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Oh hey, it's that second hole that you have to carve into a can of pineapple juice in order to get the first one to glob out. Alli Warard back with an episode of Ologies. You Better not sleep on. You're about to get walloped with excitement and passion and gossip about drugs and dogs and aliens and how it all relates to these tiny goofy dick shaped flatworms. You know you're gonna do tomorrow. Tomorrow You're gonna paint an airbrush mural on the hood of your car. That just says,
I goddamn love plenarians. Look before we get you there. Let's thank the folks at patreon dot com slash Ologies. They send in as little as twenty five cents an episode, and they get to ask questions. Thanks also to everyone who is sending this episode to friends and family despite the fact that it is about worms and it is not safe for work. Thanks to everyone who rates and
subscribes and of course reviews. You know, I pick a new one each week to read, and this week, Obsessed with Science O six says, oh hey, I hate all podcasts, but this one it's amazing. Thank you, Ali, I hope you read this. Obsessed with science so six I did read it. Also, Happy birthday. Okay, let's get into it. Plenariology, it's indeed a thing. It's the study of plenarians, which are a class of free live in free wheel and flatworms. And the word plenaria comes from the Latin for on
level ground. Because these things look like if you miniaturized a human penis and cranked it through the rollers of Aposta machine, flat phallic, little triangle shaped head that contains tiny brains to boot. So this ologist has studied them for years and we met via Twitter and he is a gem. So he's an associate professor of biology at Westchester University in Pennsylvania, an author of the popular science
book The First Brain, The Neuroscience of Plenarians. He also wrote Strange Survivors, How Organisms attack and defend in the Game of Life. And he's working on a new book about drunk dolphins No joke do out next year. So he got his bachelor's degree in general sciences and his master's in biokam before heading to Cornell for his PhD.
And we talk about what makes a brain. The personalities of clones, the sexiest underwater Olympic sport, limb regeneration, and how these simple little creatures are helping solve medical mysteries. With your new favorite plnariologist, doctor one Pegan.
I'm actually going fanboy with this effort about your podcast for a long time, and it's really cool.
When you tweeted it me, I was like a whole episode on plnaria This is that's amazing. I want to do that now. How long have you been studying plinariology if you will?
Okay, So I have a confession to make right off the start. I am an accidental planariologist, as it were. I've never taken a zoology course. My training is mainly biochemistry and pharmacology. I knew a biology, and I came to planarians. I don't know. I'd like to call it faith if you will. First of all, I was a non traditional student. I went back to school at thirty five for my PhD. Okay, So I did my bachelor's work for several years. I got married, started having kids
with my wife helped, of course, You're welcome. Then I did my master's working full time, and you know, I was very fortunate to have very good supervisors. But I always wanted to do the PhD. But I needed to work, Okay, I had a family. So when I was thirty five, a person who ended up being my PhD advisor came to Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican by the way, I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, and I did
all my education up until the masters there. So a collaborator from my advisors in Puerto Rico came to visit and everything, and he just happened to recruit a students for Cornell University. So he actively tried to recruit me. I applied, they accepted me, I got a fellowship, and well, I packed my family and I went, oh, my gosh.
Wow. So, before becoming a professor at Westchester University, onnegat his PhD in pharmacology from Cornell University, studying in a biochemistry lab with the brilliant doctor George Harris, a chemist.
At the time, I was studying the dopamine transporter and its relationship to cocaine, the abuse drug.
Wow.
I saw a paper from researcher at Temple University about how planarians got showed addiction to cocaine.
What Yeah, coca planarians.
Yes, cocae planarians, and later on we learned that we can do that with nicotine, metamphetamines and whatever. So it's really fun. Well for them, I'll have what she is having. I knew about planarians, but very peripherally. I know that you cut their heads off, they will grow it back and whatnot. So I got very excited, and I went to my advisor and I will George, guess what we can do these experiments in planary But but of course he was a physical chemist, you know, something slimy, an animal.
What he essentially said, no, he says something like in the in the lines of well, when you have your own lab, you can do and that's precisely what I did essentially.
Oh my gosh. And how long have you been studying them now.
Well, it's been almost fifteen years now. I started at Westchester University in Pennsylvania in two thousand and five. They foster research. And that's the best of both words, because I love teaching because you know, if we think about it in the same way, I get paid to read about what I like, to talk about what I like under students have to listen to me. Okay, So it's awesome.
His students, according to Internet chatter, love this dude. Now, Okay, he was working on his PhD and needed a model for research that was relatively cheap, and he was running some controls and found that a compound he used in the controls actually changed the plenarian behavior. And he calls this wormy event a serendipitous observation.
So, as any half decent scientist does, I run my controls with just the MSO and something weird happening to the behaviors of the planarian. So weird. And the first paper of the lab was about the effect of the MZO in planarians.
And you know, going back a step or two, what is a planarian? I know it is a flatworm, but can you describe it for someone who's maybe never seen one, Like how big are they? Where do they live? Oh?
