Pod Insights Short Wave Sea Camp: Is Better Human Health Hidden In The Sea? About this episode For this week's Sea Camp https://www.npr.org/series/g-s1-75877/short-wave-sea-camp, we're diving below the ocean's surface to explore the sunlight zone, the portion of ocean that's 0-200 meters deep. Here, we zoom in on some spineless inhabitants envied for their "superpowers." Marine biologist Drew Harvell https://ecologyandevolution.cornell.edu/catherine-drew-harvell tells us about stealthy sea slugs, sea stars with super strength and life-saving sponges.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:15 Speaker 00 You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.
0:20 Regina Barber? Hey, everyone. Regina Barber here. It's Monday, which means Sea Camp, our summer series where we share sign stories from the ocean, diving a little deeper each week. And today, we're finally going to take our submersible downwards to the sunlight zone, also known as the epipelagic zone of the ocean.
0:37 Speaker 02 Which is 0 to 200 meters. That is where sunlight is penetrating the ocean.
0:43 Regina Barber? This is marine biologist Noel Bowlin, who's worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. Noel is going to be our ocean zone guide for the rest of the series. And the thing that you need to know about the sunlight zone is that...
0:56 Speaker 02 The things that happen at the surface are very important for every zone. And that's the photosynthesis that happens.
1:03 Regina Barber? Courtesy of phytoplankton, the plants of the sea. They eat sunshine, poop out food for other critters, and generate oxygen. The ocean makes about half of Earth's oxygen, and plankton are responsible for a big share of that. So this zone is essential to our planet's health. And it's a place that Drew Harvell has seen up close as a diver who studies marine invertebrates, creatures without a backbone, who have been around for a long, long time.
1:31 Speaker 02 They've been on our planet for over 600 million years, so they are some of the most ancient of our animals.
1:38 Regina Barber? Drew's so fascinated with these spineless creatures of the sunlight zone that she wrote a whole book about these ancient creatures and how their long evolutionary histories have led to some interesting biology.
1:49 Speaker 02 I think of them as kind of biological impossibilities, sort of like, you know, Superman flying or having invulnerable skin, right? For an animal to photosynthesize, that's legitimately a superpower.
2:02 Regina Barber? And it's not the only one. Across these marine invertebrates, there's a whole bunch of superpowers. Everything from regeneration to super strength and even stealing other animals' abilities. Drew says understanding these animals' superpowers not only helps researchers understand the rules of life, the lessons scientists learn from them can transform our medicines.
2:22 Speaker 02 Every one of the ones that I talk about in my book also has an important application for humans.
2:29 Regina Barber? So today on the show, the strange world of the ocean's spineless creatures, what their ancient superpowers are, and how they continue to inspire human innovation today. I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Short Wave's Sea Camp, the ocean science series from NPR.
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3:55 Regina Barber? OK, Drew, we're talking about the superpowers of marine invertebrates from your book, The Ocean's Menagerie. And we're going to talk about a few, starting with sponges, which I have trouble imagining. What should I imagine?
4:06 Speaker 02 They're amazingly beautiful. They come in all colors and sizes and shapes, from vases to runners to huge barrel sponges. And they're brown and yellow and green and red and purple.
4:20 Regina Barber? That's amazing.
4:21 Speaker 02 And so, I mean, I just get lost when I'm diving, just watching them, because they're so beautiful. And, you know, functionally, they seem to be very, very simple. But then, when you look deeper, they have amazing functions. And sponges have been of great interest to natural products chemists, because it was found that the highest hit rate for anti-cancer drugs was from tropical sponges.
4:48 Regina Barber? Oh, wow.
4:49 Speaker 02 We thought the sponges themselves made the chemicals. But we've learned that often it's the bacteria, particular species of bacteria that are housed within the sponge, that actually do the chemical synthesis of these compounds.
5:05 Regina Barber? Can you give me an example?
5:06 Speaker 02 I love this one, because a sponge is that's bright green, it's in the inner title. Everywhere, Halichondria panacea, very common. It houses a strain of Streptomyces bacteria that produces a chemical. And that is now being used in clinical trials for a whole range of different cancers: melanoma, pancreatic cancer, and renal cancer.
5:35 Regina Barber? It's being used now?
5:36 Speaker 02 It's being used now. They don't actually pull it out of sponges now. They've actually learned how to create a synthetic derivative. I could go on and on. And I kind of do in the book, I talk about quite a few examples of cancer drugs that have actually been discovered and produced from sponges.
5:56 Regina Barber? Let's talk about sea slugs next. Introduce us to these critters, like, what should we know about sea slugs?
6:02 Speaker 02 Oh, my God, sea slugs are just, they're the most enchanting of the invertebrates in many ways, just because they're a ridiculous circus of colors and shapes.
6:14 Speaker 02 You know, black backgrounds with lime green stripes and polka dots.
6:19 Regina Barber? Wow.
6:19 Speaker 02 Or yellow or pink. Uh, they have these beautiful projections that look like flowers all over their backs. I mean, I think everybody who's seen a neuterbrank falls in love with it just because they're so beautiful.
6:36 Regina Barber? A neuterbrank being like another name for sea slugs.
6:38 Speaker 02 Right.
6:39 Regina Barber? Yeah, and I've learned, uh, sea slugs are a relative of snails, but instead of having a shell, they have these like chemical defenses in which they, they can eat other animals and steal their powers. Um, can you tell me more about like one of those?
