Benthopelagic Nematology (DEEP SEA WORMS) with Holly Bik

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Oh hey, it's your bass at a yarn. That's sad you gave up on knitting. Ali ward back with another farm Fresh episode we just picked for you, and I hope that you're hungry for worms. So many worms. Why worms?

Normally people aren't so excited about worms.

I am Hollybig. I am an associate professor at the University of Georgia and the Department of Marine Sciences, and my pronouns are she and her. I see you have a deck of worms with you. I do have a deck of worms with worms.

Okay.

When I saw you holding these earlier, I thought they were business cards.

They aren't business cards. What are they? They are?

So I work on microscopic worms that are extremely hard to see. So when I say I work on nematodes or nematodes, I did my page in the UK, so that's what I say.

Uh, people are like, what are those?

And often I find it easy to carry around this deck of business cards so that after people meet me they can always remember, can.

I see one? Like what do they have on them? So ooh, look at that? Is that it's face or its asshole?

That is its face? That's its head?

Oh it's beautiful, it's very sphincterous. Yes, and then what are Okay, it looks like I'm looking at a hose of some sort with a like a claw as a face. And then what are these dingled aangles all around it? I really don't know how to describe this gracefully, so I'll just be honest. This particular worm looks like a tube of wrinkly skin with a clawd buttthole face with a crown of ribbed ponytails, just a natural beauty.

Those are well, so we call them CT but they're like hairs that project way far out. So that species is special because it has really long hairs all around its head. And actually, the way we describe species is you count, so the hairs are current circles, and you basically count how many rows of circles of hairs there are, and then you count how many pairs of hairs in that circle. So you literally have to like go on your microscope and count all the hairs, and if the

Is this electron scanning microscope or what kind of microscope do you use to see these worms?

Elect Yeah, electron microscopy.

She showed me another few worm cards, one that looked like the thick scales of a crocodile but with a slit for a mouth, and another resembling cactus wearing like a cable knit sock. And these things they're just living their lives in the mud in Antarctica. They don't give a shit about you, And I respect that.

That's given of the nematode can be plate like, so kind of like armor.

And these cuticles. This one is.

Striated, this one is kind of smooth. This one is like punctures sweater. Yeah, this one's like armor. This one has a smooth cuticle, so you can't actually see much. It's really just smooth.

Yeah, okay, worms with scales. But let's talk scale.

How tiny the technically they're like a millimeter to five millimeters long. But the way it's easiest to picture the worms are the size of an individual speck of dust. So you can see them like if you have a slide and you hold it up to the light, it looks like a little speck of dust. But practically we say that they're microscopic.

And then are they all the cards the same or they different?

No, they're all different. So this is the next one.

Who's this a fanged orifice rimmed with hair but wearing cinnamon earrings? What's happening? Oh wait, it's got a spiral on the side of it. That's a perfect spiral.

Yeah, it's amazing. So these are actually like princess leebuns on both sides of the worm.

What do they do?

They are sensory pores called amphids, and no one knows why they're in perfect spirals, but this is my favorite taxonomic feature of the worms. We don't know exactly like what they do, but we think that they are sensory pores. So worms don't have eyes, but they live in mud and environments where there's a lot of stuff going on.

They're a lot going on right now, clearly.

So the current theory is that it's like sensory pore and it detects chemicals because we know that worms can migrate towards specific bacteria, so maybe they're scenting metabolites or they're basically smelling stuff in the mud and that's what they're using to navigate, And we think it all happens through those pores. What happened when you zoomed in and got to see this for the first time in real life?

Are you like there it is?

Yeah, I mean the spirals are really obvious. Yeah, so they're the one of the easiest things to see. But not all the nematodes have spirals, just a select subset of groups do. But they are absolutely perfect and they can get really big too, So sometimes when you put them on the microscope, you just see the spiral like a slinky kind of in the middle of the worm, and it's really obvious and it's really cool.

So right now, as you drink a horse shot at or do squats, there are these teeny tiny, itty bitty noodles alive at the bottom of the sea mud with Princess Leah buns and sphincter faces and very weird mouths. But she loves them, and so do I. That's so distracting that I almost didn't notice that there were like kitten claws all around this gaping mall.

Yep, those are the teeth. So that's a predatory species. They have retractable mandibles with teeth inside, so it's kind of like a wishbone on a chicken with a spike in the middle.

They have three of those.

They have tri radiant symmetry, and then they'll extend them out and then they grab a worm or they grab a bacteria or something, and then they pull it back in kind of like a sandworm or some weird sci fi thing.

I was going to say this, did you ever see like tremors or the pit of Sarlac?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was thinking of Starlac.

You will therefore be taken to the June Sea and cast to the pit of the nesting place of the old powerful Sarlac doesn't sound so bad in his belly. You will find a new definition of pain and suffering as you are slowly digestive over a thousand years.

Oh my gosh. Okay, in this deck of business cards doesn't just have worms on it, but the back bears her contact info and a very short nematode tiny bio. And now the front of the card Deep Sea Biology Antarctica nematode worms. In the middle of that is Antarctica. Like, there's worms on Antarctica. Yes, on Antarctica and around the ocean. So nematodes are literally every handful.

Of mud, dirt and soil that you pick up. There's thousands of nematodes in there. The terrestrial species on land are very different from the marine species. Actually, the terrestrial nematologists don't really talk to the marine ones. So there's some kind of like drama there. Not really, it's really just the taxonomy.

Is very different.

I'm creating drama, That's what I'm doing. Yeah, so they are. They're all the way down in Antarctica. There's nematodes in volcanoes, like hot soils in volcanoes. There was a nematod that was found a couple miles below the surface of the Earth. And like South African diamond mines, and yeah, like literally your garden, your lawn, They're everywhere, and everyone ignores them and doesn't really know that they're there.

