Universal Dependencies - English - GUM

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Cold as ice: Wikinews interviews Marymegan Daly on unusual new sea anemone

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Tuesday, January 21, 2014

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How did you come to be involved with this discovery

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Frank Rack got in touch after they returned from Antarctica in hopes that I could help with an identification on the anemone.

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What was your first reaction upon learning there was an undiscovered ecosystem under the ice in the Ross Sea?

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I was amazed and really excited.

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I think to say it was unexpected is inaccurate, because it implies that there was a well-founded expectation of something.

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The technology that Frank and his colleagues are using to explore the ice is so important because, given our lack of data, we have no reasonable expectation of what it should be like, or what it shouldn't be like.

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There's a return trip planned hopefully for 2015, with both biologists and ANDRILL geologists.

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Are you intending to go there yourself?

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I would love to.

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But I am also happy to not go, as long as someone collects more animals on my behalf!

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What I want to do with the animals requires new material preserved in diverse ways, but it doesn't require me to be there.

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Although I am sure that being there would enhance my understanding of the animals and the system in which they live, and would help me formulate more and better questions about the anemones, ship time is expensive, especially in Antarctica, and if there are biologists whose contribution is predicated on being there, they should have priority to be there.

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These animals are shrouded in mystery.

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Some of the most intriguing questions are chemical; do they produce some kind of antifreeze, and is that orange glow in the ROV lights their own?

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Talk us through the difficulties encountered when trying to find answers with the specimens on hand.

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The samples we have are small in terms of numbers and they are all preserved in formalin (a kind of formaldehyde solution).

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The formalin is great for preserving structures, but for anemones, it prevents study of DNA or of the chemistry of the body.

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This means we can't look at the issue you raise with these animals.

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What we could do, however, was to study anatomy and figure out what it is, so that when we have samples preserved for studying e.g., the genome, transcriptome, or metabolome, or conduct tests of the fluid in the burrows or in the animals themselves, we can make precise comparisons, and figure out what these animals have or do (metabolically or chemically) that lets them live where they live.

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Just knowing a whole lot about a single species isn't very useful, even if that animal is as special as these clearly are - we need to know what about them is different and thus related to living in this strange way.

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The only way to get at what's different is to make comparisons with close relatives.

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We can start that side of the work now, anticipating having more beasts in the future.

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In terms of their glow, I suspect that it's not theirs - although luminescence is common in anemone relatives, they don't usually make light themselves.

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They do make a host of florescent proteins, and these may interact with the light of the ROV to give that gorgeous glow.

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What analysis did you perform on the specimens and what equipment was used?

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I used a dissecting scope to look at the animal's external anatomy and overall body organization (magnification of 60 X).

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I embedded a few of the animals in wax and then cut them into very thin slices using a microtome, mounted the slices on microscope slides, stained the slices to enhance contrast, and then looked at those slides under a compound microscope

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(that's how I got the pictures of the muscles etc in the paper).

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I used that same compound scope to look at squashed bits of tissue to see the stinging capsules (= nematocysts).

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I compared the things I saw under the 'scopes to what had been published on other species in this group.

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This step seems trivial, but it is really the most important part!

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By comparing my observations to what my colleagues and predecessors had found, I figured out what group it belongs to, and was able to determine that within that group, it was a new species.

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It was three years between recovery of specimens and final publication, why did it take so long?

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You mean, how did we manage to make it all happen so quickly, right? :)

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It was about two years from when Frank sent me specimens to when we got the paper out.

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Some of that time was just lost time - I had other projects in the queue that I needed to finish.

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Once we figured out what it was, we played a lot of manuscript email tag, which can be challenging and time consuming given the differing schedules that folks keep in terms of travel, field work, etc.

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Manuscript review and processing took about four months.

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What sort of difficulties were posed by the unorthodox preservatives used, and what additional work might be possible on a specimen with intact DNA?

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The preservation was not unorthodox - they followed best practices for anatomical preservation.

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Having DNA-suitable material will let us see whether there are new genes, or genes turned on in different ways and at different times that help explain how these animals burrow into hard ice and then survive in the cold.

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I am curious about the population structure of the 'fields' of anemones - the group to which Edwardsiella andrillae belongs includes many species that reproduce asexually, and it's possible that the fields are 'clones' produced asexually rather than the result of sexual reproduction.

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DNA is the only way to test this.

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This map shows the location of the Ross Ice Shelf in the Antarctic, and the two known localities for E. andrillae relative to McMurdo Station

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image: Daily et al.

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Daly explained how she obtained these images of the anemone's anatomy.

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Image: Daily et al.