Well, it depends on the type of planarians. So planetariums literally mean flatworm, but they describe a wide variety of species. There are marine versions, they're called polyplats, and they are some of the most beautiful worms in the sea. Oh so, the ones that I work with are freshwater planarians, and many of those species they possess a very interesting property. They are the ones that you can cut their heads off.
They will regrow any part of their bodies, including their brain, in the right way.
How are they even doing that?
Oh?
Well, if you figured it out, you'll get a nobel price, and you mention me in your in your in your speed.
Fair enough.
Well, I think you've noticed that I'm very enthusiastic about what I do.
I love it. Let's say that you wanted to look at it, look for a planaria. Where is a good place to look? Are they in puddles? Are they under rocks? Do you need a microscope?
No?
No, because many it depends on the species. That the typical ones they're about maybe an inch loan a couple of centimeters long. Every planarian it's actually a carnivore. They're predators, so they even eat each other happily. They're cannibals. Even so,
what a very good way to hunt for them? As it were, You get like a little container, You poke holes in the lid, put a piece of meat inside of it, and live it in the water, and within a short period of time there's going to be a bunch of stuff, including planarias.
Wow.
But the ones that I work with. They're available commercially, I can buy them and that's for lab use, right, yes, yeah, and they are usedful in many schools for demonstration experiments and activities like that. I just throw drugs at them and see what happened.
And now, what kind of brains do they have? You mentioned they can even regrow their brains, and obviously if they're reacting to chemicals and drugs, they have a nervous system. Like what's their anatomy like?
They have relatively sophisticated brains for a very small invertebrate, and they are capable of learning. They have many of the same neurotransmitters that we have.
Wow.
And probably one of the most interesting anatomical characteristics of planarians is that they have what it's called a bilob or brain just pretty much like us. Well, not exactly that couse, but you know what I mean. With two lobes, okay, join together, and they instead of having a single spinal cord, they have two, one per each lobe, and those spinal cords are connected by nerve fibers. They're really cool. They're really really cool. Wow.
And now if you, let's say, were to injure a planaria. If a planaria were to get bisected, does it matter where they're cut and they can regenerate.
Well, you can cut it in any way you want. But that's a very good question because there's a part of the planarium that does not regenerate and that you're gonna love this one.
Okay.
Planarians eat via the same orifice where they defecate. No, yes they do, Yes they do. And they extend a tube called the proboscis, and that's how they eat, like an alien in a movie. Okay, they stick it in the prey and they suck it dry. Oh my god, and I've seen that in my laboratory. They rub themselves around a water fleece dafnia like a snake and they do that. Oh wow. You can cut almost every part of the anatomy of the planarian except the proboskis. That part does not regenerate.
Okay, quick aside. When I hear proboscis, I think like mouth area. I think a nose hose. But I look this up and in a planaria it's on the belly near the back end, kind of like if you had a pool noodle coming out of your navel. But you could shit out of it, and then five minutes later you could use it to slurp up the body of
your uncle like he was a frappuccino. Now, a lot of freshwater planarians are like a modeled peachy brown, but fluttering marine ones can be gorgeously brightly colored to kind of advertise that they'll poison the hell out of their enemies. Now, paris breathe through their skin, and they don't have a circulatory system, so their gut kind of acts like a New York subway map to deliver their nutrients. And of
course they have the nubbins of an early brain. All of these parts are under one of the best warranties in the business.
One continues, you can take a piece of the tail, a piece of the head laterally whatever, and they regenerate. They need kind of a minimum of about ten thousand cells to regenerate. That's about maybe I think it's point zero eight cubic millimeters or something like that.
And do they ever do work on the DNA to find out if it's the same DNA on both half or does it change at all?
Well, absolutely, there's a couple of planarium species which have been sequenced. They have their own genome projects, the ones that I use commercially. They are beginning to be sequenced a little bit. But one curious characteristic of any flatworm is that they don't have the exact genetic code as everything else.
Apparently there's something called the alternative flatworm mitochondrial code that encodes for different amino acids than most other creatures. Is this a Glitchens simulation? Are they aliens?
Nobody knows why, but it's a rather interesting mystery.
Yes, And now how are they responding to different chemicals and drugs that you're administering them?
All right? So the beauty of those is that they also display sophisticated behaviors. Okay, they are very sensitive to the environment. Of course, if you're small, if you are a centimeter long, okay, so little, you're small, you're not venomous, you cannot fly, you're not fast. What do you do? You hide? Okay? So for that reason, they tend to shy away from the light. Okay, so they go to the proverb your dark side as it works. So they like to hide. You can actually use that to your
advantage in behavioral experiments. Also, you can actually measure their gliding velocity because they glide at the bottom of a pit, tridish or any type of container like that, and they can glide with certain speeds many compounds, they actually decrease their velocity.
Okay, I looked into this, and plenaria can glide by beating little sillier projections in a layer of ukis and kind of like a cop on New Year's Eve. Observing locomotion can say a lot about how loaded they are.
Another type of response is a sea Shure like response, meaning that, for example, if you give them a certain compound in relatively toxic amounts, they go into what, for all intents and purposes are Sei Shure like movements, and you can quite defy those. Oh wow, yeah, we use all of those techniques in my laboratory.
