Bug Eyed Creatures of the Deep

I’ve been thinking a lot about eyes lately. Mostly that’s because of my best friend, editor, business associate, and fellow Cuthbert Burbage enthusiast, Maygen. She’s having LASIK this week, which has led to a lot of conversations like:

So needless to say, eyes and vision and lasers were all on my mind when I spent a rainy weekend binge watching Blue Planet. The Deep Ocean episode caught my attention with its slew of bizarre creatures that inhabit the depths of the ocean where only a very small amount of sunlight trickles down from the surface. The animals there live in a sort of perpetual twilight and as a result, many have developed enormous eyes to capitalize on what little light there is. But that isn’t all. The dim lighting has done some serious tinkering with these animals’ visual systems--and it doesn’t just affect their eyes. The mesopelagic zone covers waters from 200 to 1000m deep. At those depths, there’s just enough light to be able to distinguish night from day, but just barely. It’s an alien world to be sure. Even the light there is much different than the light on the surface. As it travels through water, the longer wavelengths of light, reds and oranges, are absorbed. Only slower wavelengths make it down to the mesopelagic. It is a blue and black world.

Bioluminescence for everyone! (Clockwise
from the top: the underside of a hatchetfish,
warning display of a jelly, a lanternfish, and
a dragon fish) Photo from Johnsen Lab at
Duke.

But the sun isn’t the only source of light there. Evolution was feeling rather glow-happy when it created mesopelagic fish: over 95% of fish species in the twilight zone bioluminescence. And they are definitely not alone: there are light up squid, psychedelic jellyfish, flashy shrimp, and glow in the dark sharks. (I couldn’t work lasers into this post, but I made it to glow in the goddamn dark sharks, so I think that’s worth something.) Let’s talk about those sharks. The cookie cutter shark (Isistius brasilensis), like many mesopelagic creatures, is covered in light-emitting organs called photophores--more on those in a bit. Well, it’s covered except for a distinct patch under its chin. (Glow in the dark shark with a soul patch!) From below, the patch looks like a fish. Would be predators swim up from the depths thinking they’ve got a nice meal in sight only to become prey themselves. Sneaky! Lots of fish and other carnivorous creatures spend their time lurking in the darker depths, watching for the silhouettes of potential meals swimming above. As you may imagine, this has led to lots of prey organisms evolving methods to mask their silhouettes. Some have become razor thin. (The better to disappear from sight, my dear.) Others have gone as transparent as possible--which is probably more impressive than you’re giving them credit for. Building transparent tissues is incredibly difficult--it involves a lot of very accurate crystal alignment and a whole host of other logistics--but it’s not impossible. Just think about the lenses and corneas of your eyes, you silly human.

Imagine if every time you ate something, everyone could see
your meal inside you. Mostly I think you'd be shocked at  the
sheer amount of ice cream I consume.

But, not content with just being transparent and therefore badass, the Solmissus incisa jellyfish, like many of its brethren, has gone so far as to absorb sea water into its tissues. The less difference in density from its flesh to the surrounding water, the less light will refract off of it and thus give it away to predators.

Photophores play a big role in the silhouette camouflaging game as well. It isn’t just our cookie cutter friend glowing by himself down there. Many mesopelagic animals have photophores lining their undersides. They use sensors on their topsides to detect the intensity and scattering of sunlight and then mimic it with their photophores. The two types of light--the down-welling light from the surface and the light generated by bioluminescence--have driven the evolution of some pretty funky eyes. Generally speaking, as one goes deeper in the ocean, the eyes of the creatures get bigger and bigger, until they just aren’t necessary anymore. Since the mesopelagic is the last depth that has sunlight, it represents the peak in eye-size shenanigans. Huge eyes work like drag nets to haul in every photon of light possible.

Who me? I'm just chilling, you know, using my yellow lenses
to filter out ambient light and hone in on bioluminesence.
The usual. No biggie. 

Yellow lenses, like on the larger eye of the cock-eyed squid, are fairly common as well. They have the disadvantage of filtering out nearly all the blue light (which, if you recall is most of the available light), but they also have one huge advantage. Photophores mimic down-welling light, which means their light is blue. But they don’t mimic it perfectly, so the light has a greenish tinge that becomes easily detectable when the rest of the ambient blue light is filtered out. Find the photophore, find a meal. Then there are the tube eyes. Oh god, the tube eyes. Where our

I found this image on an ebay site selling build your own
telescope fish 3D model kits. Tragically, they were sold out
when I got there. But it makes me happy that there
are at least four people in the world who had a need for a
3D telescope fish model. 

