly for this money. They went to industry conferences. They went to the breakers in Florida. They went to a beer institute, a World Beer Institute conference in Philadelphia. They went to the Distilled Spirits Council, and they presented the study, but they presented it with a strong sense that they would find medical evidence that would change medical guidelines, strong scientific evidence that would change medical guidelines and have doctors start recommending, actively recommending a drink a day of alcohol.

But they couldn't do the study without the industry's funding. So there was an appearance of it will give you what you want if you help fund the study. There was such an appearance, yeah. But this only came out later, and it only came out because someone got really annoyed, someone who knew about it, got really annoyed and gave me a tip to look into it. Dr. Saitz, Ronnie was talking about the actual study design. What can me give you some idea about the flaws, if the researchers were determined to be objective, data is data. What could be wrong with that?

Well, there are a few problems with the study, and also a couple problems with doing a study like this. So the main problem with the study is that it was going to look for reductions in heart disease and heart disease death, but not overall mortality and cancers. And alcohol is not only addictive, it's a carcinogen. And so if you're giving that to prevent something like heart disease, you'd like to also know if it has any adverse effects and one might be the development of cancer. But the second issue was that they really restricted who could be in the study really quite seriously. There were more than 25 different listed exclusions. And of course, you have to do that when you do a trial like this of a medication, in this case alcohol. You have to exclude people who might run into trouble with that medication.

But in excluding so many people, it means that the results of the study wouldn't be widely applicable. And yet it's very likely that the results would be used widely, meaning that they'd apply to many people who were not in the study, who are older people at risk of heart disease, at very low risk of cancer, at low risk of alcohol problems. And those aren't the people who might be reading the study later and using its results and using it to justify sort of their drinking and figuring out that, well, you'd really want to confirm this in some other study, and that other study is unlikely to be done. considering I've asked and I each people over the decades I've talked about alcohol study would you ever recommend a drink to anybody as part of your national recommendations of how to eat healthy and they said no we would never do that because we are fearful that there might be alcoholics or people don't know and they would be harmed by that is what about the ethical considerations that requires people if you conducted such a study to actually have a drink how might you know that what things that are not discovered about them yet.

Right. So you can try to make it as safe as possible by excluding those at highest risk of any of the alcohol consequences. But, you know, if this weren't alcohol, if this weren't in our culture where alcohol drinking is normative, if we just called this an addictive carcinogen and that we were going to test an addictive carcinogen to see if it might prevent heart disease, that just wouldn't fly, right? So we'd worry about the ethics of such a study. The other issue is that men and women were both in this study. They were told to drink moderately, and that was defined as one drink a day for men and women. That's never been the definition of moderate drinking for men.

It has been for women. So it's kind of interesting that they chose such a low amount, and it's questionable whether people would stick to such a low amount. And in addition to the exclusions that Dr. States mentioned, this was only people 50 and over at high risk for heart disease. This was not the general population. So as older people, there were not going to be enough women, and they were not going to follow long enough to see about the breast cancer risk. And this is an enormous risk. They were going to exclude women who were known to be at high risk for breast cancer,

but every woman is at risk for breast cancer. And at very low rates of alcohol consumption, breast cancer can be increased. We've seen that repeatedly in studies, and there's very little awareness about it. So connecting all those dots that you just mentioned, narrowing down the number of people, the kinds of people, the amount of drinking there would be doing, it sort of does point to the fact that you know what the answer is and you want to just get the results from a study.

You know that it's, you know, you want to come out with an answer that's not harmful, and then you just go ahead and do the study. Well, that's what the head of the NIH, Francis Collins, said at the meeting on Friday. He said, this seems to have been designed to come out a positive benefit for alcohol. Richard, we all started with a question about the health benefits and moderate drinking. I tried to point out this has a long history. Where did this speculation about healthy, moderate drinking come from in the first place?

