Science Friday - Venomous Or Poisonous, Crayfish Clones, Immune System Cancer Injection. Feb 9, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: February 9, 2018

Do you know the difference between a poisonous creature and a venomous one? One distinction is that poisons are often ingested or absorbed by the skin, while venoms have to be injected through a wound. Mandë Holford tells us more about her research studying these dangerous creatures. 25 years ago, all-female crayfish species originated from a hobbyist tank in Germany. In the wild, the crustacean developed a mutation that allowed it to pick up a third set of chromosomes and reproduce clonally. Since then, the cloning crayfish have proliferated—invading waters all around the world. What do the neurons of this clonal creature tell us about its ability to adapt to different environments? It's known that the immune system can fight cancer—and there have been heavy investments in the search for a drug that will boost our own body’s ability to combat cancer. Now, researchers at Stanford University may have discovered a treatment that’s not only quick, but also doesn’t send the body’s immune system into overdrive.     Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I am Ira Flato. A little later in the hour, the story of mutant cloned crayfish and a game of poison or venom. Can you tell the difference? Great stuff coming up. But first, next week, February 14th, chocolate season, right? Kicks into high gear. And you know chocolate is big business. Annual sales worldwide on the order of $100 billion. That is a lot of bonbons. In an effort to make you savor that cacao flavor, just a little bit more, we wanted to revisit one of our favorite subjects, the unsung heroes of the chocolate industry, the insects, the insects that make it all possible. Joining us to Tell That Tale, our Stacey Philpott, Professor and Heller Chair in Agroecology, UC Santa Cruz. Welcome to the Science Friday. It's great to be here. Nice to have you. Samantha J. Forbes, Ph.D. candidate in agriculture and in agriculture and in the United States. environment at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.

Did I say that right, Samantha? Yeah, you did say that right. My Australian accent, forget it. And give our listeners a chance to call in our number 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFri. And Samantha, let me begin with you. You spend a lot of time, I understand, staring at cacao flowers. Is that right?

Yeah, I do. So Australia has a very small... a cacao industry, and my research involves a lot of hours out in the field, looking at these tiny cacao flowers, and there's so many of them. How many are there? It ranges. It definitely depends on the environment and whatever, but it said that a cacao's tree in a season can produce more than 124,000 flowers.

And you're out there. Walk us through that, the popularity, the popioles, the pollination process. Describe the flies we're talking about and how they get the job done and why they're so necessary. Okay, well, the flies that I research in a family of flies called the Saratapagonid midges, and these are known as your biting midges. So in there is also the annoying sandflies that often bite people. But closely related to them is this genre of midges called the Forciipamaya. and they're a small fly that feed on floral resources and not on people,

and you can find them in the cocoa plantations in just general sort of foresty environments. And so what they do is, or how they conduct pollination services, is that they fly up to a cocoa flower, and they look for the reward that they're trying to obtain, and while they're doing that and searching around inside the flower, their backs are actually very hairy. They've got all these cute little hairs on their back. So while they're foraging inside the flower,

they're collecting all of this pollen on their thorax or on their back. And then when they fly into another flower and try and access the internal parts of the flower, all of the pollen that's on their back gets transferred to the receptive female part of the flower, and they conduct pollination that way. Wow. And Dr. Phelphat, I understand that you study the ants that the frequent coffee and can cow plantations like the Army ants. Tell us about their role, please. So the Army ants really thinking about coffee and cacao agriphor. They are important places for conservation of the army ants.

So especially in cacao agroforest that have a high diversity and density of shade trees, that they support equal numbers of army ants as to the native forest habitats where the army ants come from. And there are more than 200 species of army ants that are found in Africa and Central and South America. They're carnivorous, meaning that they eat other insects and they also can eat reptiles. and basically when the Army ant column starts moving through the habitat, it chases away almost every living thing in its pathway, right? So these colonies can have up to 20 million individuals in an Army ant colony. When they're going through the agroforest, they kind of go up onto the cacao trees, onto the shade trees,

and the trees almost turn black because they have so many ants on them. Now, are they doing something to help protect the plants themselves? Well, in this case, the Army ants are perhaps doing something indirect that benefits the cacao plant. So they're eating a lot of insects. They could be eating some pest insects. They could be eating some beneficial insects as well. But another thing that they do is that they attract ant following birds. There's about 15 species of specialist Army ant following birds, and then another 50 species that will occasionally follow the army ants.

and those birds also provide pest control services by eating cacao pests. Wow, wow, now, Samantha, one of the things you've studied is how to get more of these little midges to hang out there around the cacao trees and get more pollination going. Yeah, definitely. So where Stacey actually works, the cacao plantations look very different to a lot of the other cacao plantations around the world. kikau is becoming increasingly intensified in its management, which means taking a rainforest understory tree and putting it in full sun conditions in a rather orchard-like environment. So the kikau plantations in Australia basically look like monocultured, very manicured orchards of only kikau trees with no shade trees, no understory, just kikau.