eyes are spheres, some mesopelagic creatures have eyes that are, well, tubes. Tubular eyes aren’t very good at precision vision, but they are great at collecting and focusing small amounts of light--think of a telescope. These eyes are favored by ‘lie in wait’ predators like the telescope fish (Gigantura chuni). Tubular eyes are great at collecting light, but they leave creatures with a very narrow field of vision. To counter that, many tube-eyed creatures have developed ‘accessory retinas’ on the sides of their tubes. These extra retinas can’t necessarily form images--vision the way you and I think about it--but they can detect light and movement, alerting the fish where to direct its better equipped tubular eyes. I’d advise buying your accessory retinas now, once the press gets a hold of this it’s really going to take off. There are lots of tube-eyed creatures, but I’m going to go ahead and give the award for “Best Dressed/ Most Evolutionary Effort” to Macropinna microstoma, aka the barreleye fish. Known since 1939, a specimen had never been found intact, much less alive and swimming until 2009. Their corpses had always washed up covered in a goopy slime where their heads should have been, but the 2009 video showed something else. That goopy slime was its head. The fish has a translucent skull.

I'll just leave this here... (Thanks for photo MBARI) 

But wait, there’s more. The dark spots on the front of its mouth are not eyes, they’re nostrils. Its tubular eyes are actually the green orbs perched on top of its head. Those eyes, by the way, can swivel to the front of its head so that it can see not only the jellyfish it eats, but also the tiny creatures it snatches away from other jellyfishes’ tentacles. To quote Stephen Colbert, “that’s the craziest f#?king thing I’ve ever heard.”

Decomposing Rocks and Discarded Exoskeletons

However improbable it may sound, deep inside this pale as a lily, born and bred midwesterner beats the heart of beach bum. I may never have what people will call a "tan," but good luck getting me out of the water or away from the shore once I’m there. I will gladly haul my beach gear on the subway. I regularly try to talk my family into moving our Christmas celebration from St. Louis to St. Lucia. I actively track real estate prices in the Caribbean. You get the idea.  Like virtually everyone with a pulse, I seem to be unable to resist the urge to collect seashells while I’m frittering the day away on the sand. Recently though, while getting ready for a trip to Cocoa Beach, Florida (where I was meeting my parents so they could see my work at Kennedy Space Center) I realized that I knew practically nothing about the creatures that had made those shells. And, come to think of it, I didn’t know much about a lot of what I see at the beach. The only thing left to do was buy some books, repack my suitcase to accommodate said books, nearly miss my plane (classic Emme), and get ready to be the nerdiest beach bum there ever was.

Here’s some of what I found: Sand Ok, obviously I found sand. That in and of itself may not sound terribly exciting, but think of it like this: those inconvenient grains that invariably get stuck in every conceivable crevice of your flip flops and cling to your beach towel despite several rounds of vigorous shaking, are actually bits of decomposed rock. Sand is mostly made up of the remains of rocks that have been weathered down for an average of a couple hundred thousand years. There’s also a small amount of shelled sea critter bits and the hardened remains of other animals and plants thrown in for good measure. The sand along each stretch of beach is unique--the result of the rock composition at its source (for beaches in Florida, that’s by and large the Appalachian Mountains) and the coastal conditions where it ended up. The daily action of waves and tides, the occasional large storm, and longer-term events like sea level change all play a role in a beach’s sand profile. The sand on most beaches in the eastern US is made predominantly of quartz with a little feldspar thrown in. Those minerals are not only abundant in the Earth’s crust, they’re also hard enough to stick around long after others have dissolved or been pulverized into dust.

Slurp, slurp "Tasty!"- The creature that ate these guys

Seashells Seashells are the exoskeletons of sea critters. They are made mostly of calcium carbonate (aka TUMS) with just a dash of protein, the same recipe that the first shelled organisms used when they evolved some 500 millions years ago. Animals build their shells by pulling calcium out of the seawater. It’s a pretty cool process that we still don’t fully understand, but it has some interesting possibilities for the world of biomimetics. Many of the shells that wash up on shore contain clues about how their former residents met their end--holes where predators drilled through the shell or long grooves made by parasitic worms are fairly common sights.

• Arks I found shells from at least three species of these clams, including a few blood arks (Anadara ovalis). Unlike most clams, which have blood that is clear or bluish, blood arks have red blood. The color comes from hemoglobin, the same molecule that carries oxygen in our blood.

• Lightning whelk (Busycon sinistrum) There are few phrases I enjoy typing more than ‘large predatory sea snail,’ so I was excited to find a few fragments of these guys. Lightning whelks are the southpaws of the sea; the leftward opening on their shells distinguishes them from most other marine animals.