Yeah, I mean, as you pointed out, there have been observational studies or cohort studies, many, many of them that do find that low amounts of alcohol seem to be associated with less heart disease, less heart disease death, and even lower mortality. And there's even some early animal studies that suggest and some human biological studies where you expose people to alcohol and it looks like some markers of health might improve. However, a lot of observational studies that find associations between drinking and better health could all be wrong. In fact, it's likely that they're all wrong because people who choose to drink low amounts of alcohol, are very, very different from people who either don't drink at all or from people who drink a lot.

And so the conclusions that we draw from those sorts of observational studies are just not good enough to really know what the risks and benefits of drinking low amounts of alcohol might be. And an experiment really is the only way to figure that out, a randomized trial, which is what this was. But the problem is that it's hard to do those randomized trials. more than one is unlikely to be done, and this one, and even anyone, is unlikely to answer the question. What about the red wine issue? Where we say, oh, there's an ingru, was it a risverital? I'm not sure I'm not pronouncing it, right? There's an ingredient in red wine that is protective, and everybody should be drinking that glass of red wine to get that.

Is that just anecdotal evidence also? It's present in very, very, very small amounts in red wine. and there's, again, no proof of that drinking or wine. It's the exact, you know, whenever I talk about this with friends, I say, okay, we don't know about alcohol, but red wine, right? Red wine's good for you. No, it's the exact same level of evidence. We have no better evidence for red wine.

And again, to paraphrase what Dr. State said, is, does drinking make people healthy, or is drinking moderately just something that healthy people do? That's the problem with the observational studies. 84472485. And we all know that really intensive double-blind studies of any kind and a large population cost hundreds of millions of dollars to do.

And they're called the gold standard, and we call them the gold standard. But they're only the gold standard if the design is good. Is it possible then to make a good design to really test this out? Well, see, you know, if you think about how we've done this for other, even over-the-counter products, I like to use the example of aspirin. In order to decide whether aspirin was good for preventing heart attacks, whether the benefits outweighed the risks, we did many, not we, but those in the scientific community,

did many large randomized control trials. And they also didn't just give people money to go to the store and buy aspirin, which, by the way, was the design for this alcohol study. They were going to pay people to go and buy alcohol and drink it and then say, Come on, come on. Come on. No, I'm not making that up. I'm not making it up.

And then say how much they drank. Well, if you do a study like I was talking about with aspirin, you would measure the exact amount of aspirin you were giving, and you would give them that dose as part of the study, so you know what they're taking, and you'd have ways of measuring how much they're taking. You compare it to a placebo, and then you look over time. So that's not the kind of study that this was. And, you know, admittedly, an alcohol study is very hard to do because, as I said before, it's normative behavior.

most people have had a drink of alcohol, most adults in the U.S. in the past year. And so this study would take people who already are drinking some and then tell them to not drink or to go and buy some alcohol and to be sure that they drank one standard drink per day. It's pretty hard to get that to be valid. So I want to mix metaphors. So you're sort of throwing cold water on the idea that we could do such a study that would be controlled in the way

to answer that question. And conversely, if we're talking about heart disease and health, there are a lot of different ways you can improve people's health and trying to do this kind of. Absolutely. I mean, that's the other thing that's important to realize and remember that we know so much about preventing and treating and protecting people from heart disease and what the risk factors are.

We actually know a lot less about cancer. We know a lot less about why some people develop cancer and other people don't. And, you know, the genetics, of course, we're learning a lot about, but the ones that pop up and without the history and without the, we actually know a lot less about. And I think that, and I know that cancer death rates are fast climbing, and heart disease is still number one cause of death in this country, but cancer's climbing right up there.

I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking about alcohol and disease studies. It's just, it's amazing that the public is going to hear another thing, another reversal of something they've heard again. And what does this do you think? The public's perception of science doesn't have any effect, negative effect? Oh, look, we heard all these years that having a drink and drinking red wine is good. Now we hear that it's not true.

