The Mold From Outer Space!

I happened upon a Discovery News article today discussing the appearance of mold in a plant growth experiment in SPACE! So, it turns out astronauts are just as bad about over-watering their plants as I am! Even in these NASA-engineered growth chambers with cool magenta-colored lights, there be mold spores.

The NASA experiment is officially named Veggie hardware validation test (aka Veg-01). It started back in March 2014 and will ended soon in March 2016. I had no idea they were trying to grow plants in space so this news blurb is very exciting. Last summer, to distract my mind from studying for my Prelims, I really got into plants/gardening, especially house plants. My home went from a few desperate cacti my boyfriend had (many hanging on for dear life) to windowsills and tabletops clustered with pothos, Cuban oregano (so many), jade plants, Philodendron, Echeveria, african violets, orchids, Wandering Jews, clover, spider plants, Christmas cacti, ferns, etc. Having living plants really invigorates a room so it must do wonders for the ISS! Researchers have developed a rooting pillow contraption in which to house the planting media (a clay) and plant in a zero gravity environment. It will be interesting to see what the effect of no gravity will have on root formation and function.

Plant pillow (Photo: NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center on Flickr)

Aside from the obvious goal of producing and harvesting food (starting with lettuce), another aim I saw on their official NASA experiment page was to "Assess crew psychological benefits of plant growth..." and "...provide crew members with...a positive effect on morale and well-being." Fascinating. The psychological benefits of plant growth. We can all imagine how dreary and maddening it must get up there in that sterile, mechanical, modular space station. Down on Earth, we love imagining the dreary, maddening psychological effect of space (see: Solaris, Event Horizon, and like 1/4 of all Star Trek TNG episodes that deal in some way with space psychosis/"cabin fever"). I mean, you are about 250 miles up away from Earth, everyone you know (and don't know) exists on this minuscule blip of a grain particle. Wrapping your mind around the distance is one thing. But then imagine living there long-term?

Riker losing it (Photo: Memory Alpha's Frame of Mind (episode) Wikia page)

Enter space plants! What is it about plants? Is it because they reminds us of nature and nature is comforting? Is there an innate pleasure we get from nurturing something? Maybe it's just nice to have a non-human living thing with us - knowing it's not just us. We could go into each of these 3 things for a long time, preferably over a beer! But anyhow, we are still a long ways off from the gigantic botanical gardens seen in Battlestar Galactica:

Botanical cruiser seen with transparent* geometric domes (Photo: Battlestar Wiki Botanical Cruiser)

Right now, we are just figuring out the first steps of growing plants in space. Space planting experiments have been occurring for years here on Earth and a Veg-01-specific experiment has already help determine what species, media, etc. to use (Massa et al., 2013). So it begins...

But, alas at the very eve of the experiment - CONTAMINATION IN THE ZINNIAS!

We do not know what type of fungus it was (they stored the sample in the freezer for later analysis) but it was clearly able to take hold of some (not all!) of the poor zinnia plants once they became stressed from excess water. This NASA article summarizes the December 2015 event very well so I won't regurgitate it here. The cool thing is that there were fungal spores aboard. You can't escape fungal spores. They just are.

It makes me wonder how the spores came into contact with the affected plants. By human hands or maybe they were just on the seeds. I read somewhere the media in the pillows were autoclaved (super heated) so that should be clean. It will make the microbial analysis they are doing as a part of this experiment interesting to read up on later too. This is a pretty clean environment and I don't think they supplemented the media in the pillows with microbes so I wonder if there are other microbe sources they have in mind aside from ambient air and astronauts. All in all, I think it's good some plants got contaminated. If the plants only got too much water that would have been an easy enough fix to the protocol. But mold growth. This is better because we can learn a lot from this. No doubt there were already measures for this scenario, but now it's real! I'd be surprised if this event did not also result in additional revisions to the disease outbreak portion of the growing protocol. If it didn't happen this go-round it would surely happen later, and maybe to a larger experiment, eek!

We also know that the ISS has fungal spores. They may have been there before, but if they came in on Veg-01 material and equipment, it is definitely in the ISS interior now. Spores, of all kinds, have evolved to exist in not-so-great conditions until they finally find themselves on suitable substrate. Those that disperse through the air are well-equipped to deal stressors like drying out. I'm no spore expert but as far as longevity I know we are probably talking in terms of years, not days or weeks.

To be safe, we can never know if we don't have spores. We have to assume they are there and we haven't detected them yet. The intricacies of space living, eh? My mind likens it to a big party where the host tried to hand out exclusive invitations but in the end a whole bunch of riff raff got in anyways! So what do you do? Plan on it happening: lock all valuables away, stock up on toilet paper and cleaner, place trash cans everywhere.




