Pod Insights Ologies Nudibranchology (GLAMOROUS SEA SLUGS) with Jessica Goodheart and Terry Gosliner About this episode Discovery. Drama. Diversity. Design inspo. Let’s squirm into the sea grass and the tidal crevices with California Academy of Sciences legend Dr. Terry Gosliner and the American Museum of Natural History’s Dr. Jessica Goodheart to discover bunny horns, finger backs, stolen weaponry, “buttflowers,” doomed first dates, high fashion, tiny eyes, gender fluidity, “Finding Nemo” cameos, the boardgame you need, and how your phone can warm a scientists heart just by slipping on a windbreaker and looking for beautiful things.
Transcript 13,760 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:03 Alie Ward? Oh, hey, it's the one open table at the cafe that has croissant crumbs on it, but that's fine. Ally Ward, this is Ologies. These are nudibranchs. We're talking sluggish beauties that you didn't know you needed to love. The designs, the drama, the discoveries. Nudibranchs. What are they? They're soft-bodied mollusks of the sea. They live in the tropics to the far snowy corners of Antarctica, from the shallows to the depths. We're going to hear all about them. There are so many species to love, so many that we called upon two members of the same species, both humans, nudibranchologists, who live on opposite sides of the continent but love nudibranchs equally. One is the senior curator of California Academy of Sciences
1:46 Alie Ward? Invertebrate Zoology and Geology Department in San Francisco. He has been there since 1982. He is a legend among people who wear wetsuits for a living. We're going to talk all about it. Our second expert, I know, we almost never have more than one expert, but there was just too much to talk about, is an assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History and studies the biodiversity and evolution of marine invertebrates, including nudibranchs. Yes, new to oncology, it's a word. It means nude or naked gills or brachia, slugs with outside lungs. And they have so much more going for them. We're going to get into it. But first, a quick thank you to all the listeners supporting us via patreon.com/ologies,
2:29 Alie Ward? where you can submit questions before we record and you can join that for $1 a month. Thank you to everyone who's there. We also have Ologies merch, if you want to put us on your bodies, at ologiesmerch.com. And for $0, you can help us out so much by just leaving a review. I do read them all and they keep me going on days when I open the news and I want to die under the porch like an old dog. So let's stick together, but thank you Riley Rainbow, who wrote, "I'm officially the coolest at dinner parties. My coworkers and family like my weird facts." Also, they write, "If you have children, there's Smologies, 100 air horns. My kids ask for their podcast every morning on their way to school."
3:12 Alie Ward? Thank you so much for the review, Riley Rainbow, and also for the reminder that we have totally G-rated, kid-safe episodes that are trimmed down for carpool length. They're available in their own separate podcast feed. They're called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. Again, look for it wherever you find podcasts. Tell a friend. Okay, let's get into the weeds and the seagrass and the rocky crevices to discover facts about bunny horns, finger backs, stolen weaponry, eventful first dates, high fashion, tiny eyes, marriage equality, sea slug cameos, the board game you need, how your phone can warm a scientist's heart, and the best reason to slip on a windbreaker and leave the house
3:54 Alie Ward? with marine biologists, researchers, malacologists, and of course, new to oncologists, Doctors Jessica Goodheart and Teri Gosliner.
4:21 Speaker 02 Terry Gosliner.
4:22 Alie Ward? Perfect. Now, you have been studying aquatic creatures since you were just a wee wee thing in high school up in the Bay Area, correct?
4:32 Speaker 02 That is absolutely right, yeah.
4:35 Alie Ward? Have you been a water person your whole life? Do you like getting in a dive suit and getting into the water, or do you mostly just love the discovery?
4:45 Speaker 02 I'm a water person. I was a swimmer in high school. I feel like I sprouted gills at an early age and haven't looked back.
4:56 Alie Ward? Can you kind of take me back to the first time that you saw a nudibranch in the wild? Was it freshwater? Was it saltwater? Was it in a tide pool? Naked eye? Do you remember some of those first sightings?
5:13 Speaker 02 Oh, I remember it very clearly, like it was yesterday. I had seen pictures of nudibranchs in books, and I always wanted to see one in the wild. And I, as a kid, I went out to local tide pools and looked around, and I, I never found one. And then I had this amazing high school biology teacher who used to take classes out to all kinds of environments. And we did a lot of exploring. And so I told him that I really wanted to see a nudibranch, and he said, I can make that happen next week. And so we went out
5:55 Speaker 02 to the tide pools, and it turned out I wasn't looking in the right place. And immediately, I saw this beautiful red, blue, and yellow nudibranch.
6:07 Speaker 02 In the tide pools and I said to myself at that point, I really want to find out more about these animals and I'm still finding out more about those animals today.
6:18 Alie Ward? Is there any way to estimate how many kinds of nudibranchs are out there?
6:22 Speaker 02 I did a paper trying to predict what that might be and we said, this was back in the mid 1990s, that there were probably 6,000 species of nudibranchs. And after looking at the recent data, they're probably three to five times that amount.
6:42 Alie Ward? Wow.
6:43 Speaker 02 So maybe up to 30,000 species of nudibranchs.
6:47 Alie Ward? In which by contrast, there's what, less than 5,000 species of mammals, right? So this is, we're talking about incredible diversity and numbers. And you have discovered over a thousand species, 1,500, how many species have you discovered?
7:04 Speaker 02 About 1,500. But we've only formally named about 450 of them. So we got a lot of work to do. And fortunately, I have a great group of students and other collaborators around the world that I work with and we can make some headway, but I find them faster than I can work on them.
7:28 Alie Ward? Okay, well, you were obviously not doing something right. And then you learned how to do something extremely right.
7:36 Speaker 02 Exactly.
7:37 Alie Ward? What was that trick to finding them?
7:40 Speaker 02 Well, it was knowing the right habitat and I was looking in this other tide pool area that was maybe 100 yards away from Nirvana.
7:52 Speaker 02 Once I knew to go over this ridge and look in the tide pools on the other side of the ridge. It was a magical world.
8:03 Alie Ward? I cannot adequately describe the otherworldly beauty of these sea slokes. Picture a chicklet or a lozenge, but it's made of squishy flesh with a ridge along its back of these finger-like nubbins called serrata. They're used for breathing or defense, and they're just swaying with the currents so gently. Now, nudibranchs, they can range a rainbow of color palettes. Like, there's one with a cobalt-blue body striped with pumpkin orange. Others that look like a lilac flying carpet with two bunny ears and a yellow pom-pom tail that's actually gills or brachial plumes. There are ghostly white nudibranchs studded with these short, black bumps and two horns
8:48 Alie Ward? on the head that look like smoldering matchsticks. Others look like tiny giraffes and are velvety black with acid-green spots and a tail like a peacock if it were made out of slug feathers. Some nudibranchs breathe out of a rosette of streamers surrounding their butthole. They are better creatures than us. Do not Google nudibranch colors if you're high. It will break you. If you need to cuddle a nudibranch, don't. But do visit a site called Wool Creature Lab, featuring the work of fiber artist Irina Borovik, who handcrafted an entire menagerie of tiny, felted wool nudibranchs to pay homage to their real-life slimy sisters.
9:29 Alie Ward? Nudibranchs, you may have never heard of one until this moment, but they will slam stars in your eyes so hard. Teri is not the only nudibranchologist consumed with wonder. I also chatted with a scientist who uses genomics to investigate their evolution and is an assistant curator of mollusks at the American Museum of Natural History's Goodheart Lab in New York.
9:51 Speaker 03 I'm Jessica Goodheart, and my pronouns are she/her.
9:53 Alie Ward? I bet you people tell you how much they love your name constantly.
9:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's very common. Or, like, "Do you have a good heart?" That's another one.
10:02 Alie Ward? Do you think people are nicer to you because of your name?
10:05 Speaker 03 I don't know the answer to that. That's a good question. I guess I would never know. There's no way to know for sure.
10:12 Alie Ward? You could change it and see if people are rude to you.
10:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
10:15 Alie Ward? But I don't recommend it.
10:17 Speaker 03 Probably not.
10:18 Alie Ward? Have you always been more of an aquatic person than a terrestrial person?
10:23 Speaker 03 Definitely, yeah. I much prefer the ocean to anything else. But I also grew up in California, so I think that changes the dynamic a bit.
10:31 Alie Ward? Dr. Goodhart told me that she was technically from West Covina.
10:44 Alie Ward? A suburb 30 or so miles east of LA, which features prominently in the beloved musical comedy series Crazy Ex Girlfriend.
