A IS FOR ANTHROPOCENE: Living in the Age of Humanity
It’s a Small World After All?
An exploration of the tiny but powerful, from viruses to snails. Plus, Tim Pearce, TikTok celebrity and beloved mollusk curator.
Hi. On this episode, Steve and I talk about how a tiny microscopic virus has brought human society to its knees. We reevaluate our place on this planet and wonder what else have we filed away as insignificant or too small or just taken for granted what's the next unpleasant surprise? And then to lighten things up, I talked to the one and only Tim Pierce, tick tock celebrity and curator of mollusks at Carnegie museum of natural history.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to ASMR for Anthropocene. Hello everybody. I'm sworn McRae. I'm Steve Todd store. Hi Steve. Hi Sloan. All right. Today we're going to talk about the world of the small, the unnoticed, the taken for granted, the taken for granted that sometimes not taking it all. Um, sometimes the microscopic, obviously we're going to talk about covert 19 for awhile because it's kind of all the rage right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's such an interesting example of, uh, of sort of, um, directly speaking invisible truths about our nature and nature as a whole, uh, that make themselves evident in sometimes really uncomfortable ways, but we knew they were there, right? And the way those molecules work is that anytime any place in the universe, let's say since we don't really know that if this is constrained to this planet, any place in the universe where the right conditions are present, these molecules will self-replicate. They'll make more of themselves and the simplest ways to do that is with these viruses. They are nothing more than a piece of DNA that encodes for the structure that encapsulates, it protects it and so little things on the surface that are basically going around the world looking for the place where they attach, they are a key that looks for a place to unlock the big organisms, the complicated organisms that contain all the molecular machinery they need to make more of themselves and the more complex the organism, the more possibilities there are for a little virus to have a key to a lock and to get into that organism and take it over. We cannot know what those places are, where a self replicating robot like that will attach itself and take over our biochemical factories to make more of itself. We never
Speaker 2:know that until it happens. I've read that human's brains are, are sort of evolved to see animals and human, like things in nature and yeah, they seem like these vicious little bastards that are just perfectly created for us at this time. You know, especially America, almost like it knew that we were not equipped to, to shut down at a time, you know, it's exploited all the chinks in our armor.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, you know, that's so interesting. There's this and I, you know, I first want to make apologies to the native American Northeast Indian cultures that I'll be referring to here because I know my knowledge is very partial and has been filtered through the lens of a man of European descent named Schoolcraft who spent a lot of time studying Northeastern Indian cultures. He writes about, um, some of the characters in, um, Northeast India and mythologies. And one of those is, uh, as a character named crooked face. And as I understand it through school craft, um, cricket face had sort of two aspects of when one was out and about and, uh, was, uh, living, um, in the woods and, and had a fire for the evening. Cricket face would, um, blow smoke in the, uh, the face of the person sitting by the fire and that smoke could heal, um, ailments. Um, so a benevolent aspect of crooked face, but cricket face also played tricks on people, right? So this interesting character that, um, sort of, um, has knowledge that heals but also trips you up. And in a way, um, viruses are, are like that as well. I mean, they expose our arrogance and thinking we've got it all figured out and we're masters of the universe, right? Oh, except that this tiny little thing that we can't even see can take us down. Right. Um, and interestingly, Nicole Heller, our curator of the Anthropocene brought to light a recent publication of the prestigious journal nature, which shows that the protein, a protein that's necessary for the implantation of the embryo into the placenta and the development of humans. And all placental mammals comes from a virus. It's a protein that the virus used to invade our bodies. And somehow somewhere along the line, uh, one of our ancestors was able to capture that, the code for that virus and say, Hey, could be useful. I'm going to take that and it's now incorporated into our own DNA and makes it possible for our babies to grow inside their mothers. So this same kind of life form these viruses that seem so horrifically threatening to our lives now and are, I've also contributed to who we are and what we are in a really profound way. They are part of the mother child bond that makes life possible for us. So untangling, uh, are related to nature and the ways in which is both dangerous and profoundly, um, welcoming. Uh, that's a really difficult one. That's often well beyond us
Speaker 2:cricket face. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like all sorts of, I think mix that sorta survive. It's not literally true, but it's true with a capital T, you know, it's, it's got some, it's got some insight.
Speaker 3:That's so interesting, Sloan, because I've started writing my piece for the newsletter and what I've been talking about is what truth means to a scientist and the difference between truth with a capital T and what we know based on science, which has always provisional and partly wrong. There are lots of little wake up calls that we both as scientists and as a culture have to pay attention to. They are the things that tell us if we're listening, how to avoid the horrific disasters. And I think I would put the work of scientists with regard to climate change in the 1970s and eighties into that category. And I would put the more recent work of scientists, uh, regarding pandemics into that category as well. Scientists often, to a large extent, just sort of offer this up as knowledge. Um, say, well, here's what we've learned. Here you go, what do you want to do with this? And unfortunately it can often be the case that we decide that we really don't want to look at it cause it's not that comfortable.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. Or even more so that it's going to get demagogued because it's an uncomfortable truth. So it enters this thing that's so we're welding more. Well, I don't even think for saw it where it's posited as not true. It's so right for misinformation.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I would go back further than Orwell. I would go back to Galileo. Galileo maybe that's a good point. How, how dare he, uh, defy the dog of the time. It's awfully
Speaker 2:resistant to propaganda, right? Like, it's like, like the stars like climate change, like code 19, none of these things care if you watch Fox news or not, you know, like they don't care where you get your,
Speaker 3:yeah. I love Neil deGrasse Tyson's a remark that something like, uh, the great thing about sciences, it's true whether you believe it or not. And uh, the trouble with ignoring it is that one just digs down deeper. But this is such a strong human tendency. I, for a while I did a fair amount of, uh, sort of consulting work, doing strategic planning and external reviews, mainly for universities and especially for their field research and education stations. And it was so fascinating to me how often as you sort of peel back the layers, you discovered the things that are really the challenges for them and you present that to them and you give them some recommendations about how to, how to manage that so that it's not an obstacle, but as part of their path to, um, to greater and greater achievement. And it's remarkable how often the leaders of those organizations will say, well, you just don't understand our special circumstances. Right? You don't understand the ways that, that doesn't apply to us. And I think in part, the kind of disastrous wave response that we've had to Corona virus here in the United States is, um, it is due in part to that, um, to that sort of attitude. We're the great United States, we're the great innovators in the world. We've pulled together through remarkable things. Uh, you know, that doesn't really apply to us. We don't really have to worry about that. We've, we've got this, well, you might have it in your shop, but unless you're actually using the tool, you haven't, you haven't used it to solve the problem. You got to get off the couch and put down the beer. Um, and we didn't. Yeah, we did that. Um, and, and, uh, we, we, we made ourselves an exception. W we thought we kind of had life figured out.
