Letter to My Younger Self

If you could tell your younger self what you know now, what would you say? 


This was exactly the question to answer in this Letter to Your Younger Self project for the Science Club for Girls. 


As a woman in science, what would you tell your younger self about the challenges and issues they will face? What have you learned? 


Here is a quote from my letter: 

"Second, talk to the people who do the jobs you think are interesting. I can’t stress enough how important mentors have been in my life. Talking to people in the area you want to be in is a great way to learn if that is what you really want to do and how to get there. How do you get a mentor? Find out who does the jobs that you’re interested in and then let them know you admire what they do; this will start a conversation. Ask questions about their research or recommend a good book or documentary on shared topics of interest.

My mentors in marine science and education have helped me find a path to graduate school, helped me get jobs, and helped me network with other great people all over the country. Some have become colleagues and many have become friends." 

Its important for us women in science to advocate for each other and encourage and support the next generation. Who can you mentor? 

Read my entire letter here at the Science Club for Girls website. 

Sharks!

Sharks have a bad wrap for being huge, aggressive man eaters when the truth is that they have more reason to be afraid of humans than the other way around. Shark attacks are rare, deaths from attacks even more so at only about five per year. There are only a few species of sharks, out of over 440, that a known to be aggressive towards people - the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), the bull shark (Carcharhinus leucas), and the tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier).

On the other hand, humans kill over 70 million sharks every year. There is a large (and in some places illegal) market for shark fins to be used in soup. Many sharks are caught, have their fins cut off, and have their bodies tossed back in the ocean to die. Finning has been an increasing problem for shark populations. Since sharks are predators at the top of the food chain, their declining numbers have implications for the entire marine ecosystem. 

Watch this public service announcement about a few of the ways you are more likely to die than from a shark attack. 

Its too bad so many people are afraid of sharks because they are incredible fish. They have been around since dinosaurs roamed the planet and have survived that whole time without having any bones! Sharks are cartilaginous, that is they are completely made out of cartilage like that on your ears and tip of your nose.

The largest shark is the whale shark (Rhincodon typus). They average 30 feet long and 20,000 pounds, the largest on record was over 40 feet long and weighed over 47,000 pounds! Sound scary? Maybe a little, but not really when you learn that they are filter feeders and only eat small plankton and fish. They are docile creatures and swimming with them can sometimes be a tourist attraction when visiting their warm tropical homes.

Most sharks are much smaller than the whale sharks and great whites, some being less than a foot long. This little guy, known as a chain catshark or dogfish (Scyliorhinus retifer), is a small species that grows to about a foot long. This one is a guest at the New England Aquarium. Special thanks to Jack Szczepanski, graduate student at the University of Rhode Island, for helping identify his species.

You can learn more about sharks during the Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week. There are a bunch of online resources.

Photos by Sara MacSorley

In Memory of Mike deGruy

The world lost a great ocean enthusiast and science communicator this weekend. Mike deGruy, a zoologist turned film maker, was killed in a helicopter crash on Saturday, February 4, 2012.

I was introduced to Mike's work through National Geographic television specials and then his work on The Blue Planet series. The first time I saw a show with his commentary, I was hooked. He was the epitomy of a science communicator and I knew I could learn from his work.

The combination of his background knowledge of marine science and his storytelling ability made Mike quite a character to watch. You couldn't help but get excited about his beautiful photography and video of marine animals, often capturing unique aspects of their behavior.

Here, I've shared his TED Talk: Hooked by an Octopus. His enthusiasm and passion are palpable.

Mike, you will be missed by many. Your message and legacy live on in your work to protect our oceans.

To learn more about Mike and his work, you can visit his website.

How you can reduce your ocean footprint?

Shared from The Marine Mammal Center - www.marinemammalcenter.org

When you throw something "away", where is away? Everything we manufacture has to go somewhere when we are finished with it. That somewhere is in the land or out at sea. Although the problem of ocean trash can seem overwhelming, there are some simple things you can do every day to minimize your impact on the ocean. If you think it isn’t worth the time and energy, remember the animals who make the ocean their home. Afterall, everything we do, not only affects them, it filters down to us - we eat the same food and we swim in the same water - and the ocean is the planet's biggest life source.

Cut apart those six-pack plastic soda can rings.  If left uncut in the trash, they can make their way to the ocean and trap an unsuspecting, innocent animal. 

Reduce the toxins you use in your yard, as those affect the waterways via run-off.

Bring your own reusable shopping bags whenever you shop.

Be sure to properly dispose of fishing lines and lures, as animals can mistake them for food if they end up in the water.

Try not to use helium balloons as both the balloons and their accompanying strings often end up in the water. Choose another way to decorate a party instead.

Select re-usable items whenever possible and repurpose old items.

Buy in bulk and bring your own container to the store for flour, rice, beans and other dry goods. 

Try buying milk and yogurt in glass and ceramic containers that can be returned to the grocery store.

Recycle everything.  More and more items can be recycled if you take advantage of proper recycling stations and centers.

Bring your own re-usable cup to the café when you buy that morning latte. 

Carry a re-usable water bottle to work and school. 

Choose a product that has less packaging over those that are individually wrapped.  Better yet, can you buy it in bulk?

Whatever you do, remember the 4 R's - REDUCE, REFUSE, RECYCLE & REUSE.

Nudibranchs

Nudibranchs are snails without shells, basically the underwater version of a slug. Their name comes from Latin and Greek and means “naked gills.”

