Barbies? Yea right. Doll Houses? Please. I was never the little girl who played with mini tea cups and pretended my stuffed animals were my fellow beauty-pageant friends. I was the girl outside shooting Nerf guns at the neighbor boys and exploring the deep ends of the woods in my backyard. I’m sure my mom was thrilled when I brought pet bugs home from school rather than glitter-filled artwork. Nonetheless my fascination for bugs, animals and anything living for that matter started from a very young age. To this day I find myself watching Discovery channel till wee hours of the night or researching the latest species found in the far corners of the Amazon. It was not until recently that I began indulging in my extreme captivation with sharks.
Although I would never want to find myself next to one of these sharp-toothed vigilante creatures, the fear and complete awe I feel every time I read, watch, or hear about them gives me an experience unlike any other animal I have studied. They are powerful, stealthy and the ultimate kings of the water. Many can swim up to 40 miles per hour and some can produce up to 20,000 teeth in their lifetime constantly replacing ones that fall out. However, no shark is as intimidating or interesting than the biggest shark that has ever existed…the MEGALODON. And yes, it was mega. This ancient beast was said to be up to 60 feet long and weighed about 77 tons. Just to give you an idea, that is the same mass as 7 school busses. Its size was almost 4 times as long and 15 times the mass of a modern great white shark. That’s big! The Megalodon usually preyed on blue whales and other large fish. In fact, the Megalodon had the jaw strength to crush a whale’s skull in the same way a human jaw can crush a grape. Imagine what it could do to a human skull. Yikes! It was by far the biggest predator in the seas at the time. Because the fossil record dates back 28 million years and is almost completely comprised of teeth, some scientists debate its size, its strength and even its existence. However what current researchers are still stumped with is answering the question, “Does Megalodon exist today?”
During shark week in the summer of 2013, the Discovery network aired “Megalodon: The Monster Shark that Lives.” On the program a group of researchers and Megalodon-enthusiasts analyzed a wide range of evidence claiming that Megalodon still exists. For shark lovers like me, the prospect of actually seeing glimpses of Megalodon was enough to get me hooked. On top of the shark fanatics, more than 4 million people tuned in nation-wide to watch the special with hopes of learning, seeing, and believing in a modern-day Megalodon. Boy were we wrong. Throughout the show the “researchers” presented photos of half eaten whales claiming only a shark as big as Megalodon could do such damage. They presented eye-witness testimonies of sightings, boat attacks, and big black blurs in the ocean of the supposed Megalodon skimming the surface of the water. The final spectacle showed the “scientists” dragging a huge model whale through the water as bait with hopes of the Megalodon resurfacing and attacking it.
And….it did! Sure enough there was a giant explosion, a blur past the camera, and in a second the “Megalodon” was gone. The only redeeming factor of this somewhat ridiculous ending was that the divers were able to tag the animal that surfaced. Despite everything else in the documentary being completely fake, this part was a glimpse of truth. The divers were able to tag an animal that dove from the surface to below 6000 feet in seconds, a behavior unlike any other shark or any other animal for that matter. In the middle of all the bogus Discovery chose to broadcast, they somehow still managed to instill the belief that Megalodon exists solely by placing hope in a tracking tag. In fact, over 3 million of their 4 million viewers believed in Megalodon after the documentary, including myself. Many marine biologists have clearly stated that Megalodon does not currently exist and went extinct about 2 million years ago before humans existed. There is no doubt in their minds that it is gone. In fact, many of them laugh and scoff at the fact that after showing such phony information, Discovery was still able to convince a large part of their viewers that Megalodon is alive. After much thinking and research I have come to my own conclusion. I do not believe that Megalodon is alive but I still hope it exists. While the documentary was full of misleading information, two unforgettable facts keep me hoping.
First, the tag proves that there is some kind of animal down there that is able to dive that deep that fast. Second, the fact that only 5% of our oceans have been explored leaves the other 95% up to our imagination. Who knows what’s out there? With that being said, is there hope that Megalodon still exists? In the minds of scientists the answer would be a cold solid NO. But in the minds of hopeful shark fans like myself, myth-lovers, and the curious general public, Megalodon may very well still be lurking at the bottom of the ocean in waters we may never be able to explore.
In case you’ve ever wondered what happens to the items that are too lame to re-sell in thrift stores in our culture, they eventually get boxed up and shipped off by charity foundations to developing countries. So, rural Guatemala in the early 90s was a walking rainbow of all the poor US fashion choices of the prior decades. It is nowhere more evident how weird is US culture than through the silk-screened, ironed-on legacy of our t-shirts. Everyone appreciates a free t-shirt in any culture, but this forgotten subset of t-shirts winds up on the backs of people who don’t understand what they say. So, while making friends at my field sites I sometimes wind up translating people’s t-shirts for them, because they ask me to. Ok, some of these are so obvious that no one asks (“Coca-Cola”), others require a bit more explanation (“Cheers. Where everybody knows your name” or “Styx”), and others are just inexplicable (like “I’m with Stupid →” or, even worse “Le Shirt”—in case you don’t remember, there once was an ill-advised culture rage in the US to label objects with text bearing their nominate noun in English, and the article in French–Le Car. Le Bag.). Do you get it? I never did, even at the time, and now I have to try to explain it to a curious Mayan guy while we are both trying to communicate using fractured Spanish skills.
Here‘s how this usually plays out, if the two of us are hiking along or resting on a rock or something:
Friend: Hey, can you tell me what my shirt says?
GP: “A Night to Remember. 17 June 1981.” I think it was probably a party for young people of some sort.
Friend: Do you remember the night?
GP: No. I wasn’t at that party.
Friend: Do you think the person who bought this shirt remembers the night?
GP: I don’t think so.Friend: I don’t get the point. Why would you buy a shirt to wear to just one party?
GP: I don’t either. Hey, what kind of frogs do you see around here?
The t-shirt situation got the better of me one day. I was riding in the back of a Toyota taxi-truck, standing up with a group of local women and we were all headed off, but not together in any sense, to the market in the next town down. Mayans, I learned, have core muscles that would put a yoga instructor to shame. The ubiquitous Toyota taxi-trucks have an iron bar welded lengthwise down the middle of the truck bed, so you can hang-on while trying to stand up vertically in the back of a truck pitching along on an impossibly rutted dirt road. Well, only gringos actually need or use that bar. So we are bouncing down this road and I look like a broken pirate-ship mast flailing back and forth holding onto the bar for dear life, as I am very much taller than all the perfectly vertical seemingly motionless women filling the rest of the truck bed. A very important player in the Toyota truck-taxi system is the branch trimmer guy. He sits motionless cross-legged on the top of the cab of the truck, without holding on at all, and uses his machete to whisk away errant branches that might tear out a passenger’s eyeball. I am convinced that this guy is somehow glued or bolted to the cab of the truck, but he is not. He can just do this. But, even though he is sitting on the cab of the truck, I am still taller than him; this is a problem for me, as you can imagine with the branches and all.