Speaker 2:Well, that word exception, we thought we were exceptional. Yeah. Well, well, we were,
Speaker 3:maybe still are, but, but not in the way we needed to be to deal with this appropriately. Right. And the part of the problem there was we lack the humility to say, Oh, we shouldn't have shut down that pandemic, uh, panel governmental panel. We shouldn't have put off dealing with this. We at the Carnegie, um, in our nexus programs, which were run by, uh, an American council of learned societies, fellow, uh, dr Edith Daron, uh, in partnership with Ben Harrison, who's the curator of programming at the Andy Warhol museum. Uh, we put on a panel where we brought in an epidemiologist, a viral epidemiologist named Rob Wallace, who some of you listeners may know because of his book, big firms make big flu. Um, and, uh, we discussed how our current system of, uh, travel interchange and, uh, sort of factory farming particularly of chickens and pigs, um, sets us up for pandemics. Uh, different pandemic from this one. This one sort of came out of the blue in a way, but, uh, with regard to flu viruses of various kinds though those factory farming systems and the international nature of the exchanges and the ways in which you can't keep the rest of nature out of them because it's so small, you can't see it coming. Uh, that sets us up for pandemics. This is not going to be the only pandemic. It's a big and really horrific and tragic wake up call. But we can actually ask the scientists, even though their knowledge isn't perfect, in what ways can we learn from this and what things can guide us in the future in our relationship with the viral world and how it interacts with the whole rest of our world. How do we manage that in a way that, um, viruses and they're very rapid evolutionary rates, uh, will be less threatening to us in the future.
Speaker 2:The point about this not being the only pandemic is because in my mind a lot because it feels like a continuation or a SQL to SARS or swine flu and, and even a bowl, right? Like this has been a constant headline for decades, and then it goes into retreat a little bit and we still weren't ready for it. You know? And it's that point too about, you know, our, our lack of humility and I also not being ready for this and not responding. It's constantly that like climate change. It's that constant short term economic interest that takes all of our attention. Yeah. You know, and it's such a, it's such a punt of the football, you know, and a bad pot, you know? Yes. We do it time after time.
Speaker 3:We do, we do. It's, it's been interesting me, our history with, um, epidemics and pandemics isn't as well developed as our history with climate change. Um, but we see some of the same patterns in both. So I'm going to refer to sort of the climate change history here, but I think there's an important lesson to be gained in relation to economics. Uh, one would this have been 20, 25 years ago or so. I did some work, uh, with an environmental economist. And so he got me interested in reading the primary research literature in economics, in relation to climate change. And I was kind of floored. I know this has changed somewhat since then and I haven't really kept up with it, but at that time the economic models were all built around short term changes in economics. There was no future in those models, practically speaking. And our Holy Condamine is built that way. It's as though, um, you know, when you learn to drive and um, at the beginning, uh, steering seems like such a difficult problem and you're, you're constantly adjusting the steering wheel. I remember the moment when my driver's ed instructor told me, look way out ahead, you know, look at the Stripe down the middle of the road a hundred yards ahead and steer to that. And uh, I learned not to be so herky jerky and it kept me from overcompensating constantly. And it's not as though we don't have to pay attention to what's happening right here right now. But if we don't also keep our eye on the next curve in the road, we're going to crash. And that's what we do. I was going to crash again and yeah, and so, you know, my background is in um, population biology and evolutionary biology and, um, there's been a lot of talk about this. Uh, reproductive factor of the virus are not, um, well that are not, um, put in a slightly different mathematical form. Uh, is um, the same measure that's used to determine the maximum rate at which a population can increase a number with unlimited resources. And, um, a species like a house mouse, um, or the cockroach, it has a gigantic are not, which means that if you give him a lot of resources and you don't do anything to control them, uh, they reach a practically infinite rate of growth very quickly. And other species like an elephant, no matter how much resource you give them, there are only so many elephants that can be born per female per year or per five years. Uh, and so the maximum rate of population increase for an elephant is a whole lot slower than it is for a virus or a mouse. Um, our economy is largely built around, uh, sort of an economic terms. If you think of the dollar as like a mouse, it's built around the principle that what we want to do is increase that our max as much as possible. We want the economy to be as volatile as possible. Cause that's the way that you get the highest instantaneous growth. And if what you're, if what your job depends on is how much growth you got in the last six months, you're going to produce any economy that continually, rapidly ramps up and rapidly crashes. And that'll happen over and over again until you get a big crash. Or until you as a, as an economic entity are competing with an organization that has reasonable growth but really high stability and resiliency, right? And as a human organism, we have had a high, we've reached the point where we're growing in population super fast and uh, are going to crash in one way or another. Epidemics, starvation, conflict over limiting resources, increasingly with limited resources, et cetera. So this message from the various things that are coming at us, including pandemics, is that we need to rethink our economy so that we're not building for instantaneous maximized instantaneous growth rate over a six month or one year period. Um, that we are thinking about the model, the various ways in which connectedness across the human world as a whole can work that, um, maximize longterm wellbeing and minimize the volatility of the human[inaudible]. And a couple of generations down the road, they're sitting around a campfire, uh, telling stories about the mythical past, the seeming trickle past. You know, the Atlantis that grandpa talked about, you know. Exactly, yeah. And in fact, with rising global sea levels, uh, some predictions are a meter and a half by 2100. Um, some of our great cities will be like Atlanta. So at that point, just relating back to my experience with external reviews and strategic planning, I'm not gonna