No one loves worms because they don't know how omnipresent they are. Maybe how recently did science figure out like, oh, yeah, there's worms on Antarctica, there are worms in volcanoes. How long have people been looking for worms there.

Well, it's been hard to find them in Antarctica until technology kind of got like modern enough, So maybe mid twentieth century we started to find them down there when people actually went to start sampling and bring back the samples preserved in a way that we could look under microscopes. And the Antarctic dry valleys are actually really interesting, so that dry valleys in Antarctica don't get rain. They haven't seen rain since the plist scene.

No, so some people call the plist de scene by its nickname the Ice Age, and it started two and a half million years ago up until eleven thousand years ago, and you know what, between you and me, it is fine to have had to look that up. But yes, Antarctica has parts that have been parched since then.

And you actually find mummified seals in the Antarctic dry valleys because it's so dry. And what happens is the seals will like wander up a mountain from the ocean and then cross over into the dry valley and then freak out because there's no food there and there's no rain there, and then they just die. And then because there's no rain, they become mummified. So when you go to study the worms in those places, you're just trap seeing amongst the bodies of mummified seals.

Why doesn't it rain there?

It's the climate, I mean, Antarctica is just this really unique climate. And parts of Antarctica get snow and glacier formation, but actually the continent is super dry. So when we went on the boat, I mean, the first thing they told you to bring is lots of moisturizer.

Really, how many times have you been there?

Just once? And I just came back.

When did you get back? So she had been back on unfrozen land for maybe two weeks at the time we recorded this, Oh, that was like yesterday.

Yeah, so I'm a little bit jet like still tired from the trip. It was a three months.

Three months on Antarctica. How would you set an out of office reply? Do you what do you do?

Yes? I had an email reply. So there's no internet down there. We were on a ship around the Antarctic Continental Shelf in East Antarctica, So not only were we in Antarctica, but we're in like literally the most remote part of the remote, most remote place on the planet where satellites don't really exist. So if you're on a ship anywhere else in the world, normally you have satellite internet and you can kind of check your email and it's fine. But we had it was basically like being

Oh my god.

Did you feel like when you left? I hope nothing goes down. Like you mentioned you have kids. Yeah, did you have to prepare emotionally, like, Okay, if something happens, if there's an emergency, they'll tell me. Were you able to put that out of your mind or how long did it take to acclimate to the It's okay, someone will reach me if they need to.

So I almost made a will before I went to Antarctica.

Not a bad idea.

Not a bad idea, because I was so worried and I was like, my husband doesn't know our bank account password, like I, you know, I don't know if he knows where, Like his birth certificate is, like what if he needs that?

So I was over prepping.

I felt like like an apocalypse prepper in the amount of notes and instructions that I left for him. Yeah, and then things did go wrong when we were down there, so we had we had like a catastrophic bathroom leak in our master bath and like the ceiling was pouring with water. So you prep for everything and then stuff still goes wrong unexpectedly. So he was juggling the childcare and also like calling plumbers and at three am to try to get that sorted.

I'm glad, to be honest, I'm glad it was at your house and not on the ship, because at first, when you said a catastrophic ba through issue, I figured it was on the ship and I was like, oh, that had to be very smelly. But no, it's just back home, just back home. Yeah.

Yeah, we good luck with that, Yeah, but I couldn't do anything about it.

Did you learn anything about being so remote? Did you learn anything that you've taken away? I know you've only been back a couple of weeks, but was there anything about that kind of remoteness that made you disconnect now that you've been back home or did it make you appreciate connection more?

I would say both.

I mean, I think I really didn't miss the Internet. I didn't even try. It was so slow that it wasn't even worth it. So I literally brought Tolstoy novels to Antarctica because I was like, what is the biggest book that I can possibly find that's like vaguely snowy, twelve punchrd page Tolstoy novel that sounds great about Russia. I actually used Antarctica like to pursue hobbies that I always wanted to do. So I bought a really nice Nikon DSLR camera, and I gave myself a project to

How much sun was there per day.

So we were there pretty late in the season, but it was actually pretty sunny. So we also changed We went through time zone changes down so we were supposed to go through eleven time zone changes and the captain decides when you change the time zone.

No, yeah, what an ego trip. That's amazing, Father time, Captain time. Holy shit, party time. And let's go back to nematodes because a lot of people might be like, Okay, what is what is a worm? Tell us what is a nematode? Because there's flatworms and there's round worms and never the twain shall meet.

Right, Yes, flatworms are roundworms are different phyla. So there's other types of worms too. There's like oligo keets and polykeets, and also there's things that look like worms in the ocean that are not actually worms. Nematodes are roundworms by definition, and I think the easiest one that everyone would know is dog heartworm.

So the reason, oh, I was gonna say an earthworm.

No, earthworms are the wrong kind of worms.

Really, what kind of worms are earthworms?

Earthworms are anelids. So there are segmented worms.

Oh my gosh. Okay, so we've got roundworms, which are smooth, non segmented, and they're round shaped. Then there's flatworms, and then there's analids. Anelids aren't a subtype of roundworms. They'rech a totally different.

Thing, totally different things, separate phylum, like way far away on the tree of life.

Yeap, oh my god, this is news to me. For some reason, I would have put an earthworm as a as a nematode. Okay, so dog heartworm. This is something that we have to give our dogs little pills every once in a while for So do they tend to be parasitic? What do they eat?

What they eat berries?

