BiomimiWHAT?

Since arriving in New Zealand I have somehow surrounded myself with excessively smart people. From the other Fulbright students, to the delegates at the Future Partnership Forum, to folks at work, the people I encounter have given me a constant stream of interesting ideas and new important issues to consider. There’s nothing like having a fascinating conversation or attending a stimulating lecture to put you in a good mood and I’ve been lucky to experience several over the last seven weeks (yes, I’ve been here seven weeks already!).

Science excites me for several reasons: first of all, it’s usually extremely cool; second of all, it can help us improve our understanding of ourselves and of our place in the world; third of all—and this is what I’m most passionate about—science presents us with a wonderfully rational and elegant way to approach management of resources and regulation of our own actions, as well as a way to progress as a civilization that will hopefully someday incorporate the earth’s fine-tuned balance.

Since going to the Future Partnership Forum in Christchurch (part of the larger US-NZ council’s Partnership Forum) last month, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the ways in which not only science and policy, but also science and industry, interact. (Mind you, these are not exclusive pairings.) I’ve been thinking about what it means to innovate. Creativity is the only path that will lead us to solutions for our toughest problems like dwindling resources, food and water crises, and climate change.

On my drive up to Auckland last weekend, my friend and I started discussing innovation and creativity in design, focusing on sustainability and our current environmental challenges. The conversation turned to a field called biomimicry. The concept is simple but inspired: look at how the earth and its creatures work, and try to use the designs of Mother Nature in our own products. My friend mentioned a company called Whale Power, which I have since looked up online.

The Whale Power website tells the story of the initial conception of the project: Dr. Frank Fish (amazing name) inspected a figurine of a humpback whale and wanted to understand why the whale’s flippers where bumpy on the front edge. After some serious research, he designed new blades for windmills that are more efficient than the smooth ones that human engineers first built. This is similar to the “invention” of Velcro by George de Mestral who noticed the efficacy of burrs at attaching to clothing and hair.

(Humpback whale from the web)

Coincidentally, this week at NIWA, the Thursday lecture focused on biomimicry. The speaker, a recent graduate of a masters program at Harvard University where he studies in the Lauder Laboratory, shared with us work he’d done on the fluid dynamics surrounding seal whiskers and sharkskin. Sharkskin has long been suspected to greatly reduce drag and facilitate fast and easy movement in the water, but until Johannes Oeffner decided to pursue the question for his master's thesis, no one had ever proved the existence of or quantified the phenomenon. (Spoiler alert: the sharkskin does reduce drag but a quantifiable amount!)

Data like those presented by Johannes can have an enormous impact on engineering and industry. Now that we know how good sharkskin is at reducing drag, we can design boat hulls, submarines, and cars that reduce drag with similar mechanisms, in turn reducing the energy input required to run those machines. To be sure, you readers can probably think of many more applications than I can!

(close up of sharkskin from a "glog" ?)

The Whale Power website highlights how using biological models as a template for design is, in a way, creating a product that has been field-tested for millions of years. I love the concept that the evolutionary iterations of an organism—from the constant evolution of unseen proteins to the alteration of physical characteristics we can see—represent an inimitable series of field tests. What an awesome way to look at evolution!

If we are going to achieve a better way of living, whom else should we look to but Mother Nature?

R/V Tangaroa

This past weekend I went on a trip up north to Rotorua and then on to Auckland. While I flew through Auckland on my way into the country, I had never seen any of the countryside north of Wellington and I jumped at the chance to join my friend on a little road trip up the island. The drive was absolutely gorgeous and I had a great time.

It just so happened that my advisor from the states was coming into port in Auckland after a three week research cruise to the Kermadec Ridge, home to a submarine volcano range and some really cool deep-sea ecosystems. The ship docked at about 9 am and he was flying back to the states that night, so I snuck in a quick meeting that afternoon to discuss my Fulbright project.

He joined a number of colleagues from NIWA, the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Science, or GNS, the University of Washington, and others, on board NIWA’s R/V Tangaro. In Maori culture, Tangaroa is the God responsible for the sea.

