Rewind: BioBlitz 2010

Back in April/May our lab participated in the National Geographic BioBlitz down in Biscayne Bay. BioBlitz is a 24 hour biodiversity survey (from noon to noon), where we document as many species as possible. Groups of scientists lead groups of science enthusiasts on short forays to see what we can find using various collecting methods. We were involved in both the marine and terrestrial invertebrate surveys. There was a base of operations at Convoy Point, but we were involved with the survey based out of Elliot Key. While the tour groups would come and go throughout both days we the scientists spent two action packed nights camping on Elliot Key. So what does it look like when 12 scientists go camping? Something like this.

I realize that's it hard to really grasp the scale of supply-mountain, but we and our gear filled the deck of our the boat that ferried us to the island. And it was all deck. It was a landing-craft designed for transporting vehicles.

The eating/sciencing portion of the excursion was conducted on one side of the island, and the sleeping portion was conducted on the other. To travel between them one had to go through The Gauntlet.

I know, it's so scenic and tranquil. We too were lulled into a false sense of security, but a few steps into The Guantlet and we realized why the woman on the boat had been so insistent about bug spray.

What appears to be a diseased limb swiftly traveling down the road to amputation is actually a buffet of culinary delights from the perspective of the aggressive and bountiful mosquito and no-see-um populations of the island.

So how did we avoid the bugs (besides employing hazardous level of DEET)? By getting in the water! In this picture Jenna and Sam are showing a school group how to use a yabby pump and sieve to collect critters from burrows in the sediment. I realize you can't see the yabby pump in this picture, but the good news is I'm not holding out for a career in photojournalism.

Unfortunately I also don't have any pictures of John braving the wooded areas searching for land snails. Except for my sprints through The Gauntlet necessitated by some desperate need (food, sleep, more bug spray), I avoided the woods whenever possible.

Throughout the day, groups would come in from collecting trips and some animals would be displayed in trays on outside tables so that people could admire them. A group of us would man the tables to tell people about what they were looking at. For instance, dig this lobster.

Now dig Jenna, Nat, Gustav, and François showing this group of children a thing or two about biodiversity.

That tent in the background was the headquarters for this operation. Many animals were admired and released, but many also ended up in the tent where they were anesthetized. Then they were photographed, subsampled, and preserved to go back with us to the museum. Sarah is photographing, while Julie and Hsiu are subsampling.

Having a physical specimen, accompanied by a live photo and DNA sequence, allow diversity information to be preserved in such a way that others can use it for their own research.

All in all it was a lot of work and a lot of fun, and we expanded our knowledge and collections of Florida's biodiversity, but we weren't done yet. After BioBlitzing most of us continued taking our show on the road and headed down to the Keys Marine Lab on Long Key. More on that in another post.

Sea cucumber workshop in Guam

Part of the lab is currently in Guam because of sea cucumbers.

In the context of the PEET project, we brought together 15 sea cucumber specialists and students -- from 10 countries -- in Guam to share knowledge about field and lab techniques for taxonomic studies of our favorite echinoderm group. We are now half-way through the workshop (it started on June 7th) and we have been very busy.

Our days are filled with field trips where we collect sea cucumbers in their habitats, time in the lab where we dissect the animals collected and look at their ossicles and time in the classroom where sea cucumbers specialists give lectures and students present their research.

We have been really successful in the field and found several species that haven't been recorded from Guam before, and even maybe a couple of new species. There are two main reasons for these new records.

