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[the-circles-of-life]

The Circles of Life

52 stories of people and the things they really, really, really care about.

Have you ever loved something so much, you flew to another continent to find it? Built your online persona around it? Or made a hashtag for it? This book is what happens when Franz asks people to pick the one species that means the most to them—and illustrate them for funsies.

The eBook is available to download for free here.

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And so, this post officially marks the end of this project. Thanks to all of you who have followed me from the beginning of 2018. To stay in touch with my future projects, go to @franzanth or follow me elsewhere with the same handle—if you’re done with tumblr.

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2018 Recap / 2019 Plans

2018 Recap

Hey all! I just want to say thank you to all of you who have supported me throughout 2018 (or even longer!) You've made my interview series The Circles of Life possible, highlighting stories from under-appreciated people and creatures all over the world.

You might have noticed that I wrapped up the project with the chicken post, but it's not the end of it. I want to compile everything into an ebook and distribute the stories even more, so that's on my short term to do list.

Anyway, I'm here to discuss what I've learned from doing a weekly project for an entire year.

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This post was originally posted on my Patreon

What I liked:

Talking to people is always great. Especially when you listen to them talk to the thing they care about the most. Excitement is contagious.

It was a crash course in networking. I learned how to get behind the scenes, find people who actually know their thing, and learned the nature of different professions.

I achieved my goal of experimenting with different illustration styles weekly. It pushed me out of the comfort zone.

What I didn't like:

It took too much of my time to process each entry—from talking to contributors, compiling, editing, before finally illustrating. (Big thanks to my editor Katie here!) Not to mention I research a new illustration style weekly.

To make it worse, I jumped from one topic to another each week. I'm not always familiar with the subject, so I had to read from external sources to process the interview material.

The project was so reliant on people. My contributors were all great, but I learned that some professions often have unexpected hurdles that prevent people from getting back to me in time. I don't think this kind of project is sustainable in the long run.

What I want to continue:

Stories. I LOVE storytelling. But I'll find a way to make it less of a text-based chore and more visual.

Sticking to a visual format. Sometimes creativity works better with constraints.

So with all of this in mind, I'd like to talk about my future plans...

2019: Colors in Nature

Sticking to a theme

Instead of absorbing all sorts of knowledge, I want to stick to a general theme throughout the year so I can go deeper. My theme will be Colors in Nature, which I feel is a good starting point because:

It's broad. I can cover various topics from mimicry to bioluminescence to pigments.

It's "instagrammable." I'm trying to expand my reach to people outside of science. Otherwise I feel like I'd just be talking to my inner circle.

It helps me make better decisions in reconstructing fossil animals.

I'm also planning to travel locally for a few months to gather the photo references I need both for work and this project.

How this affects my Patreon feed

In addition to my upcoming travels, I'm trying to go for deeper, better quality content unlike in 2018 where I forced myself to just do a thing each week for practice. This means, my posts will likely be less regular until I can find a good rhythm I can keep. But I'll be sure to still post a few good things each month!

In addition, I'm planning to get rid of exclusivity. I deeply dislike paywalls in the first place and I believe education is needed more by people who can't afford it. By making all of my content public, I also wish that I could spend more time entertaining and educating people, instead of resizing and reformatting files for the highest bidders.

If you came here for the perks, I understand if you want to start enjoying my content for free. But if you're staying as a paying patron, I appreciate every bit of your support to make the world a little less sucky.

In the future, I might throw in hi-res wallpapers every now and then or tutorials that you'll get to see MUCH sooner than the rest of the world, but I won't promise anything for now!

Regardless of what you choose, thanks for sticking with me!

- @franzanth

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Gallus gallus Red Junglefowl

Why did the chicken cro—nevermind, the joke’s overused.

But to me, it shows that chickens have been a big part of our life.

In fact, as I’m writing this, there’s a viral study stating that chicken bones in the landfills will be our legacy in the fossil record. There are about 21 billion chickens living today, about three for each person. We slaughter 60 billion of them yearly, more than half the number of all humans that have ever lived.

I too, have raised and eaten many of them in my life. I spent hundreds of hours playing Harvest Moon in the 90s, fooling around with the hens. I started studying animal anatomy by staring at chicken photos on the internet.