We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. And I think, you know, maybe that's our bad as science journalists. I mean, I think that we write about a lot of studies. There are more observational studies, which are the weaker studies, than there are the randomized clinical trials,

and we write about a lot of them, and maybe we don't put enough precautions in and say, this is not a study that proves cause and effect. This is an association. And maybe we just have to keep repeating that more strongly in our stories. It does remind me of the Woody Allen film where he wakes up centuries later and finds out that French fries are good for him

and that everything was wrong. You know, I think scientists, we need to take some responsibility for this, too, because whenever we find an association or find something positive in our studies, especially if it's something that people will like, we like to go to the journalists. My colleagues on this call and have them publicize it. And it is hard sometimes to explain that no one study solves these kinds of questions and that the results are complicated and we're sort of doing the best. we can. But I think that what's happened recently, which is new, by the way, is that in recent

observational studies that have been done better than those in the past, when you try to narrow down on the best methodological characteristics of some of the studies, we're actually finding that alcohol is not, low amounts of alcohol is not associated with lower heart disease risk and that it's not associated with lower mortality. And these are some studies called meta-analyses or systematic reviews where you systematically look at the literature at large to try to get the best answer from multiple studies. And those really are not finding the beneficial associations that were seen in other individual, probably lesser quality studies. Besides, they say alcohol is toxic to your liver. There are negative effects, not just

of drinking too much, but what it has on your body. Well, there it's likely that that it's, those kinds of effects are likely from heavy drinking. But as Ronnie Rabin pointed out, for breast cancer, for example, the risk increases at about one to six standard drinks per week. And so we're talking about the effects of low amounts of alcohol. I didn't realize it was that high for breast cancer. Yeah, it's a small increase, but remember, women are high, and this is a very, a very common cancer. And there's very little awareness. And, Women seem to be drinking a lot more in this country now. There seems to be a lot of promotion and marketing of drinking to women.

And about 4% of all cancers to move beyond breast cancer, about 4% of all cancers are attributable to alcohol. And so that's, because many cancers are not easily preventable, it's nice to know that there's something that's actually preventable. And if you removed alcohol, you'd remove 4% of the cancer burden in the U.S. And for breast cancer, I believe I saw a figure 16% of breast cancers attributed to drinking alcohol. Something to think about this weekend.

Thank you both for taking time to be with us again. Ronnie Rabin is a health reporter for the New York Times and Richard Seitz, public health professor and chair of Boston University's Department of Community Health Sciences in Boston. When we come back, if we haven't talked about bad news enough, here's some bad news. Our annual week-long celebration of cephalopods is drawing to a close, but it's not quite through. So stay with us for our little celebration. celebration as our concluding celebration of cephalopods. We'll be right back after this break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. All good things must come to an end, and our annual cephalopod celebration is no exception. Today marks the end of Cephalopod week. But, but it's not over yet. We're still going to hang on for another 20 minutes. Joining me now is Sarah McAnulty, squid biologist and PhD candidate

at the University of Connecticut in Stores. She's also founder of Scapea scientists. Welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me. You know, I follow you on Twitter and you're constantly showing off all your your cephalopod friends, especially, you know, all those folks that you keep around. You study the Hawaiian bobtail squid, correct? Yes, I do.

They're very easy to show off. They're beautiful little animals. And you have this love for them. Like they're, you know, they're your pets, but you're studying them at the same time. Yeah, I mean, when you have, you have. one of the cutest animals in the animal kingdom in my, I can say professional opinion, I just want to share them with everyone possible. So they're pretty photogenic, so I love to take pictures of them and then share them with as many people as I can.

Because I don't think I really knew that Bobtail Squid existed when I was a little kid. So the more people I can share the love with, the better. So how did you first learn about them? I actually didn't learn about Bobtail Squid until I was a bit older in college. I was looking for studies on the immune system of squid, and I just went on PubMed and looked up some articles, and there was a ton of work done by Margaret McFal and I and Spencer Nyholm on the immune cells of squid.

And I found that this was going to be the perfect model to study this sort of animal bacteria communication. And so you see a fell in love with these squid. Yeah, I've always been in love with squid, but these little guys are really, really good for the kind of questions I want to be answering. Tell me why. So these squid are really neat.