First, it highlights the progress that the PEET project has made since it started. By visiting museum collections to find type specimens, by collecting sea cucumbers in many places to understand morphological variation in species and by sequencing all this freshly collected material, we have a better idea of the characters that are useful to identify sea cucumber species and we have refined our understanding of some enigmatic species. For instance, there is a genus of sea cucumber called Labidodemas that live among coral rubble in lagoons. In the past, most Labidodemas were assigned to a species called semperianum. The reason is simple, most Labidodemas species look almost alike: they are whitish, have long tube feet on the ventral side and a dark red/brown coloration around the anterior and posterior ends. However, by looking at their ossicles (microscopic skeletal elements found in their skin), it turns out that it is fairly easy to identify the other species of this genus. During the workshop, we thus recorded for the first time in Guam the species called Labidodemas pertinax. By looking carefully at the live specimen, we are now able to tell the two species apart.

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The image at the top is Labidodemas semperianum and the one at the bottom is Labidodemas pertinax.  Can you see the difference in the color of the tentacles and the tube feet? (click on the images to enlarge)


The other reason that we are finding new records and new species in Guam, is because it's the first time there are so many people looking for sea cucumbers at the same time. It's amazing what 15 pairs of trained eyes can see when they are specifically looking for sea cucumbers.

I'm sure we'll catch many more interesting things before the end of the workshop and I'll keep you posted!

Invertebrates in the News #5 (follow up)

Last week, I told you that Terry Gosliner was blogging about his field trip in the Philippines where he is looking for nudibranchs (sea slugs).

Today, there is a new post about his adventures.

Update: Here are his final posts that wrap-up his expedition.

Invertebrates in the News #6 - DNA reveals the complex life cycle of the stalked jellyfishes

If I say jellyfish, you probably picture a Frisbee-like animal with long tentacles that swims gracefully in an open ocean.

However, there is a group of jellyfishes (the Stauromedusae) that do things a little differently. First, they don't swim but live attached to the bottom with a stalk, hence their common name: the stalked jellyfishes.

Second, they are thought to have a "simple" life cycle. Most jellyfishes
go through several stages before they reach adulthood. The typical
jellyfish starts life as a small polyp (something that looks like a sea anemone) attached to the ocean floor. This polyp buds small medusae (jellyfishes) that grow until they reach sexual maturity. At this point, they release gametes into the ocean. After fertilization, the egg forms a planula larva which will settle on the bottom to give rise to a new polyp.

In stalked jellyfishes, things were assumed to be a little different, but simple: the planula attaches to the bottom and metamorphoses into a polyp (so far everything is normal). The top of the polyp metamorphoses into something that looks like a jellyfish while the bottom part stays the same and still looks like a polyp; hence a stalked jellyfish. The only problem with this story is that it is based on only a few observations based on few species, and it's hard to know if all the Stauromedusae do the same thing.

Stauromedusae (stalked jellyfish) - Haliclystus antarcticus

There is another problem: how can you tell if the two stages of the life cycle that look very different belong to the same species? In the best case, you can observe the full life cycle in the field or in the lab, but it is not always possible to do so. In other cases, you can only observe part of the life cycle.

In 1996, Gerhard Jarms & Henry Tieman published a paper where they described a new species of hydrozoan polyps that live on clam shells of the Antarctic that they named Microhydrula limpsicola. They kept the animals in the lab for 4 years, and only observed asexual reproduction by frustules (larvae produced asexually).

In a recent paper, Lucilia Miranda and her colleagues demonstrated that Microhydrula limpsicola is just a stage in the life history of the stalked jellyfish Haliclystus antarcticus. They were able to connect these two life stages by discovering that the DNA of the polyps (what was thought to be M. limpsicola) and the stalked jellyfish (H. antarcticus) were identical.


The life cycle of the stalked jellyfishes is thus much more complicated than we thought.

Furthermore, Microhydrula limpsicola was not the only one of its kind. There are two other species that were thought to belong to this family (the Microhydrulidae). It will now be interesting to determine if they are also stages of other species of stalked jellyfishes.


