← Science In Action
Science In Action
An uncertain forecast for meteorology
00:44:19
As US government cuts imperil weather data, meteorologists worldwide forecast trouble.
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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
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Welcome to Science in Action from the BBC World Service with the Roland Pease Coming up, how hormone changes may make women more susceptible to dementia.
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Menopause is this critical window where Alzheimer's risk may be highest and may be malleable. And so might we go deep and.
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We'Re connecting to an Antarctic icebreaker to learn about, shall we say, bloodless ice fish.
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Yeah, we're going to open a big door to the outside and we've got a huge iceberg outside. Well, it's 30, 30 miles by 30 miles, so it's not as big as a 23, but it is chasing the ship so we should avoid it.
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That's to come. U S researchers are holding a series of marches for science in Washington D.C. and across the country this Friday in response to what they say are seriously damaging actions. The taken by the new administration since it took office in January. Those have included a pause in the panels that select future research funding, a block on communications for the National Institutes of Health and the Centre for Disease Control, and perhaps most widely discussed, the acting of the international HIV prevention and treatment programme. Nature, one of the leading science journals, summed it up like this in an editorial last US President Donald Trump is taking a wrecking ball to science and to international institutions. Last week ended with employment termination emails going out to staff in offices of the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration across the country. The American Meteorological Society responded with a statement defending their work. The US Weather enterprise a national treasure at risk. I asked co author AMS President Elect and retired TV forecaster Alan Seals to lay out their fears.
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I and the AMs very concerned. This is what we do, all of us as meteorologists, as weather forecasters, but also as US Taxpayers. NOAA is an agency that looks over primarily the weather for the United States and our territories and surrounding areas, but it also covers what's going on in the oceans in terms of forecasting, covers climate. A lot of people don't realize it also covers space weather. For example, we had the big solar storm where folks saw the northern lights at low latitudes last fall. So NOAA is out there looking out for our best interests, which if you go back to the origin of it, it's under the US Department of Commerce. And when you think Commerce, you have to think weather, whether it's a truck, a train, a ship or an airplane.
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Or a rocket that suspect what's actually happened. I'm finding these things so hard to keep track. But as I understand it, people who are in their probationary period have been, well, they use the word let go. They've been fired. Is that essentially what's happened?
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C
Essentially, yes. And it is extremely hard to follow, in part because NOAA has multiple agencies and branches and most people know it as the National Weather Service. But even within the National Weather Service, there are multiple agencies, for example the National Hurricane center, the Space Weather Prediction Center. You have the Weather Prediction center, you have the Climate Prediction Center. And just for my professional networks, I'm hearing of so many people's positions who have been eliminated. And yes, the phrasing has gone anywhere from an early retirement to a resignation to position being eliminated, to be fired. So it is very hard to keep up with. For me, my career has been broadcast meteorology, even though I'm retired now. And throughout my career, having worked in five different states, I've worked so much with the National Weather Service. And I've worked with the individuals within the Weather Service and NOAA on committees with the National Weather association and the American Meteorological Society. And I have to say no one wants to lose their job. I've been in the position where my companies have downsized or cut or done layoffs. So I know how it feels personally. And that's maybe an issue. Number one for most people is you do your hardest job, you have passion for what you do, concern for your community, and then out of nowhere your position is eliminated. Another clarification on that, what they call probationary, period. Most people would probably say, oh well, that's the new employees. Well, not just new employees within the National Weather Service. In noaa, probationary also covers veteran employees who have switched positions or switched offices. So there are lots of folks throughout their entire career spectrum who are being impacted by this and it's sad to see.
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So these are senior people, really experienced people, but just because they've had a job change in the past six months or something, they've become vulnerable.
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C
Correct. It's senior, middle and early career. And it's also, from what I'm hearing, and boy, it's so hard to verify this, I'm hearing that some of the entry programs to NOAA are also being cut or at least frozen. And that's where the next issue comes in. And that is if you think of a scientist, most of us know that, that this is what we want to do for our lives. We know at a young age and people pursue that through formal training, college education. I teach a broadcast course in Mobile at the University of South Alabama. And last week we spent a half hour after class talking about what is going on now and how it plays into the future of my students who are all aspiring meteorologists. So it definitely scares them. And my fear, just as with any cut, is you are creating an obstacle to people who say I would love to do this but. And then you end up potentially losing out on a lot of good talent, which is what we need.
