Extreme Science

The story of how the key to DNA amplification was found in an explosion of hot water.

Taq polymerase is a thermo-stable enzyme. That might not mean a great deal to everyone, but in terms of DNA analysis, the discovery of Taq polymerase’s unusual ability to assist chemical reactions at very high temperatures changed everything.

PCR – the polymerase chain reaction that takes fragments of DNA and replicates them until there is enough material for scientists to test – needs high temperatures to work. It also needs enzymes: special proteins that act as helpers in the reaction. The issue is that when PCR was first developed, there were no known enzymes that could survive the temperatures it needed. Enzymes work best at an optimal temperature, usually the same as the living temperature of the animal or bacterium they come from; in humans, our enzymes work best at 37°C. At the temperatures needed for PCR (around 72°C), almost no living thing could survive.

Yet life finds a way, even in the most extreme conditions on Earth, and the answer to PCR’s enzyme problem was hiding in a volcanic water feature in Yellowstone Park, USA.

Yellowstone is famous for its geysers: hydrothermal explosions that spray hot water and steam high into the air. Geysers are formed when surface water reaches around 2000m underground, where it is close enough to the magma of the Earth’s mantle that it begins to boil and build up pressure, finally bursting out of the ground in a high jet of pressurised water. In the Lower Geyser Basin, in 1969, Thomas D. Brock and Hudson Freeze of Indiana University discovered Thermus aquaticus: a thermophilic bacterium that functions best at temperatures of around 70°C.

T. aquaticus isn’t just unusual because of its love of extreme temperatures (it’s an extremophile organism). It is a chemotroph, meaning that it synthesises chemicals to get its food, instead of using sunlight like plants, or consuming other living things like animals do. It has evolved to not just survive but flourish in an environment with very high temperatures, and little sunlight, food, or even any other living things. In 1976 Taq polymerase, a heat-stable DNA polymerase enzyme, was successfully isolated from the bacterium, and in 1993 Dr Kary Mullis was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work using this polymerase in PCR.

Since its discovery, other thermostable DNA polymerases have been isolated and used in PCR, but despite its relatively high error rate in replication, Taq polymerase is still often used. No one could have foreseen, when an extreme bacterium was discovered living against all odds in a geyser, that its discovery would someday lead to crimes being solved, illnesses being diagnosed, and life-saving organs being successfully transplanted. No type of science is isolated from all others, and this is proof: the story of how a geological hot-spot changed molecular genetics forever.

The Powell-Cotton Museum, Quex Estate, Birchington

An underrated scientific resource and a thoroughly unusual day out

Above: this hippo, in Gallery 3, is the one animal whose authenticity is most doubted by visitors to the museum. It is a real specimen; its slick appearance is deliberate, to make it seem wet. (©Stella Bennett 2013)

Nestled in wide green countryside on the Kent coast, Quex Park might seem at first glance to be just another family estate opened to the public. However, Quex is home to one of the most extraordinary collections of natural science and social anthropology in the world, and it can be argued that the contents of its Powell-Cotton Museum mark an historical turning point for modern science and conservation. 

Major Percy Powell-Cotton established the museum at Quex in 1896 in order to house the collections of natural history and objects of cultural significance he had collected during his expeditions to Africa and Asia. The Major, despite his predilection for Livingstone-esque safari outfits and rifles, was not the classic Empire-building wealthy adventurer. His obsession with fastidiously collecting data regardless of its immediate relevance, as well as his interest in cutting-edge photography and film techniques, means that even today the collection at Quex is being used to give new insight into the natural world. In addition to his careful scientific methodology, Powell-Cotton was unusual in his enlightened approach to communicating with the locals on his journeys. This respect and his endeavours to understand the significance of the objects he bought and collected has resulted in a huge catalogue not only of carefully preserved animal specimens, but also of objects of social and cultural significance to people all over the world. He even collected and catalogued medicinal plants on his voyages, and noted down more than standard ‘cause-and-effect’ uses for them: he also kept note of superstitious uses, such as the Somalian root he recorded was used to ward off crocodiles.