Depending on what type of nematode they are. The parasitic ones are designed to well. They evolve to live off the hosts, so they will essentially rely on the host for their nutrition. I'm not quite sure what they eat because I don't study those ones.

For anyone with pooches who has taken heartworm medication, good job. I just read way too much about these wiggly scoundrels. And they're transmitted by mosquitoes, and they creep around for six months before your dog shows any symptoms, and without treatment, they may turn its heart into what looks like a dish of glass noodles. And if you are not a dog person. They're not the only species that can be afflicted, so watch out. Jackals and beavers and wolves and reptiles

And there's also human parasite. So guinea worm, you know that one that like lives up your leg, that's a nematode too. Oncosoriasis, river blindness, the one that like burrows into your eye, that's a nematode. That's why the parasitic ones are super gross, which is why I don't study them.

O mass.

Thanks, So there's terrestrial and marine. So the majority of nematodes that we don't know anything about are free living and they eat anything from like plant roots and fungi on land to like bacteria and diatoms.

And in case you're not familiar with diatomes, if you visit the very prodiatome's site diatomes dot org, you will learn that diatomes are algae and that they live in houses made of glass. They are the only organism on the planet with cell walls composed of transparent opaline silica, so they look like woven crystal baskets, but tiny, tiny, and they are microalgae that contribute twenty to fifty percent of the oxygen on our planet we need to survive.

And actually some nematodes eat other nematodes. So the ones I did my PhD on are this group of predatory nematodes and they have like teeth and jaws and they're really physically big and they're active predators. So I have microscope images of worms ripping other worms apart, you can find a predatory nematode with another smaller nematode like hanging out of its mouth.

Sometimes oh oh on a slav.

I love it.

I picture me eating like a chili dog and just covered in beans, just like that. How did you get into the field of nematology because you were in the department of nematology at the university. So did you ever introduce yourself as an nematologist? I mean you must, right.

I mean I study worms, so I guess I'm technically a nematologist, But being in a department of ptologist kind of like, okay, yeah, fine.

If you're not a nematologist, I don't know who is. Also, anyone who studies something is technically anologist of it. So if I were to be cracking open a book and studying, I would technically be a person who studies it. You are definitely a nematologist, okay, and a nematologist here, both of those things. But now when it comes to how you got into this field, especially deep sea nematology, that

Right, So there is a story here. Actually there's multiple stories. I so, yeah, I get into science because I wanted to be a deep sea biologist. I grew up in Massachusetts, right, and so we have woods Whole Oceanographic Institute there. So I'm also first generation college student. So like, none of my family are scientists, and I'm the weird one that likes the ocean and my family actually hates the beach, which I.

Just last year. How did you discover it?

Because we went to the beach and everyone was like, oh, yeah, we hate the beach. We don't want to go for a walk. I'm like, what, I never knew this. How far away from the beach? Did you grow up like an hour in Massachusetts?

Yeah?

I would go with my friends in high school and yeah, so we would go down to the beach all the time. But I also used to go on field trips of the ocean because your school will always bring you to the beach. And I remember we went at one point

It was usually Bob Ballard.

I was the one that discovered the Titanic, right, wow, And I was.

Like, oh my god, deep sea biology. I want to do that.

So I get into science, like really more for the travel and the exploration. I thought I wanted to be like an underwater arcologists, but then I realized that I don't like dead bodies and that's kind of creepy. Dead worm bodies not as creepy. Muh, So I didn't start with dead worm bodies. I actually started with jellyfish because they are pretty. But stanting into jellyfish research is actually

Two people who wanted to study them medusology guest doctor Rebecca Helm and a toxinologist who studies jellyfish venom, doctor Anna Klompin. Links are floating around in the show notes and For more on sunken treasures, soggy boats, and watery graves, you can see the Maritime Archaeology episode. I'm going to link in the show notes because it's so good. But back to Holly and her worms.

So when I was looking for a PhD, I had three criteria. I wanted to study something deep sea invertebrate. I wanted to get molecular biology skills because I really was attracted to genomics and DNA sequence in my college courses. I did really well in those courses and I was obsessed with DNA. And then my third criteria was that I wanted to keep living in London. So I did my undergrad in London, and I was like, I'm really a city person. I love the city, in the fashion,

Oh my god, that's a beautiful museum. What did your parents think when they saw you going further and further toward a PhD? What do they do? And this was rare for your family?

Yeah, my dad is an HVAC technician, so he repairs like oil burners and heating and cooling systems. And then my mom was a secretary and kind of town government. She stayed home with me for a while. But they just think I'm really weird. I don't think they understand why I do what I do. I mean, they're really supportive of it, and they connect most of the travel aspect, I think, because you like working class families. Travel is basically an indicator of success, right if you can travel

Do you think there's any good nematodes in HVAC systems.

I'm not a cold There are nematodes and drinking water, which is really disturbing, really even tapwater.

Yeah.

So when I was processing my samples at the Natural History Museum in London, right, I work with deep sea samples, so all the worms I ever saw were dead and preserved. But occasionally when I'm picking through my sample at the microscope, there would be like a thrashing, live nematode there, and I would ask my taxonomists mentor.

Why why is this worm alive? Where did it come from?

And he's like, oh, yeah, you know the piping systems, there's nematodes that come up occasionally from there. And actually recent studies of drinking water they do like the environmental DNA sequencing.

And they look for DNA barcodes of things, and yeah.

You find like signatures of nematodes and drinking water worms, worms, worms everywhere, which makes sense, right because our drinking water comes from reservoirs and you know it's put through pipes and stuff.

But yeah, it's not completely sterile.

Don't worry about it.

It's fine.