Links

• Miranda LS, Collins AG, Marques AC (2010) Molecules Clarify a Cnidarian Life Cycle – The “Hydrozoan” Microhydrula limopsicola Is an Early Life Stage of the Staurozoan Haliclystus antarcticus. PLoS ONE 5(4): e10182. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010182
• Jarms G & Tiemann H (1996) On a new hydropolyp without tentacles, Microhydrula limopsicola n. sp., epibiotic on bivalve shells from the Antarctic. Sci. Mar. 60(1): 109-115  http://www.icm.csic.es/scimar/index.php/secId/6/IdArt/2742/ 

Credits

• Photo of jellyfish (top) François Michonneau. Lizard Island, February 2009. CC 3.0
• Photo of H. antarcticus and drawing of life cycle by Miranda et al 2010. CC 3.0
• Photo of the close up of a stauromedusa by Minette Layne CC 2.0 

Invertebrates in the News #5

Currently, the New York Times is hosting a blog series entitled "Scientists at work, notes from the field".

Today, Terry Gosliner from the California Academy of Sciences writes about new species of nudibranchs he found in the Philippines.


You can read his blog posts here.

Images by Terry Gosliner

Jenna and Mandy on a Boat (Part 2 of 2): Science at Sea

Now let's do some science! As I mentioned in the previous post. Jenna and I were on the trawl shift from 8-noon and 8-midnight. During each 4 hour shift there were between 3 and 5 trawls. Each trawl had 10 minutes of bottom time and several minutes going down and coming up. A trawl is basically a giant funnel shaped net with wooden doors at the front that keep the net open as it is being pulled through the water along the ocean (or whatever body of water) floor. I can't tell you too much about the physics of it, but when you pull the net up, you untie the narrow end of the funnel and dump out the critters. This is when the biology part begins. As we sorted through the critters on deck the fish could go together in one or more giant fish bucket(s), but the invertebrates were sorted by level of aggressiveness with swimming crabs and stomatopods (mantis shrimp) being separated from more delicate animals like squid.

If you're studying fish, most of your animals ended up nicely grouped at the end of the net near the closure; if you're studying invertebrates then many of your animals have limbs for grabbing, and are probably scattered throughout the net. In the picture below Jenna and are are going through the net to remove animals that didn't make it through to the tied off end, usually starfish and crabs.

Anamar needed specific information for each trawl including total wet weight, number of species, number of individuals of each species, and measurements of some molluscs and arthropods. Starfish were a common theme in every trawl, as were juvenile Penaeid shrimp (also known as eatin' shrimp). In one trawl Jenna had the privilege of counting 453 Penaeids! Animals that we were keeping for the museum went into relaxants, which were different depending on the critter in question.

Most of those animals were photographed and had a tissue subsample taken. Below are some of the lab photos we took of an anemone and a worm with a portion of the shell-covered tube he constructed.

We kept a running illustration of the "Catch of the Day," one for invertebrates and one for fish. Jenna had the invertebrate illustration well in hand, but Jason (the fish expert on board) wasn't confident in his artistic abilities so Jenna volunteered to give the fish illustration a go. It looks accurate, based on the ID, but we're not fish taxonomists so there may be a few errors.

One of our Catches of the Day was this huge Pleuroploca gigantea. It is the largest species of marine snail in this hemisphere. The ruler in the picture with him is one foot long.

Not to be outdone, during the last trawl of the trip the fish team pulled up this giant stingray, which is also the record-holding species for the Atlantic.

He was so big that they couldn't weigh him using the winch and the largest scale available on the boat. All we know for sure is that he weighs more than 100 lbs. He was so big that the crew all gathered at the back deck to get a glimpse of him, although since it was April Fool's Day some people didn't believe the report when they heard it. In contrast to my usual liberal application of random gender assignments to the animals we caught, we actually know that this guy was a male due to his claspers. The females get even larger!

So after our evening shift we usually stuck around the lab and fished up the processing of the specimens for the museum: relaxing, photographing, subsampling, fixing. After our morning shift we pitched in with some of the other activities. During the 12-8pm shift there were several different sampling methods being employed. One of these was a bottom grab which got two different treatments. One sample was homogenized for chemical analysis, and one was sieved and bagged to be sent to another institution. Jenna and I did some sieving to give the usual sievers a dinner break.

