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Jay Allison (1:01)
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James McClintock (1:20)
From PRX this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this radio show and this time we are bringing you a special collection of STEM stories. That is, stories all about science and technology, engineering and math. But if you're a humanist, don't despair. There won't be a quiz. And these are stories. After all, they're about people. Our first story comes from biologist James McClintock, who began his college education as an English major. By the way, he studies the ways organisms use chemistry to survive. He told this story at the 2016 World Science Festival in New York City. The theme of the night was Making waves. Here's James McClintock live at the mall.
James McClintock (2:11)
Well, I faced two major challenges on my first trip to Antarctica when I was a young scientist. I was off to McMurdo Station, located 2,000 miles south of New Zealand. The first challenge was as a chemical ecologist who studies how chemicals structure the seafloor, how organisms use chemistry to defend one another, defend themselves from getting eaten or communicate. I knew that I was among the giants of Antarctic marine biology. At the station, there were people like Paul Dayton, who had described the seafloor and how it was structured. There was Art de Vries, who had discovered the antifreeze that allowed 250 species of Antarctic fish to evolve and survive in this sub freezing water. I was among giants, so somehow I had to forge my path among such people. The second challenge that I faced is I had to get into seawater that was minus 1.8 degrees below 8ft of sea ice. I will never forget my first dive. I was up in the dive locker getting into my dry suit. It's a very bulky, heavy suit. I was thinking, claustrophobia. I'm going down a four foot diameter hole of ice and then I'll be locked under eight feet of ice. We drove down to the dive hut and I sat on the edge of the hole, of the hole cut in the floor of the hut and I dangled my feet into the icy water. And I finally got up the courage to slip in and to hit the valve on my suit that let the air out and I slowly descended. But you know what? When I came out under that sea ice, any sense of claustrophobia vanished. I could see 1,000ft under the water. It was the clearest water you could dive in in the world. I could look up and see a translucent blue ceiling of light above me. And on the seafloor as just a collage of sponges and corals, starfish and sea urchins. As far as you could see, this was one of the richest marine ecosystems on our planet. What a great place to do chemical ecology. These organisms had to be competing for space. They had to be protecting themselves using chemistry. And I learned lots of things about chemical ecology over the coming weeks. I'll never forget one story. I was out on the sea ice and I was sort of innocently peering down through one of the dive holes into the water, and I noticed a little shrimp swimming along. And on its back was a little orange backpack. A bright orange backpack. How odd. So I happened to have a little net and I dipped the shrimp out of the water and put it in a bucket, took it up to the marine lab, and there John Jansen, a colleague and a fish biologist, and I teased the little orange backpack off of that shrimp. The little orange backpack opened its wings and began to fly. It was a sea butterfly, a beautiful little snail that over evolutionary time has lost its shell and evolved wings. And sometimes when we're diving in Antarctica, we'll see hundreds flapping around in the water near us. We call them sea angels. But we got very interested in this relationship. So John and I set about sampling all around McMurdo Sound with nets. And we caught hundreds and hundreds of these little shrimp. And we found that over half of them were carrying a sea butterfly. Why would they go to all that trouble? So we brought them in the laboratory and we removed sea butterflies from the backs of shrimp and we offered them to fish and the fish would eat them every single time. But if you left that little sea butterfly on the back of that shrimp and you offered it to a fish, it would take it in the mouth and then every time spit right out, that little shrimp would happily swim away with its little sea butterfly. And we had, to the best of our knowledge, the first example of one species of animal abducting another species and carrying it around for its own chemical defense. We went sea butterfly collecting one day and we went out to the ice edge to do it. It was about 10 miles north of the station, so we flew by helicopter. It was a beautiful day. The helicopter landed near the ice edge and the rotors came to a stop and there was a group of emperor penguins off to the side that took an interest in us and sort of came over and seemingly greeted us. And we went over to the sea ice edge and unpacked all of our dive gear and thought about getting into it and ready to dive. And suddenly a ten foot long, thousand pound leopard seal came zooming up out of the water and threw her chest up against the ice and grinned at us with a mouthful of sharp teeth and yellowish eyes and the head like a reptile. We knew leopard seals were dangerous. We'd never seen one, but clearly they were dangerous. If you're in the water and a leopard seal was to come for you, it's over. Well, I'll tell you, that leopard seal disappeared almost as quickly as she made her appearance. She slipped back in the water and away she went. Well, doing science in Antarctica, time is precious. We needed those samples. So we decided after conferring that we would carry our dive gear along the edge of the ice. And if we got to a new location and still hadn't seen the leopard seal, we're going to go ahead and dive. And that's what we did. We got to this new location. My dive buddy, his name was Ron Britton, I'll never forget Ron. He was a little ahead of me in the dive preparation, end of things. So he was already suited up. He was sitting on the edge of the ice with a rope between his legs going to the sea floor, a down line. He was reaching for his mask. The last thing you do before you go in. And all of a sudden that leopard seal came right up between Ron's legs and looked him right in the eye. And somehow I had the wherewithal to grab a camera and take a picture. If you look at that picture, you can see the downline, you can See, you see the leopard seal, but you do not see Ron. Ron is doing a two and a half back gainer with 150 pounds of scuba gear on. So you know what that leopard seal was probably doing? It probably was under the sea ice the whole time we were walking along the edge, just as if a penguin was walking along the ice edge. And when the penguin goes in the water, the leopard seal attacks. We don't think the leopard seal would have attacked Ron because he didn't wait for Ron to go in the water. But being scientists, we did not test that hypothesis. We let the leopard seal have the ocean that day. Well, I went back to my university. I had a year before my next field season, and I wrote up that paper about the little shrimp, the little butterfly, and I thought, you know, this is so unique. So I sent it to the journal Nature. Now, Nature is at the pinnacle of scientific journals. This is the journal that the structure of DNA was published in by Watson and Crick. So you can imagine how thrilled I was as a young scientist to get that paper accepted in Nature. And I came back to McMurdo station the next year with a little more confidence than the first year. A few weeks after getting there, there was a knock on the door of my research lab. And there, standing there, was a group of the senior scientists at the station, including people like Art de Vries. And somebody pulled out a copy of that Nature issue that had my paper in it, and it had been signed, autographed by all the scientists and they had written congratulatory notes. I hope, looking back, I've lived up to the expectation of those scientists. I think I've had a fairly productive research career in Antarctica after all these years. It's a spectacular place. Those of you who've been there know this. Unparalleled in its beauty, it's a natural laboratory for looking at the first effects of climate warming and ocean acidification, where carbon dioxide is absorbed into the seas. And it's also an amazing place because of its resources, its marine resources. In our Chemical Ecology program over the years, we've had a drug discovery component and we have found a compound in Antarctic tunicate that's active against melanoma skin cancer. We have found a compound in an Antarctic alga that's active against the H1N1 flu virus. And last month we found a compound in an Antarctic sponge that's very active against the MRSA resistant bacteria. So 35 years of going to Antarctica and every time I go, I know I'll find another secret. Thank you.