10:54 Speaker 02 Well, we are two hours from the beach for foreign traffic.
10:56 Alie Ward? And so you grew up in California, somewhat near the ocean. Was there like an early interest in like, I gotta do a job that gets me in that water? I have to be in that water.
11:09 Speaker 03 So, yes, I mean, when I was a kid, we would go to the beach and we would dig up the sand crabs that I don't actually even know what they're officially called. I really should check into that. But I, we would dig those up and I loved like picking them up and putting them in a bucket and looking at them. But then as I got older, I didn't really know that this job existed, I guess. So I started preparing to be a vet. I wanted to study to be a veterinarian and I just didn't really like it. I, I thought I would. I love animals, but it just wasn't really for me.
11:37 Alie Ward? Jessica says that her parents weren't scientists, so she didn't have a blueprint, but she loved her biology classes and she reached out to a researcher who happened to study sea slugs. So careers, sometimes to get to the right spot, you gotta go all over the place. Speaking of, what about their range? Is it rare to see a nudibranch? Or are they in every marine environment?
11:59 Speaker 03 They are everywhere, I would say. Like you can find them in the deep sea, you can find them in obviously the tropics and polar areas. Like they are everywhere. Whether you can see them or not, I think is a different question. Sometimes they're harder to see in certain places than others, or certain animals are harder to see. And certainly in the tropics, you tend to get a lot more diversity and it's easier. But they're usually there if you know kind of where and how to look.
12:27 Alie Ward? How, where and how do you look?
12:29 Speaker 03 There's a couple of ways, I guess. So we look, we scuba dive, we snorkel, sometimes we just do tide pooling, or we do what I call docking, which is just going on floating docks and looking on the side. Usually there's a bunch of growth. But basically, you look for their prey, and you should be able to find nudibranchs as long as they're in season. So, once you start getting farther north, you can have more seasonality, I would say. And sometimes they do kind of wash in and then wash out. You might see hundreds or thousands of them all in one spot, and then like the next week, they're totally gone. Because they've finished reproducing, and that's it.
13:06 Alie Ward? Where do they like to live? And I mean, this might be not a very smart question, but are there freshwater nudibranchs, or are they all in marine environments?
13:16 Speaker 02 They're all in marine environments. There are some relatives of nudibranchs that are found in some freshwater streams and tropical environments, very close to where they empty into the ocean. So, there's some that can live in freshwater, but they're not true nudibranchs. They're like nudibranch cousins, and they can survive in freshwater.
13:43 Alie Ward? Okay, so the true nudibranchs that are in marine environments,
13:46 Speaker 02 Right.
13:47 Alie Ward? What type of vibe do they like? What type of habitat is perfect for them? Does it have a lot of algae in it? Does it have a lot of rocky surfaces? Do they like to hide?
13:57 Speaker 02 Well, you can find nudibranchs almost anywhere, as it turns out. And basically, you find a higher diversity in rocky environments, and in places like California, and tidal pools along the coast. But the greatest abundance, and where I've spent most of my time studying nudibranchs, is in tropical coral reef ecosystems. But you can find them off sandy beaches, you can find them down in the deep ocean, you can find them in the Arctic and Antarctic, wherever there's saltwater, there are nudibranchs.
14:34 Alie Ward? What kind of places have you ended up going, looking for them?
14:37 Speaker 03 Oh, a lot of cool places. So, since I started the lab, we've done collecting in Florida, and other like semi-local places, so in the US. I went to Western Australia. I took my lab to Scotland. We have field expeditions planned to Madagascar and American Samoa. I've been to French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, Panama. They're everywhere. So it's really nice to be able to just kind of go wherever I want. And there's sea slugs there. There's nudibranchs there.
15:06 Alie Ward? Did you ever think growing up that like your passport would be this stamped because of sea slugs?
15:12 Speaker 03 I definitely didn't, mostly because I don't think I really understood what sea, I don't think I knew what sea slugs were. I have a really good picture, though, of myself that I found going through my parents' garage a couple of years ago. It's a picture of me, I might have been like six or seven, holding a sea slug, holding a big Aplegia californica, which is one of the big ones in the tide pools, sea hare. And I had no idea this picture existed. And I found it. I'm like, oh, that's cool. So I actually recreated the picture. I was in San Diego at the time. So I wore like, as much of a similar outfit as I could. And I held up a sea slug and I made the same face, which was a pretty disgusted face.
15:55 Alie Ward? What exactly is a sea slug? What is a nudibranch?
16:00 Speaker 03 So all nudibranchs are sea slugs, but not all sea slugs are nudibranchs. So in general, the way that we qualify, what is a sea slug? They're within this group called heterobranchia. It also contains pulmonates or land snails and slugs. So it's not just sea slugs. It's not just things without a shell. A lot of them do have shells, but sea slugs generally are considered ones that either have a reduced shell. So a shell that for whatever reason is either internal or just smaller. So they can't really retract into it the same way. Or they've just lost it completely as adults. And that's sort of how we classify them. It used to be called a pistobranchia, but. We realized later that it actually, they've lost shells multiple times.
16:45 Alie Ward? So as we have said, all cacti are succulents, but not all succulents are cacti. And nudibranchs are in an order all their own because they have no shells as adults and they have external gills, like those bronchial plumes, or they breathe through those fingery serrata on their back. And they use those bunny ears, AKA rhinophores, to sense what's happening around them, all in a quest to eat stuff, to make more nudibranchs, and survive the haters.
17:15 Speaker 03 But there seems to be a lot of transitions to different prey types, which may be involved. Them evolving these really cool defense mechanisms may have allowed them to diversify.
17:24 Alie Ward? They're so diverse and yet they seem like they would be so vulnerable because they're out in the ocean where everything's looking for a snack. And here are these squishy, beautiful, frilly things.
17:40 Speaker 02 Exactly.
17:41 Alie Ward? How did they evolve to survive all of these environments?
17:46 Speaker 02 Well, that's really an interesting story, but basically they evolved other defense mechanisms. They feed on a wide variety of things, like sponges that are very toxic. They feed on sea anemones and jellyfish and their relatives. And they can incorporate the stinging cells from their prey into their own bodies and use them for a defense mechanism. So they've figured out some very clever ways to basically exploit chemical defense and chemical warfare as a way of being able to crawl around without a shell. And if you think about it, building a shell is energetically very expensive to produce a shell.
18:32 Speaker 02 You have to incorporate calcium carbonate, you then have to secrete it. And then you're burdened with crawling around with your house on your back like a camper truck. And basically, it doesn't allow you to have the kind of mobility and freedom of movement. And it weighs a lot. So being free of a shell has opened up a whole new world for nudibranchs in terms of ecological and evolutionary opportunities.
19:01 Alie Ward? Speaking of a whole new world, well, I guess that's, I think that's a different Disney movie. But are there nudibranchs in The Little Mermaid? Should there be?
19:10 Speaker 02 There must be. I haven't looked that closely, but if the animators were doing their job, they're definitely.
19:21 Alie Ward? What about Finding Nemo? I wonder if Finding Nemo has nudibranchs.
19:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, I've seen nudibranchs in the background in Finding Nemo, for sure.
19:30 Alie Ward? I did find a pair of nudibranchs who are extras in The Little Mermaid. They each have an orange underside and a Barbie pink body with deep fuchsia accents, and they appear to be based on Mexichromis marii. And while I really appreciate the attention to detail on that color palette, I did notice that this canoodling nudibranch couple, made up of one plain-faced partner and another with eyelashes and lipstick, was so heteronormative. I think it means that The Little Mermaid researchers either were ill-informed about nudibranch gender fluidity, or they just wrongly assumed that the world wasn't ready for it. Now, Finding Nemo, though, went a solo route, and it features one blood-red,
20:14 Alie Ward? fluttering, hexabranchus sanguineus, also known as the Spanish dancer. And it's got this wide, ribbony body and kind of a ballet-level grace as it undulates in the water. Alas, though, this fancy dancer has but a cameo. No speaking parts. Is the world still not ready? Maybe it's time that there's a Pixar movie about them, or at least featuring one.
20:37 Speaker 03 I think so. Yeah, I agree with that. I also think there'd be a good board game. Like, have you ever played Wingspan?
20:45 Alie Ward? Yes, yes.
20:46 Speaker 03 I think there should be a nudibranch version of Wingspan, for sure. Or like a sea slug version. There's a lot of really cool sea slugs.