I met with Inbal Livne, the Collections Manager of the Powell-Cotton Museum, to discuss my favourite exhibits at Quex: the animal dioramas. Powell-Cotton, she explained, realised that there was something unsustainable about the growth of the Empire and the hunting of wildlife. He intended to shoot and stuff examples of every creature he could, in order to preserve them for study. While it might seem a bit counter-intuitive that taxidermy on this scale could help conservation, the collection aimed to do just that, and even more spectacular: it still contributes to conservation today. Over a century later, the animals preserved in the museum are still being used for cutting-edge research into everything from gorilla conservation to climate change. And, Ms Livne pointed out, that has everything to do with the skill and care with which they were preserved.

Above: the Colobus monkeys in Gallery 1. Upside down in the top right is Colobus angloensis cottoni, which was discovered by Powell-Cotton. (©Stella Bennett 2013)

History doesn’t often remember the facilitators of great science, and indeed, if she hadn’t pointed it out to me, I would never have seen the words Roland Ward 1905 scrawled on a rock in the oldest mammal habitat diorama in the world. Roland Ward was the taxidermist behind the preservation of the animals in the collection, and he used an extremely painstaking, out-dated technique that allowed him to preserve each and every creature in minute and careful detail. The unusual technique has meant that genetic material from these long-dead creatures has been preserved, and recently has been put to use by scientists at the University of Oslo to study African climate change. The museum boasts the third best collection of primates in the world, and the best collection of lowland gorillas; a fact that is being used today by Ian Redmond to assist in gorilla conservation in Uganda.

  

Above: specimens from the world’s best collection of lowland gorillas, in Gallery 1. (©Stella Bennett 2013)

To the visitor, though, the most striking aspect of the diorama galleries is the unbelievable detail. As Ms Livne and I stood in Gallery 3 with our hands on an elephant leg bone twice my height, she pointed out a squirrel hidden on the very far left of the display. ‘I’ve never noticed that before,’ she said, with a note of surprise. The details that she pointed out to me, I would never have found without a guide who knew the collection intimately. A Grevy’s zebra in Gallery 1 has, apparently, a badly scarred hide that is not visible from outside the glass. The story is that the animal was attacked by a lion before Powell-Cotton found it, and it was such a rare specimen that it was sent back for taxidermy regardless. The huge bull-elephant in Gallery 3 was only supposed to be half-preserved to save money, but apparently Roland Ward was determined to preserve the whole animal, as it was the largest specimen ever recorded. In the end, I was informed, he did it for half-price as a compromise.

More uses and applications of the huge bank of knowledge Powell-Cotton collected are still coming to light. So many things about these animals, from their very DNA to the record cards with exact geographic co-ordinates of their capture, are still being used to expand our knowledge of the natural world. The Colobus angolensis cottoni that dangles upside down from one display is just one of 50 species that were discovered by Powell-Cotton, and there are over 20,000 ethnographic objects at Quex alone, without factoring in those which were donated to the British Museum and other collections.

  

Above: the facial expressions and musculature of these lions in Gallery 3 are a result of the complex, pain-staking method of taxidermy employed to preserve the entire collection. (©Stella Bennett 2013)

I asked Ms Livne what she thought the importance of the collection was in terms of the history of science, and she turned philosophical. Powell-Cotton was a cog in the wheel, she explained. His work moved, and is still moving, science forward. She sees her own role as that of a protector and interpreter, using the collection and ensuring that in another hundred years, it will still be in its current perfect condition and still providing novel insights into the natural world. As she showed me her favourite animals – a lion and lioness, high on a rock in Gallery 3 – and explained how she loved the realism of their facial expressions, I found myself understanding the appeal of something that might at first be a little unnerving. There is something very alive about the exhibits at Quex, and with the help of public donations and experts like Ms Livne, they will still be alive with possibilities for many generations to come.

Further Information:

• For opening hours, contact details and further information: http://www.quexpark.co.uk
• For information on the work done by Ian Redmond on gorilla conservation: http://www.thegreatprojects.com/projects/the-great-gorilla-project-with-ian-redmond

 

All photographs of the collection taken and reproduced with kind permission of the Powell-Cotton Museum

A Face Made for Radio

Three ugly, unloved, and unappetising creatures worth fighting for.

