Planet NOAA Podcast Episode 12: From the seafloor to the museum floor

[Planet NOAA theme music plays]

SARAH JESTER (HOST): Welcome back to the Planet NOAA Podcast. I’m your host, Sarah Jester. Today, we’ll follow the journey of marine specimens from the ocean floor to the museum floor with NOAA expert Allen Collins. But first, let’s solve the mystery of coral development.

[Did You NOAA theme plays]

HOST: I’m here with resident NOAA trivia expert Tara Garwood. Tara, last time we chatted, you left me on something of a coral reef cliffhanger. Alexander Agassiz had set out to avenge his father, Louis Agassiz, who had lost more than one scientific and philosophical battle to Charles Darwin. 

TARA GARWOOD: That’s right. As a quick recap, Darwin believed that coral reefs were formed as volcanic islands subsided into the ocean and created the right conditions for reefs to develop in three stages: the fringing reef, the barrier reef, and the atoll. On the other hand, Agassiz argued that elevated sedimentary platforms built up until they reached a point where enough sunlight went through the water for corals to live on them. 

HOST: Thanks for that recap, Tara. And, okay, please don’t keep me in too much suspense. Who was crowned king of the corals?

GARWOOD: Inigo Montoya did not manage to avenge his father in this case. In the 1950s, American scientists drilled through the reefs at the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands to investigate their cores. The scientists discovered that the reef had been growing since the Eocene period and had been developing upward on top of the volcano in the area, which was subsiding into the ocean over time.

HOST: First of all, shoutout Darwin. Second, my god, that reef had been around for 30 million years! I’m feeling like an insignificant speck in the vacuum of time.

GARWOOD: Time keeps on slippin' slippin' slippin' into the future! 

HOST: [Laughs]

GARWOOD: Ok, Sarah, let’s take a journey back in time – though not 30 million years back, I promise. 

HOST: Sold. How far back are we headed?

GARWOOD: About 50 years – by way of your local record store. We’ll be back with more right after this.

[Planet NOAA guest theme plays]

HOST: As our ocean planet continues to evolve, NOAA’s scientists remain dedicated to researching marine species and their interactions. Much of this work takes place within the NOAA Fisheries National Systematics Laboratory, which is actually located at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History offsite link in Washington, D.C.. This unique partnership has helped facilitate the collection, study and preservation of marine specimens. But just how are these specimens collected, transported and preserved as they journey to the museum lab? I’m excited to invite systematics and zoology expert Allen Collins to join us today and discuss. Welcome, Allen!

ALLEN COLLINS: Thanks, Sarah. Happy to be here as well. 

HOST: Awesome; happy to be chatting with you today. Allen, tell me a little bit about yourself. Any fascinating hobbies we should know about?

COLLINS: I don't think there's anything that's too earth-shattering, but I love to kayak and just sort of get out in nature. And I got my start in a kind of unusual way, because I have a background in economics and mathematics before switching later in life to become a biologist. 

HOST: Tell me a bit more about that – how exactly did you find your way into biology?

COLLINS: Basically, when I was about 18 years old, I was just dreaming about making a million dollars before I was 30. And so I went off to school. I was good at math and…got my undergraduate degree in mathematics and economics. And after graduating, I worked as an economic consultant, research economist, in a firm that did economic consulting. I had that job for about four years or so. During that time, I wound up moving out to Northern California and spending a lot of time outdoors there. And I took a night course on the history of Planet Earth, and basically I fell in love. And then I just got this wild idea. I could do something totally different in biology. Decided to quit my job, and I took classes full time through an extension program. Sort of…the rest is history kind of thing. 

HOST: Nice. I love that leap of faith, and I'm glad to see those night classes came in handy. I'm a night class vet myself. [Laughs]

COLLINS: [Laughs] That's awesome. 

HOST: Allen, how did you get into the arguably pretty niche fields of zoology and systematics research, specifically? And can you give us a peek into what each of those respective fields entail?