20:53 Alie Ward? Wingspan, of course, you know this. It's that instant classic tabletop game about ornithology. It was created by litologist, or professional game designer, and nature enthusiast, Elizabeth Hargrave.
21:04 Speaker 03 I've been thinking about emailing her for a long time, and I just... I don't know. I felt almost too nerdy, like thinking that I might suggest that and be like, oh, God, more Nudibranch stuff. I only do Nudibranchs, but I don't know. It's my thing, right?
21:21 Alie Ward? Someone's got, yes, it's your, when you know as much about Nudibranchs and you get to work with them, then it's okay to be the Nudibranch guy. You know what I mean?
21:30 Speaker 03 Absolutely. Yeah. But, yeah, I think, I think a game would be great.
21:34 Alie Ward? So I had the fortune of being introduced to Elizabeth via enigmatology guest, the magician and professional crossword writer, David Kwong. So I did what anyone with excess giddiness might do, and I emailed Elizabeth to tell her that Jessica says that Nudibranchs deserve a board game. And Elizabeth shot me back a note. She said that she, quote, "loves that idea from what little I know about Nudibranchs, mostly that they look awesome." So if these sea slugs don't someday make it to your dining room table for game night, maybe an animator out there will be inspired to up their visibility. So deserved. I feel like they are ready for their own animated movie because they're dazzling
22:17 Alie Ward? and they're stunning. They already look like cartoons. Can you describe visually some of the Nudibranchs out there? Because I, when I see pictures, they look like AI.
22:31 Speaker 02 Well, they do, yeah. Only AI is less creative than the real world.
22:37 Alie Ward? Exactly.
22:40 Speaker 02 You know, there's some really great examples of how Nudibranchs have entered into popular culture. And, you know, there's a website that shows David Bowie in various outfits and actual species of Nudibranchs that, that actually have the same outfits. And so, anything that David Bowie could have come up with, Nudibranchs did it before. So, that's a really great example of how creative the, the costume design component of Nudibranchs really is. And if you think of Pokemon, the Pikachu is based on a Nudibranch.
23:19 Alie Ward? Is it really?
23:20 Speaker 02 It really is. And there's a brand new species of, of Nudibranch that we've discovered that has the exact same color pattern, and it looks just like Pikachu.
23:32 Speaker 02 So they have inspired some actual creation of animation characters in terms of Pokemon.
23:41 Alie Ward? This is true. And if you don't believe me, you can get yourself in front of the 2019 article in the Journal of Geek Studies titled Pokémon Leska: The mollusk Inspired Pokemon, which has a wealth of information and visual aids with Pokemon characters and their marine inspirations. And if that sounds backwards, you're also right. There's at least one Nudibranch named after a Pokemon, such as the tiny, elusive and yellow Pikachu Nudibranch, which is known in business settings as the Casura Pacifica. But in Nudibranchology, all roads lead to Pokemon, or they circle it like a roundabout.
24:20 Speaker 03 I think the hard part, though, is it's hard for me to recreationally dive anymore because I have a hard time not looking for Nudibranchs. Like, it's just a thing that I'm automatically wired to do now.
24:32 Alie Ward? Gotta catch them all. You gotta check it out.
24:35 Speaker 03 I did love Pokemon as a child.
24:38 Alie Ward? They are so, so beautiful and so freely and bright colored. But I'm sure that those are probably the ones that are sticking in our heads a bit. But do they range visually from ones that blend into their environment to ones that are maybe give off a lot more warning colors?
24:58 Speaker 02 Yeah. And that's a really good point, is that some of them are incredibly skilled at building color patterns that blend in. I mean, amazingly, like, there's some that are found on seagrass that are grassy green with stripes, the exact width and spacing of the veins in the seagrass. There's some that are very skilled at hiding, as well as those that are really just over the top in terms of advertising their presence in the natural world.
25:32 Alie Ward? What does a field day look like for you? Like, when you're in the field, do you have a loop? Do you have to go out at low tide? How do you? You must be so good at those puzzles where you have to, like, spot the difference. You must have such a good attention to detail.
25:50 Speaker 02 Well, oftentimes, you know, I equate it to an Easter egg hunt because you're looking for these brightly colored objects that are hidden, you know, at the base of bushes, which are, in the case of the ocean, they're hydroids or bryozoans or branching things. And you're looking for these tiny little things that are just living jewels that are buried in this big world. And, and suddenly you see them and it's just magical in terms of what they reveal. And so being able to spot them is, takes a lot of training. And
26:31 Speaker 02 when I go diving, I usually start out early in the morning and, you know, once I got to where I needed reading glasses, I needed to have a loop or some way of, of magnifying things.
26:47 Alie Ward? Remember, he's been studying nudibranchs for approximately 60 years. That's a lot of nudibranch spotting. If you too need a loop, either now or down the road, and you want to know why your eyes are so mean to you, our ophthalmology episode with Dr. Rin Weiness can explain it. Or our recent optical technology episode about how glasses work is there for you. They will tell you how they got on your face.
27:10 Speaker 02 I do have some visual aids underwater now. But I think the opportunity is for people younger than 40 to be the best spotters of nudibranchs. But it takes a trained eye and you have to know what you're looking for. You have to know what potential prey might look like and what things they might be eating on and then searching very carefully once you find those things that are likely targets.
27:43 Alie Ward? What are they out there eating? Plankton? Do they ever eat their own babies?
27:47 Speaker 03 They may target one thing, but they have a lot of things in their digestive system. But they're carnivores, so things like sponges or cnidarians, or what else, bryozoans, things like that, other animals, essentially.
28:02 Alie Ward? Carnivores, that surprises me. I thought they'd be out there eating algae.
28:07 Speaker 03 Nope. Yeah, they're eating other animals. There's even, there's a genus that eats egg masses of other nudibranchs, or eats like basically the embryos of other nudibranchs. Yeah, some nudibranchs eat other nudibranchs.
28:20 Alie Ward? A baby muncher. Geez Louise.
28:22 Speaker 03 I know, it's brutal.
28:23 Alie Ward? I was hungry, but I could still eat. In terms of the evolution of things, how, how far back do they go? I can't imagine that they would fossilize well, because they're so squishy.
28:34 Speaker 02 Well, and this is really what I find an intriguing point, because when I first started studying nudibranchs, they have virtually no fossil record. So the advantage of that is that you aren't encumbered by facts, so you can make up scenarios that you want and speculate a little bit. But now we have modern tools with the advancement of studying DNA. You can see how much evolutionary divergence there is in their genetic material. And that tells us, in fact, they go back at least 250 million years.
29:12 Alie Ward? Wow.
29:13 Speaker 02 And when they first lost, probably lost their shells, because they diverged from their closest relatives that have a shell about 250 million years ago.
29:24 Alie Ward? So it would be absolute flim flam to think that nudibranchs never developed a shell. They just were over it, and they were on to the next thing, and they had better defenses?
29:36 Speaker 02 No, they do have a shell.
29:38 Alie Ward? Oh, what?
29:39 Speaker 02 As a larval stage, all nudibranchs have a shell. The larva has a tiny little coiled shell that looks just like a little snail shell. And once they spend a few weeks in the plankton and they experience the cue for metamorphosis, which is usually their adult food species. Once they detect that and they've reached a certain level of maturity, they immediately drop down to the bottom and literally crawl out of the shell and become a nudibranch. So people say, well, slugs are, you know, really primitive. They don't have shells.
30:21 Speaker 02 Well, in fact, it's the opposite. They're a higher form of evolution
30:27 Speaker 02 and have discarded their shells.
30:29 Alie Ward? So when it comes to shells, nudibranchs are like, less is more. But when it comes to their feathery crest or serrata or bronchial plumes on their back or their rhinophore antlers, they are flashy. They're like your great aunt from Boca if she got invited to the Met Gala. But their gills still are new. They're still out there and unprotected, right?
30:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
30:53 Alie Ward? Can you explain a little bit how how their gills are working? Are they taking oxygen out of the water like any gilled kind of animal? Or why, why are gills so prominent in their identity?
31:06 Speaker 02 That's a really good question, and I think part of the reason is that there are a lot of color patterns that are associated with the gills. And because they have greater activity, because they are not encumbered by a shell, their metabolism is much higher and so they need more oxygen.