They have a bioluminescent type of bacteria that lives on the underside of the squid in a specialized organ called the light organ. And now in this organ, there's just one type of bacteria. And that's really great for the purpose of science because instead of having like a mouse model, for example, that may have like a thousand species of bacteria that live in the gut, if you have just one type of bacteria in a given organ, it's really awesome because it's kind like just listening to two members of a conversation instead of trying to listen to like everybody talking all at the same time in a crowded room. So you can really understand more simply the

conversation that occurs between beneficial bacteria and an animal. And we can understand things about humans and other animals and how they relate to bacteria from a model like squid. Well, you know, it sounds like there's some symbiotic stuff going here and I think once having owned a 90 gallon reef tank in my living room. I'm sorry, I never put some squid in there. I don't think I could get him to stay alive. Yeah. I remember looking at the coral and having to learn how the coral have a symbiotic relationship also.

Is this sort of the same thing? It's a similar thing, yes. So the one thing about the coral, that's with this organism called symbiodidium. They can create energy from sunlight, and then the zoosantheli, the little animal that the coral is made up of. they're also in this one-to-one sort of relationship. The difference there is that I believe those are intracellular, and then the bacteria that live in the squid are sort of in like a pocket inside the squid.

So they're not inside the cells. They're just sort of like the same way that your gut is inside you, but it's like also kind of outside you because there's a tube that goes directly through you and then never really enters your tissues per se. It's a similar situation in the squid. Wow. So do these bacteria actually feed the squid?

Are they feeding them, food? Is that how they live together? The squid feeds the bacteria, actually. This is a really cool and interesting thing because one of the graduate students, who's now a Ph.D., Julia Schwartzman, she is now at Harvard. She was working with Margaret McFall and her work and Ned Ruby. And they found that the hemocytes,

So the immune cells of the squid will go en masse into the light organ where all the bacteria live and basically sacrifice themselves and feed the bacteria. And this is a pretty wacky thing to think about because normally you think of an immune cell as just being like an attack dog, like something that's just trying to destroy any bacteria in their path. That's what you probably learn in like fifth grade or whatever, whenever you first learn about immune cells. But these immune cells not only defend the squid also feed these bacteria in the light organ when it's beneficial to the squid. So that's really cool. And they also feed them other nutrients in different times of the day. And then in return, the bacteria give the squid light

for camouflage. She had this glowing squid that's feeding the bacteria. Wow. Wow. Do you have a, you've worked with octopus and cuttlefish. Do you have other favorite cephalopods that you like besides these squid? Yeah, so this squid is really good for kind of molecular biology, host, microbe stuff. But in terms of behavior, they're not the most exciting squid. They're pretty much just sitting around and burying in the sand, particularly during the day. But the other squid that I really, really like are these reef squid that live in the Caribbean, the Caribbean reef squid. And also there's a similar species, the Big Finn reef squid that lives around the Indo-Pacific in Japan and Australia.

and they're really large and beautiful and they're very graceful when they swim and I like those a lot. And there's also the giant Australian cuttlefish that are these like mammoth, brightly colored, big, big cuttlefish. And they have some really fun behaviors

that I love to talk about. They're great. Like what? So I don't know if I've talked about this before but my favorite cephalopod story, the thing that I like to hook people with the most is the mating behaviors of the giant Australian cuttlefish.

And this is just like, so just a testament to how complicated the behavior of cephalopods can be. So during mating season, they all gather together in one area of the reef. And there's usually about eight to ten males for every female cuttlefish. So these males really need to be good at attracting a mate. And what they do, the big males will basically battle. They'll wrestle each other. And they're sort of like large and billowy. It kind of looks like two duvets are like battling each other.

they're like just like flopping all over the place. They're usually like bright purple and blue and black. And so that's happening while simultaneously there are smaller males that know that they don't have a chance in fighting these bigger males. So they've come up with a totally new strategy for attracting a female. And so in the reefs you can tell the difference between the male and female squid because the males are putting on sort of like a blue black pattern. And the females have more of like a splotchy maroon and white.