And is there one substance in particular that surprised you how they reacted?
Well, one would would not expect to observe social anthropomorphizing property as addiction, but planarians can get addicted to substances, right, So if you give them nicotin or cocaine for instance, or I don't know, even sugar, right, and you allow them to that substance to soak in in the water, for a while. Then you take the substance away, they
go into something very much like withdrawal. They get the shakes, they start swimming around like crazy, they bomp their heads back and forth, and you can quantify that you can actually train those planarians to respond to classically substance that are used by people. And this again they displace surprisingly similar behaviors again as if they were. It is a beautiful model for that.
And how many different experiments do you have going on at once, Like what is a typical day in the lifelike of a plenariologist.
Well, you've got to have your students help you out. And that's something that I wanted to say right off the better shout out to all my students. I've had many over the years. Right now, I had to close the lab because of the worldwide reality that we are living in and I miss them terribly, So hello to
all the Pagan lab whenever you listen to this. We try, of course to run the appropriate controls and to plan ahead very well the experiments that we do, and once we obtain the data, the fund begins because we can actually analyze it, we can generate graphs, we can do all the type of things. And then if we get a baseline of the effects that nicotine does two planarium, for example, we can actually screen substances that may counteract
those effects. And that's what we have done with substances like cocaine and nicotine and some others.
I'm curious too if that makes you consider any of your own behaviors in your own life, Like, do you ever see how like plenarians react to sugar decide you need to cut back on tona?
Oh well, I'm addicted to a certain type of beverage that it's served in a coffee shop that rhymes with bogs. Okay, okay, so I can relate to that. Okay. But planarians, again, they cannot use a straw, but they can they reacting in ways that will allow us to figure out, well, disciplinaria is certainly uncomfortable in the absence of certain chemical stimulus. Once we quantify that, we can see the difference that it makes. By adding I don't know a proverbial.
Antidote, one says that the aim of the lab isn't to study addiction per se, but to figure out a way to counteract the toxicity of things like nicotine or cocaine. So working with these worms, a simpler model than a lot of labs, is saving lives. Now for more on addiction, listen to the Molecular Neurobiology episode with doctor Crystal Tilworth or Addictionology with Aaron Precy.
Because addiction is a very complex phenomenon and well, we can get addicted to anything, not only chemicals or food. We can get addicted to I don't know, gambling, okay, things like that, So it's much more complex. But we can study toxicity and the toxicity of such substances using planarians, and we can actually use terms like addiction and withdrawal with an asterisk as it were, because again it's benyanthropomorphic. We don't know what a planarian thinks you'll see or
how it feels. And by the way, did you know? And this is something that I learned literally about a week ago. Science Twitter is amazing because I got a very interesting paper from a colleague in Australia who I met from Twitter. Her name is Shawnee Hmond from Troue University in Australia and she studies sleep in planarians.
So doctor Shawnie Amand's team discovered that plenarians do sleep now the studies conclusions read quote. Despite simplicity, in active flatworms appeared to be sleeping. Specifically, quiescence was organized in a circadian manner, occurring largely during the daytime. So do not invite a planarian to lunch. They will oversleep. They will text on my way before they haveing been love the house, and you're party will not be seated until they arrive. You remember brunch. I don't.
So I want to thank her for sending me a paper that I'm geeking all the way about it because I didn't know that planarian slip. And recently I heard your episode about chronobiology and circadion are reading and everything, so you know that about the super chismatic nuclei and all these type of things. I'm pretty sure planarians have something like that. Okay, so but we don't know. So anyway, I want to thank Seanny for the paper. I'm reading
it and enjoying it. That's the beauty of it. I'm telling you, I'm fifty five and I feel like a kid learning all these type of things.
Science hero. You didn't know you needed. Now from a pharmacological perspective, he's able to use simpler animal models these platforms rather than higher vertebrates. But for what kind of stuff? And what about using planarians in terms of addictionary substance, like with the opiate issues that are kind of plaguing a lot of the world. Does that are they Is that applicable to them as well?
Yes? Absolutely, because they have similar receptors to Opis that like the ones that we have and other groups, particularly the groups at Temple University doctor Bob Rafa, doctor Scott Roles, they're working on that. And there's the things that planarians were traditionally used in regeneration and developmental biology, but it was only relatively recently that they have been kind of popular as an animal model in pharmacology. And that's something that I'm very happy to say that we are one
of the few groups that do that. But it's getting even more popular and it makes sense. It's applicable to many areas, and to have such a simple yet powerful model, it's really cool. There's no other two other way to say it.
Let's just be be back this up a little to his history and now you were interested not in necessarily plenarians growing up, but were you interested in how the brain works? What kind of triggered that in you?
Well, there was never any doubt whatsoever that I was going to end up in science. I can give you an example. When I was about maybe four or five years old, I don't remember, but my mom told me that I asked her whether God invented microscopes. That was my question at five years old, Just to give you that idea. So and again, I went to college, and actually my bachelors is in general science, in part because I couldn't commit. I liked everything. I took biochemistry, I
took astronomy, I took genetics. I never took zoology, as I told you. But you know what can I tell you? So science is magnificent.