Every color of the rainbow can be found in the over 3,000 species of nudibranchs. A quick Google image search will show you the incredible beautify of these animals. In the animal kingdom bright colors often signify a warning, “don’t eat me, I might make you sick.” This is true for nudibranchs too as you can see in these pictures of the zebra nudibrach, Hypselodoris zebra.

Nudibranchs are carnivores. A fun fact about nudibranchs is that they often have a diet of toxin-filled animals, like sponges. Not only do the toxins not injure the nudibranch, but the nudibranch incorporates the toxins into its own skin! Some who eat animals with nematocysts (stinging cells) like anemones or jellyfish can even incorporate those into their bodies! Talk about self-defense!

I did my research project on the zebra nudibranch when I was at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences. The project didn’t work out as planned, but I got to learn a lot more about these fascinating and beautiful underwater snails.

They have horns on their head called rhinophores that are used to sense tastes or scents. Those sorts of receptors are called chemosensory organs. For protection, some nudibranchs can suck in their rhinophores to keep them safe.

One of the most interesting things about nudibranchs is their sex life. They are simultaneous hermaphrodites – both male and female at the same time! This is a benefit for the nudibranchs because if they can mate with any individual they happen to run into. After mating the nudibranchs produce a clear jelly-like band that houses their eggs. In the zebra nudibranch the eggs are bright red as seen here. They make spirals of these egg bands on hard surfaces like corals or the side of a tank like here. Then, the baby nudibranchs hatch.

You can learn more about nudibranchs by watching this great video.

Photos by Sara MacSorley

Tunicates

Tunicates are also known as ascidians or sea squirts. They have a simple structure where they create a current through their siphons to bring water into their body cavity. There, they collect the little pieces of plankton or detritus – decaying organic matter from the water in a mucus net and push out the left over water.

Like other filter feeders, tunicates are important creatures for the entire ecosystem.

They help keep things in balance.

The name tunicate comes from their outer protective covering or tunic. The tunics and other parts of the tunicate body contain cellulose, something they have in common with plants. Some species use their tunic as a defense mechanism by storing acidic compounds – not very tasty for predatory fish or crabs.

This species of painted tunicate pictured here, Clavelina picta, is common in the shallow waters of the Caribbean and in Bermuda. It attaches itself to other organisms like sponges and soft corals and lives in colonies of hundreds of individuals. They are mainly asexual so they bud (multiply) into clone tunicates to add to the colonies.

The eye catching bright pink outline made painted tunicates one of my favorite animals to see underwater during my study abroad experience at the Bermuda Institute for Ocean Sciences. Their simple structure also fascinated me.

For something so simple, they are actually one of the most evolved (speaking only in terms of evolutionary time) invertebrates. They are urochordates, meaning that they have primitive spinal chords and that next in line after the true chordates they are our closest relatives. So even though tunicates may look like a bag of jelly, they have been pretty successful.

Why should we care about these little jelly bags? Well besides being an important filter feeder for the ecosystem they may also be the source of chemical compounds that could have medicinal uses, even against cancer.

Read more here about how tunicates are being used in regenerative medicine.

Tunicates can also be a stowaway in the ballast water of ships. This can potential bring invasive species into new environments where they can disrupt or even destroy the local environment. For example, there are Didemnum species that can cover the entire sea floor, literally suffocating the local marine life. This can also cause economic impacts, an example being if there are oyster beds on the bottom being covered in quickly multiplying tunicates.

Learn more about Didemnum here.

So while they are either killing ecosystems or curing cancer, tunicates are an animal that scientists will continue to learn more about for years to come. Pretty powerful for a little bag of jelly!

Photos by Sara MacSorley off the coast of Bermuda

Seahorses

The scientific name Hippocampus comes from Ancient Greek – hippos for horse and kampos for sea monster.

The smallest seahorse found to date was discovered off the coast of Indonesia. This species is only a little bigger than a pea!

Even the largest seahorses at a foot tall (the Big-Belly Seahorse, Hippocampus abdominalis) would make pretty small sea monsters, and are way too cute to be scary.

Seahorses are a type of fish but they don’t have scales. There are more than 50 species that can be identified by the number of bony plate rings covering their bodies. Their tail fins look a bit like a monkey’s tail and can be used in a similar fashion. Seahorses wrap their tail fins around sea grass or coral to hold themselves in place with the moving water around them.

One of the common fun facts about seahorses is that the males are the ones that “give birth.” The females insert their eggs into a brood pouch in the male. The brood pouch is a safe spot for the eggs develop into baby seahorses. When it is time to emerge, you see them leaving the pouch, which looks like giving birth.

Like many other ocean animals, people are a large threat for seahorses. Millions of seahorses are caught each year to be used in Chinese medicine for ailments ranging from asthma to acne. They are said to help balance energy in the body.

The aquarium trade also seeks out to collect seahorses from the wild as they are a beautiful ornamental addition to fish tank connoisseurs. Aquaculture facilities are working to change this practice by breeding seahorses in captivity for aquarium use. This way, seahorses aren’t taken from their natural habitats in the wild.  

My favorite seahorse memory was a behind the scenes trip to the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland. I got to tour the breeding facility where they raised thousands of seahorses for the National Aquarium and other aquariums around the country and even as far away as Portugal.

There were tanks everywhere I looked full of seahorses of all different sizes. Lots of little babies too like the ones at the end of this video from the New England Aquarium.

The Leafy Seadragons (Phycodurus eques) are another popular seahorse relative found in the aquarium trade. The National Aquarium at Baltimore bred those too at the time. On the aquarium market they would catch a few thousand dollars, the kicker being they don’t live that long in captivity! 

Trouble viewing the video? Try it on YouTube. 
Photo and video by Sara MacSorley.