mention that particular organization that this pertains to, but, uh, um, we did one site visit where beforehand we on the team thought, wow, what an honor to do this place. One of the most important field research stations in the establishment of ecosystem science. I mean, really they did the groundbreaking work. So I've probably given it away for some members of the audience already. And we thought, well, what are we possibly going to tell them? And you go on these things and the first thing that happens is you get a dog and pony show and everything just looks fantastic. And then over the next day and a half or two days, you slowly begin to discover the things that have been swept under the rug and the bodies that are in the trunk of the car and that kind of thing. And you're able to actually give them some good advice. And this was one of the places that I think because they'd been so successful, uh, was so resistant to the idea that they should change anything. In fact, they were pretty much furious with us. Um, and uh, I remember a young member of the team, it was the first one he'd been on saying, well, what are we going to do? They're going to hate us. And one of my partners in doing this, who's about my age said, Oh, I'm too old for that. We just tell them and it's their problem to deal with. Right. Um, so, and I think you can look at the history of organizations and you can see this happening over and over again where the kind of the survival and the reputation of the organization trumps the knowledge, the certain knowledge that they need to change. And all organizations have to change with time. That is the nature of the universe in which we live, that things change. And I think general motors is a good example of this. You know, they, they were pretty hegemonic for a period of time and they were so reluctant to make any changes in the way they designed cars and the way they advertise them in any of it and it very nearly killed them. And uh, even so they still struggle with it now. So sometimes the venerated organizations which have made life so wonderful for us and have made us exceptional are the very things that get in our way because they're unable to make the cultural changes that are necessary to deal with the world as it changes. And for me, one of the very hopeful things about this covert 19, uh, pandemic is how much people outside of the dysfunctional framework of some parts of the governmental response have come together to solve the problems themselves. People figuring out how to three D print, um, face shields, uh, making masks and distributing them to their neighbors, um, providing more money for food banks. So it's clear that I don't know that's exceptional beyond other countries, but it certainly is a hopeful aspect of human nature that when we face adversity, for most of us, what we do is turn toward each other and recognize our mutual interdependence and how much it means to have our neighbors survive. It means almost as much as having as surviving ourselves. Um, and so there's great hope in, in, uh, people learning from the experience that, um, maybe we got to pick this up and do it. And maybe by becoming complacent and thinking that our state representatives and our Congress people and senators are actually looking out for our interests rather than getting them to task and making sure they're looking out for our interests. Maybe by going through this, we've kind of re realized how on an everyday basis we gotta wash the dishes and take out the garbage. Even if we've hired somebody to take out the garbage, we've got to work with them to make sure that that's done the way it needs to be done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no one's going to say less, but us, we always look for saviors. But no, we do. But, um, like what you said about, you know, neighbors and togetherness, which it's often easy, especially for me to jump into a misanthropic point of view. But one of the things that does make us, I think one of the things that is unique about humans seems, is that sense of community. And it's what we're lacking right now so much, but it's also what we're, what we're trying to recreate virtually. And yeah, it's kind of swearing,
Speaker 3:isn't this a poignant reminder of how much we really need to be physically around other people? We are not whole without that. Uh, the whole is larger than ourselves. We don't belong to ourselves. We belong to each other, each other, that each other is more than just other human beings. Right. We also sometimes frighteningly so belong to the viruses and microbes, right. We gotta take them into account in the way we build our human systems.
Speaker 2:Yeah. From now on. If we don't, it's, it's a unforgivable, you know, we, we've been talking about the invisible, it's also important to think about the invisible among us and you know, our, our, our neighbors, our, our, even our relatives, our friends who are not only vulnerable, but we just don't see them right now. And, and, and on a site is not, cannot be out of mind.
Speaker 3:Right? In fact, we are as vulnerable, um, to those that we ignore and in our human life as we are to the viruses, we all sink, swim together.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's John Dunn, right? No man is an Island. It's, it's and for whom the bell tolls do not ask him.
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Speaker 1:this episode for our foray into the humanities, I have been reminded recently of a little English lit one Oh one that has popped up in a bunch of memes. Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he was quarantining during the plague, so be productive out there everyone. No pressure in honor Shakespeare and this episode is exploration of the invisible and unnoticed yet also the profound and even sometimes deadly. Here is sonnet 14 not from the stars. Do I my judgment pluck and yet me thinks I have astronomy, but not to tell if good or evil luck of plagues of dearths or season's quality. Nor can I fortune to brief minutes Tel pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind, or say with princess, if it shall go well by off predict that I haven't find, but from thine eyes, my knowledge, I'd arrive and constant stars in them. I read such art as truth and beauty. Shout together, thrive if from thyself to store without what's convert or else a V this I prognosticate. The end is truths and beauty's doom and date. And of course one of the greatest quotes in all of English literature. There are more things in heaven and earth ratio than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Now jump off that zoom call and write your masterpiece.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome back. I'm joined by one of my favorite colleagues here at the museum, although I'm not here at the museum. Um, I'm in my house and he's at his house. But anyway, I'm joined by one of my favorite colleagues, Tiktaalik sensation and curator of dr Tim Pierce.