Ahead I saw this very, very old gentleman walking on the side of the road in over-sized gym shorts, sandals, a hand-woven straw hat, and a loose black t-shirt. He had his machete in one hand, a walking stick in the other and was slowly walking on the side of the road. He heard the truck come up behind him, and turned to make sure he was out of the way. That’s when I fully can regard his t-shirt. There it is— in all its 70s iron-on white fuzzy font glory, the phrase that helped galvanize punk rock:
Disco Sucks
I was left speechless at this unexpected cultural collision, and I foolishly turned my head to watch it go by. I heard an unprecedented little yelp from the typically stoic Mayan women who always utterly refused to acknowledge my existence in their midst. I turned back forward just in time to a get slammed in the forehead by a large rock-solid un-ripe mango. I saw stars as it whipped my head backwards, like a losing boxer, and I saw it retreat into the distance, pendant and wobbling like a yodeler’s uvula in an arched maw of jungle vegetation. Then it fell to the roadway. I swear I heard a minor giggle emit from somewhere in the back of the truck, but I won’t ever be sure. Everything was spinning and I thought I was going to vomit on my fellow passengers. Back in camp that night, I nursed my swollen skull and demolished ego and wondered if the branch-trimmer guy was mad at me for ruining a snack he had been nurturing on his route for weeks. I still don’t like disco.
I had chicken pox when I was 8 years old. This was before there was a vaccine for varicella zoster, the virus that causes chicken pox. When I was growing up everyone got the virus and it made you feel like crap and gave you sores all over (most people wound up with at least a few scars) and then you got better. In fact, when the vaccine was introduced in 1995 many people thought it wasn’t necessary because the disease was relatively mild. The 10,000 people hospitalized each year in the US because of complications and 100 people who died every year probably didn’t agree.
And you know what? I don’t agree either. Varicella or Herpes zoster is a tricky virus that goes latent in nerve cells, much like its cousin Herpes simplex virus. Basically this means that when you recover from your infection, some virus hides out, waiting for your immune system to get weak from stress, old age, other infections, or whatever and then it attacks again! I don’t know what triggered it in my case, but a few days ago I got shingles. Shingles is a yucky, sometimes terribly painful, outbreak of the same virus that causes chicken pox. This time I didn’t get a fever and sores all over, just a cluster of sores along one of the nerves on my back. The scary thing about this, though, is that I am infectious. I could actually give chicken pox to someone who hasn’t had a chance to be vaccinated (a newborn baby for example), a pregnant woman, or anyone who is immunocompromised for some other reason like HIV disease or because they’ve had a transplant.
I could also give chicken pox to people whose parents chose not to vaccinate them. These could be children or adults. Unfortunately, they didn’t get a chance to decide whether they wanted to get a life threatening illness because their parents thought it would be “healthier” than getting a vaccine. They also won’t get to choose when they get shingles, and will put other completely helpless populations at risk when they get infected.
Some anti-vaccine people perpetuate the myth that being infected and recovering from a natural infection provides better immunity than getting a vaccine. This is simply not true. Viruses have evolved sly ways of manipulating our immune system, and often the immunity you develop from natural infections will not protect you very well from being reinfected or from the reactivation of latent viruses.
You know, if I had been born a decade later, I would have been able to get the chicken pox vaccine and I wouldn’t have this icky rash on my back. If I were older, my doctor would have recommended the shingles vaccine for me. Unfortunately I am stuck in the middle and got sick, but you don’t have to. Go get the varicella vaccine, and get your children vaccinated.
Look, we humans are awesome. We own this planet. If we really wanted to, we could spill every barrel of oil we have into the ocean, light it all into one gigantic fiery blaze, get on fire-proof boats in robot suits, somehow put on war paint inside the robot suits, build obnoxiously large metallic middle fingers, and shout to the heavens “TRY TO IGNORE THIS, MOTHER EARTH!!” Then, if we try really really really hard, we could clean it all up again, because some of us are actually sorry and some of us like to keep our marine food webs and all.
Why orchestrate such a display of power? Because we are the all-powerful movers of earth, the masters of fire and brimstone, and the makers of Haribo Gold Bears because holy freaking balls those things are really freaking delicious. We also have days of the year set aside where we butcher and devour different animals in front of children, purely because that’s what we’ve done for centuries. That right there is true power.
Point is, we are masters of everything we see. Remember in the Lion King where Simba is sitting with Darth Vader, who I guess came back to life to inhabit the form of a lion, and Vader is all “everything the light touches is our kingdom”? Yeah, we humans are exactly that. The only difference between humanity and Darth Vader is this: while the lions behave at the whim of the team of animators and writers that brought them to movie stardom, we are being toyed with by a tiny microscopic parasite that enter our guts, hitchhike a one-way ticket to our brains, and deliberately try to kill us by making us do really stupid and risky things.
I bet if you were eating a sandwich right before that last sentence, you probably aren’t anymore. It’s hard to eat something that’s been catapulted by your own shocked reaction, sending sandwich chunks to the opposite wall mid-chew. Even then, the walls may be really dirty, and that’s just not sanitary. I have no idea when I washed my walls last, and I keep my room relatively clean.
Why is this parasite trying to kill us? Simple. They want to get to our cats.
DAMMIT, MR. SCRUFFLES!!!
One of the reasons I wanted to write this article was to make myself look amazing. This isn’t hard, considering my creative wit and depth of scientific knowledge is nearly endless. The main reason I wanted to write this, though, was to talk about some badass ways that parasites can take over the minds of their hosts. It’s actually not uncommon to find mind-controlling parasites in nature. In fact, there is an entire field, called neuroparasitology, focusing on the effects a parasite can exert on host biochemistry, neurophysiology, and ultimately behavior and ecology.
Science jargon aside, there are some pretty badass parasites out there that tend to turn hosts into zombies. For instance, a genus of fungus called Chordyceps invades the mind of its insect host, forces it to climb to a high place, orders its newly-induced slave to latch on with a deathly grip, and busts out of the host all Alien-styled to shower its lethal spores onto unsuspecting insect hosts below.
Huuuugggghshhh, gross. I’m sorry I did that to you. I even feel a little dirty describing that. So, in an effort to make you and me feel less creeped-out and anxious, I’m going to comfort you by giving you increasingly creepy and troubling examples.
So there’s this non-sarcastically beautiful creature called the jewel wasp that wrestles cockroaches into submission and bites them in the neck to inject a mild dose of venom. This venom paralyzes the roach, and after a short time, causes the roach to move with absolutely no will of its own. The wasp then literally starts a one-float cockroach parade, leading the roach to the wasp’s burrow like a Siren leads a ship’s crew to the abyss to be eaten by mermaids or something. Gotta admit, I don’t fully understand the Sirens’ intentions. The wasp seals the roach inside the burrow with a single egg and a comically large timer counting down the exact moment until the egg hatches. When the timer goes off, the cockroach is devoured to death by the larvae and pupae of the wasp, giving rise to another generation of the most beautiful thing in the universe made entirely of cockroaches. Technically, these kinds of parasites are called parasitoids because they live on or within the organism for a long while, but they ultimately lead to the sterilization or death of their hosts.
The jewel wasp: made from 100% real cockroaches!! Holy balls, I just shuddered. Like, that seriously just happened.
Another badass parasitoid wasp, called Glyptapanteles, lays its eggs in a caterpillar to develop and consume the host. This time, however, the host does not die. IT DOES NOT DIE. No, these tenacious caterpillar hosts, half-devoured and all, cling to life like that chip I just dropped into my bowl of homemade salsa.
However, the wasp is not yet finished with its host. The caterpillar, after having live wasp pupae burst from its insides, spins a web of silk over the developing cocoons, stands upright on its back legs, puts on a lucky Japanese headband, and guards the cocoons with its life. Seriously, I wouldn’t dare screw with a half-eaten caterpillar sentinel, not even if I got a tummy full of wasp bodies as a treat afterwards. Eventually, the caterpillar starves to death, and that sucks, but at least– OK seriously curtains, what the hell are you doing?! Get it together!!!