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I guess NOAA has a lot of pretty small offices or maybe there offices within each state and so on. But some of these have suddenly found themselves so short staffed they can't even send up the weather balloons, radiosons I think you call them, to get the critical atmospheric data for the next forecast.
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C
Yeah, yeah. So to put it in context, the National Weather Service has over 100 offices scattered throughout the United States and US territories. And those offices will cover multiple counties or significant portions of states. All of the offices run off of NOAA data. And when we think NOAA data, start with satellite, start with radar. And those are actually the first two things you'll see on a TV weather broadcast, the first two things that you'll see on a weather app. So it's NOAA that, number one, secures the data, does a quality check on the data, and makes the data available to the National Weather Service and also to you, to anybody on our home computers. We can all pull up NOAA data, whether it's the current conditions at all the airports around the country, whether it's the buoy conditions, what's going on out in the oceans, which again, plays a big, big role into transportation. And then, of course, hurricanes, tropical weather. And then NOAA also launches weather balloons which sample the atmosphere so that we literally can get a three dimensional picture of what's going on from that. NOAA has a division that creates computer models, weather models. The models forecast the weather. The local National Weather Service offices use the models and their local experience to predict the weather. And so it is a very tightly integrated unit. And for other folks who are outside the United States, just before we started this interview, here's what I did. I went online, I looked at the satellites from Japan, I looked at the satellites from Korea, I looked at the satellites from Europe. So I'm able to see, as a meteorologist, I can see the whole world based on other countries that make their data available. And that's what NOAA does. It makes data across North America available to folks in Africa, in Europe. And you need to know that because the weather moves from west to east, we all share it. So we need to keep on sharing and having quality data.
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How critical do you think the situation is from. I guess you're talking to people, but for example, if there was some kind of tornado outbreak in the Midwest and some radar station hasn't been serviced or something, are you at the point where a town may miss some kind of vital warning of an outbreak?
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That's a big concern right now. The National Weather Service does have redundancy, where, for example, literally, if one weather service office were to totally lose communication, and we saw this with Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago in, in the New Orleans area. If one office goes down, a neighboring office can literally fill in and cover their territory. However, the problem becomes, whether it's an entire office or just a radar that has a hardware failure and you need to call in a technician to fix it, those little gaps could add up. And the last thing you want in an emergency situation is to have gaps in Your hardware data, your communications ability. The other thing that I know from experience, having been a survivor of corporate layoffs, is when you lose other people around you, your workload increases, and it's not humanly possible to keep up the same level of quality work as you start reducing the number of people. Technology can fill some gaps, but still, my concern is that even in a normal weather forecasting scenario, a person may be doing so many other things that they literally can miss one little item. And even on a quiet day, whether it's something as simple as fog and how that impacts a morning commute or air travel, have you or any of.
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Your colleagues at the Meteorological Society managed to talk to the people who matter in Washington to find out what's going on, why they're doing it, and how much more there may be?
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No, we haven't done that. And so to put it in context, the American Meteorological Society, we are nonpartisan, nonprofit, and we're over 100 years old. We exist. Part of our mission statement is to advance the atmospheric sciences for the benefit of humanity. So we're not a lobbying organization from our membership. We are hearing from a lot of members. Some members do want us to do more within the political spectrum. But here's one of the issues for the American Meteorological Society. We represent government meteorologists, private sector meteorologists, academic meteorologists. So it's difficult for us to pick and choose where and when and how much advocacy we can do for a particular group. And our perspective is we're looking at the whole picture, the entire weather enterprise, which is unique because NOAA is really at the center of it when it comes to collecting data, archiving data, enabling private industry to use that data to create value added products, to literally create revenue and income and hire folks. So we're looking at it from a holistic perspective rather than just saying, don't do this to noaa. And there's a lot of good argument to say, well, you know, NOAA and other government agencies do need to be trimmed down. And I would say, for example, if you're taking a three hour trip in your vehicle, and you know you can save fuel by lightening the load on your vehicle, lowering the weight. So you can go into your vehicle, you could take out the spare tire, leave it at home, you can open up the back seat, take the back seat out, that'll lighten the load. You can open up the hood and take out, just grab a hose here, a belt there, a spark plug there, and your vehicle will be lighter. But the question is, will it run and the bigger question is when you get to a signal light and you hit the brakes, will it stop? And that's the big concern we have right now, is that what we're seeing happening to NOAA does not seem to have a plan or a direction or a roadmap for where it's going to put us and how literally what state it's going to end up in.