We would also take turns catching up on sleep and manning the radio so we could root through the leftovers from the chemistry sample. We found some cool stuff in there including lots of worms and a cool sea biscuit.

Also during this time they would deploy the CTD. I'm sure its full name is very descriptive of its function, and might be useful for me to know now. In any case it took water measurements such as salinity, temperature, depth, current. It can also take water samples, but we didn't take any on this trip.

A few people also did some diving to get a direct observation of the bottom conditions in certain areas. Here they are waiting for the smaller boat to be set in the water to take them to the dive site.

They also had a cool camera thing that they could send down to the bottom that would take video footage of animals within the sediment using refraction, but it's a sensitive piece of equipment and opted not to work this time, although much of the last day was spent staring at it in an attempt to bend its functionality to our will. This picture was taken when we had nearly accepted defeat.

So we had a great time and saw a lot of really interesting stuff! We also found some animals that are new to the collection. Thanks to Anamar and the EPA for including us (hat tip to Jason). Hopefully we can get in on another trip in the future. In the group shot below that's not the OSV Bold in the background; it's just a boat that happened to be at the same dock.

:) Mandy

Jenna and Mandy on a Boat (Part 1 of 2): Life at Sea

So this week (Sunday through Friday) Jenna and I accompanied a team of scientists from Anamar, an environmental consulting firm in Gainesville, who had been hired by the EPA to do a survey for a future site for dredge dump materials. Part two of this post series will describe the work we did, but first I want to describe our life at sea on the OSV Bold.

Any sailor knows that safety is of the utmost importance on a boat. If something hits the fan it's important to know that you can remain calm, get to your muster station, and look good doing it. Enter the Gumby Suit:

The Gumby Suit (or Immersion Suit if you're a stickler) is designed to keep you alive if you are so unfortunate as to find yourself in the water for any length of time. I personally felt like I was drowning in the suit itself and was grateful they didn't feel the need to add water for this particular exercise.

In addition to the safety briefing, during our first day at sea we also got our shift assignments. Jenna and I were on the trawl team and our shift was from 8-12 both a.m. and p.m., additionally chipping in when extra help was needed or when people needed relieving at meal times which were from 7-8, 11:30-12:30, and 4:30-5:30. Of course food was available in the galley and break room 24 hours a day as Jenna and I quickly discovered.

Several crew members told us about the ice cream available in the freezer. We thanked them, but didn't feel the need to tell them that we had discovered at least one of the ice cream stashes within a few hours of our arrival.

Also within a few hours of our arrival (or rather our departure from the dock)...seasickness. I did not capture on film the image of me vomiting over the side of the boat (collective sigh of relief), but afterwards I lay down for a few hours and was fit as a fiddle for the rest of the trip. Unfortunately my bout of seasickness did cause me to miss one meal, but I more than made up for it over the course of the trip. Throughout the day Jenna and I made frequent trips to the galley for what we termed "fortifying cookies," candy, coffee, and water. This room really was central to our seafaring life. The chef was amazing and we didn't want her to feel unappreciated.

In fact, Jenna and I probably spent more time in the galley and the wet lab (where we did most of our work) than we did in this room.

And it had nothing to do with the fact that over the course of the week the room became filled with clothes covered in fish scales and invertebrate goo, and the cryptically named "vomit sweatshirt." We were just really busy! The room was actually very nice and pretty spacious for a ship cabin. To the left of the above picture there was even a desk where we could catch up on some informative reading.

As you can see Jenna and I took our new roles as sailors very seriously. I'm thinking of getting a subscription to WorkBoat to add a touch of the sea to my landlubbing existence. I think that the rest of the crew could tell how committed we were, because after a brief tutorial...