• Eastern white slippersnails (Crepidula atrasolea) These snazzy creatures start life as males, then change to female when conditions are right, i.e. when there are other slippersnails nearby to mate with. (An ability that I am sure would make dating in New York so much simpler.) Their shells are easy to spot because they have a shelf-like projection on the inside.

Salle’s auger (Hastula cinera) Despite some pretty solid search

Looks similar to me.

attempts, I wasn’t able to capture all that many live shelled critters. But one morning my dad dug up this small sea snail from the surf zone. It’s a shame it wasn’t auger mating season because according to my guide book “their summer mating swarms are in the style portrayed by Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity, with embracing pairs rolling in the swash zone" and that seems like something you don’t want to miss.  Ghost crabs (Ocypode quadrata) The ghost crab lived up to its name and stealthy reputation during my visit. I saw quite a few of their characteristic burrow holes in the dry sand of the dunes, but only ever spotted one as it scurried under our deck and out of sight. They live so very close to the water and need to stay moist in order to breathe, and yet they can’t swim. This leads me to wonder if there is an untapped market for ghost crab-sized life preservers.

I'm fairly certain one is not supposed to go digging around in the dunes, but
Poppers and I couldn't resist trying to excavate a ghost crab burrow.
It was highly unsuccessful in my opinion because we didn't find a single crab.
Poppers, however, got to throw shovels full of sand on me, so it was
mission accomplished for him. 

Red Mangrove (Rhizophora mangle): These guys look more like a crazed shrub than your garden variety tree (HA), but despite their haphazard appearance, they know exactly what they’re doing. Red mangroves are incredibly well adapted to their environment. They grow in the soft muck that builds up along coasts and estuaries, needing very little fresh water or even stable ground to survive. I found a seed pod floating in the waves, which it turns out, it can do for over a year. The pods drift out from their parent tree and then drift off. The tip of the pod eventually becomes waterlogged, which pulls it toward the bottom where it can take root.

Not my hand. Or my picture, for that matter.

Skate egg cases Skates are related to sharks and rays, and like those creatures they have bodies made of cartilage. Unlike some sharks and all rays who have live babies, skates lay eggs encased in a capsule that looks like a seed from an alien tree. The embryo inside is pretty crafty--when it senses another creature’s electrical field, it can shut down all of its functions--including its heartbeat and respiration--until the would-be predator moves on. I also hear they’re quite tasty. I ordered a skate taco during a recent taco expedition to Queens, but they were out. I guess I’ll have to go back.

There was a multitude of other creatures and plants as well. Bottlenose dolphins, two different kinds of seagulls (one of which--the royal tern--my mom nicknamed “The Danny Devito Bird”), brown pelicans, and mullets (both the fish and the haircut) all made an appearance during my five days of beach basking. There were sea oats, seashore dropseed, and railroad vine growing in the dunes. And there were boatloads of green algae--which I initially mistook for a weird kind of seaweed--covered in tiny air-filled bladders that help the bunches float in water.

Unfortunately, despite Cocoa Beach being fairly clean and really pretty healthy, I also found a good deal of trash in the sand--bottle caps, small bits of plastic, cigarette butts. Part of appreciating the beach is taking care of it. So please, pick up your trash and be a responsible beachgoer. Some of us are trying to buy beachfront property and between the litter, the hurricanes, and the sea level rise, you all are really harshing my property-buying buzz.

I shall think of you often in the cold, dark, slushy months ahead, Cocoa Beach. 

A Nightshade Grows in Brooklyn

Evening to-do list: wear moon gloves, weed garden,
instagram berries, get nerdy about nightshades.
#yesreally 

I have a backyard. It’s no palatial green lawn and there are, regrettably, no topiaries. (Note to self: inquire with roommates about purchasing some topiaries.) But it’s my own little green space in the midst of this concrete jungle.

About a week ago, some brightly colored berries growing in one corner of the yard caught my eye. The small, multicolored berries were attached to a vine growing some pretty funny looking leaves. When I cut one of the berries open, it looked and sort of smelled like a tiny, tiny tomato. Naturally, I had to know what they were, so I tupperwared ‘em and brought ‘em to work.

I really was going to write about something besides poison this week, but the universe had other ideas. Those berries and funny-shaped leaves are the hallmark of Solanum dulcamara, or bittersweet nightshade, a climbing vine originally from Eurasia. It was invited to the US to be a pretty face in the crowd, but now it’s classified as a noxious weed or invasive species in at least 35 states. Like a lot of non-native species it has the very unpleasant habit of running amok, smothering native species, and being downright impervious to attempts to eradicate it.