pattern and the males have two extra arms that kind of hang down below that you can tell the difference so the little males will tuck their big side arms and then put on the color pattern of the females and then swim over to the female while the big males are battling each other and not paying attention and then when he gets the female's attention will really quick switch back inform her that he's a male and then really fast mate with her and then get out of there which is just like amazing

these cuttlefish are cross-dressing as a way of mating. It's amazing. So that is clever and I just think it's so cool. So Roger Hanlon did some of this work and he looked at the egg that was laid from that female that had mated with this little cross-dress or sneaker male and found that more of the

fertilized by the sneaker male than the big males because the female cuttlefish will mate with, you know, maybe 10 males during this period and store the sperm from all of the different males. And then later when she goes to lay her eggs, sort of like goes in her rolodex and is like, okay, who did I like the best? And then choose that sperm to fertilize her eggs. And those little sneak females do better than the big males, which is remarkable and really cool. That's cool. I want to bring in another guest, Lauren Young. Science Friday's web producer. She's been helping to lead the Cephalopod celebrations in our home office.

Welcome back, Lauren. Hey, happy Cephalopod Week, Ira. Yeah, it's coming. I bought the socks. I hope you saw my socks. Yeah, I saw that you were a sucker for octopus socks. That's great. That's three kind of them.

You wrote about the Argonaut octopus. Tell us about it. It's an octopus, right? Yeah, so, okay. So this summer you might be strolling on a nice beach and come across a very beautiful, very kind of delicate, hit a white shell in the sand. And so to me, they kind of look like these cream-colored cornucopias, or, if you will, smurf caps.

And these shells actually belong to the Argonautopus. And so they are a true octopus. They have eight arms. And two of them have these larger arms. And they have these very peculiar membranous webs on them. And Aristotle, I have to tell you this. Aristotle once believed that they would stick their arms in the air and catch the breeze in their webs and sail across the sea, like a little sailboat.

There's illustrations of it, and it's pretty... Romantic. Yes, romantic. I'm kind of silly. It's great. But, yeah, it is a true octopus. Some people call it the paper nautilus, right? Because it looks just like a nautilus.

Yeah, it's kind of confusing, and that nickname is so unfortunate for this poor little octopus. So it's not a nautilus. It's actually a true octopus. And so the nautilus is actually the only living is cepapod with an external shell. But the paper Nautilus, the shell is not actually a real shell. It's an A-case. So only the females have them, and that's where the paper Nautilus gets its nickname.

It's really thin and very delicate. Yeah, you're up on our website at ScienceFriiday.com slash Cephalopod Week. You have beautiful. There was an underwater photographer. Yes. Taking pictures of this. Yeah, Julian Finn at the Museum, Victoria. He is a diver, and he also studies them, and beautiful creatures.

I wish I could see them in person. They're really awesome. You also tell the story of a French naturalist. Where does she come into this picture? Yeah, so her name was Jean-Ville Pre-Pourourne. She's a French naturalist from the 19th century. And there was this mystery about where did this shell come from? No one really understood the origin of the shell.

And so at the time, a lot of scientists believed that the octopus would steal the shell, very much like a hermit crab, you know, kind of steal shells and lives in them. So she kind of thought the opposite, that the, you know, What if it actually makes the shell? So she went out and basically made these aquariums in her house and also like these incredible cages on the Bay of Messina, which is a really calm bay in Italy. And she would set out these marine stations and watch these octopuses in the wild. Or, well, as natural environment as you can for then. So, yeah, and she would kind of just observe them and watch, you know, their behaviors.

She is called the mother of aquariums, right? Yeah. Because she did these things. Yeah, exactly. So it's really interesting that title. She was given it by another scientist at the time. And she didn't actually invent the aquariums, but she is one of the pioneers of kind of this nascent boom of early aquariums in the mid-1800s.

She really practiced techniques that, you know, we use today, like renewing the water and feeding the animals. At the time before her, a lot of people were just kind of observing dead specimens and jars. So she was, you know, one of the first amongst, like, you know, a lot of different scientists at the time who were building aquariums, you know, doing practices that, you know, people see today. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Lauren Young, Science Friday's web producer and Sarah McAnulty, the squid biologist about aquarium or aquaria. I don't know. Yeah. Sarah, did you know about her?