Now when it comes to I'm going to say nematodes and nematodes this whole thing, and I'm gonna think I say wrong every time, But that's fine. When it comes to their life cycle, what are they out there doing? How are they fitting in with their environment? Are they cleaning things up? Are they changing the pH of systems? Like what nematodes, Why why are they?

I will talk about marine systems because that's what I know best, and I'll mention a little bit about terrestrial ones too. I mean, they kind of are like earthworms in the marine system, but just like on a microscopic scale.

So think you have this patch.

Of mud on the beach at low tide, and you just have all these microscopic nemotodes kind of wriggling around, and so they're doing things like bioturbation right on a microbial scale. They're also eating lots of bacteria. So a lot of nematodes have specific little mouth parts that just

Don't be scared of all those syllables. So microbial eukaryots are just tiny organisms like fungi or single celled little blobby things, or algae or other little creatures with eukaryotic cells, that is, cells with a nucleus and usually organelles and some DNA. You are a eukaryot Many of the animals living inside of your body also are because we're never alone and everyone living in you mostly loves you.

They are predatory, so they're kind of like the base of the food chain. So you have the you know, the bacteria, and then you have the nematodes and then the bigger things like polykeat worm. Larger worms would eat nematods or amphipods or crustaceans, and they are the base

So yes. In this world, stuff eats stuff that eat stuff, and bacteria at the bottom of that chain they really get the shaft. So bacteria they're just trying to exist and then nematodes come and gobble them up like kettle corn. Nematodes are acting like the compost bins of the deep sea mud. So thank you for the recycling service bentopelagic roundworms. But as a thank you, the nematods gets slipped up by polykeat worms, which are briskly segmented things that look

The smallest nematodes are the deep sea ones because when you get into the deep sea, the food quality and the amount of food is really poor and there's just not much there. So that leads to reduction in body sizes and those can be like a tenth of a millimeter. Oof, I'm a weetle'll be really tiny. Yeah, And the largest ones, so, the largest nematode that we've ever found is actually.

A parasite of a sperm whale.

Placenta specific so specific, yes, and that one is about thirty meters long and no yeah yeah wait ninety feet yeah. So at the Natural History Museum we actually have it in a jar. So it's like this giant glass jar which is like coiled worm all up. And yeah from a sperm whale, but placenta of a sperm whale specific.

How do they reproduce if they have such small niches?

So I mean they reproduce sexually just like a lot of organisms, you actually have males and females of species. So fun fact, see Elegans is actually like the worst nematode.

What No, Okay, so see elegance. I know just enough to know that this is a study species for a lot of scientists across a lot of different platforms. Why do they pick see elegans? And is it an elegant worm?

It is a boring worm, and it's it's a hermaphrodite.

Oh love that, But scientists can get a little fluw mixed in the lab.

Most nematodes are not hermaphrodites. Most nematodes have males and females and they are sexually reproducing, so we need the males and females. The Elegans is a hermaphrodite, so it can fertilize itself. But also it has no body parts, like it's literally just a tube that's pointing at both ends, and it has no discerning features and like, obviously according to my cards, there's a lot of stuff on the worms,

What is this worm? Who is this worm? Okay? First off, it is elegant and its name means recent, rod like and elegant, which is an app description for a teenage

I mean, they're sort of like, what if we get the worm that's most closely related to sea elegans and we work with that too, And from my perspective, that's like literally the same thing because it's on this tiny part of the nematode tree of life. It's very distant from the marine species because those are like the most ancient lineages of nematodes, and sea elegans is, yeah, just a completely different part of the tree. So it's yeah, I'm not bitter, not like not throwing shade at see ale agans.

It's important.

You can order it on the internet with whatever gene knocked out that you want. So it plays an important role, but it's not representative of the crazy diversity of nematodes that we have in the environment.

Are you not mad but just disappointed?

My one of my good friends says that I'm motivated by just disinspite.

Well that those are good things.

Those are good fuels. What about the Age of Niama shows how can you even find fossilized ones? Are they so gooy that they just kind of melt?

For the most part, we do not have fossils. The oldest fossil that I recall is from the Devonian Age, and I don't remember how ancient that is, but I don't think it's actually pretty ancient.

The Devonian Age was four hundred million years ago, just so none of us have to google.

So we have like this one fossil of a plant parasitic nematode and some tree sap, but that's it. There's no fossil record. So yeah, we're working at a disadvantage compared to most other phyla. And that's why DNA and genomics is really important, because a genome is basically like a time machine or the equivalent of a fossil record, and that's what we use.

And what about the ones in Antarctica that you are studying, do they freeze or does it just not freeze? In the deep sea mud.

It does not freeze. Okay, so the ocean water in Antarctica is super cold, but because of the salinity, it's so salty. It does not typically freeze the surface.

Well, so you'll get sea ice.

But the nematodes that I work with live in the sediments, so the sediments will typically never freeze, and if they do, it's like near a glacier, and then you've got other problems like the scraping of the glacier killing all the worms on the sea floor.

Oh, I forgot to ask what moisturizer you did bring, by.

The way, Ooh, that is a good question. I brought a giant tub. I want to say, it's like like first aid beauty something. I get it target, I get like a giant tub of like ultra healing moisturizer.

Smart Holly wrote me later to say, not only did this cream keep my skin fabulously moist in the coldest and driest place on Earth, but this product lasts forever. She says, I bought the six ounce tub back in February before Antarctica, and I am still using the same one with a quarter of the tub left. So one recommend for your listeners, especially if you have combo to oily skin like me, because the space cream isn't greasy at all. So there is her tip, and she is

Though.

Let's change the subject now, what about glaciers. You mentioned glaciers. When we think of glaciers, I think of melting, and I think.