31:25 Alie Ward? And Terry says that the gills have become way fluffier than what a shell could ever contain. And yes, of course, they serve fashion and function, but that's not all they serve. Let's talk nematocysts. Now, a snail, they got a house. They have a ceramic feeling house. They're like, see ya, I'm in here. Slugs out there raw dogging it in the ocean. So does that mean that they just have to have like weaponry or like defense? Do they tend to evolve other ways to be like, don't you dare eat me?
31:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, it seems like it. So a lot of nudibranchs and other sea slugs have They can sometimes make their own defenses, but they often steal defenses. So some steal the stinging organelles or stinging structures from cnidarians, like jellyfish or anemones. Others steal chemical defenses from their prey, like sponges.
32:17 Alie Ward? And now, when you say these stinging type of structures, when they steal them, where do they, do they have like a purse? Like, do they have a pocket? Do they just absorb them? Do they eat them and then they come out? How does that even work?
32:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, I really like the purse idea. So nudibranchs have this special structure similar to all other snails and a lot of other mollusks. It's called a radula. And when they eat, they basically scrape pieces of tissue off of their prey.
32:47 Alie Ward? Like, imagine if you were sitting down to eat a block of cheddar, but you had no teeth, but your tongue was a cheese grater.
32:54 Speaker 03 So in this case, it would be, let's say, an anemone, where they're just sort of breaking pieces off. When that happens, these stinging structures, they fire from the anemone. So they have this sort of cuticle lining early on in their digestive system that allows them to protect themselves from that. But not all of them fire. And so what happens is the ones that haven't fired move up into their digestive gland and they have these special sacks. You could say a purse or something like that, a little bit of an arsenal, so to speak. At the very end of their, they have these like finger-like projections off their backs. They're called serata. And inside the very tips of those are these special sacks. And in those sacks, there's these cells that actually pick up these structures and keep them.
33:36 Speaker 03 And that's how they're sort of stored until they're used for defense.
33:41 Alie Ward? And they're stored, but they don't fire off like firecrackers on accident? Like, how do they make sure they don't pew pew pew pew, you know?
33:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. I, there's a couple of ways we think this might happen. There's some evidence that. Some nudibranchs, at least one species that has been investigated, the mucus that they have on their bodies seems to somehow prevent some of them from firing. Not all of them, but some of them. But then what we think is happening inside their bodies is that these stinging structures have some sort of maturation process that hasn't finished. And so they can't fire until that process is complete. And so what we think is happening is that they're immature, going through the digestive system, they get picked up and somehow are able to finish their development or finish
34:33 Speaker 03 getting ready to fire inside of the nudibranch.
34:36 Alie Ward? Nuts. And if you're still hungry for more facts on that, you can feast on a recent Good Heart Lab paper titled "A subset of conserved phagocytic genes are likely used for the intracellular theft of nodarian stinging organelles in nudibranch gastropods," which looks at how different tissues hang on to the consumed organelles to repurpose for defense. And some species can grab an immature stinging organelle from their prey and then they cram it up into a little sac at the tip of their serrata, kind of poised like a poison dart Nerf gun.
35:10 Speaker 02 And then there's a little hole in the tip of that finger-like appendage, the serrata, that then they can expel and induce the firing of those nematocysts. How they actually do that is really not understood yet at this point. And it points out to one of the things that's so true of most of nature is there are so many things that still need to be studied and understood. And there's so many opportunities for future generations of young scientists to help solve some of those riddles that we simply don't know about yet.
35:49 Alie Ward? When they're using those stinging appendages, are they stunning prey to eat? Are they zapping predators? Are they killing anything that's trying to eat them? Like, what kind of range of this ammo? Are we looking at artillery here?
36:06 Speaker 02 You know, if something tries to nibble on it, it gets a bad taste in its mouth and it learns to recognize the color pattern and will avoid trying to feed on them in the future. And oftentimes, when a fish or another visual predator tries feeding on a newtibranch, it ends up spitting it out and the newtibranch crawls away unharmed.
36:30 Alie Ward? Later.
36:32 Speaker 02 And it's such an unpleasant experience for a lot of these fish. I've done this experimentally in the lab where after a newtibranch has created this horrible experience for a fish and you can actually see it, what's happening to the fish. It'll sit there on the bottom, looking really unhappy and its gills will be flaring and it will look like it's, you know, if it could barf, it would do that, you know? I mean.
37:04 Alie Ward? It sounds like Hot Ones, the hot competition.
37:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's like trying to eat lots of different intensities of chili peppers.
37:14 Speaker 04 The inside of your body is made out of asbestos.
37:17 Speaker 02 And then on the other end of the spectrum, there's some that feed on things like the Portuguese manawar, jellyfish. And so the nematocysts are exactly the same as a Portuguese manawar. So they, if someone sees one of those newtibranchs, they usually live in the open ocean, but they occasionally get driven ashore by winds. And if you find one of those newtibranchs on the beach and you pick it up, you'll get the same sting as you would if you'd picked up a Portuguese manawar. So they can really pack a wallop in some cases.
37:53 Alie Ward? Have you ever, for science, had to put a newtibranch in your mouth to see what that is like or get stung by one?
38:00 Speaker 02 I, I have.
38:03 Speaker 02 When I was younger and less. Smart. I tried putting a nudibranch in my mouth and it wasn't really horrible, but it was that sort of peppery kind of feeling and numb lips for probably about 15, 20 minutes. You definitely knew that you had something in your mouth that you shouldn't have.
38:29 Alie Ward? You were like that dejected fish, just sitting on a rock going, what have I done?
38:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:35 Alie Ward? What have I done?
38:36 Speaker 02 Was this a good idea?
38:38 Alie Ward? You lived to tell the tale.
38:41 Speaker 02 I did.
38:42 Alie Ward? What do you have to do? I know we've done Rebecca Home, we've covered medusology and toxinology and do not pee on it. You don't need to pee on it. You don't need to pee on anything, right?
38:52 Speaker 03 Hot water, apparently.
38:54 Alie Ward? Some water in that. Is it an emergency situation like call a helicopter, get airlifted to hospital if you get stung by a nudibranch?
39:03 Speaker 03 Most of them, no. I mean, most of them are not bad. So you know, in touch tanks, when you go to Aquaria, often you see anemones in there and you touch them and they're kind of sticky.
39:12 Alie Ward? Mm hmm.
39:12 Speaker 03 Those are the nematocysts. So in that case, you know, it's not a big deal. But I think there are a few species that we know feed on things that are a bit more dangerous. And there are some times when I touch them and I can feel it a little bit. They're usually not that bad. But I don't actually know about the Portuguese manor or nematocysts. I feel like they're pretty dangerous, but I don't know that they'll kill you. I don't want anyone to think that they should touch them because that's true, though.
39:38 Alie Ward? More coming up on one of the weirdest looking sea creatures, this inch long glaucus atlanticus, AKA the blue angel, AKA the blue sea dragon, AKA the sea swallow, AKA the dragon slug. It lives up to the name. What about sexual dimorphism?
39:56 Speaker 02 Okay, well, this is another really interesting and somewhat kinky part of nudibranch reproduction is that they're all hermaphrodites. Yes. They have both sexes in the same individual. And you might ask, well, why would they do that? And what we found is that this is an adaptation that you find in a lot of organisms that have relatively low populations that will basically devote more energy into producing both eggs and sperm and the complex reproductive organs. They need to exchange eggs and sperm with each other. So they can't fertilize themselves.
40:41 Speaker 02 They have to outcross with another individual. And I always equate this of basically, if you had a drawer full of socks and you weren't really careful and you didn't put all your socks by pairs after you got them out of the laundry and you just put them in the drawer. But if they're all the same color, then any two makes a pair. And that's if all the nudibranchs have both reproductive organs, any two that encounter each other can mate and produce offspring. And so it's an adaptation for relatively low populations.
41:18 Alie Ward? Let us celebrate same socks marriage. I wish it were that easy in our species.
41:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
41:24 Alie Ward? Oh, man. What about how that insemination happens? I know with terrestrial slugs, it can be this really beautiful display of, you know, hanging and these tendrils of organs. What does it look like in nudibranchs? And I understand some sea slugs even will have like cranial traumatic insemination, like it runs the gamut from in terms of romance.
41:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
41:51 Alie Ward? How is that reproduction happening?
41:53 Speaker 02 So nudibranchs. They don't live very much in a visual world. They're more living in a chemical world. They have eyes, but those eyes usually aren't image-forming eyes. They're just detecting light and dark. And so to find a mate, they're detecting other members of their same species by chemical means. And so they're tracking them down. And it's basically, you know, having perfume as an attractant. It's wafting across the plane and you're following that intoxicating scent. And so that's how nudibranchs come in contact with each other.