The exquisite naked mole rat. Photo from wikipedia.org

It’s a simple truth that we like our conservation cute and fluffy. The symbol of the WWF is the ultimate case in point: it’s a panda. In my experience, there is one easy question to ask if you want to tell an ecologist from a layperson: “what do you think about the panda?”

Let me be clear: I like a YouTube video of a sneezing baby panda as much as the next person. But the simple scientific fact is that pandas, ecologically speaking, are as useful as a bag of rocks. They are vegetarians, despite being bears, and only eat bamboo, a plant perhaps unique in the fact that it would probably grow exactly the same with or without anything to eat it. Evolution hasn’t caught up with this dietary decision; they struggle to digest their food, need masses of it to get enough energy to survive, and as recent news stories demonstrate, they cannot seem to bring themselves to breed. If they do, by some miracle, manage to produce a perfect little sneezing bundle of joy, they are truly terrible parents, often abandoning the infant or accidentally sitting on the poor thing. They have no predators to rely on them for survival. They do not produce any useful product, except for the one the public seems most interested in: adorableness.

Every year, millions of dollars’ of funds are pumped into protecting this singularly useless creature. I am not alone in believing that this energy is, at best, coincidentally helping actually useful organisms in the same environment, and at worst, distracting us from creatures that truly can be saved for the benefit of the planet. While the world focused on the bamboo forests, the Yangtze River Dolphin became the first large marine mammal extinction since the 50’s, declared functionally extinct in 2006. Both in China, both endangered, and yet only one was protected enough to keep it alive for future generations. And I would argue that the world made the wrong choice going for the fluffy option.

With this in mind, I’ve assembled a list of three fascinating animals we should be fighting harder to protect, and where you can travel to see them. Each distinctly unlovely, these are creatures that would be a truly monumental loss to our world’s biodiversity. So here they are, the endangered species that are so much less than a pretty face:

1.    Naked Mole Rat

I’m not ashamed to say it: I love naked mole rats. Possibly the ugliest creature you’re ever likely to see, they’re spectacularly weird because of their biology and behaviour as much as because they look like an inside-out mouse. Though not currently a threatened species, their usefulness to everything from cancer research to behavioural evolution means that if they were lost, they would take with them a potentially huge bank of knowledge.

The naked mole rat has a bizarre lack of any pain sensation in its skin, due to a missing mammal neurotransmitter, and can move backwards equally quickly as forwards. They are one of only two known eusocial mammals, meaning that there is a queen rat and a few males who breed with her, and all other members of the colony do not reproduce.

But the truly extraordinary thing about these rats is how long they live. They can last up to 28 years, have never been known to have cancer, and have very healthy hearts and circulation. It’s been suggested that their ability to reduce their metabolism prevents oxidative stress, stopping what we know as ‘ageing damage’. Their genome is currently being sequenced, but early work is promising information on how, exactly, they are ‘cancer-proof’. Maybe, in the future, a cure for cancer might be found in a warren under the Ethiopian desert, buried in the genes of a hairless rodent.

One of the churches of Lalibela. Photo from commons.wikimedia.org

I’ve personally always wanted to travel to Ethiopia to see Axum, home of famously enigmatic granite obelisks, and Lalibela, where ancient churches are carved from whole, enormous pieces of stone. Though both my zoological and Indiana-Jones-based fantasies of visiting Ethiopia are currently on hold due to political unrest in the region, with continued conservation efforts from archaeologists and biologists alike, I truly hope that both rats and monuments will be waiting for the world when the Ethiopian people finally achieved their long-awaited peace.

For more information and for an insight into the work being done on their genomes, visit the website of the Naked Mole-Rat Genome Resource http://naked-mole-rat.org

2.    Axolotl

A curious axolotl. Photo from flickr.com

Critically endangered, this Mexican salamander has the unusual ability to regenerate lost limbs. This has lead to it being the focus of research that, although it sounds a little like science fiction, may someday help us to fully understand cell differentiation and allow us to grow human body parts in the laboratory.

Axolotls have large embryos, which makes them an important laboratory organism for experiments in development, as they can be manipulated easily and observed clearly in laboratory conditions. They usually live their lives in a juvenile aquatic form, unless they ingest too much iodine, in which case they transform into bigger, terrestrial adults. The fact that they’re so susceptible to environmental pollution is simultaneously one of the fascinating things about and the great tragedy of the axolotl: they are only found in one lake, and it’s right next to Mexico City, a huge, polluted mess.