I know what about your book, your book, The First Brain, The Neuroscience of Plenarians are How why is it called the first Brain?
Okay? So that's another funny story because when I decided to think about writing a book, it was going to be about planarians and everything. And I like the brain and everything. But I thought about a horrendous title at first. Oh no, you want to hear what it was, Yes, the neuronal worm.
The neuronal worm. Catchy sexy titles like that, just fly off the shelves. But nevertheless, he took the suggestion of an esteemed colleague, doctor Bob Rafa, and went with title the first brain now follow genetically. One says the plenarium evolved to do its thing before the line that led
to vertebrates shot off. But they have cerebral ganglia, a bilobed glob of nerve tissue, and two lateral nerves that are connected along the body by transverse nerves, kind of like having a full body tattoo of a ladder, but inside and made of nerves, making them a good simple model for the human brain. One discusses pain response later, which may ease your mind in terms of their use in medical labs. On the topics of gathering the nerve to use your brain, how about a little pep talk.
My philosophy in life is that if I don't ask for something, there's zero percent chance of getting it. So I don't have an agent. I never had an agent. I still don't, but I did my research. I wrote a proposal. I sent it to a few publishers with listen, I don't have an agent, but this is my preparation. Here's my CV. Would you consider this book, and some publishers will say thank you, no, thank you, but a rather obscure publisher called Oxford University Press said yes, and the rest is history.
What was it like the day that you found out that your book was getting picked up?
Oh my god, it was like I read the email and I said something that I shouldn't say in a podcast. But it starts with only something.
Working shirt.
That was my first words. That's what I said, and I said it out loud, and thank thank god. I was alone. As soon as I got that, I mean, I called my wife, because you have to understand, Ali, I've always been a bookworm. That comes with the territory of the things that I do. I love books, and I realized that for the first time, was going to
be on the proverbial other side of the fence. People would read me aside from scientific papers because of course I wrote a master's thesis, I wrote a PhD dissertation, But nobody, you know, unless it's really interested, read those. But a book will be read by many. And I felt incredibly After I calmed down, I felt humbled, I felt incredibly happy. I'm proud. I mean again, I was geeking out, as it were.
That's so exciting. Thank you. Can I ask you patroon questions?
Absolutely? You ask away? Do you remember Captain America and in the movies?
Yes?
Okay, so you remember this quote. I can do this all day.
But before we get to your questions. As you may know, each week we talked some cash at an organization shows and buy the ologist. In this week, doctor one Pagan asked it to go to No Kid Hungry Dot Org. Twenty two million children rely on the meals they receive at school, and for some it's the only food they'll receive in a given day. So No Kid Hungry Dot Org works with federal and local governments to support kiddo's
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Okay, back to your questions. Michelle Krabs, Bennett Gerber, and Jesse Markowitz all had the same nagging curiosity. A lot of people had this very great question, why are they so popular for school dissections and where are the schools getting them?
Oh? Well, the schools can get them from suppliers, commercial suppliers. And I know that there's some school that actually go, for example, and they go to ponds and they actually catch their own. They are so easy to use because you don't need any special equipment to store them. You don't need an incubator, don't You can actually put them in a container on a cupboard. Wow. Okay, and as long as you don't put them in direct sunlight.
They'll live.
You can fit them liver and they will thrive. And again you don't need any specialized equipment, and you may need a studioscope microscope to actually look at them. Nothing specialized. And they're so cute because particularly the water, the freshwater planarians, the ones that have only two eyes, because there's some that have pontiple eyes. By the way, the ones that have only two eyes, they're always cross eyed. Nobody knows why,
so they're really cute. Nobody really knows the physiological relevance of that.
Patron Joe Porfito asked, but why are they so cute? I mean planarians, they do look like your most stone friend pissed off a wizard and got turned into a very very small penis. They look like a little trouby arrow with eyes, or like if a snake got a branding makeover from Hello Kitty, It's bananas. They also look like a banana. Now, Patron Haley Howlings said, no question. I just think that they are very, very cute, and
I agree. Now from cute to cut, A lot of you had a similar question about their science fiction level ability to move on from physical trauma like a terminator only a worminator Eric Gerard, Aaron Unsen, Rachel ross, Owen, Quells, John Sansone let's get into it, along with Patron Nadine Duke on that note says, what if you cut them in half lengthwise? If they are only halfway cut, do they then develop two heads?
They will develop two heads? And actually I've seen experiments for example, planarians for decades are have been very popular in Japan of all places. Really yeah, and I've seen many books and actually I can send you pictures of the books that I have where they keep cutting them and you can actually make them grow like seven, eight, ten heads. Okay, so it's kind of a little bit of a hobby. Oh yeah, they're fantastic.