And so if you think about the midge, which likes a shady, moist environment, I mean, it's a very small fly. It's susceptible to sunlight. It needs organic matter to lay its eggs in and have its larvae develop. You can imagine in a very full sun manicured orchard-style plantation, that's not very conducive to these midges. So what my research has actually looked at is if you manipulate the habitat within these plantations and put back a lot of this organic matter underneath the cacao trees, does that serve as a breeding substrate for these midges? And if so, do you get an increased midge population and do you get increases in the pollination services that are happening?

And my study did actually find that we got a tenfold increase in the level of natural pollination that was happening when you actually increase this organic matter underneath the cacao trees. That's amazing. Is that something cacao farmers everywhere can do? Actually, no. So we're very lucky here in Australia that we don't have a lot of the pest and pathogen problems yet that other world, that other cocoa regions experience.

Just for example, in Indonesia, I also do some cacao work over in Indonesia, and they have a big problem with a fungal pathogen called black pod, and that can take 90 to 100 percent of your pods that are on the tree, so it can take away your yield. And so when you actually are having a lot of organic matter in the cacao fields, often this can promote pests and fungal pathogens like black pod. So lots of areas around the world have a practice of removing this substrate, removing this organic matter, so they're not promoting those fungal pathogens. Stacey, is the quality of the coffee or the cacao different,

depending on how it's grown, whether shade grown, so on? It can be. So for cacao in particular, the yields of cacao can be higher in some circumstances where there's a good level of shade within the farm. For coffee production, there's a number of studies showing that the coffee quality can actually be much better if the fruits are grown under the shade because the fruits themselves grow more slowly. The fruits are denser. And that means that the coffee beans are heavier on a per volume basis. they roast better, less prone to burning, and might have a better flavor at the end. And if Samantha, if lots of different midgets visit one cacao flour,

could you, in theory, end up with a cacao pod that's full of different flavored beans from, let's say, different genetic lines? Yeah, you definitely could. Each pollen grain is responsible. Like, that's what turns into one cocoa bean is from one pollen grain. So I guess you have a number of midges going to one flower and transferring all the pollen. I know if you have one midge that visited a lot of pollen donor flowers and deposited them all on the one female flower, yeah, you could end up with a lot of genetic diversity inside one pot. Is climate change, I'll ask both of you, is climate change affecting the future success of these forests, these cacao plants?

Yeah, I'll say definitely that climate change could have a big impact because with changes in temperature and changes in precipitation, that's going to dramatically affect where the cacao can be grown, how the pods will ripen, how the insect community changes. And there's some evidence that the smallholder growers of cacao that they might actually be able to adapt to some of the effects of climate change by adding more shade trees in their farms because that can buffer some of the climate extremes. and the excessive rainfall, et cetera. Samantha, are you a fan of chocolate? I am a fan of chocolate. Were you always? I never used to eat a lot of chocolate. No, I never was a fan of chocolate, really,

until I tried some homegrown Australian cacao that wasn't filled with milk and sugar, and it's really, it's a beautiful product when you can taste it at its raw elements and really understand the flavors that are in the chocolate beans. So you can really tell a difference between, you know, from one crop of pollinators to another, by the beans they've made. I guess you can. There's some good science in that. Stacey, you too?

I love chocolate. And you know what's interesting is, you know, it's the old Richard Feynman line. If I can appreciate something by knowing more how it's made than just the beauty or the taste of it, I have a better appreciation for knowing that. Would you agree with Samantha and Stacey, knowing how the pollination works makes you appreciate chocolate more? I think so. I think one of the most amazing things is that most people don't like midges. We all, you know, we all don't like samplies.

We don't like midges. And then when you realize that we wouldn't have chocolate without them because we'd have no pollination services or very limited pollination services, I think you develop an appreciation for these small little flies and the huge role that they have. in our societies. So we... So we don't want these midges to go away, right? We want them to stay. We definitely want midgies to stay.