Normally, this would be the point at which I say how much I want to visit Mexico City and see this animal in the wild. Unfortunately, because of the state of the lake, diving there would not be a pleasant experience, and I would almost be guaranteed not to see an axolotl. And while I really would love to visit Mexico someday, I plan to mostly avoid the capital city. Mexico’s economy and industry are growing rapidly, and while that’s excellent news for Mexican humans, work needs to be done to ensure that it doesn’t spell defeat for Mexican biodiversity.

Without help, the axolotl looks set to go the way of the dinosaurs it so closely resembles. For a useful overview of the biology of the axolotl, and the conservation work being done to protect them, visit the website of EDGE (Evolutionarily Distinct & Globally Endangered) http://www.edgeofexistence.org/amphibians/species_info.php?id=552

Even if you’re not interested in the axolotl, take a look: EDGE does important work supporting ecologically important endangered species.

3.    Yangtze Giant Softshell Turtle

The Yangtze giant softshell turtle. Photo from wikipedia.org

I’ve saved the most endangered on the list for last. The Yangtze giant softshell turtle is the largest freshwater turtle in the world, and despite the fact that it looks to me like a slimy grey pig, its Western discoverer John Edward Grey described it in 1873 as, “the most beautiful species of Trionychidae that has yet occurred”.

There are four known examples of this beautiful Trionychidae left in the world. One in the wild in China, one in Vietnam, and the fate of the species rests with two individuals in Suzhou zoo in China. The captive male is, at best guess, 100 years old. His mate is 80 if she’s a day, and as of July 2013, the two of them have gone through 6 unsuccessful mating seasons. They produce eggs, but they aren’t viable, a combination of the age of the turtles making breeding difficult, the stress the female is under, and the species’ general dislike of human company. Considering they’re the last two viable individuals of their kind, I can’t really fault them for their lack of affection for Homo sapiens.

Everyone at the zoo is hopeful that soon, there will be viable eggs. The dream, obviously, would be to visit Suzhou in a few years’ time and watch the first baby soft-shell giants swim circles around their geriatric parents. What I really hope, though, is that governments, scientists, and industry all learn from the dual examples of the Yangtze River: the freshwater dolphin and turtle. In both cases, no one knew how close the species were to ruin before it was too late. The turtle was lucky: a female was miraculously discovered, and she might save her kind. The dolphin was not, and is gone forever.

So this has been a little rant, on behalf of the less photogenic creatures of this world, the rare animals who aren’t easily spotted, who live in murky waters or underground and possess strange and wonderful biology humanity could use to further medicine and science. Really, though, we shouldn’t need the lure of scientific advancement to encourage us to protect the endangered for future generations. Every loss in terms of biodiversity makes the Earth poorer, and more and more people are beginning to realise that an ethical commitment to conservation can mean economic benefits, from tourism, science, and natural products. We’d all be a little better off if we learned to love a naked mole rat.

Further reading:

• For a really fantastic overview of the arguments for and against captive panda breeding programmes: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/08/130827-giant-panda-national-zoo-baby-breeding-animals-science/
• An article from the Natural History Museum in 2010 on the extinction of the Yangtze River Dolphin: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2010/november/is-the-yangtze-river-dolphin-extinct86470.html
• For more information about the turtle breeding programme at Suzhou, read this review of the 6^th breeding season in National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/07/130703-china-yangtze-giant-softshell-turtle-animal-science/

Pictures, as always, from Creativecommons.org

Fantastic Books and Where to Read Them

The travel destinations that inspired great works of conservation literature

I can remember with perfect clarity the moment I decided I wanted to study animals. My father always read to my siblings and I, and his choice of books was a little random. It was difficult, growing up in Namibia, to find anything appropriate for children that was in English, and it was a good couple years before my favourite invention properly took off: online shopping. With that bit of background knowledge, it makes a little more sense that my father’s choice for bedtime reading for my brother and I was Gerald Durrell’s classic My Family and Other Animals.