How is this even happening? Stem cells, specifically ones that are pluripotent, meaning that they can make any type of cell needed in humans. Only our embryonic and germ cells in the old bonats can do that. And if researchers can learn more about these type of stem cells in plenarians,
it might mean better therapies and other animals. Patron Michelle Jacobs asked this very grammatically on point question into how many segments can you cut one at a time, Michelle, I look this up, and a plenarian can regrow its whole damn body out of only one two hundred and seventy ninth of itself. That is like getting your hand lopped off, and it grows a whole new yew from it in a matter of about three weeks. I have
laundry older than that. But one told me a few fellow plenariologists in Japan and Spain discovered a specific gene in these pluripotent cells, and it's called now draki.
Which in Japanese means brings everywhere. Wow, that when you express that genes in a weird place in the planarium, they generate brain tissue. Yeah, there's so much that we don't know, which makes it so incredibly freakingly interesting.
Do you think that when they are cut? Do you think that they experience pain? Do they recoil like it? Or are have they evolved so much to be able to do that that it's not instrimental to them?
Well, that's an excellent question, because they certainly have the receptors that we usually relate to pain. Okay, but it's very difficult to ascertain that. I know that, for example, any type of stimulus in the water, they get like scrunched like they recoil away from the stimulus, which serves them well because if somebody tries to touch them, it would likely try to eat them, and it serves them well to recoil from that.
They are tiny, flat, delicious, flaccid, slimy things, and the best defense they might have is just looking adorable.
As far as pain is concerned, I don't know that's the best I can do. But I can tell you something. I can cut the planarian head, okay, and the head by itself will keep you gliding very happily on the surface of the petri dish with no I don't know, no indication that they're suffering on anything like that. I have videos of that.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
The rest of the body kind of doesn't know what to do.
When one says gliding by the bye, he means it. They move through water like figure skaters on a victory lap, only there are very small ribbons of flesh. Now. Travis Damello asked, is their ability to regenerate biologically similar to plant's ability to grow from cuttings.
That's a very good question. That's a very good question, which generally means that I don't know the answer to. However, there's many scientists who are trying to come up with common ground or biochemical pathways between plants and animals. In there's a whole very controversial field about a plant neurobiology. Okay, so, and that's yet another story that would be the topic
of like ten podcasts for later on. But the point is that, yes, plants do regenerate, and whether they follow the same specific biochemical pathways is an interesting question, but we don't know that yet. You have the best listeners, by the way, don't I Are they the best? They are the best? Say hello to everyone? Well, I can say hello myself, Hello everyone, You are the best listeners ever.
Mike Manikowski, who always always asks great questions, says, where do they come from originally? And how big can they get?
Well, it depends on the species. The record of a freshwater plannarium, I think is about about sixty inches long. But they're not very they're not Yeah, they're not very common. But I may be a little mistaken, but they can get really big. The fresh water ones.
Somewhere on Earth right now, there is a five foot long ballast shaped flatworm. Now, there are also giant twelve inch land dwelling ones called Bipallium that look like a worm whose head is shaped like a medieval battle axe. Somewhere right now, there's one just eating with its anus, living its best life, not even knowing we're talking about its slimy majesty. I don't care.
They are distributed worldwide, okay, so they are in every single habitat that they can get except Antarctica. Okay, you will find planarians, you will find plnarians. There's actually a planarian that was named It was named after Puerto Rico, my birthplace.
Oh okay, side note, I looked this up and there are several genera of flatworms named after Puerto Rican resident zoologist and legendary planariologist doctor Roman kenk and his daughter is doctor Vita Keank, herself a biologist. So some of these kank you worms can be found in caves and deep lakes. They hang out wherever. Unlike your cousin's second wife, they don't need somewhere fancy.
I mean they're found everywhere that were You know. I love science fiction too, and if you remember your Jurassic part, life finds a way and planarians. Planarians are a premier example of that. Oh, there it is.
Rob Shepherd. Patron wrote in and said, I first learned about flatworms in a science museum when I was a kid, and I've always wanted to see them in the wild with appropriate magnification, of course, but I don't know where to look to be most likely to find them. Where would I look? I wanted to ask about experiments, and you know a lot of people are home, maybe with kids.
Is there kind of a fun science observation or plenarium hunting that you maybe could do if you want to do a science liston at home.
Absolutely, because they're so easy to maintain and everything. You can, for example, do the preference between dark and light. You can get like a circular Petri dish, you cover half of them with electrical tape, and you can actually count over a period of I don't know, five ten minutes, how many seconds do they spend in the light and in the dark. That's some of the experiments that we do in the lab to ascertain, for example, to try
to come up with anxiety like behaviors. Okay, and it's very strange to talk about anxiety in a planarian but let's think about something. Remember that they like to be in the dark. They hide, Okay, so any type of compound that shifts that preference that they don't care too much if they are in the light or in the dark, while keeping the same degree of motility is an indication of lesser anxiety, as it were. And guess what anti
the presence, anti the presence cause that effecting planarians? Okay, they shift that response. Those are not my experiments, but some other groups have done.
Oh my gosh, that's so fascinating.
Wow.