Speaker 5:Hey, it's great to be here as Sloan. Thank you very much for the invitation.
Speaker 2:Of course. Welcome to our humble podcast. So I have to start out by saying, can you say your catchphrase for us?
Speaker 5:Hi, I'm Jim Paris here at Carnegie museum of natural history with that podcast for you.
Speaker 2:Nice. If you were one of the few people who haven't deemed him on tick-tock, you have to go check it out. We have lots of great content on our tech talk page, but it's anchored by Tim who has very rabid fans in the tens of thousands who, um, if they don't see his weekly mollusk ticked out joke on Mondays from all this Monday. Um, they are, they're up in arms. But actually I say that as a joke. The great thing about tech talk is like there's virtually no trolls. One of the great things about tick-tock is there are virtually no trolls. And I have to say I'm overwhelmed by the response. Um, you know, I shouldn't be because I knew you'd be a hit him, but it's, it's really fun to see this, this happened in this community sort of taking place. And I love to see the, just the warmth and the appreciation for you in all the comments.
Speaker 5:Um, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm really sort of surprised by how enthusiastic people are about these snail jokes and I really want to give you credit for recognizing that they would be a sensation. I had no idea.
Speaker 2:Thanks. I didn't think that'd be quite the sensation they are, but um, I knew that they'd be, they'd be a hit and you know, we should, we should just sort of cut to Tim's modesty. You know, he has kind of a devoted cult following here at the museum that he's cultivated for years with monthly onsite tours. You know, you were, we were one of the first people I met here when I came on board in 2014 and all of my new colleagues were asking me if they had met you and heard your jokes. And more importantly, had had, had I seen the collection of mollusks that I heard any of your, any of your talks, which is, you know, the, the, the jokes are kind of a great gateway drug to some really fascinating knowledge, I think.
Speaker 5:Yeah, there's an awful lot of interesting things about mollusks and most people have never even heard of mollusks. So that's a, it's kind of a sad situation that people haven't heard about them, but when they do learn about mollusks, there's just this whole world that opens up and mollusks are so fascinating in so many different ways,
Speaker 2:but how they have heard about them. So, you know, that's the, that's the great thing. So let's talk about mollusks. Um, can you talk a little bit about your background and what about mollusks first captured your attention?
Speaker 5:Oh boy. Let's see. Mmm, a lot. I've always loved nature. Um, and I, I was collecting things when I was a kid and uh, including mollusks of course, including snails and snail shells. Um, and then it wasn't until I was a, in college when, I guess my second year in college, I had to write a term paper, actually two term papers and I decided to write about mollusks about the slugs I was in, in school at the, in the Pacific Northwest where it's rainy a lot. And that means that there are a lot of slugs out. And so I wrote my two term papers on slugs and that was the beginning of when I really started focusing on, on snails and slugs in particular. I think one of the reasons that I really like collecting snail shells is that I love collecting things, but I don't like killing things and you know, a butterfly collection, all those butterflies on there on your wall, they would look so beautiful. But you have to kill each butterfly to get the wings off, pin them to the thing, which is kind of brutal. So I, um, I didn't like killing things, but I did like collecting things and uh, I think I might have an extra collecting gene or something. And so if I find an empty snail shell, I can collect it and I didn't have to kill anything. So that was good. My mother tells me that I was collecting snails back when I was three years old and I would sometimes take these snails to the doctor's office, um, in a cottage cheese container. And the nurse wasn't particularly pleased with it. But the doctor, I had a woman doctor, the doctor was very excited to see my snails whenever I would bring them in when I was three. Of course, I don't remember any of this, but this is what my mother tells me. So I have been collecting snails for a long time. So I think it's partly that one of the reasons that I like snails is that they have the, uh, the shell and you can collect the shell, um, without having to kill anything. Another thing is that I do like things that move and uh, Oh, there goes a bird. Oh. Oh, I couldn't quite see if it had a white Irene. Um, so birds move, but they move a little bit too fast and plants what plants move. But they move awfully slowly. Snails move just about right. I can keep up with a snail and sometimes it's fun for me too if I find a live snail to paint a number on the back and then let it go and then come back later and see if I can find where it went. And actually most of the time I could never find them again. That was another thing that I enjoy doing with nails was to see how far do they move and they actually move a lot farther than you might think. How far do that, well, during my PhD work research, um, this actually did not make it into my dissertation, but during my PhD research I was actually tracking snails. I was doing something, I call it snail on a string. It's where you take a little spool of thread and glue it onto the back of the snail and then when the snail moves, the spool unwinds and then leaves a trail of where the snail has gone. One of the reasons that I was interested in, in doing this is sometimes I would have a marked snail and I would come back and I would find it in the same place. And I, well, is the snail homing, does that mean that means, is it going out and then coming back to the exact same place every night? Or does it mean it didn't move at all? And so by putting the snail on a string, by having the spool of thread on his back, by the way, it's a school that's kind of like a skein of yarn. So the yarn, the thread comes out from the middle and there are no, no real moving parts. So by having this spool of thread on the snail, I could determine whether they were moving and if they did move, how far did they move? And in fact, the snails that I found in the same place, it turns out no, they didn't move that that night snails move mostly at night. But when they did move, they moved on the order of about two meters or two yards. Um, most of the time they didn't move much more than that. There was one night when, uh, there was a mushroom that had come up and it smelled to me it smells like grape Koolaid. It was a very pleasant odor and there were snails that converged on that mushroom from six meters