For those of you who haven’t read it, My Family is the autobiographical account of how Durrell’s widowed mother moved her four children to the Greek island of Corfu. Durrell, the youngest child, tells the story of the various eccentric tutors his mother arranged, most of whom were perfectly happy to just let him run wild around the island, investigating and documenting in beautiful, hilarious detail the local wildlife. It is a genuinely funny book, and as I killed myself laughing with my brother over the image of two drunken pet magpies ruining a family dinner, I decided that I would model myself on the young Durrell. I would learn about animals, and I would write about what I found.

A birthday present a few years later was a massive stack of second-hand copies of Durrell’s other works. A personal favourite as a teenager was The Aye-Aye and I; it’s still a great ambition of mine to travel to Madagascar. What struck me most, though, reading all the books, was the combination of anecdotal accounts of collecting specimens for zoos and the poetry of Durrell’s descriptions of the countries he visited. In my mind, he was the father of science tourism, and so I’ve put together a list of three of my favourite zoology-based books, as well as the places I dream of reading them. They’re home to some truly spectacular and very rare animals, and the more people who support conservation efforts by visiting and contributing to people who work tirelessly to protect their homes, the less likely we are to lose biodiversity forever. In the words of Durrell himself, “In conservation, the motto should always be ‘never say die’.”

1.        ‘Zealandia’ Sanctuary, New Zealand. From Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine’s Last Chance to See

Above: the extremely photogenic kakapo. Image: wikipedia.org

If you’ve never typed ‘shagged by a rare parrot’ into YouTube, you probably won’t understand my desire to travel to New Zealand just to make the acquaintance of a large, flightless green bird named Sirocco. Sirocco is one of only 124 kakapo left in the world; a fact not particularly surprising as kakapo are large, delicious flightless birds with a general inability to successfully breed. Despite their general lack of any Darwinian skills, kakapos have an active and affectionate team of dedicated conservationists supporting them, and the future is looking relatively rosy for them as a species. New Zealand is so biologically diverse that the efforts to save the kakapo, however uninvolved the bird itself might be in its fight against extinction, are protecting a myriad of other plants and animals in the same ecosystem.

My real reason for wanting to visit Zealandia – the best place to see and support conservation of some of New Zealand’s rarest species – is a book I read during my teenage obsession with Douglas Adams. Adams is best known for his spectacularly funny books in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, but he was also a science junkie, and in the 80’s he undertook a tour of the world with his friend and colleague, zoologist Mark Carwardine. The result was Last Chance to See: an amusing and very poignant journey to see species whose future, at the time of writing, seemed grim. Since its publication, two of the species Adams and Carwardine wrote about – the Western black rhino and the Yang Tse river dolphin – have gone extinct. More recently, Stephen Fry joined Carwardine for a television series re-visiting the species twenty years on, and it was on that trip that Carwardine was, as the video clip suggests, shagged by a rare parrot.

Until a few years ago, I dreamt of visiting China and photographing a Yang Tse river dolphin. The species’ loss is tragic, and it only serves to remind us that if it weren’t for the teams working in New Zealand, the kakapo would have gone the same way. Stupid they might be, but thanks to places like Zealandia, I might someday be able to see the spectacular green feathers of a living kakapo. I truly wish I could say the same for all the species in Last Chance to See.

2.        Elsamere, Kenya. From Joy Adamson’s Born Free

Above: Joy Adamson. Image: wikipedia.org

It is one of the nerdier things about me: I own first editions of not just Born Free, but also its two sequels. The story, of how the Adamson family adopted three orphaned lion cubs and raised them to adulthood, is only partly about its star, the famous Elsa the Lion after whom the estate was later named. Mostly, Born Free is a story of love, animal behaviour, and the co-existence of humans and wildlife. Elsa was never a pet. She was never held captive, and she even bred successfully with a wild male, and raised her cubs to adulthood – something most hand-reared animals would be incapable of doing. From being cared for as a tiny cub by Joy Adamson to her death, with her head resting in George Adamson’s lap, Elsa had an astoundingly normal life, despite her interactions with humans.

Elsamere is on the shore of Lake Naivasha in the Kenyan Rift Valley. While visitors are not very likely to see lions there, it is a great place for bird watching, and there are the typical Kenyan complement of hippo, eland and zebra. My desire to visit isn’t from any great longing to see a distant relative of Elsa’s, but more to pay tribute to Joy Adamson, who wrote books I love and cherish, and to see the place she raised her unconventional family. She writes about Elsamere with such passion, and her legacy is being carried on by conservation work being done on site.