It’s impossible to ignore their contribution to our history—beyond MY history.

The Chinese Zodiac features a rooster in their roster. The Europeans feared the mythical cockatrice. Pope Gregory I picked the rooster as an emblem for Christianity.

They have fed countless people from the Ancient Romans to minimum wage millennials in the form of cheap nuggets.

And what do they get in return? They don’t get the glory of dogs or war horses. The word “chicken” refers to a coward, and people say feathered dinosaurs are no longer scary now that they look like chickens. I bet those people have never seen how brutal cockfights are.

To me, domestic chickens reflect our ever-evolving relationship with nature and what we value in it. Wherever humans went, we took chickens with us and bred them to fit our many desires.

Today, a big chunk of the world breeds broilers for their eggs and flesh. But the all-black Cemani of Java is bred for their mystical appearance. In Japan, the Onagadori is considered a National Natural Treasure, thanks to it’s long, trailing phoenix-like tail.

As the final entry in this series, the chicken sums up why I did this project in the first place.

We take the birds for granted. But if we trace back from their beginning as the wild Red Junglefowl in Asia, we start to unravel countless stories.

These stories not only tell how creatures live and evolve, but also how their history is intertwined with ours.

These stories, in the end, are also about us.

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Franz Anthony is a graphic designer and illustrator. For someone who uses a chicken avatar and draws fish for a living, he tweets a lot about invertebrates.

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Lutrochus meridaensis Otter Beetle

ft. Crystal Maier

As a kid, entomologist Crystal Maier loved getting her feet wet.

“What excites me most is standing in the middle of a mountain stream with my toes in the water, cool water running past, with a net full of little tiny creatures waiting to be discovered,” she says.

This is how she got to know aquatic beetles, which are known for their love for clean water. Now, as an adult, she got to study her favorite bugs as a career.

In fact, her PhD revolved around investigating beetles from the family Lutrochidae, which at the time only had 11 species, all of which are small, fuzzy, and brown.

They live in waterlogged plant debris or on travertine—calcium deposits in streams—giving them the nickname "travertine beetles." In reality, less than 50% actually live on travertine.

“I'm a huge advocate for calling them "otter beetles" from "Lutra," the Latin name for a genus of otters. It makes sense, because they are fuzzy, brown, and are equally at home on land and in the water, just like otters!” she adds.

In her research, she identified many new species that have been sitting in museum collections for years, sometimes centuries. This highlights the importance of museums as repositories of diversity and how much is still waiting to be discovered.

Worldwide, there are over 2,000 known species of aquatic beetles, a small number compared to the grand total of 400,000 species of beetles in the world. Beetles make up 40% of currently known insect species and a 25% of all animal species living today.

But if she had to choose a single species that means a lot to her, it would be Lutrochus meridaensis. It lives clinging to the face of Cascada Velo de la Novia, a waterfall in Venezuela, burrowing through the liverworts that grow on the water-splashed rock.

It was among the several unidentified Venezuelan beetles handed to her by her PhD supervisor. At the end of the project, Crystal described and named 6 species from the country alone, with many more discovered in the rest of the world.

“An important part of science is describing and understanding what exists in the natural world, so that we may better understand our place in it.”

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Crystal Maier is an insect collection manager at The Field Museum. Get to know Crystal, water beetles, and her museum life.

Twitter · Instagram

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Pterodrilus distichus Crayfish Worm

ft. Bronwyn W. Williams

Bronwyn enjoys showing people creatures that they never knew existed, but live in or near their backyard. “I also enjoy doing so using a form of charades to explain what they look like and how they move, often like a drunk inchworm,” she starts.

Pterodrilus distichus is a tiny worm that doesn’t grow larger than 1 mm in length. It has what Bronwyn affectionately calls devil horns along its back, and a tail fan. “We have no idea what the back appendages are for, but they do have a tendency to collect all sorts of gunk, making them look like living, mobile dust bunnies,” she adds.

These peculiar worms need to be on a live crayfish to reproduce, depositing cocoons containing embryos on the crayfish’s shell. If the crayfish molts, the embryos left on that molt die. It’s a very specific life cycle that’s fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution.