Of oh no, and may yeaher.

Do you find out anything about climate from studying deep sea worms? Do you see anything change over time? Like are there more or less of them?

That is one question that I have.

I would say there's not enough people studying worms, and there's not enough data on the worms to be able to tell that. And that's kind of what we're trying to do. So we're trying to get a baseline of the biodiversity. Most places in the ocean, we just don't even know what's there. So how can we track change if we don't have that data set to start from. So a lot of my work is really just a race against time to get a baseline of knowledge.

God, if you watch things going hotter and hotter and hotter. You must be like I needed to get this information like in the fifties or something, right, Yeah, Well, we.

Know nematodes are really sensitive to temperature shifts. So the thing that kills all the deep sea worms when you bring them up on deck the deep sea is like two degrees celsius.

That's thirty six point five degrees fahrenheit tuned after Americans.

So it's like living in a refrigerator.

And when you bring that sample onto the deck of a boat, even if you just go into the lab and it's like sixty degrees, Like sixty degrees for a deep sea worm is like the Arizona desertation.

Night summer, like the mouth of Hell for that. Yeah.

So like most people ask me if the pressure changes kill the worms, but they're fine with the pressure, Like it's the temperature shift. So we could infer in a changing ocean where the climate is causing temperature increases, a lot of the species that are really sensitive to temperature are not going to do so well. And I think that's a similar thing that we see with you know, corals and other invertebrates, is that you have very species

What's their lifespan?

Usually it varies.

Usually the marine species I work with are they can live for a couple months to a couple of years.

Oh wow, Yeah. The idea of a millimeter long worm in a deep sea just being like I'm five, that's nuts.

You know, well, but deep sea species, a lot of them live for a really long time, and we don't know why that. You know, they slow down their metabolic rates because like there's just not a lot of food. So think of it kind of like hibernation. They're just really slow and that like extends their lifespan. Again, we don't know if this happens with worms because there's not a lot of data and we can't really easily do experiments. But the trend is that the deep sea is just a place where time.

Is very slow. And that's how I think about it.

What about how you're getting your samples? How deep are you going and you're on this ship. Are you sending an ROV down? Are you going down in a submersible? Are you sending a court like a big PVC pipe and seeing what you can dredch up the large straw spipe in it?

Ah accurate.

Actually, PBC pipes are pretty much the cutting edge technology in DPC science. I took a I thought that that was hyperbolic, but that's amazing. Okay, yeah, I mean slightly fancy PBC pipe. So we use what's called a multicore megacore. It's like a circle of pipes and they're just really long tubes and then they have some sort of mechanism at the bottom which will kind of feel it and bring up the mud. So yeah, you send down we call it a rosette because it's a ring.

Send that down.

It pushes into the sediment. The tubes get sealed off, and then you bring it up and you can preserve the sediment water interface. So it's actually like a really sensitive way of sampling the seafloor. And then we slice little pancakes of mud off the top of the cores and we put them in the freezer to bring back to the lab to work.

On the worms.

How much product do you get to take home, like your luggage back. Is it a pelican case full of mud or is it only like we really only can take a couple cores because it's going to take us ten years to figure out what's in one little slice.

So I have a problem with hoarding mud. This has been a problem I have faced for a decade now.

It's very important.

Technically we only need like most of the worm biomass lives in I would say the top five centimeters of mud. But you do have vertical distribution So you have some nematodes that burrow really deep, and the species composition will change as you go in the core.

So we tend to.

Collect everything because we don't know what we're gonna find, and we don't process it on the boat. We put it in the freezer and then we send it back to the lab on dry ice. And I just I am always just like all of the mud. Let's bring it all back. And I have a problem saying no, if someone hands me like a bag of mud, what about is there respiration is it? Are they anaerobic? Are they aerobic? Do they breathe through their skin or through their pit of sarlac?

So she pulled out another card and who boy, wow, this one, this one really got me. So imagine a thick long beard beard hairs sprouting from a garden hose made of skin that also has awkward bald patches if you can picture that, or maybe like a weasel with bore bristles that escaped in the middle of a grooming.

So this is what we call the Chewbacca nematode. But I would say so in this funny story behind this photo. So this nematode is basically like Chewbacca's leg and all those little hairs that you see are bacteria, so they're

I put this on a business card.

So yeah, you've got it looks like some of it is shaved, and then you've got like if you were to forget a patch of a very hairy leg. Yeah, as you shaved it. That's amazing. Normally covered, normally covered.

Yeah, So several nematode groups will have bacteria attached to them. This one is filamentous bacteria, so they're really stringy bacteria that completely cover the worm. And these are sulfur utilizing bacteria, so we don't quite know what they do, but the worms that are covered in bacteria tend to live deep in the sediments. In sediments, the reason why it smells is because there's a lot of.

Sulfur mud farts. We're talking of mud farts.

Sulfur is actually really toxic to invertebrates, So the species that can live down in that anoxic mud are they need special adaptations to be able to repel the toxicity. And the theory is that these bacteria on this Chewbacca nematode are using the sulfur or physically protecting the worm body from the effects of the sulfur because the bacteria that's what they use for their metabolism.

So the bacteria love the stinky mud, and the nematodes use the bacteria like a mink coat in January. How did you shave this worm?

So when you prep stuff for the election microscope, you need to like spray it with gold particles, and that I guess just like that the bacteria fell off when you did that.

Where you get in the gold particles, Can you reharvest the gold particles or is it just like but bye gold, you served your purpose.

I think it's goodbye gold. Yeah, I think it's gold.