away. So they had moved six, six yards. So that 20 feet, wow. One night just to get to this mushroom snails do love to eat mushrooms. So that's how far the particular snails that I was studying. Um, that's how far that they were moving in one night relative to their size. That's not an insignificant distance. Right. It seems pretty far to me. I have run snail races or slug races a few times. Let's see if you're ever entering a slug race, here are some tips for you. Yeah. As long as you find in your backyard that have the two strikes on the back and if you pick them up and your finger gets orange, those are going to be losers. They, they might have, it might look like they have racing stripes, but they're not going to be fast in a sled race instead. Um, there are two that are pretty good. One of them is the leopard slug. They can get up to be four inches. They have a pale gray background with black spots or black blots or sometimes black lines on them and they are really quite rapid. Uh, they're pretty fast. Um, or there's actually a much smaller one. It's maybe an inch and a half. It's um, tan colored and sometimes has a darker Brown markings on it. Um, that one, if you pick it up, it'll um, give off. It's got a regular clear mucus when it's calm, but when you disturb it, then it gives off Milky mucus. Um, so that one is also a quite rapid first nail. So, so if you're entering a slip, a slug race, those are a hit. This is your tip. Those are the two winters that you can rely on. There is also a, uh, another snail, it's a carnivorous snail that eats other snails. And I think as far as I know, it might actually be the winner, um, in, uh, in how fast snails go when it crawls along and has specialized projections on its tentacles and it can smell the mucous trail, the slime trail from other snails and it can tell which direction the snail went. So if it crosses a slime trail, it then takes off after that snail and they can go, I forget how much it is, eight centimeters a second. I think it might be eight. So that's what, two and a half inches. A second. Thank you. It might be a potato inches a minute. They're probably one of the top. However, if you're interested in a joke about how fast nails go, some scientists were interested in, well I call it a snail ear snails actually cannot hear, but they do have a balancing Oregon and we have balancing organs in our here. So it's kind of like our here, the balancing organ of a snail is a little chamber with a calcium carbonate rock in the middle and the snail actually grows that rock. And then the calcium carbonate rock rests on the bottom of the chamber and then the snail knows that weighs down. And if it's nailed turns, then the rock rests on a different part of the chamber. And this Neal knows that weighs down. If this, if the rock is not resting hard enough, um, then the snail knows it needs to grow the rock bigger. So if you were to put snails into outer space where there's no gravity or micro gravity, then the rock would not be resting on the chamber. Um, and the snow would know I better grow it bigger. So some scientists actually sent some snails into outer space and uh, and they saw what happened to the rock and this Neil's gear and in fact, like they predicted, but rock did grow bigger. Meanwhile, those snails are sending around the earth at 18,000 miles an hour, 28,000 kilometers an hour. And I believe those were the fastest.
Speaker 2:They weren't sluggish.
Speaker 5:They were not sluggish at all. No, they were actually freshwater snails again. Um, malaria glabrata.
Speaker 2:How did the other carnivorous snails that you mentioned, how do they feed on another snail? Do they get the other snail out of its shell somehow
Speaker 5:or it's pretty vicious. If the snail, if the price now has a large aperture, then the car number of snails is called the rosy Wolf snail is the common name. You Glen Dina Rosea is the scientific name. If the price now has a large aperture and the rosy Wolf snail just sticks its head in there and starts chewing. Um, if the snail is small, the rosy Wolf snail might swallow the whole snail and then, uh, uh, regurgitate the shell later, um, after it's digested it or, um, sometimes, actually I'm not sure if the rosy Wolf snail does this, but we have another carnivorous snails that lives around here. It's, it's um, almost the size of a dime or a nickel, um, S slightly greener, flat, slightly greenish and that's also carnivorous or actually it's omnivorous. Um, it prefers to eat snails but will also eat plants. And you have the aperture of the snip of the prey snail is too small. It will actually go around to the, um, edge of the shell and, and chew a hole. Um, it's both chewing and using chemicals to dissolve the shell. And so it'll make a hole there and then it'll be able to get the, uh, tasty morsels out of the snail show. Kind of scary,
Speaker 2:kind of scary. Yeah. You kind of want to imagine it as, as a monster and a horror film or, or, or something. Somehow I feel like, like a supersize it, I've seen some of the very tiny snails that you've collected in this region in Pennsylvania and um, I had no idea that they were so abundant here and this episode is devoted to the world of the small and the things that go unnoticed. Can you talk about, well, those snails, I think, you know, the ones I'm talking about, I think that they're the ones that have been, um, very, uh, featured prominently in your research,
Speaker 5:right? Yes. There is a whole world of the small, as far as the snails go, um, the average size of a snail species, um, maybe worldwide, but definitely here in Pennsylvania, um, is three millimeters or one eighth of an inch. So that's the average. It's, it's the median. And what that means is half of the species are smaller than that, right. And, uh, typically when, if we go for a walk in the forest, um, we might be able to see a snail as small as a quarter of an inch. I mean that's kind of stretching it, but you might be able to find us now a quarter of an inch. But these snails are an eighth of an inch or smaller. So if you, if you really well, well my research, I'm interested to know what snails are there. And so I cannot just go for a walk in the woods and say and tick them off of my snail's list because I will miss way more than half of the species. So what I do is I collect a bag of leaf litter, a bag of soil from the forest floor, and I bring it back to my lab and then I process it and I pick out the tiny snails. And so that's how I can get an accurate, a much more accurate picture of what species are living there. So yeah. Um, here in Pennsylvania we have about 130 species of land snails and if half of them are less than an eighth of minutes, that would be what, 65 species of land snails. So 65 pieces of land sales are less than an eighth of an inch in diameter. Uh, yeah, there's the whole world. So the smallest