Is there any way we can encourage them, you know? How do you attract them to your cacao plant? Yeah, there's a lot of research now just getting underway, addressing those sort of questions. Surprisingly, not many people have studied research on midges. Previously, there's some really good authors that have documented midges and their behavior and their role in cocoa pollination, but there seems to be a lot of skepticism on who the pollinators are, how efficient they are at conducting pollination services,

and what are their populations like in the wild? And that's just because they're such a small fly, very hard to study, and not many people like doing what I do, getting out there and spending, you know, hours on end in very humid, hot environments with mosquitoes and sandflies. And so now there's a lot of research up and coming, looking at who the pollinators are, identifying what they're attracted to, how can we make more of them, can we breed them in the lab and release them and manage them like other pollinators and things like that. Well, we thank you for being such a midge geek. Thank you both for taking time to be with us. Stacey Felpot, the professor in Agro Ecology University of California, Santa Cruz, Samantha J. Forbes is a PhD candidate out there in Cannes, Australia. We're going to take a break and talk about an immune system, new drug that may kill tumors in mice, maybe in people. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

It's pretty clear by now that the immune system can fight cancer, and researchers are heavily invested in the search for a way to boost the body's own cancer-fighting properties. Some of the immunotherapy approaches, well, when they've been tested, they have met with some amount of success, but they also have their downsides. They're time-consuming, or they trigger serious autoimmune side effects. But now researchers at Stanford have discovered a treatment that's not only quick, but also doesn't send the body's immune system into overdrive, at least in laboratory tests in mice. Dr. Ron Levy is Professor of Medicine and Director of the Lymphoma Program at Stanford University. Dr. Levy, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you for having me on the program. I always enjoy your program, Ira. Thank you. You're welcome. So tell us about what does this treatment do to tumors in mice? What are you giving them? And how does the tumor, how do the tumors react? Yes.

Well, as you just said, we're now coming to appreciate the immune system can fight cancer. It generally is appreciated. It can fight the invaders from the outside, the bacteria and viruses that cause illness. But now we know that it can fight cancer, the invader, from the inside of the body. So what we've done is to engineer a way to get the immune system revved up just against the cancer and not against the rest of the body. We've injected stimulants of the immune system directly into the tumor itself in one place in the body. And those immune cells that are there trying to do their job are now woken up and stimulated and fight the cancer not only there, but they travel around and seek and destroy cancer all over the body.

Wow. So they go into the bloodstream and find the same cancer that you're treating, or all cancers that might be there? Well, actually, they find the same cancer that we're treating, and we've determined that by putting two different cancers into the body and stimulate those cells, and they go and fight the same cancer, but not unrelated cancer. So they're very specific in what they're recognizing about the,

cancer that we've triggered them against. And so this doesn't, this is only working for tumors, right? Not for leukemia or other kinds of cancers. They're not solid tumors. Well, actually, we've used a number of different kinds of cancers in the mice. Leukemia's and lymphomas, melanomas, breast cancer, and a variety of other kinds of cancers. So this is a strategy that could go for cancers across the board.

Well, people are going to say, why can't I have this tomorrow? Yes, well, that's a good question. As you know, mice are not people, and there have been a lot of things that have worked in mice that have not worked in people. So we're proceeding slowly. We're starting a clinical trial just in lymphoma patients, low-grade lymphoma, the kind that grows slowly, gives us time to make observations. And also, lymphoma is the cancer of the immune system. So most of our mouse results are in that kind of cancer, lymphoma. So we're starting with patients with lymphoma, and we're going slowly, establishing that it's safe first.

And having established that, we're looking for good effects to happen against their cancers. So what is it about your technique that works so much better than other techniques that have failed? Yes. Well, we screened in the mouse experiments, we screened many different candidate immune stimulants. and many combinations of them. And we came up with a particular combination that works really well in the mice. And this is two different drugs,

one that triggers the macrophages, the engulfing cells in and around the cancers. And then another one that triggers the T cells, the cells that can remember what they're supposed to target. And these two drugs work very well together. In fact, they're even synergistic. even better than any additive effects of the two. And they work really well, and so far that's the best combination we've found.

Would you use this most, let's say, it did work in people? Would it be something for post-surgery, or could you just give it as in terms of the primary treatment? That's a really good question. We need a place to inject, and so we need to know where the cancer is in the body. or be able to reach it with a needle so we can inject our stimulants there. But it could be for a situation where the cancer has come back and we know where it is, or it could even be for a situation before the tumor is removed from the body, where we know where we're going to remove it from, and we know where that place is.

So it could be administered right then and there before the primary surgery, so-called neo-adjuvant therapy. So the reason the autoimmune reaction does not kick in here, and the body attacks itself, as in so many other cases, is because you have just basically by trial and error or design figured out the right combination? We figured out a good combination, but we're also using very low amounts of these stimulants, so low that they don't stimulate generally throughout the body just in a place we inject them. And so by using very low amounts and particular combination, we can avoid, we think we can avoid the autoimmune problems that have happened from generally taking the breaks off the immune system throughout the body. So once you wake up the immune system, it goes ahead and basically does its thing?