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Alan Seals of the American Meteorological Society it's probably just a coincidence that this week the journal Science Advances has put together a series of studies on women's health, digging into the reasons behind the global gap in well being between men and women. The focus was surely planned long before the new administration started trawling through NIH grant language for words like gender and equity.
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$8 million for making mice transgender.
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This is real, very real for girls going through puberty and becoming susceptible to asthma, which is what the largest of those grants was exploring. In any case, the Science Advances collection highlights what might be lost if politics restricts what experts claim choose to investigate. The paper that caught my eye looked into the biology that makes women more likely to progress to Alzheimer's dementia and the possible influence of menopause. The senior author is Caitlin Castelletto of the Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California in San Francisco. Another of the researchers is neuroscientist Madeline Wood Alexander of Toronto University, who laid out the scale of the problem.
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F
Around two thirds of individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease are women. And actually, apart from age and a genetic risk factor, female sex is one of the strongest risk factors that predicts the development of Alzheimer's disease dementia. So we do know that there's this elevated risk and increasingly evidence suggests that this can't be explained by female longevity alone or male not explainable by the fact that women tend to live longer than men on average. So I think in the past decade or so there's really been a boom in research showing sex differences at all levels of the disease, from the pathology unfolding in the brain up to cognitive decline. And a lot of it does point towards female vulnerability. But I think there's also a story of resilience to be told. So we were really interested in into kind of digging into how factors such as menopause and also the health of the brain synapses, which are a key resilience factor for protecting cognition, how those two might interact to influence women's risk for Alzheimer's.
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And Caitlin Madeline mentions menopause. The strong theme seems to be that there is some kind of hormonal component to all of this. So this is to do with estrogen and so on, somehow, either directly or indirectly, controlling some of those risk factors.
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D
Yeah, that's one of the hypotheses. So menopause is fascinating because, as Madeline mentioned, Alzheimer's disease, the average age of onset is around the 60s or the 70s. But increasingly we were realizing that actually the pathology develops over decades. And so menopause is perfectly positioned in the 50s. Average age is about 51 for that sort of inciting event of when we think, think the Alzheimer's pathology begins. And in fact, we're seeing that age of menopause may track with some of these Alzheimer's risk pathology markers.
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So a lot to dig into. One of the things I find very striking in this study you've done is you've managed to tap into this project called the Rush University Memory and Aging Project, which is a cohort of women who've enrolled for their end of their life to help you do this kind of research.
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D
Yeah, this is an amazing resource to the scientific community. This is thousands of participants actually, in the northeastern Illinois area, around the Chicago area in the US who have been followed in life, in late life. The average enrollment age is around 70. And they complete clinical assessments, so they do cognitive testing to measure their memory and thinking. They answer questionnaires about their health and their lifestyles, and then they agree to donate their brain when they pass away to the autopsy program, so that when they pass away, we can actually look at their brain tissue and map it back to what they were like in life in vivo.
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And, Madeleine, one of the things you pick out amongst these women, so I think this is extraordinary, but you have their life history, their medical history, and so on. And you're comparing, in particular, you're looking at a load of differences between women who took hormone therapy after menopause with those who didn't. And then you're looking at the difference not just in who's getting Alzheimer's, but also all kinds of biomarkers.