I'm not the one that does a microscopy. This is my graduate student, Marianna that does all this. So she's amazing at what she does. And I know she was not happy with this because she shaved the worm.

Wait, so you're telling me that you work with a grad student who works in deep sea biology whose name is Marianna.

Yes.

Is that not the name of a trench Mirianna? So she's Brazilian Okay, just wondering. I was like, did she get into it for the trench? Like I heard about a trench and was like, I'm a shoe in for this. I have never asked her that A might ask her when I go. I mean, if there were a trench called the alley Ward Trench, I think I'd be like,

Oh, can I quickly talk about it? Deep sea mining?

Yes?

Yes, so deep sea mining. If you are not.

Aware of this issue, there are these polymetallic nodule failds in the Equatorial Pacific and it's basically like the rainforest of the deep sea. And if you are at all inspired, you know, by the biodiversity the deep sea, or you're concerned about climate change, like deep sea mining is the worst thing that we can possibly do right now because we don't even know if we're going to need those minerals.

And who is in charge of the green light on that? Who's saying yes or no?

The International Sea Authority, which is part of the UN. I believe there has been this clock that is triggered because certain nations want to pursue deep sea mining and there's this policy and I don't even quite fully understand the policy, but it's complicated. So there's a ticking clock right now to develop a policy that oversees deep sea mining,

Have you ever gotten to go down would you ever want to go down to those depths? Like what's the difference when it comes to research between like Rova's and submersibles. Do deep sea biologists want to get down there or not?

Yes, we do.

Going in Alvin is my next bucket list thing. Antarctica is my first, and so I kind of check that off, and deep sea submersibles are my next thing that I want to do. So yeah, I totally want to go down there. And I think the research submersibles the safety procedures are incredible. I mean, they would never send down a human if they thought there was anything wrong with

I mean, like it's always a risk, and I think I would worry about it in the back of my mind.

But typically scientific submersibles are one of the safest things that you can do.

I was like, one of the safest things you could do. Holly, really, I sat on my ass and did a thousand piece puzzle this past weekend and I felt pretty safe doing that. Then again, an hour ago, I was eating yogurt out of a pyre X measuring cup because all the bowls were in the dishwasher and I sliced my pinky finger, I bled on my shirt, So I don't know. I don't know what safety is. But I looked up some stats and this deep sea submersible has completed more than

It's really hard.

I would say, I think there's a lot of people that want to go down in Alvin, and it's difficult to get onto those cruises. So I mean I could get on in one of two ways. I could beg someone to get on their cruise and maybe get on Alvin. Or I could write a grant to include Alvin in my research. I have been trying to do that. I have not been successful so far. But even for scientists it's hard.

How many scientists get to go on it?

I would say, I mean a team of scientists on a boat is maybe twenty people, and you have multiple cruises per year that go sometimes it's the same people that go over again. But I think in the actual sub itself it's two scientists.

And a pilot.

Your odds are not zero.

They're not zero, but it's so pretty hard.

You'll get on there. Anyone listening to this who has an inn Can I ask you some questions from listeners?

Yeah?

Sure, okay, they know you're coming on. Get her on that, Alvin. Someone pull some strings or some ship ropes or air hoses or what have you, and we donate to a cause of theologists choosing this week. Ally said, I would love it if you could support Earthjustice dot org. They are a wonderful nonprofit legal organization that tackles environmental issues related to public health, preservation of wild space, clean energy, and climate change and you can find out more about

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Okay, let's dig deep. Let's crack open a cold can of worms with your questions, including this one that was also asked by Belle Britney Rouis has a question, would you still love me if I was a worm?

I'm going to get the.

Answers yes on that right, I mean.

Obvious.

Yes, I'm going to see if that's a song lyric, but it might be just a just a good question for anyone. Of course it's a meme. Of course your dad me did not know this, but according to the Research Library Know your Meme dot com, would you still love me if I was a worm? Originated from a tweet by shut your hell that depicted a scenario of a woman crying at three am asking her husband if they were both born as worms, if he would still

Would you still love me if I were a want them?

And many of you, a shocking number, including Sam Isibrillard, Emily Staufer, laser intro legator Kleb, and Slayer needed to know. Do nematologists cut their worms into pieces? Is this their lab research? Sam wants to know if you cut a worm in pieces, will each of those pieces become new worms? Or is that only certain worms?

That is only certain worms, that is flatworms, not nematodes, although we do have one nematode that can regrow its tail. And actually that worm is really cool because it's basically like a two filled with bacteria.

So it's lost its gut and.

It's just like packed its former gut with these symbiotic bacteria and it's lost its mouth and it just hangs out and it if it loses his tail, that like regrows it and seals the bacteria back in.

And we have nematodes in us, right.

I hope you don't really. I mean, if you ate dirt, you might, but we would not. I mean, if you had a.

Parasite, you would, but okay.

Or you like drink some drinking water with a worm, you might, but yeah, you should not have nematodes in.

You, okay, just checking. I wasn't sure if that's one of those things like of course you have a bazillion nematodes or it's like if you do, you better you better call nine one one or something, okay.

Or you've like eaten some uncooked pork, you know, nematodes are the reason why we cook pork to whatever degree temperature because trick and Ella is the pork parasite.

Really, yeah, that'd be bad.

So if you eat these undercooked pork worms, they start their journey in your guts and then they move to your muscles to make babies. You might experience such sensations as nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, fever, fatigue, and abdominal discomfort before it escalates to headaches, fevers, chills, cough, swelling of the face and eyes, aching joints, and muscle pains, as well

There is a jumping nematode yep okay z shiragane. How can marine worms get crazy adaptations to make make them look like wild little aliens while terrestrial worms are normal and boring? Well, that is not accurate because terrestrial worms basically like have harpoons in their mouths. So the terrestrial nematodes I said, they eat plant roots and fungi juice, so they have evolved like a harpoon in their mouth that they will stick out and puncture a plant root

Holy smokes. Sam wants to know what's the wiggliest worm species? Is there a way to quantify that? Who wiggles the most?