42:36 Speaker 02 But then, once they encounter each other, some species are actually cannibalistic. Oftentimes, if two encounter each other, and it's a cannibalistic species, if they're of different sizes, the larger one will eat the other one.
42:54 Alie Ward? Before mating, or after, or not mating at all?
42:57 Speaker 02 Before mating.
42:58 Alie Ward? Oh, no!
43:00 Speaker 02 Sometimes before mating, but usually the eating driver is, seems to be more intense than the reproductive one.
43:08 Alie Ward? Wow! Sometimes you're just more hungry than horny. Mother Nature knows priorities.
43:14 Speaker 02 Others, if they are the same size, they will mate. But then sometimes, one of them will eat the other one.
43:23 Alie Ward? They got what they needed.
43:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, they got what they needed. And they have their reproductive organs on their right side of the body. And so two individuals will pull up next to each other with their two right sides. It's almost like going to a drive-up window at a fast-food restaurant. Yeah.
43:43 Speaker 02 And, you know, one of them gives, offers money and the other one, you know, gives you your happy meal. And...
43:52 Speaker 02 And it truly is a happy meal.
43:56 Alie Ward? Oh my god. So yeah, if you lived in a small town, it was really hard to meet people or you were just really far away from other folks, you might have a better shot at love if everyone's by. Nudibranchs get it. Also, I did peek a gander at what they're working with. Obviously, it varies by species, but sometimes it just looks like two worms kissing. As for their butt, some species have that circle of brachial plumage, like a puffy tail. They breathe through, and that can be called a butt flower, because you stare down the barrel of it, and that anus is right in the middle. Don't they kind of poop on their own back in gills? Sure. Guess what? The ocean is like surround sound, but a bidet. So, whatever.
44:42 Alie Ward? Freddie and Eli, Reece Perini, and Andy Pepper, as well as Amanda Lask, wanted to know, Andy Pepper says, "I know they're hermaphroditic, but can't fertilize themselves. So what's the point if you still need a partner?" So what is going on down south, which might be near their head with a slug? You never know where that's gonna be.
45:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, it is near their heads, actually.
45:07 Speaker 03 So yeah, nudibranchs are, for the most part, simultaneous hermaphrodites is how we would call it. So they have both male and female reproductive systems at the same time. There is some evidence that they might like develop the male parts first and be able to produce sperm first, which makes sense. They're kind of cheap in a lot of ways, so it doesn't take as long maybe to generate them. So I think the most interesting aspect of this, though, is even though they can't self-fertilize, they do what we call reciprocal mating. So every time they're reproducing, it's not just like a one-way transaction. It's like they're both kind of getting something out of it to maximize the chances of everything working, I suppose.
45:48 Alie Ward? And is it a sea slug that will do traumatic insemination? Yeah.
45:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, so that's a, I think there's stegaglossons that do that. It's like hypodermic insemination, where they just sort of stab and crawl away. But as far as I know, there's no nudibranchs that do that. They're much more, I guess, kind.
46:09 Alie Ward? It's good to know. Yeah. It's good. I would have pinned that on them too. So I'm glad that we could clear up that flim flam. I would have blamed them for that. Yes, kind. Aside from meeting up for a first date and finding your partner shorter than expected, so you eat them, or maybe you noticed that they had babies and then you slurp them up like boba. Nudibranchs can be messy. Speaking of offspring. Are they hard to keep in Aquaria?
46:34 Speaker 03 Can I curse on the show?
46:36 Alie Ward? Yeah, of course you can. Of course. They are fucking hard to keep in Aquaria. We do have one species in the lab. It's called Bergia stefaniae. I love to tell the story that this is actually a species that my master's advisor, Angel Valdez, he named after his wife Stephanie, which is really nice. So we have that in the lab and that's partly because it's actually easy to get it to like, not just lay eggs and to survive, but also we are able to get the larvae to hatch into juveniles. That's honestly the biggest problem is getting them to settle. Yeah. Ah, so what is going to nudge a larval nudibranch into its adult form?
47:17 Alie Ward? If you know, please tell Jessica so she can tell all the other frustrated nudibranchologists all over the earth because it is not easy, folks. And it's different for like all tens of thousands of species. It might be the food source cues, might be the exact temperature and strength of the currents. Perhaps it's whatever anemone that they're feeding on and they just don't like it that day. So yeah, being a parent to thousands of fledgling nudies, it's not a task for the weak hearted. Do they lay eggs and then the babies just go like, good luck? And then they kind of are up in the plankton with their tiny, tiny little shells until it's time? So are they just like, kind of one and done, like, good luck out there kiddos?
47:59 Speaker 02 It's pretty much, yeah, you're on your own kid. But some of them have really yoki eggs that have a lot of nutrient. And oftentimes the individual that's produced the egg mass, and I won't say mother, because they're mother fathers, they...
48:21 Speaker 02 Individual that laid the egg mass will sort of hang around, but doesn't really provide much protection. And the eggs often have some of the toxic chemicals that protects the adults. So the eggs can be chemically protected as well. So they aren't eaten because they're really enticing morsels with all that yoky, good nutrients and protein. So they're not going to get eaten very readily because they are chemically protected as well. But basically, they're on their own to most typically hatch into a larval stage
49:01 Speaker 02 that'll spend any time between a few days in the plankton, up to six months.
49:08 Alie Ward? Oh, wow. Oh. And some nudibranchs can spend so long in that baby stage that they coast on the surface as plankton long enough to nearly cross an ocean. There's Peter Pan in their way across the world.
49:23 Speaker 02 And because nudibranchs are pretty well protected as once they become juveniles and they start feeding on their adult prey, basically, they're immune to predation. So why aren't nudibranchs taking over the entire world? And it's because most of that predation takes place when they're larval stages in the plankton, where they really don't have any protection. And probably 90% plus of the individuals that are in the plankton get consumed.
49:56 Alie Ward? Well, you know, you were saying that egg-laying parent. And I imagine you're talking about how nutrient-dense those yolks are. So that's got to be expensive to make as opposed to sperm. So how is it decided which of the two individuals are kind of saddled with the burden of making those eggs versus which are just like, hey, got your sperm, I'll see you. Is it win/lose?
50:19 Speaker 02 Well, both individuals from a mating will produce eggs.
50:24 Alie Ward? Oh, wow. Okay.
50:25 Speaker 02 So they exchange sperm with each other. And so then both of them are fertilized and they can store sperm for several months from that mating. And then when the eggs are mature and ready to pass through the reproductive system, then fertilization of that stored sperm will take place. And it may be a couple of months.
50:50 Alie Ward? Well, you know, sometimes spaghetti leftovers are better the next day.
50:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:56 Alie Ward? So I get it.
50:56 Speaker 02 That's right.
50:57 Alie Ward? Sometimes soup gets better.
51:00 Speaker 02 It's like pizza for breakfast.
51:04 Alie Ward? I have a couple of questions from listeners. Is it okay to ask? Do you have a few more minutes?
51:08 Speaker 02 Of course, yeah.
51:10 Alie Ward? Oh, amazing. Okay. But first, let's scatter some cash into the waters of knowledge. This week, we are going to be donating to the wonderful California Academy of Sciences, which is a research institute and a natural history museum in San Francisco, California. It's among the largest museums of natural history in the world. They house over 46 million specimens. They also operate the Institute for Biodiversity Science and Sustainability. And if you have never visited, definitely put Cal Academy on your bucket list. Get yourself to San Francisco. There's a rainforest in there. There's penguins. There's a planetarium. There's an aquarium. I went and saw a Cure laser light show at the planetarium and the day that I got braces. And I was so
51:53 Alie Ward? glad it was dark in there. And also, my face hurt so much. Anyway, it's beautiful there. Also, while you're in San Francisco, there are some secret concrete slides hidden in neighborhoods around the city. And you climb up some stairs and then you slide down these concrete channels on a cardboard box. And it's nuts. It goes so fast. Make sure you have health insurance first, but you got to ask around to where they are. Okay. Either way, that donation went to fund the excellent world-class research at San Francisco's Cal Academy. Thanks to the sponsors of the show. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started,
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55:21 Alie Ward? Let's stick our stumpy little horns into the mailbag and answer some questions from listeners who submitted via patreon.com/ologies, where you too can join for just a scant dollar a month. Well, a few people, Amy Hanks and Brucatini, wanted to know, Brucatini asked, "What are their little ears for? Are they eye stalks, like on terrestrial slugs?" Amy said, "How do their rhinophores help them navigate?" What are those little stalks?
55:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, so those are what we would call rhinophores. They do not have eyes on them. Their eyes are actually tiny little dots near the base of the rhinophores. Very small, not super functional. So their rhinophores are generally their main way of sensing the world. They do have some other structures near their mouths often, but the rhinophores are where they do a lot of what we'd call chemosensation. So they're able to detect chemicals in the water. They're able to detect also movement in the water. So like if there's currents, things like that. And that's their main way of finding food. So they have these chemoreceptors on there. The signals go down to what we'd call the rhinophore ganglia and help them make decisions about, "Oh, I want to go this way because my prey is that way."
56:30 Alie Ward? Their eyes are little at the bottom, though.
56:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, super tiny dots, just little...
56:35 Alie Ward? I know. But the rhinophores, which look like the bunny ears, are kind of like antennae, sensing all kinds of molecules and motions, which makes sense, given that rhinophore means nose bearing. So those are the horn-like rabbit ears. And again, the dorsal finger-looking fringe used for gas exchange and picking up sensory cues, those are serrata. All of these structures, of course, help them survive in the vulnerable state without a shell. But they have also stolen ammunition. Also, heads up, you may hear a jingle. Maybe I'm jostling a tambourine, or maybe it's my dog's collar, because she doesn't respect my work. Ashley Mars, Abby Grab, Jennifer Fro, Hetta Johnson, Keelime Pie, Sarah Moracom.
57:20 Alie Ward? So many people wanted to know, in Reina's words, are they poisonous because they look like radioactive caterpillars? And would they be considered poisonous or venomous? Like, do you have to sort of look at the semantics of that? Are they technically venomous if they don't kill anything? Is it still venom?
57:42 Speaker 02 Well, the definition of venomous is not just that they're poisonous, but they have to have a delivery mechanism. So the ones that have the nematocysts that can actually fire, they technically meet the definition of being venomous.
57:59 Alie Ward? Oh.
57:59 Speaker 02 But all of them are at least distasteful, ranging to some that could probably, if a human consumed them, they could actually suffer some serious health consequences and perhaps even die from that. But you would have to eat a lot of them.
58:21 Alie Ward? Yeah. If you find that many nudibranchs, they should just apply for a position in your lab, because they have a gift.
58:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
58:29 Alie Ward? What about their brains? What are they working with? Kelly Shaver, Bug in a Rug, wanted to know. Bug asked, what in the heck are their brains like? And some other folks, Graham and Ads, wanted to know. Kelly also asked, can they be trained? Do they learn? What kind of brain they working with?
58:45 Speaker 03 So they have? Something that you might call a brain, it's like a cerebroplural ganglion is what we would call it. There's these two ganglia that may be fused. And then they have plural ganglia, which are kind of in the middle. Then they have pedal ganglia, which are towards the foot. Then they have rhinophore ganglia, which are for their sensory structures. So they kind of have what I would consider a kind of distributed nervous system. Hmm. Where they do have some centralization in these ganglia, but largely it's kind of, they have a lot of peripheral nervous action going on, um, and sensation.
59:20 Alie Ward? Uh, DJ Breder asked if they have sensations. Bug in a rug asked if they have feelings. Do different individuals exhibit different behaviors or do different species, kind of like breeds of dogs?
59:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, they have a relatively simple nervous system. And they can detect the most important things around their environment, which is the two most important things are individuals of their same species and food. And so they've pretty much got those two things on their minds most of the time and probably not a whole lot else.
59:56 Alie Ward? [laughing]
59:57 Speaker 02 And so everything is really driven by feeding and reproduction. They detect light and dark, which is important to, um, some of them are nocturnally active and are pretty inactive during the day. So that the light levels are really important. I wouldn't say they have feelings in the way that we have feelings, you know, which is has its advantage. They just they don't carry around a lot of emotional baggage, um, [laughing] which, uh, probably is the reason that Niedberg psychiatrists haven't evolved.
1:00:39 Alie Ward? [laughing]
1:00:41 Speaker 02 And
1:00:41 Alie Ward? I envy them right now.
1:00:43 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, it's a lot simpler existence. Uh, and if all we had to worry about is where we're going to get our next meal and who we're going to mate with, it would be a lot more simple.
1:00:57 Speaker 02 And, you know, a mating is just a way of perpetuating your species. There's not much attachment in terms of forming bonding pairs like other species that mate for life and, and really have that. It's a sort of one night stand and away they go.
1:01:19 Alie Ward? Well, that was actually on the minds of Anna Wolf, Shay, and Abby Greb. Anna Wolf asked, what courtship rituals do they have? And Shay asked, what makes one nudibranch stand out in a sea of suitors? And Abby wanted to know if they shoot love darts like snails do.
1:01:35 Speaker 02 They don't have love darts, but they do have elaborate spines and stuff in their reproductive system. And oftentimes those spines are associated with a gland that probably produces some secretions. But we don't know enough about the courtship and mating. And we do see that oftentimes they will nibble at each other and crawl around each other. And so there is some sort of courtship and recognition process that goes on before mating actually ensues.
1:02:12 Alie Ward? So, yeah, they enjoy a little artistry, I imagine, as well. Like, that's a beautiful thing. We had some questions about specific species.
1:02:20 Speaker 02 Okay.
1:02:20 Alie Ward? Pear wanted to know, why is Glaucus atlanticus so different in shape? Why did it get these poison sacs? And then Karen H. said, why is the blue glaucus so different in shape compared to most nudies? Is she just not like the other girls? So, I'm not familiar with a glaucus, but elaborate.
1:02:39 Speaker 02 Okay. They're gorgeous, sort of silvery and bright shiny blue. And the reason they have that shape is that they're found in the open ocean. I mean, literally on the surface of open waters. And because they feed on things like the Portuguese manta worm. A lot of that unusual shape is to help them maintain flotation on the surface of the ocean. They'll swallow an air bubble to give them buoyancy and then they spread out their nematocysts that are in the serata and spread out their serata to help maintain that flotation.
1:03:21 Speaker 02 So that's why they have such an unusual shape is because they live in such a really completely different habitat to most of the species that live on the bottom of tide pools and in shallow waters.
1:03:37 Alie Ward? Oh, how gorgeous. And again, this glaukis type of nudibranch, AKA sea swallow, the blue dragon slug, looks almost like this tiny kind of manta ray shape if it were rimmed in tentacle-like ostrich feather projections and had this silvery blue pattern. They do not look real. I mostly wanted to talk to you about nudibranchs for superficial reasons because they're the weirdest looking things out there. Yeah, they're pretty weird. But when it comes to nudibranchs, are they all the fanciest sea slugs?
1:04:13 Speaker 03 Definitely not.
1:04:14 Alie Ward? Really?
1:04:15 Speaker 03 So I'd say the most sort of charismatic of the nudibranchs are the ones called dorids. These are the most brightly colored ones you often see. They kind of have that standard slug shape, like the oval, and they have those beautiful gills off of the back.
1:04:30 Alie Ward? And these dorid nudibranchs, they come in all shapes and colors. They're just stunning. Whoever named them dorids was smitten as the taxonomy is a nod to a Greek goddess, a sea nymph who went by the name Doris.
1:04:47 Speaker 03 So those are what I would consider like the charismatic nudibranchs. I think one really good example is Fabulonopsis iodinia.
1:04:55 Alie Ward? Okay.
1:04:56 Speaker 03 It's a species in California that is like bright purple and orange. It's really beautiful and it's commonly found in tide pools, so people often see it. But a lot of them are super, super tiny of the ones I study. So you can think like on the order of millimeters and they're brown and, you know, it's, they still look very cool to me, but maybe not as exciting to the rest of the world.
1:05:20 Alie Ward? We have so many, so many questions. Raining Emily asked, why do sea slugs look like they are in the most fabulous drag while land slugs look like they're in faded camo? In terms of fashion, those are all evolutionary adaptations to, as warning colors mostly?
1:05:38 Speaker 02 Right. Yes, it's basically so many Nederbrinks have evolved those color patterns because they're advertising to predators that they're distasteful. And not all of the land slugs are distasteful. They are sometimes tasty morsels, but things like banana slugs, large, yellow and green colored slugs that live in the redwood forests of California and get really quite large, they are distasteful and they have toxic mucus that if a dog tries to nibble on a banana slug, it has the same response that one of those fish predators of Nederbrinks have.