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Yeah, yeah. So this is a really interesting. And to provide a little bit of context, a bit of a controversial area of study, actually. Is menopausal hormone therapy good for women's health as they age and in later life, or are there some risks associated with it? So when we saw that age at menopause and biomarkers of synaptic integrity or health interacted to influence some of the outcomes that we were looking at for Alzheimer's disease, kind of our immediate question was, well, does taking menopausal hormone therapy further modify that. So we did run exploratory analyses where we compared just women who report taking hormone therapy to those who didn't. And we actually saw that this deleterious synergistic effect, or the combined association of earlier menopause, exacerbating this adverse relationship between synaptic degradation and Alzheimer's disease, it was attenuated, suggesting that maybe hormone therapy might further alter some of these outcomes and these associations. But I will say that this is not causal research. Our study design can't allow us to establish causality in that way. So there could be other underlying differences between women who did versus did not take hormone therapy that could further be impacting the results.
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I mean, I imagine you'd need huge numbers to make a concrete finding, but it's sort of striking that you've got about a quarter of the women who are on hormone replacement therapy were progressing to Alzheimer's, but just around a third of those who weren't taking it. So that's quite suggestive. But you keep on talking about synaptic health. Synapses, these are the connections between neurons in the brain. This is sort of the bread and meat of how the brain works.
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Yeah, yeah. So synapses are the junctions or the very connections between our brain cells, and they allow our brain cells to talk to each other. So, as you can imagine, synapses are absolutely critical part of brain health. And while we do see some decline in their functionality with aging, really, in Alzheimer's disease, there is profound destruction and dysfunction of these connections between the brain cells and the synaptic changes are observed very early on in the pathological progression of the disease and track really well with cognition. We know that among people who have Alzheimer's disease pathology in their brain, those with worse synaptic integrity or more dysfunction of those connections, have more cognitive decline.
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And how's that showing up in this study? As I say, you've got some biomarkers for the brain chemistry that's there. I mean, are you also doing microscopy studies? I'm not sure how you study this and what you're actually drawing out from those findings.
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D
Yeah. And in terms of quantifying the biomarkers, So I mentioned we have brain tissue now after these participants have donated their brains, and we can basically assay the tissue to measure how many markers of these synapses are present, what are the levels. We can also measure things like how much Alzheimer's pathology is in this brain, how many amyloid plaques and tau tangles. And so with that we can get a really nice picture of a person's brain health after they passed away and again, map it back to in life.
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A
How does that then help you understand what was happening when menopause was onsetting, let's say, in the mid-40s to the mid-50s or something?
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F
Yeah, so that's. That's a great question because you pointed out a really important consideration, which is that we have this temporality issue where we're kind of measuring pathology after participants have died. But what we actually know is that these pathologies, including the pathologies that characterize Alzheimer's disease and including the synaptic changes, they actually start in. In the brain decades before the symptoms of dementia occur. So we know that when we put people in midlife in these scanners, we will see Alzheimer's disease pathology in a not insubstantial proportion of them, even though they obviously don't have dementia at that stage. So I think that we are making an assumption that these changes that we're seeing a post mortem, which are at that point quite severe, have been going on for quite a long time. And we think that possibly some of the hormonal changes that Caitlin mentioned could be contributing to progressing those pathologies along.
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A
So are you seeing some kind of pattern with these biomarkers with the kind of Alzheimer's damage that you're talking about, but also then the age of menopause and also if there's any effect of hormone therapy?
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F
Yeah, definitely seeing some really interesting patterns. Essentially what we saw was that among women who had earlier age at menopause, greater synaptic dysfunction or more synaptic damage was associated with higher levels of tau pathology in the brain. That's a key Alzheimer's disease pathology that we look at. And also associated with greater cognitive decline. By contrast, among women who had average ages or later ages at menopause, we didn't see this adverse relationship. So there wasn't a link between synaptic dysfunction and Alzheimer's disease outcomes. And then we further saw, when we stratified the sample by history of hormone therapy, we further saw that this interplay between age at menopause and synaptic dysfunction on Alzheimer's disease outcomes was no longer present in women who took menopausal hormone therapy.
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A
But I'm sort of curious then, Caitlin, at the moment, you don't have the full chain of events, but this is very suggestive of what. What you need to look at.