She first heard about these worms when she was looking into a crayfish invasion in the Prairie Provinces of Canada. But the story has a twist: the crayfish had tiny worm companions.

Back then, she was interested in invasion biology and genetics. She wanted to use genetics to figure out how crayfish from different habitats are related to each other, to understand how they spread. But instead of using the crayfish’s DNA, she used the worms’ instead, since their shorter lifespan means they breed faster and their genes change more quickly.

Unfortunately, her crayfish research failed. But this led her to investigate the worms’ diversity instead. Today, she gathers crayfish in the field and looks for the worms clinging to their shells. Sometimes, the worms can also be found at the bottom of the jar in museum collections.

Her aim is to determine how these worms vary spatially—across individual crayfish, crayfish species, habitats; and temporally—over evolutionary time particularly relative to their crayfish hosts.

Even now, she’s wrapping up a scientific paper describing a new species that quickly becomes her favorite species. When the paper comes out in a few months, she’ll happily introduce the world to a new chubby little worm, one that Bronwyn affectionately calls The Michelin Man.

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Bronwyn W. Williams, Ph.D. is the Research Curator of Non-Molluscan Invertebrates at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Get to know Bronwyn and her branchiobdellidans, entocytherids, crayfishes, and several non-molluscan invertebrate pursuits, such as climbing and travel.

Twitter · Lab

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Glossopteris

ft. Aviwe Matiwane

It's just a myth: your car doesn’t run on liquid dinosaurs. Though it’s true that coal and gas were once living beings, they’re remnants of plants and small animals that died millions of years before the first dinosaurs walked the Earth. This was a time before flowers even existed.

“In South Africa, Glossopteris formed our oldest coal fields. This shows the great contribution the fossil plant has in our economy,” says paleobotanist Aviwe Matiwane.

Glossopteris is one of the largest and best-known groups of extinct plants. Their fossils are found all over the global south, what we now call South America, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. This distribution is one of the many pieces of evidence that those places, though now separated by oceans, were once connected as a supercontinent called Gondwana.

These once common plants were majestic trees that could grow as tall as a ten-story building, with hundreds of species scattered all across Gondwana. Today, they’re mostly only known from their simple, tongue-like fossil leaves.

Unfortunately, their plain appearance makes it hard for scientists to tell them apart. This is a 200-year-old mystery Avie is trying to solve: figuring out which tiny features of the leaves are most useful for classifying each species.

On top of that, she’s also developing a database that will be available online for researchers worldwide. Her research is possibly the first one to look at these iconic plants’ taxonomic details at such a great detail, a proof that shows how understudied plant fossils are.

In fact, when Avie competes her PhD, she will be one of three paleobotanists in South Africa.

This is why she wants to get people excited about fossil plants. Through twitter and instagram, she wants the world to see what paleobotanists do, whether it’s curating fossils at the museum or going out for fossil digs. In the physical world, she also participates in a lot of outreach programs at the Albany museum where she works in.

Though plants might be at the bottom of the food chain, only by understanding how they lived and died we can paint a better picture of life in the ancient past.

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Aviwe Matiwane is a PhD student at the Department of Botany at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. Get to know Avie, fossil plants, and biostratigraphy.

Twitter · Instagram · Albany Museum Instagram ·  Albany Museum Facebook · Writing

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Etheostoma osburni Candy Darter

ft. Brin Kessinger

To a North American, the Candy Darter looks like a tropical fish. Little do they know, these rainbowy fish dwell in their backyard.

“The males are more colorful than the females, especially during the breeding season. I fell in love during my undergraduate. Not only did I not know they existed, I didn’t know there were so many species just in my state!” biologist Brin Kessinger says.

All darters of the genus Etheostoma are small. They cling to the bottom of fast-moving streams using big fins and dart from rock to rock to catch insects, hence the name.

The Candy Darter is native to one river basin that extends from West Virginia to Virginia. Such a limited range makes the Candy Darter vulnerable to extinction caused by habitat loss and fragmentation.

Interestingly, the biggest threat to the Candy Darter is its cousin—the Variegate Darter. These two species were isolated from each other by Kanawha Falls, but began hybridizing when the Variegate Darter was introduced to the ecosystem. As the hybrids flourish, the Variegate’s genes began to swamp out the Candy’s.