1:06:23 Alie Ward? Well, speaking of putting slugs in our mouths, you and I do have that in common. I'm from the Bay Area myself, and so we went on field trips to tide pools. We went to the redwoods and it was definitely a dare to try to kiss a banana slug, which now that I know about like roundworms and stuff, I'm like, that's a horror, a rat lungworm. I don't know if banana slugs have rat lungworm, but definitely don't kiss a slug. It's just a PSA I should put out there now that I remember about that.
1:06:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, people love to do that kind of stuff. And most of the times we dodge the bullet and don't have any adverse consequences.
1:07:04 Alie Ward? Yeah.
1:07:05 Speaker 02 That's how humans, and particularly indigenous people, have learned through those experiences, you know, what's food and what's not food. It's, it's all part of that natural curiosity and trying different things. And sometimes there's some adverse consequences.
1:07:23 Alie Ward? Never, ever, ever eat or lick a raw slug. I hate that I have to tell you that. But maybe I do. Rat lungworm is as gross as it sounds. You get it by eating raw snails or slugs who have eaten rat feces. And in some cases, it can cause meningitis that kills you. So as hard as it is to resist, I get it. Don't chew on a garden slug. Maybe wash your backyard fruit. Have you ever encountered anything anthropologically or from a historical perspective about indigenous reactions or lore or folklore with nudibranchs? Is that even well studied?
1:07:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, it is. But yeah, I can only give you like two or three examples that I know of. And basically, there are some nudibranchs that are eaten. There are some that are found in the islands off of Russia that are eaten by indigenous people. And but basically, they know where the distasteful parts are, and they basically chop those off. And then the rest is pretty edible. In the Cook Islands, there's a species of sea hare that is actually pretty toxic because it feeds on algae that has a lot
1:08:37 Speaker 02 of toxins. And so the indigenous people there know what organs to remove, and then eat the remaining part of the animal after they they remove the areas where the distasteful and toxic substances are stored. So there's a lot of indigenous knowledge about that that really reflects a pretty profound understanding of their biology.
1:09:02 Alie Ward? What about, you know, speaking of reflecting and color, Enifer Jelly taught Ashley Tweet and Earl of Grammalkin, Jordan and Chloe Koschnick, a first time question asker, wanted to know, are there any UV reactive nudibranchs? Do any glow?
1:09:17 Speaker 02 Yes, there are some that if you shine a black light on them, there is UV reflectance that's certainly beyond our
1:09:29 Speaker 02 Normal spectrum and probably reflects, no pun intended, living in darker waters where there's not so much light penetration from the visible light spectrum. And so some deep sea fishes probably can see reflectance in the UV range that most shallow water predators don't detect.
1:09:57 Alie Ward? Wow, gosh, I bet that's gorgeous. Do you get to see those often? Do you have to swim around with a black light?
1:10:04 Speaker 02 I've done that on certain night dives and yeah, it's really surprising what you see. And, you know, you try something and as close relative, the one species has no reflectance and the other does. And so that's another puzzle. Why is that the case? And so still so much to figure out and discover.
1:10:27 Alie Ward? So while fluorescing under certain wavelengths like ultraviolet light is simply iconic and it's stunning, it is distinct from the inner glow of the bioluminescent. Ian de Noel, Maddie Julian, and Ads want to know, in Maddie Julian's words, do we know of any species that have bioluminescence? Are there any glowing ones?
1:10:49 Speaker 03 Yes, yes, definitely. This is something I'm trying to get into, actually, the bioluminescence questions. So there are actually a few possible origins of bioluminescence in nudibranchs. There's one group called Philoeroi. These are super cool nudibranchs. They're fully pelagic. And I highly recommend everyone look them up because if you look at them, they just kind of look like translucent fish.
1:11:15 Alie Ward? Okay, nudibranch that looks like a swimming cloud rimmed with fairy lights. No one asked you to look that good, yet here we are.
1:11:23 Speaker 03 They swim with these undulations to kind of make them look like fish. They're bioluminescent. There's also another group called Polysarids that there's some bioluminescent taxa. And then there's one newly described species that they have these bioluminescent structures that they can actually autotomize or release. And it's hypothesized to be a form of defense.
1:11:45 Alie Ward? So just sort of like throwing glitter and then running?
1:11:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's kind of the idea, I think.
1:11:51 Alie Ward? Just a glitter cloud, like, look at that, bye. What about the hardest thing about working on these little critters?
1:11:59 Speaker 03 The hardest thing? I think the hardest thing, but the thing that's also the most fun is that they're actually quite hard to find sometimes, right? Like, I think that aspect of it can be very challenging, but I always loved eye spy and where's Waldo as a kid? So I think it's also, it feels like a challenge to me, which I really enjoy. Yeah, I would say that's probably one of the main things.
1:12:27 Alie Ward? I'm so sorry that I've kept you so long, too, but you're just, you happen to be fascinating and so fun to talk to you. So I'm so sorry.
1:12:37 Speaker 02 Well, thanks.
1:12:39 Alie Ward? Last questions I always ask are the hardest and the best things about the job. I imagine conservation has got to be the biggest challenge. Is there anything that when it comes to conservation, you wish people knew more about? Or you wish that there were more action?
1:12:54 Speaker 02 Well, actually, you know, I feel pretty upbeat about conservation and particularly in places around the world where I work, and especially in the Philippines, we work very closely with local communities and share the information that we have, not just about new to Branks, but about how ecosystems are doing. And we've established some marine protected areas and made recommendations based on new to Brank diversity and, and work very closely with those communities where they become the sort of bottom up supporters
1:13:35 Speaker 02 of establishing new marine protected areas because their livelihood depends on it because of ecotourism and diving. And they're some of the biggest and strongest advocates for marine protected areas. And so a lot of the reefs where I've been diving in the Philippines for 30 years, plus some of those reefs are in better shape today than they were when I first went. There and there was blast fishing using dynamite. That's pretty much been eliminated in most of the places I work. And so there's a growing understanding and actually in remote parts of the world,
1:14:17 Speaker 02 there is more opportunity and receptivity to education than there is in the States where, you know, we have so much polarization about the topics of climate change and conservation that in my experience, I don't find as much resistance to scientific fact as what scientists know and how it is generally accepted by local communities versus some of the resistance we see currently in our own society. And so I'm tremendously upbeat and optimistic about the future as long as we, and particularly
1:15:01 Speaker 02 scientists, devote much of their energy to talking to people and building those bridges to not only unearth new knowledge, but share that knowledge and build an understanding of why that knowledge is useful to local people.
1:15:18 Alie Ward? That being said, is there something about the work that vexes you the most? Is there a petty inconvenience about studying new to Branks that we should know about?
1:15:30 Speaker 02 Well, you know, the real world always gets in the way of your ambitions and finding funding, asking people for support, spending a lot of time doing that. And particularly in this anti-science climate world that we live in today, it becomes that much more challenging. So I would say I don't mind spending time to make the case for the value of what we do, but I think not enough scientists devote energy to explaining what they do and why it is actually relevant and important to other people's lives. And the more we do that, the better people will understand and support science.
1:16:15 Speaker 02 So that is not only a responsibility, but it's a way of making sure that future studies can take place and we can continue to solve some of the mysteries that still remain out there.
1:16:32 Alie Ward? Um, what about your favorite thing about your job or about nudibranchs?
1:16:36 Speaker 03 The thing I like most about nudibranchs is
1:16:42 Speaker 03 there's too many options to pick one. I think it it's sort of comes along with the scuba diving. I love the idea that there's all of these hidden aspects of the ocean or the world that all you have to do is like, look hard enough to see them. And there's so much you can see that so many people have never seen. And I I just love the idea of that. That said, my goal is to try and help people see it. So
1:17:11 Speaker 03 that's something I also enjoy.
1:17:12 Alie Ward? And if you can't make it to an ocean, perhaps look on the forearm of someone sitting next to you on the bus. And then just girl wanted to know if you have a nudibranch tattoo.
1:17:23 Speaker 03 I don't, but I thought about it. And part of the reason I don't have one is that it's kind of the same problem with people asking me like, what's my favorite nudibranch? Because it's like, you know, it's like having kids. I feel like I can't pick like one favorite. If I did it and I put it on my body, I'd kind of go, but I wish I'd done that other one. Or why didn't I get both? Then I'd end up with like tattoos everywhere, I guess, which is not a bad thing, but it costs a lot of money.
1:17:53 Alie Ward? You could always do them life size.