one is one 16th, or sorry, one 25th of an inch in diameter, one, one millimeter in diameter. Um, and so, and those are the adults. The babies are even smaller than that. So yeah, there is a whole world of the small out there. And in fact, this one, that's one millimeter in diameter, that's the most common snail in Pennsylvania. But you would never know it. Hardly anybody ever sees them. How snow populations have been impacted by acid rain over the years. Yeah. Well, um, I'm still still studying that acid rain. My, uh, is my working hypothesis I should say. So yes. I was studying a snail called the tiger snail. The scientific name is by her up alter nada and it's a, it's a relatively large snail. It's the size of a nickel, maybe a little larger, and it's got some dark, um, markings on it, on the, on the shell, um, kind of like a tiger tiger markings. So it's sometimes called the tiger snail. And this net snail used to be anyway, one of the most common large land snails in Eastern North America. What that means is that museums have an awful lot of specimens because people notice them and pick them up and donate them to museums. So historically, museums have lots and lots of specimens with these tiger snails. But I started noticing in the mid 1990s I started noticing that they were getting harder to find my life at that point happened that happened to coincide with a change in geography. I moved from Michigan to Delaware and so I wasn't sure, are they just less common in Delaware or are they less common in the 1990s? It's taken me quite a while to figure that out, but I've now convinced myself overwhelmingly that yes, the snail is declining. Um, and in fact in Pennsylvania we have, we have a what, 67 counties and this nail was known from 53 of those counties prior to 1960. After 1960. It's now known from home only 23 of those counties. So from 57 counties to 23, it's now known in fewer than half of the counties. And so there's declining, it took me several years to convince myself of that. At first I thought, well, am I looking hard enough? That is a drawback with using museum collections. You have no idea. How hard did they look to find these specimens? You know, if I've got a box with five shells in it, well did they look for one hour or did they look for two weeks to find those five shells? And I really don't know. But I did, um, through actually two independent methods, I have convinced myself that not only am I looking hard enough, I'm probably looking harder than they were in the past. And so the fact that I am finding fewer of these snails really does indicate that they are declining. Now, the reason that I started suspecting acid rain is that the decline of the snails started right around the middle of the 19 hundreds, maybe around 19, the late 1950s, early sixties is when the snail started declining. And that's also about the same time that acid rain started increasing. Uh, so it's a, a working hypothesis. And right now I've expanded my study from just Pennsylvania to now include all of the States of the Northeast. So I've got 26 different States in there and uh, well I'll, I'll tell you what I'm about to do with the study. I'm not quite there yet, but the idea is, um, to look at every County and, and determine, well, snail was the snail there before 1960 and if so, did it persist after 1960 or did it disappear after 1960? And the prediction is that if the County has experienced more serious acid rain, then you would expect more of them, more disappearances where if the, if the County had less acid rain, then you would expect more persistency. So I've got the prediction and right now I'm in the process of gathering the data. I've actually got more than 130,000 records from a whole bunch of museums around the, around the country. And uh, right now I'm working up the data to be able to know which ones I want to process. And so I don't have the answer yet.
Speaker 2:In Pennsylvania, the counties where they have declined or disappeared, are they distributed sort of geographically in clusters? Are they, they have like features in common other than geography
Speaker 5:in general, the counties that still have the snail are in the Western part of Pennsylvania and it's disappeared more from the Eastern part, especially the Southeastern part. And um, I don't really have a good explanation for that. The Southeastern part is the lower elevation, uh, parts of the state. Well, the snail is more common in Northern United States. So actually that was another hypothesis that I was examining. Plus, uh, global warming, global, uh, increased, increased warming because if the snail doesn't like the warm areas, it's not very common in the Southern United States, then you would expect it to disappear from the lower elevation areas. I dismissed the climate change hypothesis because the timing didn't work out very well. The snail was disappearing right around the middle of the 19 hundreds. Uh, climate warming really wasn't, it didn't rise out of the noise. So by, by noise, I mean that the, the weather climate is really the average of the weather. The average, um, didn't really rise out of the noise. The average of the climate didn't rise out of the noise of the weather until, well, maybe the middle 1990s, possibly the late 18, 1980s, but that's way beyond, that's way past when the snails started to decline. So I don't think I can blame climate warming for the disappearance of the snail.
Speaker 2:Every time I talked to you, I learned so much. And again, it's, it's a world that most of us don't, we can't even say we take for granted because we just don't know what's there.
Speaker 5:I'm a subject of tiny snails. There are snails that are even smaller than the smallest snail in Pennsylvania. There are a number of different ways of measuring size. You can measure how long something is or you can measure its diameter or you can measure how heavy it is or you can measure how, how much volume it is. Usually what I talk about is the greatest dimension. So in these snails that are the smallest in Pennsylvania, they are sort of flat and so what I'm doing is I'm measuring diameter, but there is another snail in Pennsylvania that is even smaller in diameter 0.4 millimeters, which would be, what would that be? Less than a 50th of an inch 0.4 millimeters in diameter, but it's 1.4 millimeters tall. So in greatest dimension it's bigger than the smallest Smale in Pennsylvania, but in diameter it's much smaller in diameter. So we do have some of those. There were some snails described as new to science just a few years ago from Asia, Eastern Asia. They, they made a big splash because the, to demonstrate how small they were, the researchers put the snail inside the eye of a needle and the snail fit in there. So the snail in greatest dimension, the snail is 0.8 millimeters in diameter. So that's something like one 30th of an inch.