This gives me an idea for another post...I will try to post with more regularity in 2016! New year!

* WHY are there transparent dome windows?! Windows are for sunlight and you are in the great void that is space!

Early 2015 haiku

Dry, stripped branches fall
Crackle under tire treads
Settle in the ground
________________________________

Spring is here!

It feels like eons since the last post! But Spring is here and nature is waking up from its wintry slumber!

Here is a beautiful video shot by a photographer of minuscule things, Daniel Stoupin's Slow Life.

Close the shades, turn up the volume (or better yet, plug in your best headphones), and make the video fullscreen. This video is composed of different corals all brilliantly colored and structured moving. The video is sped up so we are better able to perceive their movements. I know corals are animals but I can remember when I was a little kid that I grouped them in my brain with plants. Things that are alive but pretty much stationary and thus, BORING! Birds, tigers, grasshoppers, they all had faces and limbs and I could see them moving, behaving. It's incredible how much the limitations of my senses colored my perception of life. And now, going in the other direction, it's the things I can't obviously see that are fascinating like the storm going on inside our bodies when we have infections, long-term ecosystem changes, time lapse footage of glaciers retreating, evolution in general, anything happening in space or underwater, etc.

Anyways, this season I hope to update more often!

Little monsters

School is officially out and the summer research season begins again! I was reading up on my Pacific Northwest salamanders when I came across this silly character with a face only a mother could love:

California Herps - Aneides lugubris

ADORABLE - buggy eyes and all! That is an Aneides lugubris, otherwise known as a an arboreal salamander because they can be found up in trees, think 30 meters (over 98 feet) off the ground!

As you can see they have quite a muscular jaw and sharp teeth, good for hunting small bugs, worms, and other types of grub. Since they are kind of big, about 5-10 cm, they can hunt larger prey than other salamanders and have even been found with bits of salamanders in their bellies!

California Herps - Aneides lugubris

Another cool fact about A. lugubris has to do with their tree-lovin' lifestyle. Like monkeys, they have prehensile tails which means they can grab things with it...like a branch. Other salamanders have this trait too. They also lay their eggs on a jelly-like string that attaches to the underside of something, usually wood or a rock. They look like grapes hanging off a vine. This is not an A. lugubris but A. aeneus, the green salamander, a closely related species:

You can't really tell but they are suspended from the ceiling! Weird huh? 

Sources:
Jones, L. L. C., Leonard, W. P., and D. H. Olson. Amphibians of the Pacific Northwest. Hong Kong: Seattle Audubon Society, 2005. Print.

Flowers on a recent hike

....

 Spiky

Cones of a horsetail

....

Calypso bulbosa

Trillium kurabayashii - definitely NOT in its usual range of southern OR and northern CA, most likely an escape from someone's garden...

Sword fern (Polystichum munitum) spores on the underside of the blade

Cone of a horsetail (Equisetum). You can see little green spores!

Flox?....I knew I should have made this post as soon as I got home and had the names fresh in my head.

Beautiful garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) by a small waterfall

Some kind of pea :)

Aeroplankton

I learned a new word today: aeroplankton. Though the concept is not completely new. Most of us are familiar with tiny itty bitty organic particles floating in the air all the time, pollen is one for example. Think some more and maybe you will come up with fungal spores, airborne virus particles (like flu), or even some minuscule spiders. NPR did a cute video of the extraordinary bug-filled world above our heads a few years ago:

Did you watch it? Isn't that great? If I were just listening to this story on the radio I would still be duly impressed. But...that cartoon image of all those little bugs flying above the neighborhood - that was a real wow moment that hit it home for me. Anyways, I digress.

The fact that living things are present high in the atmosphere totally changes the way you comprehend natural connectivity. You realize that for a good number of creatures the world is not that big when you can take to the skies!

And of course I thought about the connection of this to disease!

I was researching a strange disease last year called Kawasaki disease (do not Google image that disease). As far as I know no one knows how the children get it. And it is mostly children that get it, very young children, like under 5 years of age. It is very deadly but so far doesn't appear to be contagious. It sprung up in Japan in the 1960's and now there have been cases in Hawaii and the western US. What is interesting is that the cases appear to be linked with strong winds coming from central Asia blowing towards the Pacific Ocean. When the winds go on to drift over Hawaii and the US there was also a rise in those cases. Eerie huh? Keep in mind it is a very thin chain we are using to link wind currents and Kawasaki disease, this is correlation NOT causation.