OK, so I just bought one curtain yesterday, and not only is the color subtly different than the other curtains in my room, but they’re about a foot shorter, too. It keeps moving and I keep staring at it thinking “I can’t wait to give you back to the store”. I have never hated a curtain so much in my entire life. Please, curtain, quit moving and let me write.
Anyway, the point is that there are some pretty bitchin’ parasites and parasitoids that turn their hosts into zombies. You’ll notice though that all of the host examples I’ve used so far are from insects. Insects are little and dumb, and their tiny dumb stupid heads are really easy to invade. I mean, we’ve got huge brains! HUUUGGEEE!!! And they’re so complex, too! I mean damn, your visual cortex is so complicated that if you took every grain of sand on a 50-meter stretch of beach beach and lined them end to end, I’d be really disappointed because you decided to do that instead of listen to me talk about the visual cortex.
No, we are not immune. You read the first couple of paragraphs, so I assume you knew that already. So let’s just jump right into things and talk about Toxoplasma. This little protozoan is microscopic, but somehow it’s able to hijack the most complex brain on the planet like it ain’t no thang.
Braaaaainnnssss. Rat Amygdalaaaaaaaasssss.
Much like a forgotten old woman with nothing to live for, Toxoplasma loves cats. I’m not sure why Toxo loves cats so much, but in reality this is not very strange. See, parasites often have to infect several hosts in order to reach the one it’s really out to infect, called a primary host. All the hosts it infects in order to reach the primary hosts are called secondary hosts, or intermediate hosts. Secondary hosts often don’t feel the full effects of infection because the parasite isn’t reproducing inside of them, but occasionally a secondary host can have its behavior manipulated in order to reach the primary host. This is what Toxoplasma does. In fact, Toxo does this very very well.
The most clear-cut example of Toxo behavioral hijacking comes from the changes it can make to the brains of rats. Since Toxo is out to infect cats, it often causes the prey of cats to become more apparent in hopes that its current host will end up in the cat’s belly, the perfect place to make little Toxo babies. How does it cause rats to become more apparent? It forms cysts in the rat’s brain. In particular, Toxo cysts form near a region called the amygdala, a tiny region that controls fear and aggression. These inhibit the function of the amygdala, and basically cause rats to get sexually turned on by cat odors and actively seek cats by tracking their urine. Seriously not kidding.
Toxo gets really really interesting when we start talking about humans. The tiny protozoan can cause the formation of brain cysts just as it does in rats, though the damage is very subtle at first. These cysts aren’t as selective in their real estate options, so they just kinda form wherever. They release enzymes that convert a dopamine precursor into dopamine itself, triggering the action of receptors of a group of neurotransmitters called catecholamines (which include dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine). Ultimately, this causes people to do some wonky things.
What kind of wonky things? Well, for one, do you remember the Beatles? Well, John Lennon once saw a newspaper article about a car crash and wrote a song about it, which isn’t really relevant but does serve as a good segue into talking about how Toxo can make you crash your car. Just as in rats, Toxo can induce reckless behavior. So basically…man, I gave it away. Gimme a second to recover.
What else can Toxo do, you ask?? Well, it’ll deform your babies, of course!! Apparently Toxo can cause some pretty terrible damage to babies while they’re in the womb, causing deformities that I cannot describe to you. Let’s just say that I googled “Toxoplamodium babies” and it’s not likely that I’ll sleep tonight because of that decision. You’re going to google it anyway, aren’t you?? You heartless bastard.
See? It’s a real problem because this floating baby head appears on a banner with the name of the disease. That means it’s dangerous.
These things all seem pretty obvious. Sure, Toxo can cause people to be reckless, and babies are easy to injure as it (Anderson and May, 1967) is so the damage from Toxo seems a bit expected. What else can Toxo do that’s more unexpected? To find out, let’s take a quiz.
Question: Which of the following facts about Toxo is true?
A) Toxo can cause adult humans to become incredibly attached to their cats
B) Toxo can spread through dog semen, and can help upregulate testosterone to increase the odds of infecting a female
C) You’ll have no symptoms of Toxo in the later stages of infection
D) Toxo is associated with causing schizophrenia.
Answer: all of the above.
I find it absolutely mind-blowing that a tiny protozoan can increase a human host’s risk of schizophrenia. This isn’t some brain augmentation to an ancient area like the amygdala. Inducing hallucinations is not simple to do. On top of that, Toxo can cause humans to acquire ADD, OCD, and can even increase suicide risk. Just read this link. Your mind will be blown too.
Nature is truly out to kill us. How do I know? I am never wrong.
Dat p-value.
How else do I know? Toxo exists. We think we’re so high and mighty, immune from crazy zombie-inducing parasites.We are clearly not. Here’s where I make a point that we are not so different from components of the greater aggregate of beings we call “nature”, and that we ourselves are indeed a part of that. Then, here’s where I get really preachy, talking about how things we do affect the natural world, and here I mention the circle of life and make a funny quip about the Lion King and the irony therein that my argument of the circle of life has referenced an earlier part of this article.
Want to hear me talk about an animal, plant, bacterium, or whatever the hell else that you think is awesome? Leave me a message in the comments! I’ll probably ignore it, unless it’s actually really good. It’s worth a shot to try though.
Come on. Comment. Go for it.
To view the really interesting article most of this information came from, click this link!
Before I moved away from Florida I never realized how much I depended on good weather to motivate me. I’d always believed that optimism and happiness came from within, but now I know this is only half true. Moving to an area that gets less sunshine than from where you came from is a real downer. Atlanta gets a relatively median amount of sunshine per year (compare Atlanta GA at ~217 days; Tampa FL at ~244 days; Seattle WA at ~164 days) but the pitiful winter here harbors few sunny days. Gray skies can last for 3 days straight, the harsh cold wind is relentless, and February seems like the longest month of the year despite having the least amount of days.
What bugs me most is that threatening clouds hover over the city for days but never DO ANYTHING. At least in Florida when clouds come, they produce rain, thunder and lightning for an hour, then get the hell out and the ordeal is over. But here, when the weather wants to be gloomy, it’s taking you down too. It doesn’t help when my family, still in Florida, tells me they’ve taken the boat out every weekend since the beginning of February.
It’s amazing how the weather can be a source of depression. I’m sure you’ve heard of seasonal depression, which is technically called Seasonal Affective Disorder. If you haven’t, it is a type of depression that occurs when bright light and sunshine is limited, most often during the winter months. Sunshine is the obvious treatment for the disorder but just how effective is sunshine? Especially when every dermatologist and health magazine advises you to block the sun?
Studies have shown that the brain produces more of the natural antidepressant serotoninon sunny days than on darker days. This is regardless of the season. Not only are serotonin levels higher on bright days than on overcast ones, but the rate of serotonin production is directly related to the duration of bright sunlight. No other atmospheric conditions are related to serotonin levels (article from WebMD Health News).
When sunlight interacts with our skin, Vitamin D is produced through photochemical reactions. Of course, prolonged UV exposure can be harmful for your skin, but some exposure is extremely beneficial. (DO: Be active in sunlight when possible, with at least 25 SPF on. DO NOT: Lay by the beach all day without lotion). Vitamin D works together with calcium to build strong bones and maintain bone strength. It also has a preventative effect for some cancers including colon, breast, ovarian and prostate. A deficiency in Vitamin D is linked to these types of cancer as well as to depression, lowered immunity, osteoporosis, and arthritis.
You might have been aware that sunshine was positive for you, but here are some fun facts that maybe you didn’t know:
According to Healthkicker, people tend to buy more lottery tickets on cloudy days because weather-induced bad moods deplete self control, making us vulnerable to temptation. (Ladies, think Ben & Jerry’s ice cream pint intakes – were those ever on bright sunny days?)