This is why wildlife managers must be aware of each fish’s DNA makeup when they release a fish into the wild. Brin is one of the scientists investigating the issue.

But even with the pure Candy Darters, not every fish is the same.

If two populations have similar genetic makeup, wildlife managers treat them as one. This means a fish from one group can be freely introduced to the other.

When they are genetically distinct, they should be kept separate. This is because each group’s genes are often fine-tuned by thousands of years of evolution to help them survive in a specific part of the river. When they cross-breeding with a foreign fish, the offsprings can be physically unfit to live in that specific habitat.

This complexity shows that conservation is often a deeper issue than what our eyes can see. For us all to do it right, we need to be thorough and swift.

“The Candy Darter has been proposed to be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act and could go extinct if action is not taken soon,” Brin laments. —

Brin Kessinger is a master’s student at West Virginia University. Get to know Brin, fish genomes, and the Wild Genomics Lab. Twitter · Instagram · Wild Genomics Instagram · Wild Genomics Facebook

Brin dedicates this entry to ichthyologist Isaac Gibson, whose enthusiasm and comprehensive knowledge of the Candy Darter sparked the effort to protect the small, unassuming fish. Isaac passed away in August 2018.

The Candy Darter has formally been listed as an endangered species on 20 November, just one week before this interview goes live.

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Cytheropteron

ft. Caren Shin

No restaurant would ever serve the so-called “seed shrimp.” These crustaceans, also known as ostracods, are way too tiny to fill anyone’s belly.

“You could fit 100 or so on your thumb. They are generally smaller than poppy seeds, so you could also fit a handful on a grain of rice if that helps with a sense of scale,” says biologist Caren Shin.

In fact, they’re so tiny, she had to sieve mud and sand to find ostracod shells for her research. Unlike the more familiar shrimp, an ostracod looks more like a microscopic bug living inside a clamshell. This covering is what is usually found in the fossil record, although in rare cases fossilized organs have also been found.

“It fascinates me that there can be such a range in size, shape, and adornments that they can take!” Caren exclaims about the shells.

Her study revolves around why ostracods are so diverse and she cites a subgroup called Cytheropteron as an example. This group is so variable, Caren and her colleagues think they must have been adaptable enough to have lived from the shallowest waters to the deep sea.

But the tiny critters tell a bigger story than just the animals’ life and death. By closely studying the ostracods, Caren can peer into the history of the land they were found in.

And yes, land. Though ostracods live under the sea, her fossils are mostly found in cliffs or hills that used to be submerged under shallow seas in the past.

Specifically, her fossils come from the maritime region in Southeast Asia called the Coral Triangle. The region is now dotted with thousands of islands, mostly belonging to Indonesia and the Philippines. It is also known as the “Amazon of the seas” due to the countless number of species of fish, corals, and many other creatures living in the waters.

Though Caren was originally trained as an ecologist, she took this nosedive to the deep past when she started learning about these fossils. To her, understanding the past is a crucial part of making a better sense of the present—and eventually the future.

“It excites me that there is so much to discover about the natural world, and it all starts from observations that we build upon our knowledge of it.”

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Caren Shin is an ecologist and artist based in Hong Kong. Get to know Caren, ostracods, and meet Jim, the adventuring ostracod! Twitter · Thesis · Twitter Moment · Google Scholar

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Dryopteris cristata Crested Wood Fern

ft. Emily Sessa

The concept of a species is a human construct — one that nature doesn’t always get along with.

In reality, biologists often face the problem called a species complex, where a group of closely related species are very similar to each other and the boundaries aren’t so clear. It takes a lot to untangle the mess and organize nature in neat tiny boxes people come up with.

One example of such success story is the Crested Wood Fern, Dryopteris cristata. It’s a member of the North American complex of Dryopteris, the focus of Emily Sessa’s PhD research.

“It’s a beautiful plant, fond of swampy and wet habitats. It’s fairly rare, but when you find it, there’s usually a robust population, so it feels like a treasure hunt with a big payoff at the end,” she says.

But her main interest is much smaller than the plant itself. As a plant systematist, she studies the how plants are related through evolution, especially by looking into their DNA. Her work tells a hidden story of how the species might come to be.