3.        Corfu, Greece. From Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals 

Above: Kalami Bay, Corfu. Image: astronautilus’ Picasa web album, through creativecommons.org

Finally, it probably won’t come as a surprise that I plan to travel to Corfu some day. Kalami Bay, where the White Villa that Durrell wrote about is situated, is my dream destination: olive oil, sunshine, and a really over-eager interest in the insects buzzing around my head. That’s the plan. The botany and zoology of Corfu is spectacular, as is the marine biology for anyone with their scuba qualification or a decent snorkel. I’m not certain if the pre-WW2 law that Durrell mentioned in the book, whereby those who dynamite fish get worse prison sentences than murderers, is still enforced, but certainly the island is famous for excellent seafood.

I won’t bore you with my dream of mapping out Durrell’s Corfu from the book and following in his footsteps, but I will suggest that everyone visit http://www.durrell.org to find out about the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. The work they’re doing is vast and brilliant, and they’re doing everything possible to ensure that the global biodiversity their founder documented is maintained for future generations. It’s easy to support the Trust, and they offer some brilliant experiences, such as luxury camping in Jersey and the superbly named ‘lemur liaison’ day at the Durrell Wildlife Park.

Science tourism is an important source of income for many different conservation NGOs and organisations fighting all odds to save biodiversity and individual species from extinction. But even if you never get a chance to go to Corfu, I can’t recommend these books highly enough. Great men and women of science changed my world view for the better, and I hope they do the same for many generations to come.

Further information:

For details on the opening times, events, and work of Zealandia, visit http://www.visitzealandia.com. Do it even if you don’t plan on going – there are some really adorable pictures of kiwis.

For more information about Elsamere and how to visit, go to http://www.elsatrust.org/pages/Elsamere_Conservation_Centre.vrt

Pictures, as always, from creativecommons.org

Seeking A Natural Muse

Where to find three animals that were the inspiration for, and source of, groundbreaking science

Above: Mice engineered to express green fluorescent protein (GFP), which was discovered in jellyfish. Photo: wikipedia.org

There are some animal heroes of science that most schoolchildren would be able to name. Darwin’s finches inspired the great man’s long academic struggle to find a theory of evolution, Jane Goodall learnt about animal behaviour from the chimps, and Dolly the Sheep proved that cloning of complex organisms is possible. But there are others, less well known; spectacular animals whose biology and unique abilities have inspired recent leaps forward in science.

More and more, creators of technology and novel engineering are looking to the natural world for inspiration. With genetic techniques getting cheaper, world travel and communication easier, and exploration of the sea floor and deepest rain forest advancing quickly, inspiration is everywhere. And for the eager bio-tourist, these innovative creatures live in some of the most spectacular places on Earth; places where evolution has pushed living things into developmental corners straight out of sci-fi novels.

Here are three of my dream destinations, places where travellers can find truly inspiring forms of life.

1. Butterflies, genus Morpho

Atlantic Forest, Paraguay

Above: Morpho menelaus, a species of Morpho butterflies. Photo: wikipedia.org

A butterfly flaps its wings in the rainforest, and a new kind of electronic device display is developed in the USA. Butterflies of the genus Morpho have wings of a brilliant, iridescent blue, but their colour is the least of their genius. The visible appearance of the wings isn’t due to pigmentation, but instead comes from a phenomenon known as ‘structural colour’. When viewed under a microscope, the wings are made up of a complex, ordered structure of nanoscale plates. The precise arrangement of these plates reflects light wavelengths, disrupting and re-ordering them in a unique pattern in order to produce the fantastic shade of blue the human eye sees. The butterfly’s evolutionary reasoning is that pigments require much more energy to produce than the ‘nano-shingles’, but when a young electro-mechanic named Mark Miles stumbled across this biological structure, he saw it from a different perspective.

Miles developed the Mirasol display, a trademarked technology that can create colours through interference with reflected light, consuming far less power than many conventional displays and with good visibility even in high ambient light. The display mimics the butterfly’s evolutionary innovation, and the technology is being adapted for use in phones and e-readers.