Speaker 2:Wow. So it's like that old medieval philosophical question from Thomas Aquinas. How many angels can you put on pinheads? It's snails are actually the, what we should be asking the question about.
Speaker 5:Oh, I love it. I love thinking about snails as angel.
Speaker 2:There you go. Yeah. Can we, can we think of, uh, snails and mollusks as demons for a second? Because one of the things that I always really enjoy about the tour of your collection is, um, the, the mollusks that, you know, are almost, have like sort of like hypodermic, you know, dark kind of poisoned features and that are, that are they're deadly even to humans.
Speaker 5:Yeah, that's right. Um, so these snails, um, they're actually pretty famous now are in the cone snail family and uh, actually I guess they're all still in like genus CONUS. And uh, so, uh, all of the snails in the genus Konas and in the cone snails, um, they are all carnivorous and they have a little hypodermic dark and they use it to inject venom into their prey. Um, I'm going to make a distinction between venom and poison. Uh, one of them hurts you if you swallow it and one of them hurts you if you inject it. And so poison you don't want to swallow a poison. But venom, most maybe even all venoms are made of protein. So if you were to swallow the venom, you would just digest it and it wouldn't be able to hurt you. It can only hurt you if you bypass your digestive system and go directly into the bloodstream and then it can hurt you. So these snails are injecting venom into their prey and then it paralyzes their prey and then the snail can slurp them up if it's a worm or, or somehow eat them, swallow them whole. And so most of the cons, nails, eat, doing worms. Yum, yum. We all love worms. Tell me. Um, there are some of them that like to eat other snails and then there are some that like to eat fish and I think that's a pretty cool trick that snails can actually catch any fish while ha. Um, and uh, so the snail waits until the fish is nearby, jabs it with the dark really fast. The fish is paralyzed almost instantly. And then the snail has a big mouth that then swallows the fish. And you can see videos on YouTube. If you say cone snail eating or cone snail feeding, you can see pictures of the cone snail catching and swallowing the fish. In fact, if you want a joke, one of the videos of the snail is eating a clown fish. Oh, poor Nimo. Um, but the snail actually doesn't like eating plan fish because if it's a clownfish then it tastes funny. Some of these venoms potentially have medicinal benefits it possible since they are proteins. Yes, definitely. And there's an awful lot of research into these benefits. By the way. These snails are just really amazing from an evolutionary perspective because these venoms are, uh, hyper diverse. Um, they are evolving much more rapidly than most genes evolve. So the genes that are making, uh, the snail minimum, they're either the most rapidly evolving or, or maybe second, they're one of the most rapidly evolving, um, set of genes in the animal kingdom or maybe even in the, in the, uh, the living kingdom does living world. Um, so that's pretty amazing. Wow. The snails, it's not just a single chemical, not just a single, uh, uh, protein that they're injecting. They're injecting a whole cocktail of 50 to even a hundred, uh, different proteins or short proteins, peptides, um, maybe on the order of 30 to 40 amino acids, um, amino acids, makeup proteins, and, uh, so they are injecting this whole cocktail into their prey. And each one of these, uh, different peptides seems to have amazing different properties. Um, and some of them it's been discovered are turn out to be pain killers. It's not clear why that's nail would want to inject. It's pray with a painkiller. Um, my guess is that the peptides are affecting different species in different ways. And so in one species that might act, um, to paralyze it and another species that might act as a painkiller, but it's, it's found to be a painkiller and it's actually being used in humans right now as a painkiller. Um, it's more powerful than morphine. Wow. So it's, it's a kind of a morose side of the story is it's being used in end of life cases. So where, where you're managing pain until somebody dies. The, uh, if they've maxed out on morphine, they can't, morphine doesn't work for them anymore. They can use the, uh, the snail venom. Um, it's called Prialt, PRI alt or, um,[inaudible]. Those are a couple of the names it goes by. Um, and then they can use this snail venom, which by the way, you don't build up a tolerance and it's not addictive. Wow. It does have a serious drawback though. It, uh, it doesn't cross the blood brain barrier and so to use it, it has to be injected directly into the spinal fluid. Not particularly convenient, but, um, uh, it does really work. Wow. They're working on ways to try and figure out how to get it to sneak across the blood brain barrier, maybe a Trojan horse kind of strategy. And if they can solve that, they might be able to solve the opioid crisis. I think that's
Speaker 2:pretty cool. That would be, that would be amazing if, if, if the secret is, is smelled at them.
Speaker 5:Um, so there are other amazing properties in some of these male venoms. Um, there are some that can help people with their moods. Uh, but anyway, a bunch of different things that these snail venoms can, uh, be useful for. And by the way, uh, in of these three quarters of a million different peptides, um, in the snail world, um, we've only explored what 0.1% of them. So what about the other 99.99% of them? Um, what, what amazing properties might they have? We just don't know yet.
Speaker 2:I'm going to try that. Or any of them listen to genic. He asked for a friend.