6:52 Speaker 02 We have a neuterbrank that lives in the Pacific Northwest that eats sea anemones. And when it eats a sea anemone, it uptakes the stinging cells that sea anemones use in their own defense. They select the immature stinging cells so they don't explode when they're eating them. They pass them all the way through their digestive system and into these little packages on their back. The stinging cell completes its development and is then used as a harpoon by the neuterbrank.
7:26 Regina Barber? Wow.
7:26 Speaker 02 And the diversity of this particular group of neuterbranks that does this is very high. They've been very successful, particularly in our shallow waters, um, in temperate and tropical ecosystems. So the beauty of the bright colors is a warning to, to fish and other predators that, don't eat me, I'm dangerous, I've got explosives and I'll use them.
7:50 Regina Barber? It's almost as if I like, if I were to like eat a venomous snake, then somehow I could have venom or something like that. So like, what lessons can, can humans learn from that?
7:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think, I think the, the lessons we can learn from the ability of Neuterbranch's to uptake these foreign organs from other groups is in transplantation surgery. It's very hard for us to transplant kidneys, for example, even among different humans, let alone what we try to do from pigs to humans. And the way we do that now is we try to suppress our immune systems. That's not what Neuterbranch's are doing. They're playing around with the recognition process. And so it strikes me that there's a real opportunity there to really think a little bit outside the box about other ways to go in and optimize our transplantation surgery.
8:44 Regina Barber? All right. Last but not least, my favorite, maybe yours, are sea stars?
8:50 Speaker 02 You know, Gina, I think we share that.
8:53 Regina Barber? Okay.
8:54 Speaker 02 They're certainly one of my favorites because, I mean, first, they're like Martians. They have
9:00 Regina Barber? Yeah.
9:01 Speaker 02 They have multiple arms. They have thousands of tube feet for running around. They have eyes on each end of each one of their arms.
9:10 Regina Barber? Yeah, all their arms are heads. I remember doing a story about that.
9:13 Speaker 02 Right? Yes.
9:15 Regina Barber? Yeah.
9:16 Speaker 02 And so, you know, just as an animal, they're very, very strange. And yet, the thing that just as a marine ecologist blows my mind is they're incredibly important ecologically. We think of sea stars as ecosystem engineers because of their power. They're predators, so they eat prey, and they eat a lot of their prey, whether it's mussels or clams or sea urchins. Recently, we've been studying one that lives in deeper waters that used to eat all the urchins and control them, but it was decimated by a huge outbreak of disease. I kind of call it the COVID of sea stars because it affected
9:59 Regina Barber? It's the wasting disease, right?
10:01 Speaker 02 It's the sea star wasting disease, and it affected over 20 species in addition to the sunflower star, which is the biggest and fastest in the world. I mean, this thing is three feet across. It's huge.
10:15 Regina Barber? What?
10:16 Speaker 02 And it eats a lot of urchins. When you remove all those sunflower stars, the urchins explode, and they've decimated our kelp meadows. And so Along the entire west coast, from San Diego up to Washington, we've had declining kelp beds, partly due to the removal of just this one species of sea star.
10:37 Regina Barber? Wow.
10:37 Speaker 02 And weirdly, for such a big, powerful critter, it was the most susceptible to this disease. And so it's now on the endangered species list. And we have, we've been working for a decade on a recovery program for it.
10:51 Regina Barber? I really like this. You're talking about how these sea stars, they're eating these urchins. They also eat a lot of clams. So how, how are sea stars doing this?
11:02 Speaker 02 The trick, the superpower, is that it takes them a long time and they can hang on without spending much energy. And they hang on because they have hundreds of tube feet, which are like little suction cups that grip incredibly strong. And then the other part of the superpower is their smart skin. They can basically cross-link the microtubules in their skin to make it stiff under nervous control. And then hold that without it costing them anything. And so that's how they win, by hour after hour, just hanging on and pulling till the clam is opened.
11:45 Regina Barber? So what, what could humans do with this superpower of like neural control?
11:50 Speaker 02 Well, there's been a lot of interesting research trying to use the ideas and the smart skin of sea stars and sea cucumbers in tendon replacement therapies because of the ability to change under neural control. So all of these organisms, and they tend to be invertebrates, that have this, these so-called smart tissues, are a lot of interest in transplantation therapy.
12:18 Regina Barber? In the epilogue of your book, you write, "The most precious resource on our planet is not oil or metal. It's the deep secrets that string our web of life together." What would you like to see in the future in how humans care for the ocean, like in honor of the statement?
12:34 Speaker 02 You know, I think that the first step is to try to help people understand just the incredible wonder of, of these resources and their extreme value. And then from there, to take the next step of protecting them.
12:51 Speaker 02 These spineless invertebrates have been on our planet for over 600 million years. They're phenomenal adaptations to change, to a changing climate. There are secrets and mysteries that they have solved that are going to be of a lot of use to us.
13:08 Regina Barber? Thank you so much for talking with me today, Drew. I had a wonderful time.
13:13 Speaker 02 Thank you. This has been a really fun session, Regina. I loved it, too.
13:17 Regina Barber? Drew Harvell's book, The Ocean's Menagerie, is out now, where you can read about other invertebrates like jellyfish, octopi, giant clams, sea fans, and corals. And if you like nudibranchs, check out our past episode all about these fascinating creatures. We'll link it in our show notes.
13:36 Regina Barber? Short wave is if you want to go deeper with C-CAM by learning and seeing bonus content and even getting fun puzzles, sign up for our special limited run newsletter. It's at npr.org/ccam.
13:49 Regina Barber? This episode was produced by Broly McCoy. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Jimmy Keeley. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.
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