Attention hipsters: you may collect this vintage
bittersweet nightshade print at on Amazon. Oh,
and look at those leaves...there all different!

As far as structure goes, bittersweet nightshade has what you might call a ‘devil may care’ attitude. Its berries don’t ripen all at once, so immature green berries, semi-mature orange berries, and fully mature red berries all hang out together and even rub elbows (seeds?) with the small purple flowers that will eventually turn into berries.

The leaves too seem to have decided to throw regularity to the wind and are a mix of shapes and sizes. Smaller leaves are more or less arrowhead shaped, while large ones are more heart shaped. Most, but not all, of the larger leaves have a set of double, irregular-shaped lobes on their bases. Bittersweet nightshade does its own thing, ok? For those of you who are unfamiliar with the nightshade family, technically known as the Solanaceae (so-lan-AY-see-ee) family, it’s full of charmingly poisonous plants like henbane, mandrake, jimsonweed, and belladonna (also known by the oh-so-creative name of deadly nightshade). Before you go rushing the exits, you should know that, depending on who’s counting, there are between 2,000 and 4,000 plants in the Solanaceae family and not all of them are terrifying; some are probably in your pantry or your backyard right now: tomato, eggplant, tobacco, potato, husk apple, chili pepper, sweet (or capsicum) pepper, petunias….they’re all nightshades.

Try saying "Pre-Columbian
potato pot" three times fast

The Solanaceae are a well travelled, highly influential family to say the least. There are mandrakes carved on the side of an ivory casket of Tutankhamun. There’s archaeological evidence that capsicum peppers were being eaten 9,000 years ago in Peru. There are frescoes of eggplants in Roman villas and pre-Columbian potato-shaped ceramic vessels from the Americas. Both King Hamlet of Shakespearean fame and Ulysses of Greek fame ran into henbane: it worked out somewhat more favorably for Ulysses who just had to deal with his crew being transformed into pigs. King Hamlet, meanwhile, had to deal with being dead and haunting his son. (A father’s work is never done.) There are larger historical echoes as well. The Irish Potato Famine, anyone? The transatlantic tobacco trade? Bittersweet nightshade has led a quiet life in comparison to many of its relatives. It is poisonous, but you, as a normal-sized human, would have to eat an awful lot of it to do anything other than sour your stomach. Its poison, like most poison in nature, isn’t about us. It’s about repelling insects and browsing animals, so just get over yourself.
Like a lot of nightshades, bittersweet nightshade contains a toxin called solanine. Also like a lot of nightshades, the poison isn’t concentrated in just one place; it’s in the berries, it’s in the leaves, the stems, the roots...everywhere. Nightshades, let me reiterate, are not fucking around.

Chances are actually pretty good that you’ve ingested some solanine in the past day or two. It’s in peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes (to name a few), though its concentration in those foods is much, much too low to have an impact on the average person.
In higher concentrations than a dish of salsa, pizza, or poutine, solanine is trouble. It has a really neat, but really nasty ability to shut down the effects of a certain neurotransmitter called acetylcholine (a-see-till-KO-leen). Solanine blocks a chemical whose normal function is to break down acetylcholine, letting the neuron know it’s time to stop firing. Think of the neuron like a light switch--acetylcholine flips the light switch on, the other chemical flips it off. Except, when solanine gets involved the light switch just stays on and soon the bulb burns out, the neuron dies. Then, like those strings of christmas lights where one burnt out bulb causes all the others to go out, the other neurons nearby start shutting off too.

Hemlock, which did Socrates in, contains a highly toxic alkaloid
known as coniine. (If my fellow New Yorkers are in search of a
place to go contemplate alkaloids, I highly recommend David's
"The Death of Socrates" at the Met.)

Solanine is part of a class of molecules called alkaloids, nifty nitrogen-containing compounds made primarily by plants. They might not be about us, per se, but they do have some very pronounced effects on us and our nervous systems. Morphine was the first identified alkaloid, but that’s not all. Cocaine, caffeine, nicotine, strychnine, and quinine are all alkaloids. Do you have sudafed in your medicine cabinet? Take a close look at it’s active ingredient: pseudoephedrine! A certified alkaloid derived from an Asian plant called Ephedra sinica. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to try to remove the bittersweet nightshade plant in my backyard. Yes, it’s weedy, non-native, and slightly poisonous. But it’s beautiful and it’s given me a great excuse to stop and examine every leaf, vine, berry I come across. Now when I’m late to happy hour it isn’t because I decided to change my entire outfit at the last minute, it’s because I was crawling around someone’s front garden to see if that green berry is a sibling to ones in my backyard. My friends, as you might imagine, are very patient people.