When organisms reproduce sexually, most of the time they inherit one set of chromosome from each parent, causing the new generation to inherit both of their traits. These offspring, which have two sets of chromosomes, are called diploids.

But D. cristata is a tetraploid, meaning it has four sets instead. Such mutation tends to cause miscarriages in humans, but it seems to be very common among plants.

In addition, D. cristata turns out to be a hybrid between two species, one of which has gone extinct. All that’s left of this missing parent is its genomes, living on inside D. cristata, and possibly other hybrid species out there.

To Emily, non-flowering plants like ferns, mosses, and liverworts make us reconsider nature’s charm in a different way. For example, D. cristata’s leaves are divided into tiny segments, that are often positioned parallel to the ground like Venetian blind slats.

“Flowers can be very distracting, and there is so much interesting biology going on in plants that has nothing to do with flowers. When you take flowers, fruits, and seeds away, you’re left with all this other fun stuff to study!”

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Emily Sessa is an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida. Get to know Emily and plant systematics.

Twitter · Sessa Lab

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Chlorobi Green Sulfur Bacteria

ft. Maureen Berg

Microbes are everywhere.

They raise your dough, turn milk into cheese, and ferment grape juice into wine. These decomposers are also found in rotting pigs, which is how Maureen Berg first got involved in microbiology.

Despite this, microbes can be choosy about where they live. The Green Sulfur Bacteria (GSB) she is investigating, for example, flourishes on a very specific depth in freshwater lakes.

They need sunlight to photosynthesize, but hate oxygen. So they live close enough to the surface where it’s bright, but deep enough to avoid the oxygen dissolved in the water.

Maureen looks into how organisms — animals, bacteria, viruses — interact with one another. Right now, she specifically works with bacteria and their viruses called phages.

Almost nothing is known about phages that infect GSB, so she is developing new ways to measure them. One way to do this is by using a cell sorter, a tool which collects the green particles it finds in the water sample. Because these green particles will only be GSB, the phages in that sample will be GSB phages.

In another kind of bacteria called cyanobacteria, an infection causes the host to put more energy into self-defense than photosynthesis. This change is not good for the phages, which hijack the fuel produced by the bacteria. To bypass this, the phages make proteins to force the host to photosynthesize more. Maureen is interested in figuring out if the GSB’s phages behave in this way or not.

Such interaction shows how adaptive they are. “The thing I love most about microbes is that they can do anything. If there is a resource or nutrient out there, there is a microbe that can metabolize it,” she adds.

This is why microbes play a big part in our lives. Not only they produce our food, the microbes in our gut also help us digest. Even as a species, our evolution has always been affected by these organisms that we can’t see.

“I get excited when thinking about how microbes are interacting with and influencing their ecosystems. Just, microbes living life and doing their thing! Phage research is newer to me, but I'm developing a similar feeling towards them.”

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Maureen Berg is a Postdoc at the Joint Genome Institute. Get to know Maureen and microbes, along with her general joy and amazement of all things biological.

Twitter

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Eutrichota gopheri Gopher Tortoise Burrow Fly

ft. Amanda Hipps

There are thirteen known species of insects that feed strictly on gopher tortoise dung.

“Yeah, they might eat poop, but they’re picky about what kind,” says Amanda Hipps, professional #ShitBugs researcher.

This sounds pretty gross to some people, but these insects essentially act as the garbage disposal service that operates on legs and wings. The tortoises, which live in burrows, might get overrun by pests and parasites without these helpful bugs.

“It’s hard to pick just one, but I think my favorite shit bug is the Gopher Tortoise Burrow Fly. I see them in most burrows I survey and they’re an important food source for another burrow commensal — the gopher frog,” Amanda says.

These connected interests go back to her graduate school days. She started out with a passion for reptiles and amphibians but then noticed how their six-legged co-habitants rarely get any attention in science. Her research then pivoted to the more entomological route, realizing that these insects that may play a vital role in the gopher tortoise’s lives.

Today, she wants to fill in the knowledge gaps as an ecologist. No one else has looked for the “shit bugs” in Southeast Florida, so she wants to find out which ones live in the area and how they’re distributed.