Morpho butterflies might have inspired new types of mechanical innovation, but to most nature-lovers, their biggest appeal is still their unique beauty, regardless of it being a trick of the light. A trip to Ybycuí National Park in Paraguay is on my bucket list; it’s famous for waterfalls and natural pools perfect for swimming, surrounded by the electric blue morphos.

2. Jellyfish, Aequorea victoria

Friday Harbor, Washington, USA

Above: Aequorea victoria, the jellyfish from which GFP was originally isolated. Photo: opencage.info

Work with transparent jellyfish won the 2008 Nobel Prize for chemistry, and may now be the answer to a new type of solar energy. Even if you’ve never heard of the protein GFP, you’ve probably seen it at work: the image of a white mice glowing green is often used in debates and articles about genetics. The key to cloning creatures capable of glowing green is found in modifying their genetic code to include a jellyfish gene that produces green fluorescent protein (GFP). Osamu Shiomura purified the protein from jellyfish he caught in Friday Harbor, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in 1998.

The protein itself, once isolated, can be attached to virtually any other protein, and so its discovery has been used successfully to provide visuals of microscopic processes we would never have otherwise been able to see happening in real time. GFP has been critical in expanding our understanding of cellular processes and disease and our knowledge of bacteria and other microbes.

But it’s not just medicine and molecular biology using jellyfish juice as inspiration. Jellyfish are hardy creatures, capable of surviving the toxicity and acidification of oceans, and for this reason they are becoming severely and damagingly overpopulated in many parts of the world. One novel, eco-friendly solution to the rising tide of jellies is to use their protein for solar cells. GFP-powered solar cells work in a similar way to the already existent technology of dye-sensitised solar cells, except in that they eliminate the need for certain costly elements such as titanium dioxide.

Friday Harbor is the major city in the San Juan Islands, on the west coast of America. It’s easily accessible by ferry from the mainland, and in addition to its famous Friday Harbor Laboratories, the city itself draws a fair influx of tourists every year. I am utterly biased in my desire to go there because one of my all-time favourite films, Practical Magic, was filmed there in 1998.

3. Great White Sharks

Cape Town, South Africa

Above: White shark, a species famous for human attacks that may, indirectly, soon save human life. Photo: wikipedia.org

Sharkskin has been behind Olympic gold and faster boats, but it may soon be keeping hospitals clean and safe. Sharkskin has two unique features: it reduces friction drag through water, and it auto-cleans parasites from its own surface. The first has been the focus of a great deal of research into the engineering of more hydro-dynamic swimsuits for athletes, and streamlining boat design. The second is also an important factor in shipbuilding, as attachment of creatures such as limpets to ships’ hulls increases energy inefficiency. Yet sharkskin’s uses for water-based activities may just be the tip of the iceberg: they may be the answer to medicine’s search for non-chemical antibiotic surfaces.

Sharkskin is made up of tiny individual scales, each of which has grooves along its surface. These channel the direction of water flow, break up turbulence, and help to mix fast and slow water. The faster water at the surface of the skin reduces its contact time with parasites, the roughness of the skin limits surface area available to them, and the scales re-arrange and flex, creating a moving target. A synthetic sharkskin pattern is being tested for use in hospitals, creating surfaces which protect from microbes without harsh chemicals that can encourage the development of microbial resistance.

Besides, seeing sharks in their natural habitat and up close is something everyone should do once in their life, if only for the rush of seeing the predators in their element. The best way to do it, in my opinion, is by cage diving off the Cape of Good Hope; the water is cold, but the venue is stunning and most day trips include a videographer, meals and refreshments. Plus, you get to see the poetry of a Great White with only a frisson of adrenaline, rather than the sheer terror of coming across one accidentally.

Innovation in science often comes from unlikely places, but through bio-mimicry, designers and scientists are accessing a database of ideas millions of years in the making. Evolution is, at its heart, a system of trial and improvement not dissimilar to that of engineering or technology. And by travelling to areas where you can find these unsung heroes, you might find inspiration of your own.