People use more alcohol, coffee, tobacco and chocolate when there’s less sunshine because they feel the need to compensate artificially as means to elevating their mood.
Getting a daily dose of sunshine increases your number of white blood cells, which in turn enhances your immune system, stated by Natural Health Restored.
Sunshine encourages healthy circulation by also stimulating the production of red blood cells, which increases the amount of oxygen in your blood.
A study performed at the University of Michigan proved that sunshine is strongly correlated with daily stock returns. Stocks traded on sunny days yielded nearly 25% more money than those traded during cloudy periods. Psychologists attribute this to people’s tendency to view situations more optimistically when it’s sunny, and less likely to scrutinize an investment they might cast aside when feeling grumpy.
March is only a few weeks away, which means warmer weather is coming. Besides the fact that spring is my favorite season, I am SO excited to shed my layers of fuzzy clothes and to enjoy Atlanta’s parks again. When the time comes, do yourself a favor and GET OUT of the library, frolic in the daylight like a fool high on Vitamin D and always wear some sunscreen!
In the spirit of things: [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/44617965″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Imagine you are in your last semester at college. You’ve done well academically, studied business, and you have a job offer lined up. Your parents are letting up on the constant brow beating about expectations and preparing for the future. The light at the end of the tunnel that opens up to the real world is as close as you have ever seen it. Just a few more classes to get through and you are home free. But, say, during one of those classes the professor says something that catches your attention.
“And believe it or not boys and girls, you could potentially grow gourmet mushrooms from recycled coffee grounds.”
You sit up, stop your doodle and look around. Did everybody just hear that? The professor just told us how we could make money on waste! Free money! Mushrooms! You approach the professor after class as all but one other student in the lecture file out of the auditorium. Though you probably wouldn’t know it at the time you are looking your future business partner in the face. Another light blinks on in the tunnel, and this one is green.
Sound far-fetched? It’s not. That is exactly how “Back to the Roots”, a startup enterprise centered on bringing consumers in touch with their food in a sustainable way – all while turning a profit and benefiting their community of Oakland, California – began. Nikhil Arora and Alejandro “Alex” Velez met for the first time after a lecture at UC Berkeley during their last semester in college in which the professor made the same proclamation I wrote above. Just as the professor had said, you can grow gourmet mushrooms off of waste like used coffee grounds, which is exactly what the pair did. First by experimenting in a frat-house kitchen after watching videos on YouTube on how the process should go, then to selling their mushrooms at a farmers market in Berkeley, California and eventually to their debut product the Back to the Roots at-home mushroom kit which features coffee grounds collected and re-purposed from Peet’s Coffee & Tea, a Berkeley based café, into do it yourself mushroom kits. Just add water at home to grow over a pound of gourmet mushrooms ready to eat!
The Back to the Roots grow-at-home mushroom kit
Within three years of their founding in 2009 Nikhil and Alex who are self-described “urban mushroom farmers” have secured distribution deals with massive retailers including Whole Foods, Bed Bath & Beyond and the Home Depot. They went from collecting coffee grounds headed for the landfill to being paid to haul it away by Peet’s Coffee & Tea, an early supporter of the young startups. As of 2012 they had diverted millions of pounds of coffee grounds destined for landfills. At roughly 3.6 million pounds in 2012 alone, that’s the equivalent of 175 dump trucks of material.
I first became aware of Back to the Roots through their recent Kicstarter campaign to launch a new product – the Aquaponics Garden – which like the mushroom kit is a “grow-at-home” concept herb garden using hydroponics. Growing herbs at home using this method is an old trick, but the mushroom wielding duo (Mario and Luigi?) added an interesting twist of a live fish in the nutrient bath. In this way, feeding the fish encourages it to… “feed” the plants which in turn clean the water for the fishy. The Aquaponics Garden has the same closed loop low waste ethos as the mushroom kit and is thus very much in line with the mushroom kit using recycled coffee grounds.
But I couldn’t avoid the nagging feeling that there was more afoot than delicious herbs and modern architecture inspired fish tanks. Around the same time that the Berkley grads were gearing up to take the DIY culinary world by storm, I began my PhD studies in Atlanta, GA. My new apartment with sweeping views of the side of a building and a dumpster covered in puke didn’t produce the kind of urban living I had expected when moving from rural Virginia where I went to college. Determined to spruce the place up, I wanted some potted plants. After all, there was a spacious balcony from which to enjoy to aforementioned scenery with a cool glass of sweet-tea (Atlanta, remember?). But lo – no direct sunlight. My first batch of plants withered soon after sprouting and becoming spindly, yellowed baby plants.
I turned to the internet – the font of all knowledge – to seek a remedy. Hydroponics was the logical solution. With hydroponics I didn’t need sun or warm weather. Hell, I didn’t even need soil. I settled on one branch of hydroponics – pardon the pun – called “aquaponics” in which the roots of the plant are interwoven into a passive binder, usually clay pebbles, and dangle into a nutrient rich solution. Through my research I found an easy design using a spray-painted plastic storage bin with holes drilled in the top and a fish tank aerator hot-glued to the bottom, a few feet of aluminum flashing to make a reflective enclosure, and a couple of 20 watt CFL bulbs plugged into the sockets of a “make a lamp kit”. Make a lamp indeed. A grow lamp.
Unfortunately, some of the critical supplies I needed couldn’t be found anywhere. I remember inquiring in the garden section of a home improvement store for things like “netpots” and “hydroton” and “rock wool” and “grow max powdered plant nutrients”. After a few minutes of listing name brands to a dumbfounded employee in an orange apron, I told him my intended application.
“I am trying to make an herb garden in my living room. Like basil and stuff.”
I felt it was a reasonable claim. After all, I had just put a few packets of seeds for exactly that – basil and stuff – in my basket.
A knowing look came over the clerk’s face.
“Oh. We don’t have that here.” he said with a little grin.
Back to the internet. It had to be done. A specialty store. I searched everywhere I thought was reasonable – head shops with fluorescent posters and glass “tobacco” pipes, local hardware stores serving as fronts for the mob, Jerry who lived behind the dumpster. Nobody had even heard of the stuff. When I finally found what I was looking for it was on the edge of the city in a run down industrial park. I called the store.
“Do you guys have…” I paused, remembering the clerk at the home improvement store, “Net pots?”
The clerk, “What size?”
This was the place.
When I arrived I found a brightly lit sign over the top of a small warehouse. Inside was every manner of tubing, pots, nutrient and testing apparatus that I had never heard of. They also had camouflaged “grow room tents”. It was an odd mix of completely legitimate looking industrial equipment – hydroponics is a great choice for farming organic produce in otherwise unsuitable locations – and everything I imagine I would need if I was looking for a great way to get kicked out of school.
I bought my supplies and a small booklet on hydroponic gardening. I paid in cash.
Is this aquaponics garden thing legit? I interviewed Nikhil, one of the co-founders of Back to the Roots to learn more. Nikhil and I discussed their recent success with a Kickstarter campaign to raise capital for production of the Aquaponics Garden, lessons learned from development of their grow-at-home mushroom kit, and the business philosophy that has helped them gain recognition.
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Charged Magazine (CM): So, How’s it going?
Nikhil (N): Doing good. Just wrapping up the year so it’s been crazy. Comes to an end all of a sudden, Ya’ know?
CM: First, I wanted to congratulate you on the Kickstarter thing. You guys were asking for $100K and I think it closed a little less than week ago and you guys cleared almost two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars?