Yes. The immune cells travel throughout the body and go everywhere, actually, even into the brain. and we've even been able to eliminate the tumor when it's in the brain. One of the really important parts of our study, since the mice that we usually work on, get their tumors artificially, we inject those tumors and let them grow and then treat them. A lot of work has been done in that way. We were able to actually treat a naturally arising tumor, a breast cancer, that happens because a certain strain of mice has a gene,

which makes them get breast cancer. All the mice in this strain get breast cancer and all their memory glands. They have 10 different memory glands, and they all come down with cancer. So Editsigeev-Barfi, the scientist working on this project, was able to perform our vaccination

with these stimulants on the very first cancer that arises in these mice. And by triggering that immune response, she was able to prevent all the other cancers that occur throughout the body in all the other memory glands. Wow. It sounds too good to be true. It might be too good to be true.

We'll not know until we try it in people, and we have to go slowly and first establish that it's safe. I want to emphasize once again that this first foray into people is just for lymphoma, patients with lymphoma and the slow-growing kind called low-grade lymphoma. Well, this is quite interesting. I want to thank you, Dr. Levy, for taking time to be with us, and would you keep in touch on how you're progressing? Let us know how this is, you know, we're progressing as you go ahead. Okay, thank you very much for having me.

You're welcome. Ron Levy, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Lymphoma Program at Stanford University. You know the story of the teenage mutant ninja turtles, those little pet turtles who, after stepping into a mysterious radioactive goo, became New York City crime fighters, Well, there is a real-life version of that, an army of mutant female marbled crayfish. I'm not making this up.

They are taking over the waters across the world. Now, we can't confirm if these crayfish are fighting crime or teenagers, but they did arise from a strange aquarium accident where they were released into the wild. Scientists are baffled by how this has all happened. I see a movie here. A group of researchers sequenced the gene of the marbled crayfish to try to get a better understanding,

and their findings were published this week in the journal Nature, Ecology, and Evolution. And my guest is one of the authors on that study. Wolfgang Stein, Professor of Neurophysiology, Illinois State University in Normal and Crafish Geneanone Research. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you very much for having me. What a great show so far.

Thank you. Well, you're part of it. And you have a great story to tell. Give us a little background, the origin of how the species of crayfish came to be. Yeah, it's actually quite interesting. Like you said, we sequenced the genome of this personal genetic species, the marbled crayfish. And they reproduce asexually, basically. We don't really know exactly how it happened, but at the time to slough crayfish,

those are crayfish that live in Georgia and Florida. A couple of them mated, and something went wrong. And one of the daughters of these animals inherited an additional set of chromosomes, and that daughter then could no longer reproduce normally, but instead was able to generate life offspray. without any males. And this is quite interesting because that happened like 25, 30 years ago.

So it's really only species where we can actually account for when the species started. So this is a new species that really has only been in existence for like 30 years or so. And in those 30 years, it has been multiplying around the world? Yes, it's crazy

because we've been able to track those animals back to the one animal. And so all the crayfish that we have in existence now of that species, stem from that one accident, that one animal that, you know, inherited those additional sets of chromosomes. And so by now they have

spread all over the planet. We find stable populations in Japan, in Europe, in many countries, in Madagascar, and you can buy them in the U.S. as well. In Petrade, there are no stable populations in the wild so far, but actually I wouldn't be surprised to find them. Oh, so they're not living in the

waters, they're living in people's aquariums. They are living in people's aquariums. wherever you put them, and that's actually how they travel with pet trade, and people, you know, you get one of these animals, and they reproduce within like three months, you have 200 offspring, and, you know, people get tired of them, and the worst thing that they can do is they put them in a lake next to their house, and, you know, a year later you have thousands of these animals. In the lake? In the lake, yes. Do they start attacking things in the lake, clean, you know?

Not that we are aware of, but they are out-competing the local crayfish species, and so eventually, this will be a problem for conservation of the local species. And they spread really, really fast. And this was part of the study as well. In Madagascar, we tracked essentially since 2007 how much they spread. And just to give you an idea, when they were first discovered in Madagascar in 2007, they occupied the space of like half the size of Rhode Island. And by 2017, that's the size of Ohio now.