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D
Yeah. So we. Yeah, as Madeline mentioned, we think that synaptic dysfunction can drive Alzheimer's Pathology, maybe age of menopause is this moderator of that relationship. And, and if age of menopause can attenuate or change how these pathological relationships develop, maybe we can start to tackle menopause. And in fact, there are some data that suggests that age of menopause may be malleable. There's certainly a large genetic factor. So your mom's age of menopause influences your age of menopause. But there's also some emerging data that suggests that our lifestyles are engagement in physical activity and diet and health behaviors, social determinants of health, and socioeconomic status. All of these factors may influence our age of menopause. And so again, to us, this suggests that menopause is this critical window where Alzheimer's risk may be highest and may be malleable. And so might we go deep? Might we study menopause to better deeply, foundationally understand Alzheimer's disease and ultimately improve biomarkers and health of women, but also men? We think that these findings have really important influence for men as well in our understanding of Alzheimer's disease.
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A
And insofar as you do see this relationship, shall we say, between the women who did have hormone replacement therapy and so on, we shouldn't be giving medical advice here. But is it suggestive that there may be benefits we haven't talked about in the past with hormone replacement therapy?
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F
Yes, I think recently there is renewed interest in revisiting the question of how exactly does menopausal hormone therapy influence the brain health as women age? Because I think there's a lot of basic science research to, as Caitlin pointed out, animal models and things like that, that really suggests that estrogens have neuroprotective effects and that they could help combat some of this development of Alzheimer's disease pathology, which of course, eventually drives dementia. So I think that the problem is that these findings don't actually line up very well with what randomized clinical trials have shown in terms of hormone therapy. And I think that more and more we're kind of revisiting that old data and the study designs and kind of trying to work out maybe. I. My opinion of it is that there will be a different answer to this question for everyone, because I think that the relationships between hormone therapy and brain health and, and. And body health more broadly are complex and probably depend on a lot of different factors, not least the. Which are your menopause history and what types of menopause symptoms you're experiencing, but also, also things like your vascular health, your genetic risk for different conditions. Your health behaviors. So things like physical activity, smoking, I think that these all come into play and that really we need more research to disentangle these associations and advance precision strategies for women in this midlife transition of menopause and beyond.
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D
So, historically, you may have heard or may not have heard of the women's health initiative, which was this randomized control trial that madeline was alluding to thousands of women enrolled across the united States to try and understand in an empirical way, Is menopause hormone treatment protective for women's health or not? And essentially the headline of the study that came out in the early 2000s, late 1990s, was that the trial was ended early because there were adverse outcomes on things like cancer and heart disease.
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A
However.
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D
And so of course, with a headline like that, hormone treatment got a bad rap. However, subsequent reanalysis of those data and as madeline was suggesting, new data are suggesting that maybe the design of that study wasn't exactly right. And what happened was, when we look at those data more carefully, we found that the study actually enrolled women on average in their 60s. And again, we mentioned age of menopause is typically around 51. So this is over a decade after a woman has been in a menopausal state. And new data are suggesting that indeed, if you initiate hormone treatment at later ages, more than five years past menopause, this might not be beneficial and it might be harmful. But again, in those randomized controlled trial data, if you look at the women who initiated hormone treatment within five years of their menopause transition, there were actually beneficial outcomes. So it's complicated. We really need more data. I think the message I'd like to get out there is that hormone treatment is not all bad and in fact is incredibly efficacious for some symptoms like hot flashes and bone health. It's really important to talk to your provider about the risks and benefits of any medication. But we truly need more data here.
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A
And if I may, Caitlin, I couldn't help read your paper and listen to what you've just been saying without thinking of the what's going on in u. S. Scientific research at the moment. And there are the. All these ideas. Well, there's all this action about trying to root out, as they say, dei so diversity, equity, inclusion in research and universities. Are you experiencing any problems at the moment, or are you concerned that because this is sex based research that you may actually find it harder to get funding in the future?