N: Yeah. Two-forty-eight. Almost 250 but it was crazy. It was really cool seeing the response from the community. It was the first time I’d really done something like that, the whole crowd sourcing thing, it just works! People we’ve never met before and don’t know who they were just coming out with their support. It was really cool.
CM: I think you’ve hit on something important – you’re talking about, I guess, the community involvement in your project. Is that the reason you guys decided to go with something like Kickstarter?
N: Yeah. I think we knew had a lot of support for the mushroom kit from our community and we felt that the aquaponics kit could be something similar. And I think to do really well on Kickstarter, and we were like studying it for a while before, you have to try to hit people on a different level. It wasn’t just a transactional thing. People felt more like they were supporting a movement, and they were supporting something bigger than themselves, and that’s why when we launched this product we felt it was something like that. It was something that inspired people and hit the right chord on Kickstarter so it kind of took on a life of its own. It was really cool to see and we got our product improved so much man, the 30 days from where it started off we got thousands of messages from people just out of good will giving us awesome ideas and suggestions. We just signed off on our final design yesterday to send off to the manufacturers and we made so many changes based on feedback we got from people.
CM: Right. And uh, speaking of that feedback, I read in a little bit on your Facebook page regarding this particular product and I definitely see what you mean as far as people who are very interested and passionate about the idea – but of course there was a little bit of negative feedback as well – specifically regarding the fact that you guys would have a live fish in the Aquaponics Garden. But you guys handled it surprisingly gracefully. You know, you said “yeah, we are definitely aware that this is something we need to build into our design” and it seemed you owned it right off the bat and the product is not even on the shelves yet, so I have to commend you on that.
N: Thank you man. It was a big design constraint for us. According to PETA and the most common standards, 1” of fish needs 1 gallon of water. That was our reasoning that for our 3 gallon tank you could have one beta fish in there or two smaller fish so we kept to that. One cool thing about aquaponics and why it’s totally different is that most of the time the health of fish is determined not by the size but more the toxicity of the water. You’re supposed to change the water in regular tanks really frequently, like once a week, to make sure it’s clean and ammonia is not building up but the cool thing with aquaponics is the plants are constantly cleaning the water out so it’s more about the constant quality of water for the fish.
CM: And definitely having the opportunity to grow yourself some fresh herbs at home is a driver.
N: Yeah. I think when you put something like that out into the world, on that kind of platform, we knew were going to get a lot of feedback, and we got some negative feedback and we got a lot of positive feedback that we were able to apply and make changes from. Overall it was a really cool experience and it would have taken us so long to get this data back if we had just launched into retail, because here you have such a direct communication with people I thought it was an awesome way to launch a new product.
CM: So, I think you guys mentioned this during an interview or something, but the connotation with two kids from Berkeley trying to grow mushrooms has a certain connotation – so I thought it was somewhat ironic that the second choice you guys pick is something with an equally, somewhat seedy I guess connotation, that is hydroponics and the whole growing plants in your closet kind of thing. I wonder if that thought occurred to you or what you think of that?
N: Yeah, you know it’s funny we never even thought about it that way. We had been kicking the idea around for a month or two before somebody said to us, “First you guys were growing mushrooms and now you’re selling hydroponics systems?” We just started cracking up and it hit us that we hadn’t even considered that both products have that same stereotype.
CM: Regardless of the stereotype though, I think the market you are attracting is a mix of DIY enthusiasts and people interested in knowing their food and on top of that doing something good for the environment and education. That’s the next thing I wanted to talk about, I think it’s pretty impressive what you guys are doing in the schoolrooms. You guys are doing product demos and have a program where you donate the mushroom kit to classrooms. Do you have similar plans to do that with the hydroponics kit?
N: We are. Actually, for the mushroom kit, every kit that you post a picture of on our Facebook page we donate one to a classroom of your choice. With the Aquaponics Garden we are trying to think how we can make that work. Now we’re thinking because we saw such a cool response to the whole Kickstarter idea, we thought, “Why don’t we implement that on our website?” We are thinking of having people who want to get a kit to a school of their choice can post that school on our website and they can get friends and family to pledge a dollar or two dollars and they can crowd source their own kits for schools or something like that. We are trying to think right now how to incorporate that because we are not launching them until late February or early March. We know this stuff would be amazing for schools because with the mushroom kit, it lasts for maybe a couple crops so maybe you get a month out of it, but with the Aquaponics Garden you buy it once and it lasts you for a lifetime, so teachers can have it for like 10 years you know? We want to see it in every classroom so we are trying to figure out what is the best way to make that happen right now.
CM: It’s way cooler than the class hamster.
N: Yeah!
CM: You and Alex are quite young, and I thought what is particularly interesting is that you guys are kind of wrapped up in the era of the startup culture. I would say some of your contemporaries in the tech fields go a completely different direction. It’s basically they have a handful of guys who work until they spin out an idea and they are seeking venture capital for like a million bucks. You guys every step of the way it seems said “How can we not only build our business and build a community involvement in our business? How can we build these connections where things that are good for our business are also good for getting jobs to the Oakland area?” For example in an interview you guys were talking about trying to find a domestic producer for your fish tanks.
N: Which we did. They are like 20 minutes away from us right here in northern California.
CM: Yeah, which I think is fantastic. I guess do you have a comment regarding your own education or maybe people who would be in your age group as far as the typical way of approaching a startup company?
N: Yeah, I just think for us it’s just been the right thing to do based on our values and I think it goes back to the environment we were in, how we were raised, things like that all played a part into that. But it’s hard to just pitch it to everyone saying “it’s the best thing to do based on our values, based on the environment” but at the end of the day it’s the right thing you do for your business too I think. There has been this transformation towards transparency and community in helping companies grow, and if you are not engaged in community from the start and giving back and being a positive part of that community then you are stunting your own growth. There has been a shift in the kind of companies people want to support and people are really looking for companies that are doing good. That’s the one message we really try to tell people. If you are not going do it because you love the environment or something like that then do it because it’s good for your bottom line. Being open to your community is the next wave of marketing and transparency. There is a really cool movie actually called “The Naked Brand” that talks about how it’s not about clever marketing anymore, it’s about transparent marketing and how transparency is the new clever in how to grow a business. It’s something we’ve become really passionate about and I think us being open about our flaws and what we were doing right and what we were doing wrong has actually helped us grow faster. Admitting mistakes has helped us grow faster. We’ve all graduated in the middle of this whole financial crisis, I think with a sense of “there has got to be a better way to do this.” I think people, consumers, are thinking the same thing that there has got to be a better way to do business and are looking to support companies that they feel are doing it the right way. I just think it makes sense all the way around.
CM: Another thing I thought was interesting is that when you guys were talking about originally doing product research for the mushroom kits you turned to YouTube, and when you were trying to find buyers for your leftover coffee grounds you turned to Craigs List. I am kind of going back to what I was talking about before with the tech startups where of course their business wouldn’t exist without the internet but it’s because their business is on the internet. How has the internet shaped your company?
N: Yeah. That’s dead on. We graduated having no clue about anything to do with mushrooms so we just watched every single YouTube video and found all these articles and books on different websites. It’s just cool how you can teach yourself anything now. There is no longer an excuse of “I didn’t know that, or I didn’t know how to do that.” You can just log on and teach yourself anything. We taught ourselves mushroom farming on coffee grounds from YouTube. It democratizes business and startups and education because you can go to a library and long online and just figure it out.
CM: What are your goals for the launch of the Aquaponics Garden?