COLLINS: So I started as a paleobiologist, and once I entered my Ph.D. program, my focus was on the very earliest animal fossils. So, I was very interested in the dawn of animal life and how animals came to be. And during that time period was when people started using genetic data to understand the evolutionary relationships between groups. And the first groups that diverge within the animal tree are the jellies and the sponges. And so in order to get genetic data from them, I had to go out in the field and collect them. I just started learning more and more about them, particularly the jellies. And I learned then a lot about their different morphologies, their different life histories…basically what they look like and how they build themselves. And I built up an expertise in that. And what I do now is; as director of the National Systematics Lab for NOAA Fisheries, this lab has a mission to understand the basic biology of groups of economic and ecological importance to the United States. This word systematics is kind of an unusual word, but it entails taxonomy. So understanding the names for different organisms. But we name them, we describe them, we try to understand their evolutionary relationships. And that's helpful because if we know some basic biology about one species, and then we're trying to learn something about a species that's closely related, we can use the evolutionary histories to sort of make predictions about attributes of different lineages or species. 

HOST: Wonderful. Thank you so much for that overview. And just to go back, our last guest, who is now a coral conservation expert, also came to that career path through paleontology. So I think you find yourself in good company here at NOAA. 

COLLINS: [Laughs] I saw that and was really interested in that as something I shared with him.

HOST: I love it. I’d also like to hear a bit more about what being an invertebrate curator involves, particularly as part of the partnership between the Smithsonian and NOAA Fisheries.

COLLINS: So the partnership between Fisheries and the Smithsonian goes way back. It's actually older than NOAA. The very first curator at the Smithsonian was also the commissioner of the U.S. Fish Commission and did some early work on fisheries. And so we've always had that tie together, the museum and Fisheries. And the formal beginning of the lab was when the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries merged their collections into the U.S. National Collections offsite link that the Smithsonian cares for, and stationed a biologist there to do systematics-type work on the collections. Our lab is about seven people strong, and the scientists who are part of that lab act as curators for parts of the U.S. National Collections. So myself, I'm a curator for the sponges and for a lot of the jellies at the museum. And that basically means that I'm charged with deciding who can borrow those specimens. I am charged with trying to promote their study, and then also studying them myself. 

HOST: A small but mighty lab. 

COLLINS: Yes, indeed. A very small but mighty lab.

HOST: I think it's definitely appropriate that the Systematics Lab is based out of the Museum of Natural History, particularly with that partnership extending so far back. The Smithsonian's invertebrate collection offsite link; it's globally recognized with over 50 million specimens and counting. The thing about NOAA scientists, though, is that they actually get to go on a lot of these expeditions that recover those specimens from the sea and kind of bring them back into these collections for folks to learn more from. So I'd love to talk a little bit about the recent NOAA Ocean Exploration expedition that you were a part of that investigated pelagic diversity around seamounts in the Gulf of Alaska. And that is a bit of a mouthful…

COLLINS: [Laughs]

HOST: [Laughs] …so I'd love it if you could break it down for me. What exactly were you studying and why? 

COLLINS: We were investigating how some seamounts off the coast of Alaska were impacting the pelagic diversity. So that is the diversity that lives in the water column. The waters of the northern Gulf of Alaska are extremely rich, and they support very large fisheries. So they're extremely economically important. There's a lot of connections between organisms that live on the bottom and then organisms that are swimming around. So benthic diversity refers to all of the organisms that live on the bottom of the seafloor. And there's a connection between this benthic diversity and then the diversity that's in the water column above it. And in the water column, you get larval forms of the organisms that live on the bottom, and then the whole suite of organisms that always live in the water column. So different jellies, even worms, lots and lots of fish, of course. So we went all the way out to these seamounts, and then we sampled them on different sides, knowing where the currents were coming from, in order to better understand the distribution of the different water column organisms and how they related to these mountains that rise up from the seafloor but don't come all the way to the sea surface.

HOST: Allen, I'd love it if you could walk me through what a typical day onboard this expedition was like. So, how did you go about physically collecting specimens and what was your day composed of aside from that collection? 

COLLINS: So we would have the schedule of putting out the nets. The nets would go out, the animals would come up, and then we would sort these animals and process them. By the time we're done with that, another net would come up, and we would have to go again. And so every day was a little bit different one from the next. If there was bad weather, we maybe couldn't deploy a certain net [type]. And then we would have to, you know, we'd have a little bit extra free time or time to process. 

HOST: What does processing specimens in real time involve onboard a marine expedition?