But it is an intriguing starting point for a very mysterious illness. What is it? A virus? A bacteria?  Lots of different types of viruses and fungal/bacterial spores can survive in relatively severe physical conditions; it wouldn't be too far-fetched or surprising at all...but it is nonetheless impressive, no?

Life...curioser and curioser...



More Kawasaki disease:
Kawasaki Disease Lab at UC - San Diego

More aeroplankton reading:
Wade, Lizzie. Jan 2013. Microbes survive, and maybe thrive, high in the atmosphere. ScienceNOW.

Pearce, Fred. 2011. The long strange journey of Earth's traveling microbes. Yale e360.

Fairy Bonnets

I just stumbled across this mushroom genus on the internet: Fairy Bonnets!

First off, what a whimsical name to describe these mushrooms!

The Mycenas of Norway

If I were a wee fairy I would totally use these as a head topper. These mushroom are very small and delicate, especially one very very tiny one:

Mycena culmigena from the Oregon Wild Blog

Mycena culmigena are found around Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia among wet, sedge dense areas. The caps of these are 1-3 mm! Wow! This is my new goal. To find one of these things. And I too will take a photo of my fingertip nudging an itty bitty M. culmigena. A quick search revealed its species name was given by someone named Maas Geesteranus in 1986, a particularly good year if I do say so myself ;) But it actually wasn't totally discovered for the first time ever this year - it was reassigned to the current species name from its former placement in Mycena juncicola (named by Gillet 1876).

It's always interesting when this happens - in this case it appears Geesteranus said this should really be a different species from M. juncicola (found in Norway though seems to be quite rare there in the record books...). Someone named Redhead described another similar species, Mycena cariciophila, in 1980 and Geesteranus folded that into M. juncicola. The specimen used to describe M. cariciophila was found in New Brunswick (next to Maine)...Anyways, this is probably not the most exciting post but untangling taxonomies is what I use to do and can be a fun exercise time to time :)


Sources:
http://linnet.geog.ubc.ca/Atlas/Atlas.aspx?sciname=Mycena%20culmigena
http://home.online.no/~araronse/Mycenakey/juncicola.htm
http://www.cbs.knaw.nl/Collections/BioloMICS.aspx?Link=T&TableKey=14682616000000063&Rec=13403&Fields=All

"Life...finds a way"

Echoing Jeff Goldblum's famous quote from Jurassic Park, scientists discovered bacterial life in one of Antarctica subglacial lakes!

Antarctic subglacial lakes: Lake Vostok was reached earlier this month, Lake Ellsworth is planned next. 

Lake Vida: this super salty lake sits under 27 m of ice at its thickest point (not a subglacial lake but it is the thickest layer of ice recorded); in 2002, researchers found and thawed microbes that were locked away in ice cores collected in 1996.

--------- Now these are the main subglacial lakes:

Lake Whillans: under 800 meters of ice it is the first subglacial lake discovered to have life! Big finding! It was reached January 28 2013.

Lake Ellsworth: subglacial (~3,400 meters of ice on top!);they started drilling this winter but had to call it off Dec 27th due to technical problems...the equipment needs to be reserviced and who knows how long that will take. Drilling this deep has never been done before and the procedure/technology completely new. What's crazy is that if things had gone according to plan, they would have just about 60 hours to collect all the water/sediment/ice they wanted! After that the hole they made would've frozen completely over...

Lake Vostok: the largest subglacial lake known in Antarctica it sits under a staggering 4,000 meters of ice; in Feb 2012 researchers reached the surface of the lake, no life has been found as of yet but it is still early in the hunt*...

http://feeds.nature.com/~r/news/rss/newsblog/~3/JUXIjXo87pQ/antarctic-researchers-find-life-in-subglacial-lake.html

--------------------------------------------
*News update!
March 7, 2013

I had this entry as a draft for quite some time but this came across my radar today: 

Antarctic Lake Vostok yields 'new bacterial life'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21709225

Well, they have found bacterial (what looks to be bacterial at least) life! Lots of press about it, now we wait to see what more the scientific team offers...Where does it fall on the tree of life? What might it be living on? Articles say it has 86% similarity with its closest sequenced relative...is this enough to make a new branch on the bacterial tree? What is it eating down there?

Bacteria do it better

The Economist hath written an interesting article about a recent discovery from a lab here in OSU. The Giovanonni lab studies marine bacteria. Cool enough right? Well, it gets even cooler - with PARASITES!!!