Wow. I'm just trying to soak that in. Yeah, it's about a hundredfold increase in, like, area that they live in 10 years. How do you know if you have one? Well, the easy way is actually you take it, you put it in a tank, you wait a couple of months, and you'll have offspring. If there's no other animal in there, you can be sure that you have one. They have a certain, like when you look at them, the coloring, that's why it's called Marble crayfish. So that said, they are not very easy to differentiate from other species out there.

Again, yeah, go ahead. No, no, this is just, I'm just soaking this in. I know there's something called parthenogenesis, where animals reproduce asexually. Yes. Is this what's going on here? Yes, that's exactly what's going on. The parthenogenesis, like you said, is just an expression for asexual reproduction. And there are other species that do that.

So the interesting thing about this particular species is that we can now track it as this happens. we know, you know, 30 years ago, this species came about, and now we can track how the genome of this animal actually changes. Because for most of the species that reproduce asexually, we know they're genetically diverse. This hasn't happened to these animals yet, so we are a bit baffled by this, actually. I can tell. I know you call your lab the crab lab, where you study all sorts of crustaceans, but you're a neurophysiologist.

What are you trying to learn about this? Let me just let you answer as I give the ID. This is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International. So I'm a neuroscientist, as you say, and my interest is in how drugs and medications affect the brain. And so it's well known that people respond quite differently to medication, but it's really not clear why this is the case. And so the underlying assumption is always that this is differences in genetics.

And we now have the chance to test this because the genetics, in these animals is really the same. It's identical. And so we can test how diverse the brain actually is if you're genetically identical. Now, I know you have marbled crayfish in your lab. Do you keep them under lock and key? I mean, how do you?

Yes, yes, we indeed do. We make sure that they don't get out. We don't want to cause an infestation in the local lakes here. So, yes, we have separate tanks that we pay well attention to, I guess. I am thinking of movies from the 1950s now where somebody from Hollywood's going to call you any minute. You know, they're a good source of protein, so I guess one way of getting rid of them would be to, you know, eat them.

So that would be a way. How do they taste? I know you must have tried it. No, I have not tried them. I have tried the crabs that we work with, but I have not tried the crayfish. But I suppose they would taste similar to other crayfish. Some people call them crawfish in different parts of it.

sudden parts usually, I guess. This is amazing. So what have you learned about their neurology? Their neurophysiology, are they different from other crustaceans or crawfish? They are in terms of the neurons that they have are very similar to other crustaceans, in particular to crabs and other crayfish. What we've seen so far is that they're really less diverse. So if you go from one animal to the next animal, it seems like they are more identical,

which corresponds to the ideas that we have. And so theoretically, they should be more susceptible to interference. Like if I give them a certain drug or so, they should respond all the same. You know, as an old Aquarius myself, I used to have a lot of fish tanks. You know, the Aquarius in me says, I'm going to go out and get one of these and put it in a tank and watch. You know, in some areas of the world, they are banned now from Petrae. In most parts of Europe, they are banned. In some states in the U.S., they are banned.

I think in Illinois you can still buy them. I don't know about New York. But you're not encouraging anybody to do this. No, I would not do that. And, you know, if you do that, make sure that they are not getting out. Don't flush them down your toilet. You know, don't put them in a lake next door. It would really be a problem for conservation.

But there's another part to this that kind of fits also the theme of your today's show, which is our collaborators in Germany at the German Cancer Research Center, they're interested in tracking tumors in that population because for the same reasons, actually, that we work with these animals. Because if they're all clones, we can understand, you know, that opens a lot of doors for understanding how tumors come around in a population and spread across populations. What a great idea.

Yeah, it's really a neat species to work with, and we're all excited to have it. So nature did this accidentally, and now you can make use it. it. Yes. Actually, since you mentioned nature did this, we are actually not sure whether it happened in a tank in, you know, someone's aquarium at home or whether it happened in the wild. We do know that the father and the mother were not closely related, so they might have come from, you know, I don't know, different lakes or so. We don't know if any radioactivity was involved. I highly doubt it. All right, Dr. Stey, this is quite a very far.

fascinating. Don't go out and get the crayfish. Exactly. Wolfgangstein, professor of neurophysiology at Illinois State University. Thank you for a very informative discussion. Thank you very much. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, do you know the difference between a poisonous

and a venomous animal? Stick around. We have a quiz. We've had a quiz online on Twitter. We're going to have a quiz. I'm going to take the quiz. Right there on our website at Science Friday.com. You can take the quiz. yourself right there. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

This is Science Friday. Hi, I'm Ira Flato. Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes? Ah, yes. When you think of Indiana Jones, one of the images that surely comes to mind is Harrison Ford fending off a thousand poisonous snakes as he makes his way through the giant snake pit in Raiders of the Lost Dark, remember? Wait a minute. Did I just say poisonous? Yeah, I think I did, but I should have said venomous. You know, we often use the two terms interchangeably, but they actually mean very different things.