N: For us, so much about the Aquaponics Garden has to do with inspiration and education. Our big vision is to see how many classrooms we can get this into. We’ve taken it to some classrooms right now, this one prototype we have, and honestly it is incredible the response you get from kids. I think it’s maybe the combination of the fish, the bubbles going up from the pump or the sound of water coming back down, but it’s so stimulating for them that they just rush to it and ask all these questions. It’s crazy how fast they understand what’s going on with the whole ecosystem. That’s our biggest goal. We want to build this thing out so we can literally get this into every classroom. We feel like for every classroom you can get this in, you are changing 30 kids perspective on food and the environment. You are teaching them that things work together and there is no such thing as “waste” because the fish waste is making the plants grow. That’s our big vision. We really want to get this into schools.
CM: Sure. So my background is in engineering, and actually I have attempted to do my own hydroponics before. I moved into an apartment that had no sunlight, so I really couldn’t do any window planters so I made the whole enclosure with some CFL lightbulbs. When I was building my own design I spent a lot of time online to see what other people had done but I ran into a lot of kind of technical hiccups that I had to work through. So out of curiosity, I’m wondering what are some of the biggest technical issues you guys have run into trying to bring something like this to market?
N: The biggest thing for us has been bring this whole system down to a smaller scale – aquaponics is normally done on a larger scale – we took months of experimentation into how to get the ratios down, looking at flow rates to make sure the system was still functional at such a small scale, how many fish do you need, how many plants can you grow, things like that. It was constant learning, and we finally got to the point where we had produced a ton of these and put them in different households and it we had functional prototypes. Once we saw the basil popping up we got so pumped because we had figured it out. We were always tweaking along the way and we wanted to encourage communal learning around this where people are sharing tips on what worked. We want this to be a platform for people to get really creative with it – people want to try and grow flowers, different foods. One guy emailed us saying he wanted to put shrimp in there. It’s like people hacking into their own creativity.
CM: I’m interested in some of the manufacturing aspects. You mentioned you were able to find a local provider. Was that difficult given the way that everything – at least when you are trying to do it cheaply and in huge quantities – goes overseas? What did you learn from that experience?
N: It was a big learning curve all around. We talked to dozens of manufacturers. It’s funny, because you design something, and then you realize the first go-round when you take it to engineers who tell you “you can’t do this, you can’t do that” or it’ll cost you thousands of dollars so there was a lot of back and forth between design and engineering.
CM: Did you find a lot of pressure from existing industry to abandon your business philosophies as far as sustainability and local design are concerned?
N: We had a really good design partnership and at the end of the day I think Alex and I knew what we wanted to do and we wanted to keep it domestic – we wanted to keep it local – and there is kind of a statement about that so we shopped around until we found a partner who believed in that same vision. It’s tough. It is cutthroat, because every dollar of cost (in manufacturing) ends up being like 4 more dollars of retail because of markups and stuff like that, but we really wanted to keep it at a $50 price point. That was our big goal and we are working our butts off to do that. With that we had to compromise a lot, because we could have added a lot more features, but for us it was more important to get something out of $50 and leave room for people who really want to get into it with add-ons, but we wanted it to be available and accessible to everyone, at least to a lot wider market than having like a $100 price point.
CM: When you project into the future, how do you guys imagine you are going to maintain the regional impact you have in the Oakland area. Eventually you are going to need more space. What’s the plan?
N: Yeah, we are looking at a new space now but we want to stay in Oakland. We see a massive opportunity to connect people to their food and we want to work our butts off to take that on and be the brand that people think about when trying to connect to their food. We want people to feel good that our company is doing stuff in the right way. For us, were not afraid of scale, were not afraid of size so we are working to grow and meet really ambitious goals along the way. The more we grow the more good we can do in the world is how we see it. The more we can develop a platform for our products the more capacity we have to do good and I think the community is going to help us get there. We’re maintaining an open door policy. I’m really pumped. I’m excited for this new year.
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For more information on Back to the Roots products, and a look at their growing list of accolades, you can visit their website: http://www.backtotheroots.com/
Herpetology and getting lost. These are the two driving themes of my life. They have shaped my career and enabled me to discover species new to science, but they have also cost me relationships, frustrated everyone close to me, and nearly cost me my life. Without them I would be a different person, so this is a ballad to the lost art of getting lost.
After college, I left Santa Barbara, California to go to graduate school in Texas and study under a mid-career hotshot who specializes in Central American herpetology. He is a gringo North American but was raised in Guatemala and moving in-and-out of that culture is the norm for him. In the first year of my grad program I got the assignment of my dreams. I was to be delivered to a coffee plantation in a remote region Guatemala to conduct a survey of amphibians and reptiles. I was to do an ecological transect of herpetological diversity up the face of a very steep mountain in the Sierra de las Minas, in the state of Alta Verapaz. Although the area had certainly been populated since at least the Classic Maya Era, no biologist had ever worked anywhere near the region. If you look at a map of Guatemala, you’ll see a huge lake (Lago de Izabal) in the eastern part of the country. I was about 20 miles west of the lake, in the Polochic Valley, at the base of the north slope of a mountain called Cerro Raxon. The village/plantation is called Pueblo Veijo (Old Village) in reference to the fact that the site had been inhabited by native Maya for millenia. The problems turned out to be: 1) I spoke not a word of Spanish; 2) although I grew up in Europe (army brat) and was accustomed to being immersed in foreign cultures, I’d never been to Latin America beyond a couple family fishing trips to Baja California; and 3) Guatemala was embroiled in a horrific genocidal civil war (that was purposefully instigated by the US-CIA in the 50’s, by the way).
The day before I went to the airport my mentor gave me some topographic maps of my study site and said “If you get pulled over by anyone that looks like police or army, don’t let them see these maps because they will assume you are there to inform the indigenous insurgency and you will be arrested. Oh, and don’t bring those Vietnam-era military field boots you wear. They are US-Military issue. Get some boots that look more like a tourist would wear.” So I borrowed money from my parents and bought some brightly colored boots from the local REI. I put the maps in the bottom of my bag of gear.
I swear never again to travel so ignorant of my situation. It turned out that speaking Spanish would have been only of partial utility, as I was sufficiently remote that most people there spoke Q’eqchi’, one of the many dozens of very distinct Maya languages in the region, and only a bit of Spanish. Every time I ventured beyond the main part of the coffee plantation (as was my task as a herpetological surveyor), I encountered Mayan villagers who would drop everything and run away from me. I was terrified. If they were scared of me, then there must be something that I should be scared of as well. Since my return, I have built a small library on the recent history of Guatemala, and I now know what I did not know then. It turns out that the chinks I saw in the concrete-block walls in the nearby town of Telemán were from a massacre only a couple of years prior to my trip. Genocidal civil wars are real, and they are incredibly ugly.
I had an ecological transect to conduct, and I finally got myself up to the highest village on that slope of the sierra, a tiny Mayan village they called Peña Blanca (“White Stone” because there was a big one there) in Spanish, or some other name I never managed in Q’eqchi’ (Mayan dialects include glottal-stops in mid-syllable, so they are essentially impossible for the non-native speaker). The people seemed nice in Peña Blanca, and they did not run away from me. I set up a camp outside their village, with their implied permission. The first two nights I had a small crowd of people around me watching as I made a crappy camp dinner and prepared my specimens, samples, and notes. None of us could really talk to one another, but I managed to get across that I hoped to camp there, wished them no trouble, and planned to wander around outside the village looking for snakes and frogs and such. They were cool with that, and even brought me all the snakes they killed in their cornfields every day (very useful specimens for me).