Ps I look this up and in a twenty eighteen study titled PLDT Plenarian Light Dark Test, researchers found that these creators hid in the dark when they smelled quote frog odor, but then they chill out in the light when administered one percent ethanol aka that's a booze bath or what's known on the streets as bath salts or fluoxetine aka prozac, a drug I have also taken to
spend less time in the darkness. I'm gonna guess plenarians had lower deductibles, though Meghan McLean asked, has anyone ever knowingly eaten them? And if so, what do they taste of Dulton's rugby started asking the real questions here, you know.
What, you're going to believe this, But that's the strangest question that I've ever gotten about planarians. But but your listener was not the first one because I when my yeah, when my kids were at school. My youngest is eighteen right now, okay, but when when my youngest was a school I used to go to schools all the time, to their school all the time to show them the worms and whatnot. And one year he asked me precisely that question. When I was do you have any questions
about that? Yeah? What do they taste like? And I was like, okay, I can honestly say that I've never eaten one. I don't think they will hurt you. But then again, they live in pond water, which is not as sterile as steril environment as it were, so I wouldn't need them.
But to each his own, and Rachel Weisce wants to know do worms have individual personalities or do they kind of like bacteria no offense bacteria.
I don't know about personality per se, but behavior sometimes that's why we do replicats in experiments. Have you heard about the Harvard's Law of Animal Behavior. No, okay, so it's not it's not mine. I read it somewhere and I don't I can't find the original reference. But it's something like this, and I'm probably paraphrase in't it. Regardless of how carefully your behavioral experiments are designed, your animals will do whatever the heck they want.
Okay, under controlled experimental conditions of temperature, time, lighting, feeding, and training, the organism will behave as a damn well, pleases writer and scholar Joel Garrel two thousand and nine.
Planarians are a very good example of that, because it's just like it's like humans. For example, in a beginning of population, Let's suppose that three people get a migraine. All right, One of them may need a certain medication, another one may need just I don't know, I beeprofen, and the third one just may need coffee. Okay, Because despite having the same basic genome, there's enough differences, enough genetic variabilities that may account for again, pharmacogenetics.
That's a whole feeling of science, this variation in preferences. It's even true for cloned dorms, which is making me have kind of a gentle existential crisis about souls and if they exist? And where do I go when I die? And if there was another me, would it be wearing matching socks?
When we have there's clonal populations of planarians that the people over decades. For example, a professor Alejandro Sanchez Alvarado, it's one of the main people who work in planarians. They have a clonal population of planarians that they have been maintaining for decades. And even in a clonal population, which means that they have the same genes, their behaviors can differ in the same way that two identical twins can differ in their taste. One of them may like
coffee and the other one may like tea. Because most people sometimes forget that the environment is as important as the genes. Oh wow, okay, so yes, I mean, I guess that in terms of personalities, they may display different personalities. But how do you ascertain the personality of a planarian? I don't know. I know I'm very charming, but I don't know. How can I ascertain whether a planarian is charming?
You know?
I guess you have to look and see how many planarians are around them, just listening to their stories exactly exactly. Now, keepers of aquaria may be familiar with plenarians as tank pests, just loitering around trying to eat your shrimpies. But Laura Stacey asked, how harmful can these worms be? Are plenarians dangerous to humans?
Not the fresh water type because they don't have any specific defense mechanism like you know, venoms or some like that. But the marine planarians, some of them have nasty toxins in them, so those can potentially harmon human if the human eats the planarios.
So marine planarians are called polyclads, and they look like if you rummaged around a good Will bin and pulled out a tuxedo shirt from nineteen sixty eight, but it was made of black and pink velvet, could breathe underwater ate flesh, and had two dicks. And now, as long as we're talking goss about planarians, Ian McGregor wants to know, can you discuss penis fencing? Is penis fencing in like saltwater planarios? That thing?
It's just as far as I know marine planarians. Yeah, and that particular activity, it's like exactly what it sounds like. Okay, And they the thing is that flatworms in general are hermaphrodite. They have both set, both sexes in them and in the marine planarians. The penis fencing activity. What happens is that they do what you imagine they do.
Kathy Warren, George Ferrar, and Annette Kaye also asked about this, and I looked up a nat Geo video showing these seaworms penis fencing. Right before it rolled. I want you to know the YouTube ad for backyard fencing played, so Google still not able to distinguish that I want penis fencing, not penis fencing. Anyway. On their undersides, both worms jut out two little nubbins. They've got these two dicks, but
no one said they were a giant. And I'll be frank with you, they look kind of like a tiny set of tatas. They can wrestle for an hour, kind of like oceanic dick jiu jitsu, until one is in effect tapped out. Now, getting knocked up is calorically expensive, so.
Let's suppose that one is able to stab the other one. The one who is stabbed is the looser and gets pregnant.
Oh my god.
As far as I know, freshwater planarians don't engage. Now, no, freshwater planarians are pretty decent organisms and do not engage in such activities.
Juliver wants to know how old do the oldest planarians get.
Well, that's a very good question too, which nobody knows the answers to. For a couple of reasons, planarians are very easy to kill. I mean you can actually squish them, you can add chemicals to them, and actually they will die very dramatically. They just won't die. They die and disintegrate like in a movie or something like that.