Further information:

• Information on how Morpho butterflies inspired innovation can be found in the article that inspired me to write about them: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/How-Biomimicry-is-Inspiring-Human-Innovation-165592706.html The Smithsonian website has a huge wealth of excellent blog entries and articles, I’d really recommend subscribing.
• For an incredibly detailed and useful (though quite technical) description of GFP and its uses, visit: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/techniques/fluorescence/fluorescentproteins/fluorescentproteinshome.html
• For more insight into GFP solar cells, visit: http://inhabitat.com/solar-cells-made-from-bioluminescent-jellyfish/aequorea_victoria/ It contains links to the original research I talk about here.
• For an incredibly detailed summary of the innovations coming from studies on sharks: http://biomimicryinstitute.org/home-page-content/home-page-content/biomimicking-sharks.html This website is a treasure-trove for anyone interested in bio-mimicry in general.

Images, as always, courtesy of Creativecommons.org

In Praise of Crypto-zoology

Often labelled as pseudo-science, crypto-zoology is on the very fringes of what anyone can reasonably call non-fiction, but recent work by Professor Bryan Sykes has shown that an unwillingness to let sleeping monsters lie can provide new perspectives on the natural world.

Sykes’ research, carried out using cutting edge methodology at Oxford University, concludes that there may be a real sub-species of brown bear behind the popular yeti myth. However, for every success story such as this, there seems to be three more along the lines of the 2008 ‘yeti scare’ in which US scientists analysed supposed yeti hairs and found them to belong to a Himalayan mountain goat. I would argue that, particularly for students of science, we cannot underestimate the importance of being able to distinguish what belongs on the fringes, and what is accurate.

Enter the International Crypto-zoology Museum in Maine, USA. As I mentioned in my previous entry, this establishment boasts a ‘non-profit educational and scientific mission’, and has a range of exhibits from ‘real’ yeti-hair to replicas of the Loch-Ness Monster and Bigfoot. They welcome donations of art inspired by cryptozoology, and have several movie props on display, including their very popular fiberglass coelacanth. Their list of intriguing visitors ranges from anthropologists and zoologists through to the Talking Heads’ David Byrne, who visited on the Summer Solstice for reasons known only to himself.

Many would dismiss the ICM as the private project of an obsessive collector, who indiscriminately has collected items of interest under a single roof and organised them seemingly randomly, according to undisclosed logic. I, however, take a more philosophical view. The earliest museums, cabinets of curiosity owned by the wealthy and highly educated in the 17th and 18th centuries, fit perfectly under an identical description to the one outlined above. While not as clearly designed for public education or unbiased reporting of science as prestigious modern museums, I strongly believe that there is an important place in the world for privately run museums and collections, even those at the fringes of true science.

Above: The famous ‘cabinet of curiousity’, belonging to Dutch collector Ole Worm, from the mid 17th century. Amoungst other findings, Worm proved that lemmings were rodents, and not as previously thought spontaneously generated by the air.

With the recent focus on the reliability of scientific results and the repeatability of so-called ‘landmark’ experiments, I propose that it’s no bad thing to have an example of ‘bad science’ for students to critique and observe. It is a belief in the infallibility of science or scientists that leads to errors and conclusions being based on false data. One only need read a certain British tabloid paper weekly to realise that if everything that the public translators of science concluded caused cancer did so, the human race would probably be an endangered species.

Professor Sykes’ research, when I read beyond the headlines, was at its heart an elegant experiment in which ancient DNA samples from extinct species of polar and brown bears were reconstructed, sequenced, and compared. The team behind the findings included no crypto-zoologist, and their results will probably not be welcome news to the good people at the ICM. However, the crypto-zoological slant the findings have been given by the British media has made this research headline-grabbing, providing publicity and potentially funding for the department. In the end, it may prove that this brief flush of yeti-mania will have a lasting impact on our collective knowledge of evolution and natural history.

Further reading:

• I found The Economist’s recent article on the reliability and repeatability of scientific findings really interesting, and I would highly recommend it to anyone wondering what all the fuss is about: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong
• For a good overview of Professor Sykes’ ‘yeti study’ and a brief video explanation, check out the BBC article from the 17^th of October http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24564487
• I promise I’m not on their publicity team, I just love the ICM as an idea. Here’s their link one more time for anyone who’s interested. http://cryptozoologymuseum.com

All pictures, as always, from creativecommons.org