And here, to set us straight on the difference between poisonous and venomous creatures. And we're going to play a little game with us, as well as Mandy Hulford, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Hunter College and Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History. Good to see you again. Hi, Ira. So nice to be back. So you're a venom researcher.

Do you cringe when people say a creature is poisonous when they're actually venomous? I cringe a little bit, but I give them a little leeway because I know that they don't know better. And the lexicon has sort of conditioned us to always say poisonous, poisonous, poisonous, but there is a difference. Give us the difference. The difference, and I think it's pretty straightforward, but of course I've been studying them, and the difference is if an animal is venomous, and I'll do it in terms of bites. So if an animal is venomous, it bites into you, right? If an animal is poisonous, you have to bite into it, right? And so that's an easy, I like to say bite or bitten, but that might be the easy way to reference them.

So venomous creatures have to have sort of a weapon of some kind. Right, exactly. So the scientific definition would be if you're venomous, it means that you have a delivery mechanism. You have a gland of some sort that makes the venom. and then if you're poisonous, you sort of sequester your toxins from outside. You don't have a way of delivering them necessarily, and you don't have a special gland. And also, with a venom, you need to pierce the skin and make a wound. With a poison, you don't have to pierce the skin.

You can eat it, ingest it, or touch it. Okay, I'm getting the idea now, but I know that sometimes even scientists can't tell. Right. Right? Researchers have been going back and forth over whether a creature called the bearded fireworm. Yes. Is it venomous? Is it poisonous? Discuss. So it's either venomous or poisonous?

So for a long time, these fireworms have been hurting people. They sting is very painful. They can cause local necrosis sometimes. And so what wasn't clear is whether or not their venomous or poisonous because we couldn't determine if they had all those components. So did they have something that they can use as a weapon to pierce and make a wound? Check. Yes, they do. It's a keto. We all know the keta. is there. Do they have a special gland

that produces their venom? No check. No one can find the gland. It's very unclear if it has a gland. We've done all kinds of microscopy studies, but no one has been able to locate it. Do they produce their venom indogynously, or do they get it from eating something from their diet?

Question again, not sure. So when we took on this project, we wanted to figure out how many of these questions could we tick off that relate to proving that it's either venomous or proving that it's poisonous. And so we studied these three different species. One of them, actually, they use in a cocktail in Haitian voodoo mixtures to make people

walk around like zombies. So it was really cool. Did you try that one yourself? No, no, no, that's an experiment we don't do with the grad students. And a lot of this was led by my grad student, Ida Verde, who's now in Jamaica because she just defended. So she's having a nice holiday. That's good.

But basically, in the study, what we did, we took these three different species. We ground them up, we sequenced them, and then from the sequence, we looked for what kinds of cocktails do they have in their venom arsenal. And so things that are venomous tend to have a lot of proteins and peptides. Things that are poisonous tend to have a lot of alkaloids like caffeine, nicotine, tetrototoxin. And so what we found was the species of fireworms that we grounded up and sequenced all tend to have things that related to known venom proteins and peptides. So we sort of tip the scale by saying, okay, we still don't know if there's a special gland.

We do know that there is a machinery for delivering some venom. And now it seems like the venom arsenal or the toxin arsenal that they produce is endogenous because we took it out from sequencing their RNA. And it's similar to all the other known venom types of proteins and peptides that you find in animals like snakes and spiders and scorpions. So we're like, okay, I think we're going to put our foot on the scale. and say that these are venomous creatures, because we seem to have things that line up. Quacks like a duck.

Looks like a duck. Looks like a duck. Haven't found the gland, but does everything else. All right. Anything else you have to do with that, or you're pretty convinced. You're never going to find the gland, but that's... Well, we might find the gland. We just need to do different types of microscopy studies.

We also have to confirm by taking out the secretion and finding it using mass spec. We did it just sequencing, so there are other kinds of experiments. that we can do to prove that it's there. Look at more species, do more dissections, all those kinds of things. We're going to get to our venom poison quiz in a second. But before we do, I want to, you know, because I love murder mysteries and things like that, I have to ask you this question.

I've been wondering for years. Can you, because they do this in TV and movies, can you unaculate yourself to a venom the way you can to a poison by taking a little bit of it at a time, you know? Not really. You can do that with a poison? You can do it a little bit with a poison, but you can't do it with a venom because, and this is another way to tell if something's venomous or poisonous, but also an experiment that you might not want to do. In glass A, we have a compound and you swallow it. If you die, it's probably a poisonous compound.