I mean, my answer is always going to be nematodes.

Yeah, okay, I take it.

They thrash around in an sh shape because that's the only way they can move because they're lacking some key muscles for wriggling.

Oh my god, when you are a worm, you just whip your worm back and forth. Craig Collins wants to know, would love to know about the research surrounding worm memory. I recall that if you teach a worm a maze and then grind them up and feed them to another worm, Oh, my dear, that worm will know how to solve the maze.

Is this true?

Ah?

This sounds like a very far outside my area of expertise.

Yes, that may have been apocryphal, that may not.

I mean, I know c elegance is used in Alzheimer's research because one of the reasons it's a useful model is because it has some of the same proteins and neural pathways that for human diseases. So like Parkinson's and I believe Alzheimer's. Yes, we have a lot of proteins in common with the lily nematode.

Can you feed a worm to a worm? All right? I looked into this, but because there are thousands upon thousands of sea elegant studies and I have to bathe and eat at some point my goose was cooked here, I'd never find the study. I did find one titled Principles for Coding Associative Memories in a Compact Neural network

Now.

If you'd like to know more about worms on drugs, you can check out the Plenariology episode, which is a stunning and charming one with Doctor one Pegan, who we love. So you have more in common with the rest of the world than you ever thought possible. So welcome, welcome to unity with worms. I mean, we share so much DNA even with yeast yep alex rtman wants to know what is the deepest underground a worm has been found. Also,

I believe the deep it and I'm going to talk about nematodes specifically. The deepest that we found is that one in the South African diamond mind, and I.

Believe it's like three kilometers. It's pretty deep.

How did they find a worm? Were they looking for worms?

I'm maybe because there's a lot of like a subsurface microbiology research, but mostly what they find down there is just bacteria and fungi. But then they found a nematode and then it was a science paper.

Did that person have to name the nematode?

I think they invoked vampires, but I can't remember the exact name.

Okay, I got you. So this worm was found in twenty eleven in a gold mine over two miles below the surface of the Earth, and the geoscientists who first saw it described them as half millimeter black, little swirly things that quote scared the life out of me when I first saw them moving. So you can read more about their discovery and the paper Nematoda from the terrestrial

What a world?

What a beautiful world? Have you gotten to name any nemotodes?

Not yet, but we are trying to do that with the Antarctic samples that's on the radar it's just really hard to name nematode species because you need some ridiculous amount of individuals from the same species.

What are we talking.

You need like five females and five males and then some juveniles, and usually sometimes we never find more than one nematode from a given species. So, like just getting the checklist of things you need to describe species is actually really hard for nemotodes because there's all these rules written in the eighteen hundreds that don't make sense anymore.

Do you have a mentor or someone that you really admire that you would want to name or would would you name it like a Chewbacca nematode or something like that.

That's a good question.

I haven't actually thought about that, And I don't know how I feel about naming nematodes after people, because there's been some pretty big press about like why we name species after people and why that may or may not be a good thing. Maybe I would name one after Buddha, because well, that would still a fend some people, but I feel like that's what I would be comfortable with.

But that's a problem that you're gonna have to catch a lot more worms. Yeah, to even have that problem. Curious Kat wants to know do worms have a nervous system or is it species reliant? They don't seem to have eyes, but are they like jellyfish and able to detect light? So what kinds of sensory organs are we looking at?

So I'll give you this card.

A translucent slim faced baby. It looks like one of those long nosed Russian wolfhounds, but with two little red dots snugly close together on its snoop oh spots.

So those are a celle also known as eye spots. And this is a nematode that lives in kelp hold fast like when they attach to rock. You have that like squiggly massive roots, and you have a nematode that only lives in those roots. And for some reason they have these eye spots. We don't really know why, but a lot of nematodes will have these dark patches of pigment that they're not really true eyes, but they're pigmented

Does the information that these eyespots gather does it get processed anywhere in the worm?

We don't know, and that's a good question. I do more like ecology and evolution research, so I don't necessarily study the nervous systems. But I mean, if we're using nematodes in like Alzheimer's research, then I'm assuming they have some sensory information that's useful.

Yeah. Ooh, can I keep this one?

Yeah?

This one is also aldoramble. So if, like patron Curious Cat, you're wondering where these flesh tubes store their brains, the answer is in a ring around their throats, kind of like an airplane neck pillow, full of thoughts and feelings

Okay, that's fun, all right. First of all, I said, nematodes have males and females, so sexual reproduction male nematodes one of the defining taxonomic characteristics is something called a spicule, okay, which I describe as like picture a steak that you use to kill a vampire. So like this giant like er wooden thing that's pointy at both ends. Male nematodes have two of those, and they will eject those and then slam them into the female nematode to like pry

Oh, a bit rude. Does he like vampires? Does it have to be invited or is it just like they can? And how do they sense a female? Well, how do they know that there's a female reproductive track even around?

That is a very good question. I do not have an answer to that. But they don't necessarily Another fun fact, they don't necessarily have to put it exactly in the right place. There is this reproductive strategy in nematodes called traumatic insemination.

Heard about this bed bugs do it too, right, yep, yep.

So they may just use those steaks to like stab the female anywhere, you know, and just like throw some sperm wherever, and then I believe the female will take the sperm and then just like migrate it to the correct place.