Wow, just poof gone, just like ghosting your own funeral. Now. Also, this one blew my mind. Planarians do not need botox.
Many species of planarians. They don't seem to display the phenomenon of senescence. They don't get old in other world all day biochemical markers of sentences they are not present in certain species of planarians. So potentially a planarium would be kind of as long as you keep them and maintain them, could be potentially immortal. Nobody knows exactly how old they live. Not all planarians are able to do that, but many space species do.
Wow, okay, okay, hold the phone. Plannarians slurp up other planarians and either disappear into a poof or there may be immortal So sexy vampires kindly step aside. This Halloween, we're wearing full body spandex worm outfits with googly eyes. I think this is a great question. Nikki DeMarco wants to know. First time question asker, if they regenerate, do they remember what they've learned? Are they a whole new being?
Oh? My god, that's an awesome question, and we know part of the answer. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, there were a series of controversial experiments about the retention of memory in regenerating planarians. So what they did was to train planarians to recoil from an electrical current or something like that. Okay, then they will cut their heads off, right, they will allow the bodies to regenerate their heads, okay. And there's seemed some indication that the tail remembered the stimulus.
They were more easily trained to recoil from the stimulus and whatnot. But for the longest time those experiments were controversial. They were called the James McConnell experiments because many people criticize him because of you know, you know, scientists can be vicious at criticizing each other. But then came professor
Mike Levin of Tought University. He actually replicated McConnell's experiments in a controlled environment UnBias, using computer observation and everything, and he was able to demonstrate a portion of the McConnel experiments. He trained planarians to recognize the roughness of the of a surface okay, and relate that to the process of food okay, and cut their heads off. And yes, the tail did remember, the tail did remember? So that part is completely established. I mean that could happen. Wow.
Now let's go back to the sixties. In the sixties, doctor McConnell trained planarians too again recoil from electrical and electrical shock. Then they will grind those planarians, feed those planarians to naive planarians. And he claimed that the planarians who ate the train planarians got their memories transferred to them. Those experiments have no been replicated yet. Actually, McConnell, Doctor
McConnell was a very controversial figure. He was actually one of the victims of the famous well of the infamous UNI bomber. The UNI bomber sent a bomb to doctor McConnell. And he was not killed stankfully and real, but he was injured and everything because of his controversial brain experiments. So the memory transference in planaria that has not been established as far as I know, but that the rest of the body retains at least some capacity to remember. Yeah,
that's pretty much true. That brings us opens the again, pardon the proverbial pond. It opens a can of worms, because where two memories are stored in the planaria, and it's not exclusively in their.
Brains, you know, So it opens the can of flatworms to figure out if it's a fluke or not.
Oh yeah, that's another good one.
Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I usually ask ologists about movies or TV shows about their fields, but plenarians, I mean, there's not going to be a superhero about a cross eyed flatworm.
There was a comic book about pallinarians called Planarian Man.
No.
Yes, that was the brainchild of mister Neil Obermeyer, who is a very gifted editorial cartoonist from Nebraska, and in the nineteen nineties he created that comic book a planariumn He was actually very kind to allow me to use some of his drawings in the first brain Plenarian Man. What better cartoon I know, And it has an origin story very similar to Spider Man.
Side note. I looked this up and Plenarian Man's backstory was that he was dissecting a worm in biology class and nicked his finger and became one with the planarian. But in true regeneration fashion, when parts of his body would get locked off in combat, they themselves would grow a new person. And so his nemesis is mad doctor Plenarian, who is like you, but if you were evil, which is just kind of casually each of our darkest fears.
Also Onate told me that in a nineteen thirty nine paper about plenarian head duplication written by one doctor Hamburger, the fused multi headed flatworms looked exactly like Battlestar Galactica raiderships.
Really and when I saw that paper, that looks like a sylum and I said, another explain if that I that I shouldn't say in the podcast, But you know, you can find connections. You can find connections everywhere with these topics.
Now, as amazing as plnaria are, there must be something annoying about them. There must be something that you hate about Planaria.
Something that I hate about Planarian? Let me see, Actually, no, I love them.
Ah, this guy I love like loves worms. But come on, there's got to be something bad. Did they smell?
Not that I know of, not, because they come in pond water and as long as you change the water regularly, they don't smell. They don't smell nice. And they're so cute creators. There's a source of fascination. I mean, it's like playing. Really really, what I do is play with worms. I just play with worms. That's what I do.
Is there anything about your job that you hate.
About my job?
No.
I love teaching, and of course I love talking about science about I love reading about science. I love doing research because there's something about you discovering something that you know or you are very sure that you're the very first person that's ever learned about that, and it isn't an indescribable feeling. I can't, for the life of me tell you anything that I don't like about my job.
That's amazing.
I don't like administration that much because I know my limitations and I know that I know that I would be a very bad administrator. That's for sure, my heads off. Oh yeah, my heads off. Two people who can do bureaucracy and all these type of things.
I'm pretty bad at it too. What about your very very favorite thing in terms of work or these critters.