Speaker 5:I haven't heard about any and I don't know if they would be keeping those kinds of things secret or not. By the way, the one that is used as a painkiller, the one that has been approved by the FDA, um, I have heard that people who use it hear music. Uh, it's hard to park me to verify this, but as far as I can tell, maybe a hundred percent of the people who use it hear music and sometimes it's so loud they have, they try to cover their head with a pillow, but then music's coming from inside their head. Sometimes they can't hear the conversation they're having because the music so loud, it's hard for me to verify that, but that one seems to be true. The part that I haven't been able to verify is some people have asked, well, what kind of music is it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. Isn't this really like it's a bagpipe music or is it, is it, is it organ grinder or something that's kind of pleasant to hear?
Speaker 5:One place I heard that it was music from the seventies and eighties. That's as much as I know. It seems likely that there would be other hallucinogens, but I, I really don't, that's, I'm speculating here, but there's also a whole branch of pharmacology that is, I'm trying to make non-protein analogs. So the way that a protein molecule works is that it has a particular structure and then it has active sites in particular areas of this protein molecule. And so when those active sites, um, join onto a cell or some other structure, then it will become active. And so in theory one could make a non-protein they would have the same structure and the same act of sites. And then in theory you could swallow it and it wouldn't get digested. So I'm not sure, but I'm speculating that, um, pharmacology is working on non-protein analogs of these snail peptides. Indeed. This is exactly why I was sort of here to have you on the podcast. There are other, um, negative sides to snail. So you were talking about the snail venom. Um, snails actually are really good at carrying parasites and well maybe other diseases, but parasites and other diseases. I'm not sure what makes nails so good at it, but they are very good. Um, one of the most common ones that, um, affects humans is a disease called schistosomiasis or bill. Bill[inaudible] is another name for it. It's quite common in the tropics and it's, uh, a little a flatworm and the platform has, spends part of its life in the snail. It's a freshwater snail and then it swims out of the snail and then it's trying to swim into a human. And so if a human happens to be swimming or waiting or doing the laundry, um, and getting wet, then the snail can swim into their skin and then it goes into the bloodstream. And then eventually it sets up shop inside a muffle. And the, um, most, most of the flatworms by the way, are hermaphrodites. So there's one animal is both male and female, but these schistosomes are, have, they have separate sexes. And so a female will get into the muscle and then a male worm will get in there and then they snuggled together and then the male fertilizes the female's eggs. It's the eggs that are actually damaging to humans. So the eggs will go through the bloodstream when they get to your bladder. Then the eggs, the eggs, most of the time we think about exits being kind of stationary and not active. But these eggs actually are active and they can burrow. So it will burrow through the wall of your bladder into your bladder, and then you pee out these eggs and the blood because in Berlin, through your wall of your bladder, they've caused you to bleed a little bit. And so that's one way that you can tell that you've been infected if you're peeing blood. And so if you happen to be near the water, if you pee into the water, then the eggs get into the water and then they can affect in fact a snail again. And then the cycle starts all over again. So schistosomiasis is actually the second most debilitating disease in the tropics really actually kills a lot of people. It's just to semiosis doesn't kill so many people, but it really reduces the quality of life. Um, so it's a very serious disease. And, uh, there's a lot of work actually, um, going on to try and figure out how to control it. Um, in some cases people think, Oh, well we better kill the snails off. Um, actually that would solve the problem. But I hate to hear that, that solution because
Speaker 2:I don't want to kill off holes with nails. Also, good luck. We've already, we've just talked about how, you know, they're kind of everywhere. And I think of the collateral damage if you attempt to do that too,
Speaker 5:right? So it's not, not every species of snail can Harbor these. There are only certain species, but typically when people are using snail control for just a semiosis control, then they are poisoning all of the snails. Um, there was a fellow at, um, hope college in Michigan and he was looking at a closely related disease called swimmer's itch. So it's actually also schistosomes these little worms. But the schistosomes in Michigan are, um, duck or duck parasites. So they're looking for, um, organic or duck to swim into. And then it will continue its life cycle. If they find a human, the little worm thinks, huh, it doesn't quite smell right. It doesn't quite taste right, but okay, well let's give it a try. So it burrows into the human, but the human is not the proper host. And so it dies in there. And then the itch that you get, the swimmers itch is from the allergic reaction that you have to this worm. So there's professor Harvey blankets bore at hope college. He had this idea instead of killing off the snails, what if we vaccinate the ducks? Yes, exactly. He was catching the ducks with the, with nets and then vaccinating them and it worked, uh, by vaccinating the ducks, he broke that cycle and then the ducks could survive and the snails could survive. The drawback with his solution was he had to vaccinate the ducks every year. So it was kind of labor intensive, but it really did work. And it showed promise for the possibility of controlling the snails. I suppose something like that could work with humans too. If you could vaccinate the humans or, or somehow, um, prevent the humans from getting, uh, um, infected, then you could break that cycle too. Um, in fact, Japan, historically Japan did have just to some biases, I'm not sure it was the, uh, the bladder. Um, it's just to some, but it wasn't a different one. Um, but Japan successfully did eradicate, it's just a songs from the Island of Japan. So they did show that it is possible.
Speaker 2:Our time is almost up. And I, I hate to say goodbye because I'm enjoying this so much. Oh, do you have any jokes for us that we haven't heard yet? I'll tick tock by any chance.
Speaker 5:Um, here's one that I've created that, uh, I haven't tried it anywhere else yet and I'm not sure how well it's going to work. Alright. What is a snails favorite? Amusement park is snail and if a snail breaks its shell, then it has to go to the hospital and see a specialist.
Speaker 2:Um, thank you so much. And uh, we'll, we'll have to get you back on again.
Speaker 5:Hey, it's been great being here. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:And I hope to see you in person again sometime in the, in the not too distant future. Make sure you see his videos and all of our content on ticktock at Carnegie, M N H.