After a few days I hiked back down to my main camp on the plantation and got read the riot act by the fascist, racist Guatemalan manager for having “anything to do with those rebels on the mountain” (recall there was a civil war going on, essentially between aristocrats like this guy and the Mayans in the mountains). About a week later I went back up the mountain to my camp, but this time not a single person would come anywhere near me. I was there for about three days when it dawned on me that I was doing a bad thing—my self-serving data collection for my degree was severely compromising their daily life. No kids were playing outside, and the men were sneaking off before sunrise to tend the corn. I assumed they returned from the fields, but I never saw them. Evidently, someone had spread word that I was not what I seemed. I felt terrible, but packing up camp and leaving was not such a simple affair because I was so far up on the mountain. So I had to spend that night there, and planned to leave the next morning—carrying what I could on one trip (it took about three trips to get all my stuff up there), and leaving everything else for them; things I naively hoped could be useful (e.g., sleeping bag, not a bottle of formaldehyde).
Evening set, it began to rain, and I realized that this was my best and last chance to sample the highest part of the mountain because I never intended to return. Nocturnal amphibians and reptiles move in the rain, and it started to rain to rain really, really, really hard so I did get some good samples. Around 1:00 am I was exhausted and turned to go back to my camp. On the way back I took a wrong fork in the trail (it was still really raining and, if you wear glasses like I do, one cannot look around during a rainstorm; you look straight down, at your feet) and I wound up not in my little encampment, but smack in the middle of this village. I was disoriented, wet, cold, and scared. As I looked around, my mega-flashlight (standard issue in my line of work) was beaming through the twig huts and wakeing everybody. I could hear commotion coming out of the huts. My first thought was of regret—oh, darn, now I’m waking everybody up! Then I started to hear machetes tinging, guns being loaded and cocked, and saw barrels sticking through the slats. I’ve since learned that it was standard practice for Guatemalan Army squads to wipe out “rogue” villages by sending in troops in the middle of the night—with mega flashlights—to massacre and set fire to entire villages. I was mortified, and terrified. So, I just started yelling “Gringo perdido, no hay problema” and “Culebra! Rana! Sapo!” at the top of my lungs. That all translates essentially into “Lost white-boy, there is no problem. Snake! Frog! Toad!” Meanwhile I dashed in the nearest direction that did not have a hut. I clawed my way up through a steep muddy corn field and finally found my camp. At the first glimmer of daylight I left and never went back up there. I regret that I caused them so much distress, I really do. I’m glad they did not shoot me. But given what I’ve learned since then, I’m amazed that they did not. I’m convinced that those few words in Spanish, “Gringo perdido, no hay problema” and “Culebra! Rana! Sapo!” saved my life.
I’ve returned to Guatemala many times since then, but things have changed. The war mellowed out, even if the original tensions remain. I never travel alone. I’ve learned Spanish (but no Mayan dialects, beyond a couple of animal names). And I am not so naïve. To be sure, there were many more adventures and misadventures over the years, including a murder right in front of my face, but nothing since, anywhere, has been so personally transformative as that particular night. I have a one-man punk band called Gringo Perdido and some friends use the phrase as a nickname for me. No one wants to be known for being an uninformed, unintentionally inconsiderate, disoriented boob, but a colleague of mine returned from Guatemala recently and said, “Joe, do you realize that every young biologist in that country knows that story?” Gringo perdido, no hay problema.
A few days ago I stumbled upon this webpage and couldn’t stop laughing. I don’t think I have ever laughed so hard in my entire life. I was crying, a stitch in my side. Any time I would regain my composure, I would lose it again within 0.237 seconds of reading another line. So of course, after struggling through the page, I decided to consult my trusty friend YouTube for some poop-themed videos. Here’s one of my favorites: 3 Types of Girlfriends Based on Pooping Habits (it’s a little vulgar). Now, I’m not entirely sure why I find these types of things so entertaining, but I think I find them funny because they are usually true. Some people don’t like to admit they poop, and they definitely don’t want to talk about it, but why is that so? Everyone poops!
Have you ever wondered how poop is formed, or why it comes in different shapes and sizes? Well, let me enlighten you. After food passes through the mouth, esophagus, and stomach, being digested by various amylases and gastric juices, it makes its way into the small intestine where the majority of the fluid and nutrients from the digestive process and from the food you eat are reabsorbed by the body. An additional amount of fluid is reabsorbed in the large intestine, also known as the colon.
This is where the magic happens.
Digested food moves through the colon via a type of smooth muscle contraction called peristalsis. As it moves along, the poop starts to take shape as the fluid (referred to as H2O in the diagram below) is drawn out. As more fluid leaves, the poop becomes more solid. During times of viral or bacterial infections, fluid may not be properly reabsorbed, causing the common side effect of diarrhea. Have you ever been constipated? This is a result of poop moving too slowly through the colon, causing too much fluid to be reabsorbed. Depending on what you eat, your poop may vary in appearance. If you eat some corn, you may see it again since our bodies can’t digest the cellulose outer layer. Ever drink a brightly colored slushy saturated with food coloring? Your poop likely changed color.
The digestive tracts of carnivores differ from those of herbivores due to the different digestive requirements each type of animal has. Take a koala for example, whose cecum (the section of colon below the attachment point of the small intestine) is about 2 meters long! This longer cecum enables the koalas to digest leaves and provides a greater amount of surface area for nutrients to be absorbed. Check out this koala who, instead of eating leaves, is chomping on an apple. I wonder how long it took for that apple to become poop…
Sources:
Campbell, Neil A., and Jane B. Reece. Biology. San Francisco: Benjamin Cummings, 2002. Print.
An algal bloom appears off the Princess Astrid Coast in East Antarctica. NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC.
Greetings biophiles! What do algal blooms, great white sharks, and okapis all have in common? They’re all absolutely fascinating and they’re all on my list of events and animals I would jump at the chance to observe. This ever growing list of biology-related items has evolved into something of a bucket list, hence the title, and includes biological phenomena around the globe that I hope to one day see for myself!
So what ‘s first up on my biology bucket list? Algal blooms.
First some background: Algal blooms are basically just the growth of aquatic algae at a hyper fast pace, resulting in washes of discoloration over bodies of water. These artworks of nature generally occur due to favorable conditions such as availability of resources like minerals, nutrients, warmth, and sunlight. The algae, usually referred to as phytoplankton, are microscopic, single-celled organisms that make their home in the upper layers of both fresh and marine waters. They serve as vital components of aquatic ecosystems due to their powers of photosynthesis, as they provide food (directly or indirectly) for everything from penguins to blue whales. Phytoplankton even feed you, as they are used as feed in aquaculture. We depend on these little guys!
However, I not only appreciate them for their hard work in the upkeep of our oceans, but also for their aesthetic value on both a microscopic and macroscopic level. If you do an image search of either “phytoplankton” or “diatoms” (go, click on it!), you’ll see that these guys come in all kinds of wacky shapes, sizes, and colors.Looking at them under a microscope (and I would love to take my own sample from an algal bloom) is pretty much like walking through an art gallery (except better) because the artwork is made out of living organisms just hangin’ out, powering an entire ecosystem and being funky shaped. Ahhh, that is the life.
(Side note: lots of ordinary things look crazy awesome when looked at close up, sand for instance. Oh nature, your beauty reveals itself on so many levels. *swoon*)
How do I plan on experiencing an algal bloom you may ask? By swimming in one of course!* (Or looking at them from the International Space Station, as most algal blooms can be seen from space. NASA, if you want to make dreams come true, hit me up!)