Problem solved. In glass B, we have some substance, toxin, and you swallow it and you live. If you live, it's venomous because the venomous mostly break. down in our gut because they're made up of peptides and proteins similar to every amino acids that make up the things like your skin and your hair and all of that. So most venom's can break down in the gut. If they make it out of the gut, you'll die. But for the most part, you can't kill someone by feeding them venom.

But you could possibly kill them by feeding poison. And you can, you know, sort of inoculate yourself a little bit. It's all dose-dependent, right? Yeah, I get it. I get it. All right. Now that we know how to identify a venomous animal from, a poisonous one, we thought it would be fun, to play a little game on the air called venomous,

poisonous, or both? Both. Okay, and if you want to play at home, you can check it out on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash quiz, where we have the choices up to you. Now, we also played this game yesterday on Twitter, and I'll let you know how they voted, the Twitterdom, voted during the game. So, Mandy, you have a list of six animals there. That I do.

And I'm going to make a guess for each run. So give me your first animal. Our first animal is called a flower urchin, and I'm not sure if everyone's seen one. If you think of like your shower poof, they live in coral reefs. They settle on the bottom on the sand, and it's this poofy, brightly colored thing. I'm going to guess that it's venomous. And Twitter said 38% of the people took our poll said both. Let's see who was right.

Ooh, that rattlesnick means it was venomous. It was venomous. Battlesnake means venomous. Yes, it's very, very, very venomous. It's actually one of the most deadliest venom you can have on the planet. Also, one of the oldest venom that we have from these animals. And what's nice is that they don't use a spine like other urchins. They use sort of this claw that opens up and it has movable jaw.

And it looks like an open flower. And then it has sensory organs. When things get near it, snap shut, injects the venom. Gotcha. I don't want to step on it. I got to go near that. No, you don't want to go near. Don't go near.

Okay, next one, man. You give us your next one. Next one is the puffer fish. And you guys know this. It's like the inflated ego symbol. You know, it starts very small, gets very big. That's the puffer fish. I know a lot of sushi places for try to use puffer fish.

So I know that's sort of got to be poisonous because they tell you if you have this, it could be lights out of it. Right, exactly. So this is, exactly. Puffer fish. 59% of you guys on Twitter guest it was poisonous and? It's poisonous. It's poison. I love it.

Ten points for knowing where that sound clip came from. It is poison. It is poisonous. These are puffer fish. They produce tetrota toxin, which is very lethal, T.TX, if you're into acronyms. And if you eat the puffer fish without dissecting out the organs that have sequestered the TX, it will kill you. So they get their poisonous toxins from eating different bacteria in the sea. They don't produce them endogenously.

No. Yeah. Oh, the bacteria in the sea are poisonous, and they just eat them? The bacteria in the sea have. And they can live in the animal and the fish without destroying it. Without destroying it, yeah. But the minute you bite into it, Ira, watch out. I'm not biting into that one.

Okay, Mandy, next one up. The next one is the Asian tiger keelback snake. Oh, okay. Now, 54% of Twitter users said that was venomous. So I'm going to say, snake, it's got to be venomous. Let's see what the right answer is. It's poison. That was poison?

Well, it's actually both. So the snake has both. It can bite into you like a snake, right? It has glands. It produces the toxins. But it gets its toxins from eating different toads. And then if you touch it, so let's say you can wiggle away and you get away from its fangs. But if you hold its neck, it secretes this very cardiotoxic ooze that would send you

into like shock, right? So it gets you both ways. It can bite you, so bitten, right? Or, you know, if you touch it, it can also cause this poisonous reaction. That's why our little noise had both the rattle. And the little story. And the little boy from, do you remember? During a blank.

George, and it's a wonderful life. And he was in, as a kid, in the pharmacy. You have to go see the movie. It's great. One of my favorites. Okay. Okay, have another one for it. All right.

The next up is the fire belly newt. The fire belly newt. Now, I had a newt as a kid. They're hard to keep track of. I mean, I think I lost mine when I was five. I still haven't found it. Did you have any siblings that disappeared also? No.

Not that I know. I didn't mention it. Is it venomous? Is it poisonous or both? I'm going to say a newt. I'm going to, I figure you have to touch it. So I'm going to say that since you have to touch, it's got a skin, it's going to be poisonous. And let's see what are Twitter people?

Twitter people says 61% said yes. They said it was poisonous. And the answer is? It's poison. Correct. It's poison. It's poison. And so noots are actually very interesting.