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D
Yeah, it's such a timely question and it's a lot of concerning rhetoric just to be totally Frank that's out there and I am concerned. I guess the message again I'd like to promote is that the reason why we study these factors well, the reason why we study sex differences is because men and women simply have different biologies. And the reason why we study gender differences is because gender identity tracks with health outcomes. And as scientists, to be a good scientist, you are in the weeds. You are in these details and you're looking at factors that track with health outcomes. And that's our goal. We want to improve human health and so we need to study factors like demographics that track with those outcomes. We'll see where the future holds. I hope that we as a community, as a scientific community can have the open dialogue to ideas and how we study these phenomenon. Ultimately, with the goal to improve human.
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Health, A New Way to Approach Alzheimer's From Madeleine Wood Alexander and Caitlin Castelletto.
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C
This is the story of the one As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Grainger, because when a drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs, and next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-granger. Click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
- [35:05]
A
Now let's head south to the Antarctic coast where the research vessel Polar Stern is coming to an end of a three month deployment exploring the ice waters and seabed near the frozen continent. Last time we connected to the ship there in 2022, marine biologist Orton Purser was describing a city of nests he had discovered carved into the soft seabed sediments by ice fish where they could nurture their eggs. He's back there on the ship to explore more with Nottingham University's Lisa Chakrabarti, an expert in unusual metabolism. Of course. I called again.
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E
Yeah, hi there. Hi.
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A
Hi. Are you really down at the edge of Antarctica? Is there a door you can open so we can hear the noise outside?
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E
Me and Lisa are in the Antarctica now and we're just going to take you outside. So we're going to be for our noisy. Say hello, scientist is walking by. Hello. So we're going to walk to the outside now, just walking along. It's 130 meters long, our ship, so it might take us a little while to reach the outdoors. Hopefully the audio is still working and yeah, so yeah, we're going to open a big door to the outside and we got a huge iceberg outside. Well, it's 30, 30 miles by 30 miles, so it's not as big as a 23, but it is chasing the ship so we should have avoided. And here we are, the noises door just about opening.
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C
There we go.
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E
And now we're outside in dam. It's windy, it's about minus four here and we're looking outside now on a very still day. Huge iceberg in the distance and we can see that the iceberg has crashed into something in the past because it's all battered up on one side.
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A
You better come back in, Orton. We're not hearing the noise. We're hearing the noise suppression on your microphone, which is very interesting. That must be quite a wind though that you've got there.
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E
Yeah, it's very windy here and as we go outside we get the very noisy old engines. Now we're back in our storage room with all of the equipment which is all stuff for moorings. One of the big things we'll be doing on this cruise is putting down instruments to measure. The environment down here is changing over time and every two or three years we come down here and change the batteries. And while they change the batteries and take the data, I collect fishes in this case for my colleague Lisa and Elisa Chakrabasi from Nottingham to work on and I map the seafloor for what animals are there and things like that. So that's what we're doing.
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A
Last time I spoke to you we were talking about images, you were Getting of the sea floor with cameras on a sled that you dragged behind the, the ship or something. Is, is the sled down at the moment?
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E
Yes, sleds down at the moment. And we are doing exactly the same thing. We're doing exactly the same thing right now. We've left our two colleagues in charge while we come to talk to you. And what we're seeing is a number of ice fish actually are different species to what we talked about before. And on the western side of the Vedel Sea here, so the ones we found before on the eastern side, narrow on the western side and this bit of the ocean. Species, different species, yes. It's still an iced fish, still one of these, is that right Lisa? You tell me. I asked my expert friend here, Lisa, is it an ice fish that we were seeing today?
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G
Well, I've seen a mixture so we've seen a few ice fish but also I've seen some red blooded nempsthenuids as well. Very closely related to the ice fish and interesting for that reason as well.
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A
These autumn last time we spoke to you, these were the ones that were, they made patterns of nests. They sort of dug into the sediment on the seafloor for laying their eggs I think. Are they doing the same here?
- [38:44]
E
Well, this side of the ocean they prefer to nest next to sponges and stones. The floor here is very rocky and hard so they can't really nest in there. So they seem to be hiding behind sponges and stones although they're not actively nesting at the moment. We didn't see any actively nesting anywhere on this expedition. We've seen them hanging out near the nests and.