COLLINS: That first involves sorting them into sort of major groups; pulling out the organisms that are delicate or of special interest. So they're just things that we all think are rare. Then there was a whole process where we were trying to do quantitative sampling. So we would split the remaining organisms into parts. One of the parts would all be looked at for and do exhaustive counts based on their morphology. The morphology is basically the form of an organism. So all the little arms or mouths and how it looks. One of the other parts was basically used for whole DNA extractions and then subsequent sequencing of the mixed DNA to try to understand what was in there. One big part was basically left to the zoologists to go through to pull out organisms of interest. And basically for me, that would involve finding all the jellies, making sure that we collected several different exemplars of any given species, or what we call a morphotype. If we're not exactly sure what species it is, we try to get, “the little yellow jelly that looks like X,” and we call that a morphotype. And then we would photograph that very thoroughly and preserve it for both morphological work back in the lab — so it would come back to the museum — and then also genetic work, genetic characterization, basically.

HOST: Tell me about one or two of the organisms of interest that you pulled out as you were cataloguing jellies. 

COLLINS: So, the group that I was focusing on in this particular expedition were the jellyfishes, and then also another group we call comb jellies. And these are jellies that have giant cilia on their bodies that they use to propel themselves through the water. So we found a number of really interesting organisms on this trip, but one that really I recall was a very small jellyfish. Deep, deep, dark red. So dark red that it was practically black. And I was set up taking photography of the different specimens. And I got this specimen under the camera, and it was almost impossible to photograph…[laughs]

HOST: [Laughs]

COLLINS: …because I had set up with a big strobe system…it was casting a lot of light on the specimen, but nothing was reflecting back. You couldn't see the texture of this jellyfish at all. And I was really intrigued by that.

HOST: How does it feel to be up close and personal with these deep sea creatures that, in many cases, up until this point, humans have never laid eyes on?

COLLINS: Experiencing it firsthand was a real “a-ha” moment. That's one of the best things about science is…in biology we learn a lot, we read a lot. And then when you're in the driver's seat, so to speak, and you actually get to experience something, it's really pretty special. And so I was really excited that I had that opportunity. To top it all off, there were a couple other jellyfish experts at sea with me, and we could not figure out the species to which this belonged. And it's very likely a new species. And so that was really exciting too.

HOST: That’s pretty incredible; definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I want to talk a little bit about the actual journey that these specimens take from the ship to the actual museum lab. What are some of the steps that kind of have to occur in between that initial collection and their arrival at the museum?

COLLINS: Yeah. So that's great; there's a lot of work that goes into it. So while we're at sea and making the collections, we start storing them. And so they become actually like a little mini collection; a bunch of jars lined up. And they could be either in ethanol, which we use to preserve the morphology of some organisms, or formalin, which is better for preserving morphology for the soft-bodied animals. They will all get packed up very carefully, and they then get shipped to the museum. And then when they're at the museum, staff in the National Systematics Lab unpack those specimens. And then we’ll rehouse those specimens into containers for long-term preservation. And at that same time, they will be assigned a museum catalog number. So that is done by using all of the data that we collected with the specimens at the time of collection — what we call collection metadata. And at that same time, the samples are separated, the parts that are for DNA extraction. So they get put into what we call plates. These are basically 96 wells on a little piece of plastic…that has 96 little holes in it. And a unique specimen goes into each one of those. Then we have a DNA extraction machine at the museum which will extract those. And then after that we'll do what we call genetic barcoding or genetic characterization, making sure that we get sequences that help us understand the identity of the organism.

HOST: Wonderful. Thank you. That's a great overview of some of the different tools and methods that are being used to study these specimens at the lab. What are you currently working on as part of the research taking place post-expedition? And I’m interested to hear a bit more about the value of genetic barcoding in that process. 

COLLINS: So we're in process so far. So we've gotten all the pictures and the DNA extracts done, and they're being prepared for DNA sequencing. We have been deriving genetic barcodes for a long time. And genetic barcodes are simply small pieces of sequence that allow us to identify a species. You can imagine a little filet of fish. You can take a genetic barcode from the filet of fish and understand what species that fillet is actually from. And so the genetic barcodes have a really recognized importance for a long time, but it's even more so now because of new DNA sequencing technologies, and particularly what we call environmental DNA is being applied in lots of different arenas. Environmental DNA is also known as eDNA, and it's essentially a mix of DNA from different organisms. And so you can basically scoop up water and sequence all the DNA in that water. And then you have sequences for all the organisms that sloughed off tiny cells or mucus or other sorts of bodily parts. And this works with gut contents. So you can take out the gut of a fish and you can sequence all the organisms that were inside that gut. It also works with sediments. And so we can use these technologies to understand communities of organisms. What happens, though, is that a lot of the sequences come back with no match. We have a real challenge in marine biology and marine ecosystem work, and that is the sheer size…the magnitude of diversity out there. We know about one quarter million marine species right now. And so there's a real race to sort of genetically characterize everything so that many different scientists who are using environmental DNA techniques…we can facilitate their work. So one thing that we're trying to do is make sure that every single species that we collected in the northern Gulf of Alaska has a full set of genetic data that will allow it to be identified in the future.