I love data. I love when I get able to get some numbers and then grab them and analyze to try to find a particular phenomenon that I can ascertain from that. I love my data. I love analyzing data. I'm intending to learn a lot more microscopy and that I know, so I can apply to for example, applying some fluorescent compounds to planarians so they can tag specific receptors and we can actually trace nerve cells all these
type of things. I want to learn how to do that because we have all the equipment at the university to do that. But I hope we can open soon so we can do that.
I hope. So too, Are you keeping busy at home at all? Can you be working on your data at home?
Actually, I have a bunch of data that I'm writing up. As you can imagine, the university went all online. I was furiously converting my class to online mode. In every semester, I have an average of about six hundred students depending on how many courses I teach. So it's a big undertaking to do that. And I want to say again hi to all my fellows, faculty members, and my students at Westchester, because I mean, we're all in this together and we're going to get through this. But it's been
an uphill. Let's say, let's put it in academic terms, it's been a steep learning curve to do everything online.
I bet yeah.
Because one of my techniques to teach is that I tell very bad jokes.
That's amazing.
I am a dad, Okay, so I love doing that jokes. But the real reason why I teach bad jokes in class is that we are all conditioned to a few minutes of close attention followed by distractions Okay, commercials, you know, whatever, a cell phone or a text or whatever. So when I see that a significant fraction of my class is not quite there puller, if you know what I mean, I crack a stupid joke. I get a courtesy laugh or a pitty smile, Yeah, a pitty smile, or a groan or an eye roll. But at any rate, I
reset that attention and bring them back to me. So I cannot do that online. So a big part of my technique I cannot use right now, but I'll make do meanwhile.
You can find him at his blog Baldscientist dot WordPress dot com and on Twitter at bald Scientist. I love his tweets. He's got his pronouns. It is bio. It is just a warm, wonderful person to add to your timelines. Trust me, we love to see it.
I love answering questions. I love meaning like minded people. As I said before, I love science Twitter. That's where you can find me.
Oh my gosh, this was so fun. Thank you so much for doing this.
Thank you for your opportunity. I really appreciate it. And well, you cannot fake this. I'm enthusiastic about these things. Thank you. Oh I know, I thank you, thank you, thank you.
So you know the drill, whether it's by FaceTime or whispered over a landline or load through the muffle of a mask from six feet away, ask smart people stupid questions, because we're all going to be dust one day, and who gives a rats ass. It's cool to know stuff all right now. If you are besotted with friendly worm expert again, you can follow doctor Bragan on Twitter at bald Scientist or at his blog also Baldscientists dot WordPress dot com. I'll link both of those in the show notes,
alongside sponsors in the show and no Kid Hungry. There are more links and research up at aliwar dot com slash ologies slash Plenariology, and that link will be in the show notes too. Your cat maybe on your lap. You probably not have a pen.
It's fine.
Come be friends with us on Instagram or on Twitter. We're at ologies on both and I'm on both as ali Ward with one l and for Ologies sweatshirts and hats and tots and stuff. You can hoad it over to ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Felts for that they host the comedy podcast You Are That. Thank you to every single patron that supports the show on patreon dot com slash Ologies. Aaron Talbert admins Theologies
podcast Facebook group. Thank you Emily White and all the Ologies transcribers for making transcripts available, and Caleb Patten for bleeping episodes to make them kids safe. Good luck with this one. Transcripts and bleeped episodes are up at aliwarn dot com slash Ologies extras. There's going to be a link in the show notes to that. Thank you Noel Dilworth for scheduling and so much other help. Kelly Dwyer
for webmastering and congrats on the brand new Babe. Also, you can check out her husband, Matt Dwyer's podcast Conversations with Matt Dwyer It's So So Good. I happened to be his guest this week, but check out his back catalog It's so good. Jarrett Sleeper of mind Jam Media also hosts My Good Bad Brain, a mental health podcast.
Thank you Jarrett for assistant editing. This one took so many extra hours because we had a lag in the remote recording service that we use and it was just a nightmare to edit, and he and Steven did an amazing job. So thank you, of course to the be mustached Stephen Ray Morris who hosts the podcast The Percast and Sea Durassic Right for lead editing. And if you stick around until the end, you are rewarded with a
little bonus truth nugget. And this week I finally figured out that I might be a little more snacky and sluggish at home, partly because I'm just not drinking enough water because I never use my insulated water bottle at home. That's usually like a leaving the house thing, and that thing keeps shit ice cold. And a little fun fact about old dad word room temperature water is disgusting to me. And water that's been sitting out a while that might
have dust in it is also gross. And I think that's from seeing signs by m Night Shamalam in a theater twenty years ago. But I just started filling my insulated water bottle with ice water to drink and I think that's helping, just a little fun tidbit. So stay hydrated and raise a glass to all the plenarians who bravely underwent research and are saving other animals lives. Thanks Planarians. Not to end on a sad note, I mean I
meant that in a good way, but thanks Planarians. We're Pacaderman College, Bombiology, Zoology, Lithology, Technology, Meteorology, theology, technology, seriology, helmet bet don't.
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