They let Jenna and I drive the boat! Although I think the engineers in particular were unimpressed with our driving. During my turn at the helm they called up to the bridge to make sure that everything was ok and that the chief mate (who was on shift at the time) hadn't been hijacked or drinking on the job.

Also during our last days we did manage to grab a few moments of downtime on the steel beach on the bridge deck. In this next shot, the part of Jenna and I will be played by our echidna traveling companion.

We had a great time, but we also worked hard. Next post I'll talk about the work that we and the other scientists conducted during the trip. In hindsight, maybe I should have posted about the work part first, but I was just trying to set the stage. I promise we did work Gustav!!

:) Mandy

Invertebrates in the news #4 - Speciation in reef hermit crabs

The journal Science has a section entitled "Editor's choice" where they feature recent papers that caught their attention. This week, they chose to highlight a paper written by Machel and Gustav that looks at the patterns of speciation in the genus of hermit crab Calcinus.

Calcinus lineapropodus (photo by Gustav Paulay)

By combining information about the genealogical relationships of 56 species (almost all the species known in this genus as well as 9 undescribed species) and information about the color of the species and where they live, they were able to discover some interesting facts about the evolution of this group.

• Closely related species have similar shapes but they can have very different color patterns. This means that color patterns evolve rapidly and that they can be used to tease species apart. This also suggests that the hermit crabs themselves use these color patterns to recognize the members of their own species. So, the apparition of new color patterns could lead to new species. To illustrate this rapid evolution in color patterns, compare these closely related species that live most of the time on branching corals: Calcinus minutus (from Guam), Calcinus rosaceus (from Oman) and Calcinus nitidus (from Moorea).

Calcinus minutus from Guam (photo by Gustav Paulay), Calcinus rosaceus (photo by Machel Malay), Calcinus nitidus (photo by Gustav Paulay)

• Isolated islands and archipelagos such as Hawaii have several endemic species of Calcinus, which suggests that the formation of new species (speciation) happened on the edges of their geographical ranges.

• Most species of Calcinus are found in oceanic areas in particular in the Western Pacific and in Polynesia. This is different from what is known for other marine invertebrates. Indeed, in corals, fishes, and various groups of mollusks, most of the diversity is found in a more continental area called the "coral triangle" (from northern Australia to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea). To illustrate this difference, compare the 2 maps below. The first one shows the distribution of the diversity for the hermit crabs of the genus Calcinus whereas the map on the bottom is the same kind of map for the cowries. The unusual diversity pattern found in Calcinus highlights the importance of the ecological and historical processes characterizing each group of organism that have led to their current geographical distribution.

Distribution of the species richness of the genus Calcinus. Contours represent 4, 10, 13 and 17 species. (from Malay & Paulay 2010)

Distribution of the species richness of cowries. Orange to red colors represent high number of species (above 64), green to yellow colors represent intermediate number of species (between 40 to 64), light blue to dark blue represent low number of species (between 1 and 40). (from Paulay & Meyer 2006)

Links:

• Editor's choice. Science. 327 (26 March 2010): http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol327/issue5973/twil.dtl#327/5973/1555-c
• Malay MC, Paulay G. 2010. Peripatric Speciation Drives Diversification and Distributional Pattern of Reef Hermit Crabs (Decapoda: Diogenidae: Calcinus). Evolution. 64-3:634-662. DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00848.x
• Paulay G, Meyer C. Dispersal and divergence across the greatest ocean region : Do larvae matter ? Integrative and Comparative Biology. 2006;46(3):269-281. DOI: 10.1093/icb/icj027

AAUS Training

In order to dive under the auspices of the University of Florida, divers must undergo training to become AAUS certified Scientific Divers. Art, François, and Nat all needed this training for their future field endeavors. In order to keep your status current you must complete 12 dives a year. Jenna and I had fallen short (way short) so we needed to re-checkout with Cheryl, the Dive Safety Officer (DSO) of UF, so we tagged along on some of their dives one day.