Upon arrival in Auckland, I found my way straight to the dock and met with my advisor on the ship. When the meeting was over, my friend James, an engineer at WHOI gave me a tour of the ship, highlighting some of the quirkier aspects of the R/V Tangaroa.

Like the tile bathtub…

…and the factory-like rooms down below that I imagine were used for fish processing. I have no proper sources for this assumption, but I think it used to be a trawler before it was converted to a research ship.

I even snapped a shot of the city skyline from inside the ship's bridge.


I stayed in Auckland until Tuesday afternoon and really enjoyed catching up with friends and checking out the city. A special highlight was the Maritime Museum, which had a huge range of exhibits from traditional islander and Maori canoes to the winning 1995 America's cup Yacht. The museum is a must do in Auckland.

What can I say? I'm a total ocean nerd!

Thinking vs. Doing

I can be hard-headed and sometimes I can have trouble stepping back and accepting the fact that I know virtually nothing about anything. I will carry on thinking that I’m on the right track until something—a journal article I read, an e-mail I receive, or a meeting that doesn’t go as planned—smacks me in the side of the face (figuratively speaking of course) and screams “you have no idea what you’re doing!” When this hard truth hits, it can be quite upsetting and I sometimes let it result in a “bad day” which may or may not involve complete loss of confidence, withdrawing to my office, and/or taking everything anyone says the wrong way, suspecting that they too have lost all faith in me. This paints a picture of an extreme case, but it does happen.

While preparing to leave Woods Hole for New Zealand, I was chatting with my advisor Dr. Tim Shank at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) about the year to come. He said something that caught me off guard which, paraphrased, went something like this: “If you come back to WHOI with a boatload of genetic data about species around New Zealand, you will not have had a successful year. But if you come back understanding what goes into designing a research project, that will be success.”

My emotional response to this was a cocktail of excited and a bit irritated. I was excited because this whole learning to sculpt a research project business sounded like a very large step down the poorly-defined, often blocked, and tumultuous road between studentville and scientist city that we call a PhD program.

So, why did this also bug me? Because in my mind I had already come up with a research project: I was going to study the genetic connectivity of seamount invertebrates and try to understand what the genetic legacy of bottom trawling might be on benthic dwelling species. I had a topic. I had leader-of-the-field advisors to work with at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). I was going to hop on a plane, land in New Zealand, grab a pile of samples, and be a DNA-sequence-generating lab-dwelling machine for a year (with brief breaks to explore the country and play cello of course). But that would have been too easy and, in the end, pretty pointless.

While I knew that my previous forays into the world of science were heavily skewed to the grunt labor side of things, it was never as clear to me as it is now just how little I know about how to do science. Working as a summer intern or a lab tech for months at a time gave me a very naïve version of how things work. Over the three weeks that I’ve been at NIWA I’ve been working to formulate an actual plan and proposal for how to proceed with my research. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. At each step—actually figuring out what the research questions are, choosing a target species, determining the physical sites of the populations I am to use, and trying to understand what genetic markers and tests could help illuminate patterns of gene flow in the deep sea—I find that there is an entire world of knowledge that I have never broached. It’s almost terrifying how much there is to learn. And while I could spend the rest of my life THINKING about these topics, there’s a very hard-headed part of me that wants to start DOING.

There have been some good days when I think I know what I’m going to do and I’m just one tantalizing step from being able to actually get in the lab and start doing work. And surely there have been some not-so-good days when leads that I thought I had on samples or genetic markers fall through and I realize I haven’t made progress.

But yesterday was the first bad day. Yesterday felt like one of those smacks in the face I was talking about. I received information that, while actually really helpful in designing my study, has strongly made me reconsider using the two species I was hoping to use for my major research questions.

What do you do with this kind of information? You breathe deeply and start thinking again. It’s called being a rational human and it can be extremely difficult. So, after my typical series of irrational emotional responses—helplessness, uselessness, frustration, omni-directional worry—I’m back to thinking. Rationally.