And no, I’m not talking about taking a dive in the pond scum of the poorly-kept neighborhood pool. Instead, I hope to travel to what are known as bio-bays: bodies of water where bioluminescent phytoplankton, or more specifically dinoflagellates, light up the waters at night and create waves dotted with glowing spots to match the starry night sky. There are several locations around the world where tourists can experience the glowing waters- Puerto Rico, Vietnam, and the Maldives to name a few.
However, these kinds of trips cost money and, alas, I am a poor college student, so until I can save up to travel to Puerto Rico (or the ISS), I’ll continue looking at satellite photos (like the ones from NASA, linked below). Other types of algal blooms can occur in bodies of water around the world and vary depending on seasonal and causal factors.
Glowing blue waves on Vaadhoo Island in the Maldives. Photograph by Doug Perrine, Alamy
I like to keep my eye out for new photos of algal blooms, such as this one, which displays Impressionist-esque swirls of green and yellow atop the waters off the Princess Astrid Coast in Antarctica, taken by NASA’s Terra Satellite this past February. Antarctic blooms generally occur in December (the start of summer for Antarctica) as the increased sunlight favors the growth of these photosynthesis superstars and kickstarts the rest of the marine ecosystem in time for baby-making season. This particular algal bloom’s late season appearance excited scientist to the possibility that it was caused by a more unusual factor: nutrients blowing off of a nearby ice shelf. This is just one example of how algal blooms can come about.
Year round you can find news of all types of algal blooms being spotted in different places around the world, so keep a lookout for this fascinating biological phenomena! If you would like to see more of their intoxicating beauty I would recommend perusing through Visible Earth, a catalog of photos from NASA, or checking out this gallery from Wired magazine, which will also tell you about regional types of algal blooms.
So, dear readers, what do you think? Would you go swimming in a bioluminescent ocean? I hope you’ll take a look through some of the galleries linked throughout (some of these photos make great wallpapers!), and of course I’d love to know what’s on your biology bucket list via the comments section below. (Also, keep a look out for our next installment of our biology bucket list series!)
*It should be noted that some algal blooms are harmful (HABs), and certain species, about 2% of the 5000+ species of marine phytoplankton, are associated with toxins and can actually harm an ecosystem through the release of neurotoxins and the depletion of oxygen in water. These HABs can arise naturally and in predictable patterns, but have also increased in frequency due to human activity like agricultural run-off. So please do not just go jumping into any old discolored water and be sure to look out for notifications from your local health and marine departments if you plan on participating in any recreational activities in or near your local lakes or beaches.
OK, kids, we need to talk. No, you’re not in trouble. The people in trouble are health, anatomy, and psychology teachers who try to teach a specific concept that is WRONG.
Any guesses about what connects those teachers? No? Well, here’s the offending diagram.
Don’t believe images like this. EVER.
That, my lovelies, is a picture of a tongue. But see those cool segments that tell you what flavor is tasted by each segment of the tongue? They’re completely and totally unnecessary. Your tongue doesn’t work that way, despite what so many teachers and even college professors would have you believe.
No, don’t try to look all cute and happy, Mr. Boring. You’re on scientific trial here.
Let’s go back a bit to Harvard University circa 1901. A psychologist, Edwin G. Boring (more like Edwin G. Mistaken-Fact-Check) misinterprets data in a German paper, leading to the belief that each region of the tongue is specialized to taste exactly one of four basic flavors.
“OH! Cool!” he says, thinking this break-through will change the way we interact with food (or something).
Trust me, it didn’t.
Let’s fast forward to 1974, when Virginia Collins discovered that all tastes are distributed equally across the tongue. Case closed, right?
NOPE! People are STILL using the tongue map to explain taste buds in 2012!
Let’s expand your knowledge a bit, though. Why is this tongue map concept so incredibly insulting to the science of taste? Here’s three big reasons why!
Well, first off, it is incorrect in the count of basic flavors. The map shows the four flavors (bitter, sour, salty, and sweet) that were known in 1901, but there are at least five that we know of now. The four that are on the map DO exist; the fifth wheel of taste we use at a wine and cheese party is actually one of the most important – umami. That’s the taste of savory things like meat and cheese, and was described as early as 1908, a mere seven years after Boring made his translational mistake.
Secondly, the map claims the receptors for each flavor only exist on the edges of the tongue, the very back, and the very tip. That leaves a HUGE bit of space that doesn’t really do much, right smack in the center… where most food hits the tongue.
Um. Science says, “Whoops?”
It’s an impractical model from the start, is what I’m trying to say.
Thirdly, our sense of taste is much more important in basic development and exploration than the map allows for. From the time we are born, we explore the world through all of our senses. Senses like sight don’t fully develop until we are between 6 and 18 months of age, but we make up for what we lack by using other senses, taste, in the case of infants.
Well, why is that particularly important, you ask? Because of chemistry. The basic correlation between chemistry and taste is that acids taste sour and bases taste bitter. The safest way of testing this is to taste a lemon, which is full of citric acid. It’s sour, right? Right.
Since things that are bitter are not necessarily desirable as food products, it’s very difficult to find them on market shelves. Egg whites and some crackers are the closest edible things you’ll find to basic foods.
Now, think back to childhood…. Do you think a baby would like something that tastes bitter? NO! That’s a natural response. It’s a safety precaution, too; bitter foods tend to contain deadly chemicals, like ammonia. According to the tongue map, those substances would have to hit the back of the tongue to be tasted, which probably means someone is going to have to call poison control because little Johnny has swallowed ammonia instead of spitting it back out because he tasted that bitterness immediately.
So, lesson of the day? Don’t think of the tongue as some city planner’s way of keeping the taste bud gangs from having turf wars. It’s much more accurate to think of it as a metro area, where everybody mixes and coexists while doing their jobs.
Barbies? Yea right. Doll Houses? Please. I was never the little girl who played with mini tea cups and pretended my stuffed animals were my fellow beauty-pageant friends. I was the girl outside shooting Nerf guns at the neighbor boys and exploring the deep ends of the woods in my backyard. I’m sure my mom was thrilled when I brought pet bugs home from school rather than glitter-filled artwork. Nonetheless my fascination for bugs, animals and anything living for that matter started from a very young age. To this day I find myself watching Discovery channel till wee hours of the night or researching the latest species found in the far corners of the Amazon. It was not until recently that I began indulging in my extreme captivation with sharks.
In case you’ve ever wondered what happens to the items that are too lame to re-sell in thrift stores in our culture, they eventually get boxed up and shipped off by charity foundations to developing countries. So, rural Guatemala in the early 90s was a walking rainbow of all the poor US fashion choices of the prior decades. It is nowhere more evident how weird is US culture than through the silk-screened, ironed-on legacy of our t-shirts. Everyone appreciates a free t-shirt in any culture, but this forgotten subset of t-shirts winds up on the backs of people who don’t understand what they say. So, while making friends at my field sites I sometimes wind up translating people’s t-shirts for them, because they ask me to. Ok, some of these are so obvious that no one asks (“Coca-Cola”), others require a bit more explanation (“Cheers. Where everybody knows your name” or “Styx”), and others are just inexplicable (like “I’m with Stupid →” or, even worse “Le Shirt”—in case you don’t remember, there once was an ill-advised culture rage in the US to label objects with text bearing their nominate noun in English, and the article in French–Le Car. Le Bag.). Do you get it? I never did, even at the time, and now I have to try to explain it to a curious Mayan guy while we are both trying to communicate using fractured Spanish skills.
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