Here are the three trainees (Nartçois) preparing to descend to 100 feet. We were diving in a spring that day and the water was quite cold, so they're all rocking a hood.

Although AAUS certification is not a NAUI-card-having designation of diver, there are several aspects of the training, one of which is to become a Rescue Diver. Below, Jenna plays the role of a tired diver and François gives her a hand with a fin push.

Although it it seems pretty clear from this next picture that François is attempting to drown Nat, he is actually practicing getting them both out of dive gear while towing him to the exit and administering rescue breathing.

Below is a short video of Nat performing the same exercise on Art, either saving his life or drowning him. You be the judge.

Also key to scientific diver training are navigational skills. Here Art and Nat prepare to navigate an underwater square at a depth of 30-40 feet using a compass for direction and a pre-determined number of fin-kicks as the distance.

You know what dive training means...more fieldwork! And hopefully some more blog posts from the field, replete with showy animal photos and calendar-worthy scenery.

:) Mandy

...but we've been really busy

I know it's been way too long since my last update, but just wait till you see all that we've had going on and I hope all will be forgiven.

The Shrimp Mafia has disbanded with Ivan and Sammy returning to their respective countries of origin leaving Art to describe new species on his own. But not to worry, Magali Honey (Maggie) is visiting and will be here for a few weeks. She came just in time, I think that by this point the hotel we use has started factoring our visitors into their monthly budget. Here are Machel and Maggie bonding over talk of barnacles and sea cucumbers.

Also during the month of February, prospective grad students came to visit the department. One of the women who came to interview with our (Gustav's) lab is Christine Ewers. I didn't capture her on film this time (I was sick, another reason for the lack of posts, do you forgive me yet?) but she has been on a R/V Bellows field trip with us in the past. Here are she and Julie patching up a trawl net.

Another new arrival who is here to stay (at least for a few years) is Hsiu-Chin Lin. The newest member of the team, she is joining us a post-doc. She has a lot of genetic expertise that we are anxious to add to our collective knowledge.


In addition to all the arrivals and departures. We also participated in the 2010 UF Marine Biology Symposium. Many of us presented talks or posters of our various and sundry research interests. My data were a mess and needed a lot of time and attention to polish up enough in time to present at the symposium. Other things that I might have been meaning to do (i.e. posting to this blog) may or may not have fallen to the wayside as a consequence, but I'm sure you understand. At the conference, the cuke team swept the undergraduate awards with Julie, Laura, and J.D. all winning prizes. Here is a glimpse of Julie's first place presentation with some nice ossicle pictures. Try and soak in the knowledge.

So in addition the the grant-ending other-work-neglecting catch-up to do, we now have our symposium-readiness other-work-neglecting catch-up to do. Sarah has been doing a lot of cataloging and label matching. Here she is shelving a freshly labeled box of something. This is the shelving where we keep the wet (ethanol preserved) collection. It's not as creepy as the lighting makes it look. You should see the herpetology collection!

Jenna has also been tackling some label matching, but it seems like there's always someone wanting a Geneious tutorial. We've been getting back so much sequence data from the Smithsonian that everyone wants to get to work on building some trees for their study group. One of the latest petitioners is Sea.

Fred has also begun work on his Thailand collection and has spent some time in the range this week sorting through trays of land snails that's he's collected to prepare them for cataloging.

Also doing land snail work, Chelsey and John have been working on the many, many (many, many) lots from Madagascar. Chelsey may be employed full time over in the shark range, but she keeps coming back home to Invert Zoo, feeling the pull of the Acavidae and their messy taxonomy, and possibly the snack drawer and its ever-changing bounty.

I'm also pleased to report that I've made serious inroads into the desk blockade that has been constructed around me. I would say that things are returning to normal, but I realize that I really have no standard for comparison. What can I say, we're a happenin' joint.

:) Mandy