“A typical day in the field for me is sifting through the sand, sometimes head first, shoulder-deep inside of a burrow trying to catch insects,” she explains her methods.

She uses fresh tortoise dung as bait and sets out a number of insect traps. “Most days can be discouraging – I’ll spend hours every day in the hot Florida sun, digging through poop and usually end the day with nothing exciting to report,” she adds.

“On the occasion when I do find a rare insect, it feels like a pot of gold. They are insects that can be found nowhere else in the world except inside of gopher tortoise burrows. Many of these declining insects haven’t been found in many years and few people get the chance to see them. I feel pretty lucky.”

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Amanda Hipps is a master's student at Florida Atlantic University. Get to know Amanda and her gopher tortoise shit bugs.

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Cephalodesmius armiger

ft. Nicole Gunter

When you see biologist Nicole Gunter, better not touch her field bag. It’s not her lunch that’s in the Tupperware containers.

“Mostly it’s a variety of dung, neatly prepared and labeled — but also rotting mushrooms, fruit, and carrion. Collecting dung beetles is inherently weird, my field bag is filled with a variety of ‘baits’ to lure dung beetles.”

But what’s gross to one person isn’t the same for others. “I always get grossed out by forensic entomologists but then I realise that they are probably as desensitized to what they do as I am,” she adds.

In fact, multiple religions held dung beetles sacred. From the Ancient Egypt to Taoism, dung beetles have been symbols to all things spiritual and celestial.

This is partly due to the fact that dung beetles follow everywhere mammals go, except underwater or in the Arctic. In fact, there are more species of dung beetles than there are mammal out there.

This diversity makes some of them really quirky. There are even a few species that grew so attached to sloths or kangaroos and cling to their fur waiting for them to poop then drop off.

Some species are amazing parents that perform parental care, restocking their babies with dung balls and then stay with them until they turn into pupae. One such example is Nicole’s favorite, the flightless Australian dung beetle Cephalodesmius armiger.

She’s interested in the evolutionary history of Australian native dung beetles. They are unique compared to the rest of the world, because their evolution and lifestyle evolved in tandem with the marsupials of the continent.

This tight-knit evolution tunes their body to perform on marsupial dung.

“They can’t really feed on agricultural dung, Australia actually introduced foreign dungies to clean up after the domesticated cattle and sheep.”

“Dung beetles are really some of the unsung heroes of the invertebrate world due to their critical ecosystem service of nutrient cycling through dung clean up.”

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Nicole Gunter is an Associate Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Get to know Nicole and her army of six-legged friends.

Twitter · CMNH Entomology · CMNH Profile · Podcast

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Celebargiolestes toli

ft. Pungki Lupiyaningdyah

Everyone knows what dragonflies are, yet people tend to remember butterflies and beetles more when they think of insects.

This is why Pungki Lupiyaningdyah goes on adventures like Indiana Jones, except that her “treasures” are dragonflies and their close cousins the damselflies. She wants to learn as much as possible about them — including how they live, how different species are related to each other, if they’re endangered, and many others.

For biologists like her, seeing them fly by is more than just fascinating. Their presence also lets her know that there’s a clean, healthy aquatic environment nearby where their babies, also called nymphs, live.

Even very early in their lives, dragonfly and damselfly nymphs are ferocious hunters that can tackle larger prey animal, including fish or tadpoles. They stay underwater for several months up to five years depending on the species, before they make their way above the water to molt and spread their wings.

As adults, dragonflies and damselflies mate in an eye-catching way. While most other insects mate by mounting each other or by facing the opposite directions, these long-bodied insects use a different approach. 

“With his rear end, the male grasps the female’s neck, who curves her body to reach the male’s sexual organ that’s located close to his thorax. This results in an upside-down heart shape, which I think is romantic,” she describes the process.

This peculiar mating pose only adds an extra charm to Pungki’s favorite damselfly, the Celebargiolestes toli.

It is one of the many species found only on the rich island of Sulawesi in Indonesia and not anywhere else. As a result, it’s a rarely seen species that doesn’t even have a common, non-scientific name. She was stunned by the species when she first met it during an expedition to Mount Mekongga in 2010. Like its relatives, this insect lives near rivers in pristine forests, especially in remote areas that are isolated from human settlements.