The main bacterium they study, Pelagibacter ubique (pelagi = ocean, bacter = bacteria, ubique = everywhere (ubiquitous), is the most popular member of a larger group of bacteria called SAR11. I can give you all the statistics or you can believe that it's given scientific name is true and that there are more of them than anything else in the ocean. Anyways, a funny thing some people noticed since this bacterial group was described, was that there didn't seem to be any bacteriophages (bacterio = bacteria, phage = to consume) associated with it...

From BIOS Oceanic Microbial Observatory

You may think, Well they are quite small for bacteria so maybe they just avoid encountering phages or Maybe being incredibly minute makes P. ubique hard to infect? But no no no, there are so many of them out there and there are others of similar size with plenty of phages that eat away at them...

Well, rest easy folks, they found them! Now we know it's not that SAR11 has magic anti-infection powers. It's just that no one has found them until now. These researchers did an ingenious study, the methods of which are concisely explained in this Economist piece. They used P. ubique and found it does indeed have phages - and since their are lots of P. ubique (and their SAR11 cousins) out there, there are lots of their phages too. How might this work?

Remember the mid-14th century? Under plague conditions, people whose immune systems could not handle infection died in the masses, taking their genes with them. Those with the fortunate cocktail of immune genes would survive the outbreak, have babies, and continue the human race. A very dramatic case of natural selection. Why am I talking about the Black Death? Why, to bring up The Red Queen Hypothesis. This evolutionary theory (RIP Leigh Van Valen) posits that "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." And so, immunity traits must keep changing and evolving in order for its host to stay one step ahead of parasites and pathogens. Humans recombine genes during sex and make a kid. Way to go for the kid but the parents are still stuck with the same genes they were born with for the rest of their life -> bummer! Bacteria don't play that. They can swap DNA with each other (conjugation) or just absorb it from the environment around them (transformation)! What a wild and crazy world, huh? As you would imagine, this means a community of bacteria can evolve to adapt rapidly to stressful conditions. And that is exactly what this paper suggests. They suggest that rapid* coevolution in the SAR11 group in response to phage predation has helped lead them to successful dominance of the ocean!

It will be very interesting to see what new research comes of this discovery. Being one of the most abundant things out there in the marine landscape, SAR11 plays a huge role in the microbial food web and in regulating geochemical cycles.



* the Nature article also mentioned studies in which they found recombination rates in the SAR11 group were also freakishly high!

Zhao Y et al. Abundant SAR11 viruses in the ocean. 13 Feb 2013. Nature <http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11921.html>

Leaf Miners

If anyone can tell me what critter made these I would appreciate it! The trail is light pink with a shimmer to it :)

I found this suspicious trail on a hike this past weekend. It looks like someone took one of those glittery gel markers and drew all over a leaf! My botanically-inclined companion informed me this is the work of a leaf miner. The term loosely refers to the larvae of any insect that lives within the leaf and eats the cellulose material. That way, the little critters are somewhat protected from predators and any chemical plant defenses that may exist on the outer layers. Pretty sneaky of them...

The Wikipedia page cited a 2009 BBC article mentioning the discovery of a plant from Ecuador that has suspicious leaf miner markings... but not caused by an insect at all! One of the first things we learn in biology class is that chlorophyll allows plants to make energy from the sun and gives them their green color, right? So, if a plant has splotches of white on the leaves, that just decreases the area on which photosynthesis can occur...non bueno right? Not so! These researchers from Germany found those splotches might be doing good in another sense...

Traipsing around the Ecuadorian forest they noticed a plant that sometimes had fully green leaves and sometimes had leaves with white splotches:

"A leaf damaged by mining moths (left) compared to one faking it (right)."

They also noticed that the fully green leaves seemed to be infected by leaf miners more often than the splotchy one. A hypothesis was born. They hypothesized that plants 'faking' leaf miner infestations would have less damage from actual leaf miners (in this case it was a type of moth) because insects prefer to lay their larvae in uninfected leaves (duh, more food and no damage). They did some experiments with green leaves, splotchy leaves, and hand-painted splotchy leaves (they used white-out!) and found that moths indeed preferred to infect fully green leaves. (By the way, they did tests to see if the chemicals in the white-out affected moth behavior and it didn't.)

This is the official scientific paper but if you just want a cursory look the BBC article does a good job casually pinning down the main points. So, that's how a quick internet search on the pretty pink  leaf trail ended up being a blog post! Pretty cool huh? If enough of these plants start faking it I wonder if the moths will wise up and start using more non-visual cues to assess infection...


Soltau, Ulf, Stefan Dötterl, and Sigrid Liede-Schumann. "Leaf variegation in Caladium steudneriifolium (Araceae): a case of mimicry?." Evolutionary Ecology23.4 (2009): 503-512.