HOST: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that definitely speaks to the broader frontier of ocean exploration, really, how much we have left to explore. Our planet is 70% covered by ocean, and we've only mapped slightly more than a quarter of that at high resolution. We've only physically explored around 5% of that total body of water. So we have a very long way to go in visually surveying and researching and understanding the species that inhabit our ocean planet.

COLLINS: Yes. And the mid-water contains about 95% of the livable space on the planet. So it's a massive, massive space, and it needs a lot of further exploration and characterization. 

HOST: Allen, on the note of exploration and the ongoing work to genetically characterize unknown species, what’s the coolest organism or specimen that you've either discovered or collected as part of any expedition, any research you're doing?

COLLINS: Well, that's exciting. [Laughs]

HOST: [Laughs]

COLLINS: I was getting ready for the “my favorite jellyfish” question, but one experience that I had while I was at sea, it exemplified the whole, sort of…why we're out there doing exploration. And it was…it's just a small thing. An ROV is a remotely operated vehicle, and it's essentially connected to a ship by long fiber optic cable. We were on shipboard, but the ROV was going across the bottom and we were in the control center where we have all these videos and a little tiny tentacle sort of drifted by in the upper left hand corner. So we were like, look at that tentacle, you know, what's that? As they turn the ROV towards this organism, it revealed this very large…like a ten meter squid.

HOST: Oh my God. 

COLLINS: And we followed it for a little bit. Exactly. It was like, wow. And what struck me was…we were so close to not seeing it because it just barely…this one little tentacle went through the frame and that's what alerted us to the fact that it was there. And I just kept thinking, how many of these that we have we gone by that we didn't see because down there it's completely dark? And the ROV then has all these lights and it's just pointed forward and it's a tiny, tiny little light in this giant, giant place. 

HOST: You're painting a beautiful picture of the The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou for me. I don't know if you're a fan, but…

COLLINS: I'm a huge fan. Yes.

HOST: Surprisingly, Wes Anderson is going to help me with this segue. A lot of The Life Aquatic deals with scientific legacy, as Bill Murray’s character is kind of examining his own life’s work and looking ahead to the future. So how do NOAA scientists ensure responsible preservation and future study of the specimens being collected today?

COLLINS: We try to maximize the value of every collection, so we're really careful now to make sure that everything is documented extremely well. I sometimes am working with specimens that were collected 200 years ago, and the people who collected them are dead and gone, and they collected them and preserved them in such a way so that I can study them. And I can use new technologies that they didn't know anything about, like genetics. And I think about that a lot when we're doing our work because we want to take as good of care of the collections as possible, because we can't possibly know what questions people will be asking in the future, nor what sort of technologies they'll be able to apply to them. And so we just do the best that we can to maximize the long-term value of these organisms.

HOST: Allen, I appreciate that. I think that’s a great response. I think it’s important to recognize the value of those early samples and collection efforts, because we wouldn’t be here today without them. Let’s take a future outlook for a moment. How are you and your team paving the way for the scientists of tomorrow to continue this work, whether it's through responsible preservation practices, through opportunities for students, mentorship…

COLLINS: As I mentioned before, it's always in the forefront of my mind that there's going to be people coming in the future who are going to look at the work that I have done. So sometimes I'll come across sort of like a scientific hero and their handwritten notes inside a jar with a specimen, and I always get really…I don't know. It's just a special moment of connection across time. And so I think about that as well when we're creating the records that will be used decades after I'm gone. Or hundreds of years, who knows? As I've been at NOAA Fisheries for 20 years and had the opportunity to do a lot of mentoring…being at the museum, we have interns that we can mentor. And then I've had graduate students and then young postdoctoral researchers, and that has turned into the one of the absolute most satisfying parts of my job is to work with young people, see their curiosity, try to figure out what they're really curious about, and help them act upon that curiosity to create their own new knowledge, you know, for humanity. 