1:17:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, true. Very tiny, tiny nudibranchs. Yeah.
1:18:00 Alie Ward? Get a lot of them. Maybe a big sea hare thigh, sea hare. We all have a little more, you know, real estate or
1:18:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
1:18:08 Alie Ward? Back tattoo, a full back tattoo. Jessica Wood wants to know if it's silly of them to get one as a tattoo.
1:18:15 Speaker 03 Absolutely not. No, I love nudibranch tattoos. It's really fun when when people show me them as long as they're in places that are appropriate for me to see.
1:18:26 Alie Ward? Well, upping the stakes a little bit more. Libby Tomko says, I'm adding a nudibranch to my ocean sleeve. Which one should I add? I would tell literally every single person in the world that a scientist picked out my tattoo.
1:18:39 Speaker 03 Oh, God. I can't even pick one for myself.
1:18:43 Alie Ward? Well, you have more pressure because you you're a nudibranch person.
1:18:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's true. I mean, I think glaucus is usually a good one. Those are very pretty and they have a cool pattern and a cool shape that's different from a lot of other nudibranchs. And they seem to be very distinctive, so I feel like that would make a really good tattoo.
1:19:04 Alie Ward? Any particular species?
1:19:06 Speaker 03 Um, they all look pretty similar, but glaucus atlanticus, I think, is a really good one. Yeah.
1:19:12 Alie Ward? Anything behaviorally that you want to add about them?
1:19:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, so there's a recent paper that looked at a glaucus species that showed that they're able to use their stinging structures, not just for defense like other nudibranchs do, but they seem to maybe use them to capture prey as well. So the way that they're shaped is kind of flat and they look like they have wings. But what most people don't realize is they're upside down. So their mouths are actually on the top of their color, like where their color patterns are, that's where their mouths are. So what happens is they're kind of floating upside down and they kind of grab on to their prey. And that that seems to be how they they feed to some extent. And they can capture fish that way. When other types of animals, it's pretty cool. But yeah.
1:19:59 Alie Ward? It's so jujitsu. It's so like, it's very.
1:20:03 Speaker 03 Kind of what it looks like, yeah.
1:20:04 Alie Ward? You know, it's also, um, kill them with kindness. Hug them, hug them to death.
1:20:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, that is, in essence, what it looks like is it's just like a big hug.
1:20:17 Alie Ward? All right, Libby and Jessica Wood. Not silly of you to get one, Jessica. And Libby, there's your assignment. Go forth, get in.
1:20:25 Speaker 03 Yep, tag me on Blue Sky when you get it.
1:20:27 Alie Ward? Yeah.
1:20:30 Alie Ward? What is your blue sky handle? We'll shout it out right now. Yeah, it's mollusks@AMNH. Love. Yeah. So, tag Dr. Goodheart in that. And if for some reason you don't want that tattoo, maybe go for Terry's pick. Do you have a favorite nudibranch?
1:20:46 Speaker 02 Oh.
1:20:46 Alie Ward? I know this must be asked of you all the time, but come on.
1:20:49 Speaker 02 That's, yeah, okay. So, I have two answers to that. And one is, yes, I do, but it changes weekly, which is pretty much the case. But certainly, the first new species that I found in the tide pools in California when I was still in high school, you know, has a special place in my heart. Because my colleague Gary Williams, who was a high school student with me, and we found it in the senior year of high school. And we named it after that high school mentor, Gordon Chan, who first took us out to the tide pools and really was the person
1:21:32 Speaker 02 who helped turn on that light and get us on a path towards becoming scientists, rather than just curious people.
1:21:42 Alie Ward? Oh, wow, that's amazing. So, the Halaxa chani, AKA Chan's Dorid, is this beautiful 25 or 30 millimeter or so, about one inch long, little lemon-yellow sweetie with nubby maroon rhinophore rabbit ears and a golden crown of bronchial plumage on its little rump. It's speckled with ruddy brown freckles. It's got some elegant beige beauty marks. And yes, we are talking to one of the guys who discovered it six decades ago. And here we are, all the way in the future, hearing tales of oceanic adventures and being inspired to keep our eyes open.
1:22:25 Speaker 02 But being a curious person is the first important step. And so to all of the people that are listening, you are all scientists. You are making observations every time you go out in nature. And scientists need you to make those observations because there aren't enough of us. And so one of the things that we're doing in the spring is we're going to have people going out to California tide pools and document some of the species and post pictures on iNaturalist, which is a great platform to record the natural world. And basically, we really welcome everybody to participate in that process.
1:23:10 Speaker 02 And it's a really simple one to become involved. And I would encourage everybody to do that and to make observations of what you find in your backyard. When you go outside, you don't have to be in a rural or relatively pristine habitat. Cities have vital habitats that have amazing endangered nature that is worthy of your documenting what happens literally on the street corner or schoolyard where you live or work.
1:23:43 Alie Ward? Oh, my gosh, you're gonna make me cry. That's so inspiring and such exactly, exactly what we all need to hear. And this starts in May. This starts next month. So we will link the Cal Academy's Community Science page for the 2026 Sea Slug Search. Or you can download the fantastic app iNaturalist and just look for the Sea Slug Search for more info on how an afternoon excursion to a nudie beach can make Terry the happiest sea slug researcher on planet Earth. Now, they're looking for California coastal observations. But no matter where on the planet you are, if you're near the ocean, you can search for nudibranchs. Or if you're not near an ocean, search for any plant or creatures and post them on iNaturalist.
1:24:27 Alie Ward? It fills the hearts of scientists you'll never meet.
1:24:31 Speaker 02 And you can do it independently. You don't have to be part of that. Formal, going out to the tide pools. You can do it anytime, anyplace, anywhere around where the water tastes salty.
1:24:46 Alie Ward? Oh, that's great. This has been an absolute treasure of a convo. Thank you so much.
1:24:52 Speaker 02 You're most welcome. Thanks for inviting me, Ally. I appreciate it.
1:24:58 Alie Ward? So yes, ask marine people well-meaning questions because honestly, what a wealth of beauty and fun facts and life lessons not to eat slugs. And thank you so much to Dr. Goodhart and Dr. Goslinger for taking the time to be on Ologies and for all the work you do for the voiceless and the tender creatures on this earth. We'll have tons more links on our website at allyward.com/ologies/nudibranchology. And more links to Jessica and Terry are right in the show notes. We are at Ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram where we will be posting nudibranch pictures. And I'm at Ally Ward on both as well. And we have those shorter, kid-friendly episodes called Smologies wherever you get podcasts or at the link in the show notes.
1:25:40 Alie Ward? You can also head to allyward.com/smologies for those. Please tell your friends with kids. We also have merch at ologiesmerch.com. And thank you again to patrons who have joined up for a dollar or more a month to support the show. Erin Talbert admins the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardoyer does the website. Keeping her rhinophores on the pulse is scheduling producer Noelle Dilworth. The stomach bubble that keeps us afloat is managing director Susan Hale. And highly evolved and dazzling editors are Jake Chafee and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Also, I just realized that Erin Talbert, I've known her since we were four. We went tide pulling together in third grade for a class trip.
1:26:24 Alie Ward? I'll never forget it. Nick Thorburn fluttered out the theme music. If you stick around to the very end, you know, I may tell you a secret. This week is that I tend to drink a lot of green tea. I love green tea. I just take a plane. I've been drinking it every day for decades. And I like it like really weak and watered down or iced. And you're like, what's the point? My point was I was like a protest. It's hot in LA, right? I brought a Nalgene for hydration and naturally I filled it with weak green tea, iced tea, and as I walked along, the ice melted. Just in general, green tea gets a
1:27:03 Alie Ward? little foamy. But here's the thing, there were no bathrooms along the route. And toward the end, someone asked me if my green tea was urine in my Nalgene. And that made it harder to stay hydrated because that's a visual that doesn't leave you quickly. Also, if one person asked me that, how many other people thought it? I'm never gonna know. Either way, keep your eyes open for beautiful creatures out there, especially in front of the mirror. Uh-oh. Bye-bye. Pachydermatology, homeology, cryptozoology, lithology, nanotechnology, meteorology,
1:27:44 Alie Ward? geology, geology, geology, geology.
1:27:55 Speaker 05 You're a slug! Me a slug?
Previous Megafelinology (SNOW LEOPARDS + OTHER BIG CATS) with Imogene Cancellare Next Cannabinology (MARIJUANA) Part 1 with Ziva Cooper and Caroline Melly Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