“It has an orange spot between its eyes down to its mouth. When it flies, it looks like a forest fairy flapping its wings. This is why I fell in love with the species.”

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Pungki Lupiyaningdyah is a researcher at Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense, Research Center for Biologi LIPI (Indonesian Institute of Sciences). Get to know Pungki and the dragonflies and damselflies of Indonesia.

Instagram · Researchgate

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On 28 September 2018, Sulawesi was hit by a devastating earthquake followed by a tsunami that killed over 2,000 people and displaced many more. Please consider supporting disaster response efforts to help rebuild the impacted areas.

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Doryteuthis pealeii Atlantic Longfin Squid

ft. Casey Zakroff

Compared to the bottom-dwelling slugs or sea stars, squid are peculiar invertebrates. Despite their lack of backbones, these predators swim in the open waters — behaving more like fishes. But just like everything else in nature, there’s always an exception.

“It’s built to be a visual, pelagic hunter, yet it often rests on the seafloor,” Casey says about his study subject, the peculiar Atlantic longfin squid.

It is one of the better-known species in biology, having appeared in studies like neurobiology and camouflage science. But just like its weird lifestyle, it constantly surprises scientists in so many different ways.

For his research, he photographed baby squid in water droplets under the microscope to measure their growth.

“They have this little hexagon on their head. It’s the first thing I look for to see if I need to flip them over, which can be arduous as they are sticky little buggers.”

His squid were raised in tanks that simulate an extreme condition called ocean acidification. This is a global phenomenon that happens when a large amount of CO2 dissolves into the ocean, making it more acidic.

Usually, this phenomenon happens over a long period of time due to the fluctuations in our atmosphere. These days, it’s happening faster than the natural rate because humans are dumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

It turns out, higher levels of CO2 make Casey’s squid grow slower and hatch later.

This slower growth affects their swimming speed and control, which in turn may hinder their survival. This is crucial not just to the squid, but also to the countless other species that are connected to them in the food chain, including humans.

Such a global change affects all marine inhabitants, though some places and species will be more impacted than others. Animals that rely on coastal ecosystems like the longfin squid, for example, are more vulnerable because of their proximity to human settlements.

Right now, scientists are tackling global environmental challenges from many different angles. Tiny as they may seem, Casey’s squid squad is helping us understand how nature responds to a new world sculpted by mankind.

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Casey Zakroff is a PhD Candidate at MIT-WHOI. Get to know Casey and his squid squad.

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[the-circles-of-life]

Asarum canadense Wild Ginger

ft. Marion Andrews Holmes

Inside a forest, there’s always more to see beyond the great trees that block the canopy.

“My mother and grandparents would point out species like teaberry, jack in the pulpit, and club mosses from the earliest times I remember being in the forest. Forest herbs are fascinating if, like me, you like to observe and pay close attention to small details. They are beautiful; forest wildflower walks are popular for a reason!” biologist Marion Andrews Holmes begins her story.

As a professional ecologist, Marion’s fascination with forest herb communities only grows. These plants are incredibly diverse, it is not uncommon to see more than 100 species at a single site.

This species count is not just a number — it reflects the diversity of stories inside the forest. There are plants that switch between male and female flowers from year to year. Fruits that explode to launch their seeds as far as possible. Plants that don’t even photosynthesize.

For us humans, some of these herbs are important in our culture or as medicines, so the relationships between forest herbs and their environment include humans as well.

This aspect is central to Marion’s research, which focuses on how forests regrow in places that were once farmlands. Most forests in eastern North America and Northern Europe have an agricultural past, so understanding the legacies of land-use history is critical to understanding how forest ecology works.

When plants recolonize farmlands, different species take root in young forests at different rates. Unlike trees, many forest herbs are not adapted to spread their seeds far and wide, making them less likely to return. This prevents various herb species from returning even after human settlers left.

To Marion, the wild ginger is a prime example for this: its seeds are dispersed by ants, so it does not make it into regrowth forests when the insects’ habitats are fragmented.

“Agricultural legacies of biodiversity loss in the herb layer persist for more than 80 years after the forest has regrown — and ginger is frequently one of the species lost.”