- [39:05]
G
Yeah, and today we've seen some really, really fat ones that are clearly filled with eggs. So very close to laying their eggs.
- [39:15]
A
I think to keep the boat there.
- [39:17]
E
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so if the captain wants to keep them here. We've been here three months. It's a very long expedition. It's almost the limit for our ship which is a limit of like 100 days. So we've been here since before Christmas and I think he's seen just about enough ice fish and he's not too worried if they're going to be having eggs in the next days. He just has to get on with the next expedition.
- [39:37]
G
Yeah, all the fresh food has completely run out. Oh no, we're on the end rations now.
- [39:43]
E
There's no tomatoes, there's no fruit. Lisa, you're a Big Apple fan. The last apple is hidden in her cabin.
- [39:50]
A
Yeah. Lisa, last time I spoke To Orton about this, his interest in the these ice fish is ecology and how they reproduce and survive and so on. But you're sort of a proper, almost molecular biologist. What's your interest in them?
- [40:07]
G
Yeah, I am a proper molecular biologist, you're right. So my interest is in how the ice fish actually managed to survive, given their very, very interesting biology. So they lack hemoglobin, but their blood isn't red like all other backboned animals have red blood. So these fish don't have red blood, they have white blood. And so it's a mystery how they get oxygen to all their different organs and tissues. They don't even have another pigment like a copper pigment. So they're very, very interesting. From the point of view of getting oxygen around body of a larger complex.
- [40:48]
A
Animal, I'm sort of struggling to understand this. So the red of our blood is because there's these red blood cells which got hemoglobin in them and that's what captures the oxygen and moves it around. I mean, do they have red blood cells but they're not red or is it that they don't even have those, those kinds of oxygen carrying cells?
- [41:09]
G
Yeah, brilliant question. So you think that if they lack hemoglobin, they would still have the cells that would normally carry hemoglobin, but they have very few or no red blood cells or these erythrocytes as we would call them. And so they've lost a whole cell lineage as well as having lost hemoglobin. So they really are quite unusual.
- [41:33]
A
I mean, I suppose what this sort of shows is that if you go to extreme environments, biology finds all kinds of different solutions to biological problems. I think what I'm saying is that this is a really good reason to be going to the ends of the earth to try and study strange biolo.
- [41:53]
G
Yeah, and I think that's exactly right. I think biology is strange around the planet actually. And Antarctica has its own particular strangeness. And these ice fish are only found in Antarctica. So we do have to come all the way down here to study this haemoglobinous phenomenon, which, you know, could be applicable to lots and lots of different types of biology.
- [42:16]
A
So if you manage to collect any ice fish as well as watch them in situ.
- [42:21]
G
Yeah, yes, we have, we have. So we've been really lucky. Autumn's rigged the sled camera to be able to collect ice fish for us as well. So we've been able to pretty much all the work that we set out to do, which is unusual I think as well.
- [42:39]
A
So You've brought them abroad. I mean, are you taking them back to Nottingham or are you studying them on ship?
- [42:45]
G
Studying them on the ship, actually. So it's not very easy to take animals all the way back to Nottingham. We will take some of the tissues, but most of the physiology work we have to do on the fish or on the fish tissues on board the ship. So we have to bring all the equipment, had to remember all the reagents and set the whole lab up from scratch on the ship to be able to do our molecular biology and physiology studies here.
- [43:11]
A
And has it been worth it? I mean, you're not going to tell me everything you've discovered because there might be a brilliant paper in this, but are you getting to some of the answers you want?
- [43:21]
G
You know, I was doubtful that we would get everything that we wanted from this cruise, but I think we've been really, really lucky. Everyone's worked really hard and the data are really, really compelling. So I feel really, really happy with what we've got. And, you know, everything seems to have worked really nicely, which is something that you don't imagine when you start up on something like this.
- [43:48]
E
My biggest concern was whether the net was actually going to work. When we did the first dive, the net was untested.
- [43:53]
A
Of course.