HOST: Absolutely. And I think that NOAA's internships and fellowships provide just such a great opportunity for people to unlock that internal curiosity and spark that drives them into science and into research. So I really appreciate the work that you've done to kind of usher in the next generation of scientists. And I'd highly encourage any listeners who are young folks or students to to seek out those opportunities and visit noaa.gov to explore more. Well, Allen, I really enjoyed getting to chat about systematics, zoology and some of these incredible cinematic experiences you’ve gotten to have at sea as part of your research. And I’d like to encourage folks who are interested in learning more about Allen’s research and his team’s work to visit fisheries.noaa.gov and navigate to the National Systematics Laboratory landing page from there. Thank you so much for joining us today, Allen. 

COLLINS: It was absolutely my pleasure.

HOST: Allen Collins is the Director of the NOAA Fisheries National Systematics Laboratory, and a Research Zoologist and Curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Allen’s research focuses on the evolutionary history of relatively simple animals like jellyfishes, corals and sponges. 

[Did You NOAA theme plays]

HOST: Welcome back, Tara. Let’s hop into the time machine.

GARWOOD: [Time machine sound effect]

HOST: [Laughs]

GARWOOD: Okay, before we go back fifty or so years, let’s go back a couple of months. Sarah, I know you’re a big vinyl collector – tell folks about your last trip to the record store.

HOST: [Laughs] Audiophile reporting for duty. You got it. A couple months ago, I was over at Som Records in Washington, D.C., and I was chatting a little bit with the owner because we had just spun the tornado warning vinyl on the Planet NOAA Podcast. And he looked a little surprised when I mentioned that, and pulled out this fantastic National Weather Service winter storm warnings, announcements vinyl. And we've got the record here. It's in a plain black dust sleeve, which is a little bit worn. The center label reads Winter Storms Announcements, and it also contains a pretty standard tracklist with different winter storm PSAs. But there's not a publication date listed anywhere on this vinyl. So, Tara, I'd love it if you could hopefully shed some light on when and where this might have come from. 

GARWOOD: We believe that this particular vinyl was pressed in the early 1970s. Up until 1970, the National Weather Service was called the National Weather Bureau, but the label specifies that this is a National Weather Service record. Since 1945, the Federal Communications Commission has required radio stations to play PSAs from federal agencies, so we think this record was pressed for use on regular AM/FM networks. The first set of tracks are each a minute long and the second five tracks run for thirty seconds each. The track titles range from “Blizzard Safety” to “Wind Chill Factor” to “Livestock Care…” 

HOST: As a born and raised Chicago girl, livestock care wouldn’t have come to mind as a PSA I’d be hearing over the radio. That sounds like an interesting one.

GARWOOD: Oh, Sarah, we’ve got to get you some work boots and a good pair of overalls. Let’s take a listen.

WINTER STORMS ANNOUNCER: The big killer of livestock during winter storms is dehydration since animals cannot lick enough snow to satisfy their thirst. Stockmen are advised to use heaters and water tanks to ensure a sufficient supply of water. Livestock can survive extreme weather conditions provided they have some non-confining shelter from the wind and can feed and water at frequent intervals. The Commerce Department's National Weather Service issues stockman's warnings to alert ranchers and farmers when precautions should be taken to protect livestock.

HOST: Man. Alright, we no longer issue stockman’s warnings, but some of our National Weather Service offices do generate forecasts on potentially dangerous cold temperatures for newborn livestock. For the National Weather Service's current weather safety information and guidelines, you can visit Weather Safety for All Hazards. I gotta say, I love that old-school sound.

GARWOOD: Yeah, same here. Sarah, having played this record, did you notice anything else different about it?

HOST: Actually, yes. There are fairly deep grooves in between each track. When I played different tracks, even if they were towards the beginning of the record, my needle lifted automatically as if it had reached the end of the record. Why is that?

GARWOOD: We’ll find out on the next episode of the Planet NOAA Podcast. In the meantime, make sure your livestock are well-fed, watered and sheltered!

[Planet NOAA theme music plays] 

HOST: Thanks for joining us on the Planet NOAA Podcast, where we prepare people for tomorrow’s planet, today. Join us next time to get all of your winter weather audiophile questions answered.