I don't like it. Oh, Christopher Blabout wants to know with your work in Antarctica and then a little flag there are there worms that can survive the dry climate and extreme salinity of areas like the dry valleys we were talking about.

Yep, yep.

We have a lot of nematodes there, not a lot, so there are many fewer species. The biodiversity is really low in the dry valleys. But it's an interesting environment because you have very strong connection to like the microbial communities and yeah, definitely high salinity, I mean also pollution. So once some of the worms I study are like in the Port of la where there's all.

Like gunk and DDT that's buried.

And one of the things that my work is doing is trying to figure out if we have specific nematode species that love pollution and they can thrive in environments like that. So we're trying to use them as bioindicators as habitat a pristineness or impactedness, and we use the NA sequencing nowadays for that. But the goal is to be like this nematode loves pollution. Well, we were bad yesterday.

I'm standing on a dock with someone who's like, oh yeah, I got someone number one, Where are those barrels, and how do you get access to the gunk that might be linking out of them.

I believe they are somewhere off the coast of San Diego, And I mean it's kind of as easy as emailing researchers that are going out there. So I actually may have an email when you might inbox about the DDT barrels.

But they're not like right off the coast here.

Well, they're off the coast of like San Diego somewhere. They're not that far off the coast. I mean, you come, come in a sailboat and go there. But they're deep, right, so you need the deep sea core equipment. You need an ROV or something to like go down there and gingerly push the PBC tube into the gunky spot world the da leaked out woof.

And so if you can find if there's a higher population of certain worms, then you can kind of figure out if we get a lot of these worms over here, at chances are we got a lot of this gunk.

Yeah, And one of the things we're also trying to do is look at the genome of those worms. So the idea is that like, if you can persist in such a toxic sludge pool. Then you have certain things in your genome, like maybe upregulation of certain proteins or certain metabolic pathways that basically help you to survive in that environment, and that will help inform research like in other extreme places like volcano soils or like Yellowstone hot springs.

Things like that.

Oh my god, those are going to be the apocalypse worms. Yes, trend forecast. If things keep going poorly, these are going.

To be really hot. Yep.

What about the hardest thing about what you do? What sucks? What is something that's just hard about worms?

Or life? Your life?

So my answer to this is bureaucracy, because Okay, I run a lab, so I'm kind of like seeing myself as a CEO of startup company and I'll have to do like a lot of this paperwork and it really sucks the life out of me if the paperwork is not efficient, right, Like I just want to get reimbursed for this research trip to the beach, but I have to like upload receipts for like fifty cents because I

They're so expensive focus wise, and then by the time you get to the work you want to do, you're like, I spent all my focus filling out receipts.

Yep, yep.

What about What do you love the most? What do you love about nematodes nematology.

I love the sense of looking at something that no other human on Earth has ever seen before, And that's really like what motivates me. And I can pick up nematodes from outside in my garden and still like maybe there's a new species that no one has ever laid eyes on before. So I travel to these remote places and it's really hard and expensive, and I don't go

What does the mud smell like?

Smells like parts, Yeah, it smells like Yeah, that's good to know.

Let's say that you're a backyard or burgeoning pneumatologist. What kind of microscope do you need to see them?

You don't even need anything fancy. You can get away with a cheap stereoscope, even just magnification like ten x. If you go to your garden and you put that in the petri dish, then you'll be able to see like worms wriggling. I mean, you can't see them to the stage of what we get on our fancy microscopes that cost fifty thousand dollars, but you can see them wriggling and you be able to experience it's the joy

You can share the world of worms. Doctor Pick just got tenure, which is a huge deal and has explored Antarctica and has a robust mud collection and well moisturized skin. What else is on her agenda?

I'm doing things like experimenting with tiktoks to tell stories or just like even more thoughtful tweets and not some science writing, So just having kind of like an artistic side of my scientific career that's focused on communication and just like spreading that joy and getting everyone excited about worms. I'm feeling really excited about doing that.

The sea just swimming with so many souls of tiny and giant creatures. Maybe there's water ghosts. Who knows. A beautiful thing to think of? What a party it is?

Yeah, and actually I want to be buried in the deep sea.

Do you really?

How do you do that?

Well?

I don't have a.

Concrete plan yet, but I definitely want my remains to be like fit back into the ecosystem. So maybe maybe like scattering of the ashes, Like I don't know if they could just like throw my body over the side of the boat, Like I'm sure there's rules on that, but definitely like scattering the ashes, and then my ashes will be marine snow and it will feed the worms and.

The circle of life. Would you want it to be an Anarctic in particular.

No, I'm not picky any deep sea, any deep sea, and the coast of California gets pretty deep pretty quickly, and I love California so warm food.

I think that's beautiful Thank you so much for talking to me.

You're welcome. This was fantastic to meet you and join you on your first ever snorkling trip.

Do you think I have Nemo toads in my hair from yesterday I rinsed my hair?

Oh?

Probably, well, I hope again, I hope not, but maybe yay, But your hair looked amazing anyway.

Oh, thank you so ask warm experts wiggly questions about cold mud, because there is no question that is too on smart. Look at how much weird info our brains now have. Thank you doctor Hollybick for being on and you can find links to her TikTok website and so much more, plus a link to Earthjustice dot org in the show notes. More links are up at aliwar dot com slash ologies slash neumatology. We also have smologies, which are kid friendly shorter versions of episodes that are classroom safe.

I Love you?

Byevie Spooktober. Let's get it on you creeps. Pacodermatology, homeiology, ydo zoology, lithology, new technology, meteorology, paratology, nthology, seriology, selenology.

A worm at the bottom of the motion