I did. She is such a great story of like women in science pioneering and getting out there. I just love that story so much. I think cephalopod biology actually has a ton of women in science, like from a long time ago, which is always heartening and nice to see. Do you have any tips for us, Sarah, about how to keep any of these cephalopods at home? I mean, can you build your own aquarium and do this? You absolutely can. I would not recommend my little bobtail squid because they're nocturnal,

so they're not the most fun pets. But one thing that you have to mentally prepare yourself before taking on a cephalopod into your home, is knowing that their lifespan is very short. So if you want an animal for your kids to grow up with, the cephalopod is not the way to go. They live somewhere between six months and a year. But if you can really master the like fish and corals, start small with sort of easier to handle organisms.

And then once you have a fully, we call them like fully cycled systems, so systems that have a full complement of bacteria in them that can handle like kind of like the waste that these animals produce, then you can definitely give it a try. They're really fun to have around. They're engaging. And if you're a good aquarist and you really can take care of them, then it's worth a shot.

Yeah, I know from my own past experience. Lauren, this has all been part of cephalopod. You're sorry to see it. And what are other kinds of things? I'm so bummed. What are some of the other things that people did during the way? If only we could, you know, we should be celebrating cepopods all the time. They're really great.

So, part of my pun, people really got cracking this year with a cepopods. fun stuff. And so there's nothing like celebrating Cepa Pond Week. I picked that pun up. I got it. Yeah, you got it? There's nothing like celebrating Cepad Week with like people in person. And actually, Sarah was at one of our events at New York. We did a really fun Cepid movie night and a bunch events across the nation. We also did a lot of fun things on, you know, at Cy Fright. Our Johanna Mayer wrote a really great piece on the first major underwater film starring a mechanical octopus. We also have an activity where you can model the papillae of cuttlefish skin, and we played a bunch of games on Twitter.

Around 800 people signed up for our text Cephalopod of the Day chain, which was a lot of fun. Now, I understand that you have a favorite Cephalopod haiku. Is that right? Yeah. Please. I do. Regala. Yeah.

So we called out for haikus, and I swear this is not me, but Lauren on Twitter wrote Ceplepod Week. Squids are cute, but I'm feeling a little naughty. And he had a picture of an Nautilus on it. It was pretty fantastic. I love that one. I retweeted that. It was great. So we still have time.

People can still celebrate. Absolutely. All weekend. We'll still be, you know, sharing stuff. And our partners, our people, you know, other organizations too, PPS Digital Studios, Popular Science, Smithsonian Earth. A lot of people are, like, you know, creating great content about cephalopods, sharing fun facts. It's really, really great.

That's great. I want to thank you and the rest of the Science Friday staff for all your efforts in Sepulapod Week. It's been terrific. Absolutely. We now just have 3654 more days. wait. I know. Countdown begins today. I want to thank Lauren Young, Science Friday's web producer. You can find her article and beautiful article on our website at Science Friday.com slash Cephalopod Week. And Sarah McAnulty,

squid biologist, Ph.D. candidate in marine biology, University, Connecticut, and Stores, and founder of Skype, a scientist. I love your tweets. I'm going to keep following them. Thank you, Sarah, for joining us today. Yeah, anytime. And just a few things before we go. We want to learn how to make podcast. Do you? Well, if you love science and a good story, this is your chance. Our documentary science podcast, Undiscovered, is hiring an intern. And yes, we pay you something. Find all the details at sciencefriety.com slash intern, but hurry because the application deadline is June 30th.

That's science friday.com slash intern. And also, SciFri is headed to Hawaii. We've got two great shows for you in Honolulu and on the Big Island. That's July 6th and 7th, talking about Hawaii. these endangered species, what it's like to live in a simulated Mars habitat, and a way to survey coral reefs from the air. So get your tickets and info at ScienceFriday.com slash Hawaii. That's ScienceFriday.com slash Hawaii July 6th and 7th. Charles Berkowitz is our director, senior producer, Christopher and Taliatta.

Produces our Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Hiler. Our engineering help from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Jack Harowitz. And this is Jack's last week with us. We bid a fond farewell to Jack and wish him good luck in his next endeavor. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato in New York.