- [43:54]
E
We wanted to test it before, but we never had the chance. And I saw Elisa and the other scientists looking at me thinking, oh my God, this better work. And thankfully we got fish within the first 10 minutes on the seafloor. So we're really lucky that this new sampling device, low cost sampling device works and we can actually see the animals we collect and we can see that we're not damaging the environment in any way because this sort of net, it just skims the surface of the seafloor. It's a very low, invasive device that we have put together and we're filming everything that we capture. So that's been. It's really good for monitoring things in the future. So we'll be using this net again, I think.
- [44:28]
A
I hadn't even thought of the practicalities of catching individual fish 500 meters or whatever below the sea surface. That's. That's a, a tricky job. Yeah.
- [44:38]
E
And it was, it was when I, I made this net in, in Bremen, where we're from, and I showed it to my colleagues. Oh, yeah, it's a very nice net. They said, do you think it's going to work? No chance, they said. So I was really glad that it did actually, actually work. We thought the ice fish may be lazy or at least constantly guarding their nests. But one of the things, it's likely the wrong time to see them nesting. They're approaching the nesting period and they seem to be fattening themselves up and really actively fishing. We see them swimming around and eating other fish and eating squid. Right, Lisa?
- [45:07]
A
Yeah.
- [45:07]
G
And actually this is really important from a physiology point of view as well, because we were always told that they don't need that much oxygen because, you know, they just hang around on the bottom of the sea floor. In fact, you need oxygen for all your growth maintenance and repair processes as well. But to actually see them as active predators as well suggests that they really do need that oxygen to provide the energy to do all of those things. So this is interesting from physiology point of view too.
- [45:37]
A
And Alton, I think last time you were there, you'd left. I think you'd left a camera on the seabed or something near the nesting site.
- [45:45]
E
Yeah, we left two cameras there. So we didn't know that we were going to find ice fish and we didn't. It wasn't the purpose of the expedition. But when we found them, we saw they were nesting. So we thought, wouldn't it be great to leave a camera here and photograph what happens? So we looked on the ship and we built two cameras from spare parts and we put them on the sea floor. One of them exploded immediately, but the other one worked. Other one worked and it took us 1,700 photographs. So. Yeah, so it took four a day for more than a year, and that was fantastic. So we could see how these nests developed over time, when the fish left them, when the eggs were hatching and what happened to the nest afterwards. And if you want to know more about that, you'll have to read the paper that we're hurriedly putting together right now that we aim to submit and to submit before we reach port in a week's time. So.
- [46:33]
A
Oh, my goodness, you're going to be busy. But.
- [46:35]
C
But.
- [46:35]
A
So that's. That's really interesting. So you. You got this time lapse of this sort of fish city, as it were.
- [46:40]
E
Yeah.
- [46:41]
A
And you could see a whole part of the life cycle.
- [46:44]
E
Yeah. And not only that, we saw other aspects of Antarctic life in the Weddell Sea, which is an area which is constantly covered in thick ice. It's much thicker ice than you get in the Arctic, for example. It's usually three or four meters thick and it's very dangerous and difficult to sail here. So we managed to take these photographs from an area where no one's really done time lapse at this depth and then that was really excellent. So we see other behaviors of other animals. For example, there's some interesting observations of octopuses, also these things, various other things on the seafloor. So I mean, I think it's going to be a really interesting set of data that people can look at.
- [47:17]
A
Orton Purser and Lisa Chakrabarti should we care about the weird physiology of some strange ice fish? I'm just filled with curiosity. But remember too that the new blockbuster obesity drugs started with nih funded curiosity 50 years ago in the venom of the Gila lizard, colleagues vividly remember the appearance of local zoologists at John's door with large plastic bags of buzzing insects. In response to an ad in the Washington Post, an obituary for biochemist John Pisano recorded a little later. That's science for you. Well, we're eternally curious here at the BBC Science unit on topics big and small. And we'll be back with more science in Action same time next week. I'm Ronan Pease, the producer is Alex Mansfield. Please do join us.
- [48:09]
B
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- [49:25]
A
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- [49:47]
C
7.
- [49:48]
A
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