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Marion Andrews Holmes a freelance ecologist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Get to know Marion and the understories of post-agricultural forests.

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[the-circles-of-life]

Hemicorallium laauuense Precious Pink Coral

ft. Nicole Morgan

The so-called precious pink coral defies people’s expectations. It doesn’t grow in warm, tropical shallows, but on mountains 200-700m under the waves of the Pacific Ocean.

“I had no idea deep-sea corals were even a thing, but quickly learned I had been missing out on some really cool science!” biologist Nicole Morgan recounts her first time hearing about them.

“It’s anywhere from white to a vibrant red color and is often used for jewelry or figurines,” she describes the coral.

Their beauty plays a part in their demise. Most of the time, they’re harvested by dragging wide nets across the sea floor, breaking up corals and entangling everything else that lives nearby. Only a few harvesters actually use submersibles or remote vehicles (ROV) to pick them individually, which is more environmentally friendly.

“Unfortunately, no harvesting for commercial use is really sustainable because these corals are extremely slow growing, on the order of millimeters per year.”

If we want to replenish the damaged areas, knowing where and how far coral babies travel is crucial. To figure this out, Nikki looks at the corals’ DNA and compares how individuals from different locations relate to each other.

To her, looking into an animal’s DNA is like an exciting puzzle — except that it involves a lot of “accurately moving small amounts of clear liquids into other clear liquids using a micropipettor.”

Such lab work helps her answer the question: are coral populations throughout the ocean connected with each other, or isolated within each seamount? Knowing the answer helps researchers like Nikki pinpoint which areas should be protected.

But to her personally, deep-sea research is a rewarding career on its own. It’s a world brimming with a lot of questions that can be answered with engineering, biology, physics, chemistry, and of course, actual fieldwork.

In 2017, she got to dive in the submersible with the Hawai’i Undersea Research Laboratory, which still excites her to this day.

“The icing on the cake is the fieldwork involved with deep-sea research often includes month-long boat trips out to the middle of nowhere and cool robots.”

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Nicole Morgan is a Research Assistant at Florida State University. Get to know Nikki, deep sea creatures, and her baking adventures.

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[the-circles-of-life]

Rhodocrinites kirbyi

ft. Selina Cole

Sea lilies are not plants, despite their name and appearance. To most people’s surprise, these lilies, also known as crinoids, are more like starfish on a stalk.

There are around 600 species of crinoids today, but they were even more diverse in the past. Many looked like flowers growing from the sea floor, others were like a swimming feather duster. Over 10,000 fossil crinoid species have been identified and named — at least a dozen of them by Selina Cole.

To Lena, each species is more than a name. She thinks of how each one relates to its ancestors, sister species, and the role it played in the grand scheme of the crinoids’ evolutionary history.

For example, take Rhodocrinites kirbyi. It was one of the last of its lineage – a subgroup called the diplobathrids.

“They survived for over 160 million years, recovered from two mass extinctions, and gave rise to hundreds of species that happily lived in shallow oceans. Shortly before its demise, the group had one last hurrah as Rhodocrinites became very abundant and diverse.”

“Then inexplicably, during the idyllic "Age of Crinoids" when other groups flourished, it went extinct. Maybe it couldn't cope with the changing environment. Maybe its food source disappeared. Maybe a crinoid from another lineage evolved that outcompeted it,“ she explains.

This is what drives Lena’s curiosity. By investigating each crinoid species, she’s piecing the puzzle together to paint a better picture of the ancient seas.

Today, starfish and sea urchins are taken for granted because they're familiar, but there is nothing normal about them or the crinoids — collectively known as echinoderms.

“They never evolved blood and instead circulate seawater through their bodies. They sense light without eyes. A crinoid can lose a big chunk of its body and still regrow. Broken arms can live for months by absorbing nutrients from the water.”

It’s no wonder that echinoderm scientists like Lena are fiercely loyal to these bizarre creatures.

As her fellow echinoderm expert Rich Mooi put it, “The very strangeness of Echinodermata is partly responsible for the dedication that specialists in the group feel. We revel in their weirdness.”

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Selina Cole is a MAT postdoc in Paleobiology at the American Museum of Natural History. Get to know Lena and her love of crinoids, phylogenetic trees, and squirrels.

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