Something that my NIWA advisor, Dr. Ashley Rowden said to me last week will make a lasting impression on my career, I think. When I expressed my eagerness to get in the lab and start doing things, he essentially said, “Ellie, I have news for you. This reading and thinking is most of what science is.”

Sirens, bells, and whistles exploded in my brain (well, probably I just grunted) because this led me to recall what Tim had said back in January about what a successful year would look like. He was telling me that success would be learning to think and not just do. When two extremely intelligent and well-published scientists from almost directly opposite sides of the globe seem to have the same message, they must have a point.

Mountains under the sea

As some of my friends and family know, the last couple of weeks have been extremely eventful and emotional for me here in New Zealand but let's be honest: I've been a horrible blogger thus far. I was in Christchurch when the earthquake hit on February 22nd and while the story of my experience would probably make a good blog post of sorts, what I’d rather do is give you some resources to help the people of Christchurch and move on to something more science-like. So if you are able, and feel so compelled, please donate to the NZ Red cross to help the effort in Christchurch by clicking here.

So, on to the mountains of the sea…

If you think you can plan a trip to the world’s longest mountain range and gaze in awe at its magnificent peaks, you’re wrong. You would have trouble getting to the longest mountain range on earth, as it is in the ocean. The mid ocean ridge (MOR) extends for 80,000 kilometers (while length of continuous mountains is ~65,000 km) and runs throughout the world’s ocean. Fore reference, the earth’s circumference is roughly 40,000 km!

Here's a map from wikipedia (the pink shows the MOR system):

Like on land, the mountain ranges of the oceans (including the MOR and others) outline the planet’s subduction zones and spreading centers, where tectonic plates crash into each other or are pulled apart, dramatically destroying and creating the earth’s crust. And here’s the cool thing about the ocean, in addition to the MOR, there are thought to be hundreds of thousands of seamounts, or undersea mountains, splattered across the globe (think Jackson Pollock).

Seamounts are a hard geological feature to define (pun intended). If you ask any number of ocean scientists to do so, you are likely to get a range of answers depending on discipline. If you are going to be a serious geologist about it, an underwater feature is only a seamount if it rises more than 1,000 meters off the seafloor. However, we biologists are more likely to clump much smaller features—down to 100 meters in altitude—into the definition. I’ve discovered that in New Zealand, some of the legislation about seamounts uses this broader definition, much to the chagrin of the fishing industry. Here’s why.

Many commercially valuable deep-sea fish like orange roughy (pictured below), and oreo (yes, that's a kind of fish!) aggregate on seamounts. Because of the way the ocean currents interact with these bathymetric features, lots of the nutrients and food necessary for benthic invertebrates and pelagic fish alike to thrive are in high abundance at seamounts. It follows, then, that fisheries would target seamounts while trawling for fish, and who’s to blame them? But when we think about managing the fisheries and try to understand the effects that fishing has on the marine environment, we must consider the impact that trawling will have on the benthic habitat and the organisms within that habitat. When writing the laws, however, if one uses the broader definition of seamount, then more features will be subject to whatever regulation is being imposed, thus explaining the aversion of some fisheries advocates to the use of a more lenient definition.

Orange Roughy on a seamount (this photo was taken by one of my advisors, Malcolm Clark, from NIWA. This particular file is from 3news.co.nz):

Some people find it hard to relate to the marine environment. What’s below the low tide mark remains hidden to almost all people and many marine species continue to be eaten but never seen. Think about how many times you may have eaten fish sticks or fish and chips; now try to think about what cod or haddock look like. Can you? If that was an easy one for you, what about the deep-water coral and other benthic invertebrates often caught as bycatch? As the animals we eat remain largely mysterious, we find the environment from which they came to be virtually unimaginable.

If you decide to follow this blog as I share with you my journey as a graduate student through the world of deep-sea science, I hope that you will soon find yourself as enthralled with the deep sea as I am!

Until next time,

E