There's an urban legend about campers who were out camping and they all died. And so when the Forest Ranger came to their campsite, he saw these people all dead, couldn't figure out what it was. Forensic people came in and they looked into, they were boiling water for coffee and there was a newt inside of the water. And so what they found out was the TTX, because that's the toxin that's inside of the newt, was in the water. They made their coffee. They all died. So not a happy camper morning for them, right? But what's nice about nudes is nukes and snakes are in this evolutionary arm race, venomous versus poisonous. So snakes eat nukes. Nutes build a stronger T-TX toxin to try to fend off the snake, snake makes a bigger, stronger venom to try to eat more

nukes. So you're going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth in this locked-in chemical warfare. So nukes are actually one of the most lethal things. The reason some people can keep them as pets is if you can touch them without having a wound on your hand, then you won't get absorbed the poison and it won't kill you. But if you have any kind of a nix or scratches, which is where I asked if any of your siblings disappeared.

If they touched them while they had nix or scratches in their hands, it would not be such a good thing. You shouldn't handle them too much. And you shouldn't have them as pets, really. Really? No. These days, those days we had little turtles, too, and they don't have those anymore. This is Science Friday from PRI Public Radio International.

Enjoying my conversation with Mandy Hulford, who is an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Hunter and researcher at the American Museum of Natural History. In case you're just joining us with... I'm taking a quiz about poisonous. Well, it's going to be poisonous or it could be venomous or whatever. Okay, you've got another one. I have another one. Next one is the platypus.

And these, if you haven't seen. The Platypus? The Australian platypus. They're very cute, adorable, hairy with a beak that's kissable. All of those guys. Yeah. Okay. A platypus.

I'm going to, I can't imagine. Maybe it's a trick question. Maybe you expect me to be. bit and let's say it's poisonous because I'm going to say poisonous. And our Twitter people, our Twitterism says you at home said 57% of you said venomous. And the real answer is, it is venomous. It is venomous. Your viewers are very smart.

It is venomous. So these cute, adorable creatures, they have venom and they have a spur on the hind leg. But they only use, so venom can be used for defense or predation. These guys use their venom only in sexual reproduction dances. So they have a sex warfare going on. And only the males produce the venom and use the spur. And it's sort of cyclic. So in the mating season, the males will express their venom

and they fight each other to decide who gets to mate with the female. So, you know, women are prizes, as we all are. And so the men are fighting each other to figure out who's going to be the lucky winner to get to reproduce with the female. Wow. So they don't really use their venom for predation or defense. It's more of a sexual selection. Yeah.

Let's go on to our last one you have. The last one is the soil centipede. Crawling like a centipede. Crawling like a centipede. Okay, I would guess a centipede. It's got to have a stinger in it someplace. So I'm going to say, I'm going to say venomous. And let's see, Twitter, 41% of Twitter said both.

Survey says, Boys, my day. It's porous. Both. It's both. It's both. Yes. These are cool creatures. I love them. Wow. Because they have claws on the top of their head, right? Which they can bite into you, as you're right. They have venom. They have a claw, a delivery mechanism.

But on their bellies, they exude hydrogen cyanide. You know hydrogen cyanide, right? Yeah. Pretty lethal gas. It's like a chemical agent can kill you. Kind of smells like, you know, dirty sneakers or burnt bitter almond or something like that. So they're doing both things. So they can get you from the top and the bottom. Is the one I saw a picture of it, attacked a mouse?

There was a centipede. That was the centipede. It bit the mouse. Yeah, exactly, yeah. They can take down creatures like 15 times their body size. Venom, welcome to the world of venom. Venom is definitely the world of the crazy, the very powerful, and the very potent. And it works through the what system, the nervous system?

Yes, for the most part. Yeah. The one that you saw works through the nervous system. Wow. This is fascinating. Mandy. Yeah, I love it. This is why I'm a venom researcher. Wow. You've got a great job. I love my job. I love it

a whole lot. Must be a dangerous lab. We're a fun lab. We play games all the time. So let's keep your heads behind you. I'm not walking around there. Mandy Hulford, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Hunter College and Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History. Thank you for taking time to come back

and we'll have you back on another topic. Yes, definitely. I wanted to say just quickly that we have games that we make. Killer Snakes. Where we talk about venomous snails. And the first game is called Assassins of the Sea. That's what your specialty is snails. That's what my specialty is snails of the sea. Killer snails.com?

Is that one? Killer snails.com. That's right. I'm going right to that after the show. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music. And of course, we're on all kinds of social community places. And, you know, have a great. What more can I say after that?

So have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.