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

OR Notes
Late last night I came across this lil guy and instantly emailed Marymegan the following;

Marymegan,

I'm a freelancer writing for the English edition of Wikinews, and news of the above discovery [I named the species in my subject line] caught my eye. As a marine science undergrad myself it was particularly interesting and I'm always keen to help expand science coverage on Wikinews.

An anemone that grows on ice is just irresistibly interesting. :P I'd appreciate the chance to send you some questions to publish on the site as a question-and-answer style interview. I like to get plenty of hard science into stories like this and we've no space limits which makes for a good opportunity to get discoveries to a mainstream audience.

If you're happy to write up some answers for me please let me know and I'll get back to you with questions.

Best regards,

[Me]

I almost instantly got the following reply:

I'd be happy to!

Best, Meg

BRS (Talk)   (Contribs) 18:12, 20 January 2014 (UTC) Sent a few mins ago:

Hi Meg,

Sorry I took my time replying, I spent a little longer prepping than I had anticipated. Here are my questions. There may be some overlap between them, so it may be best to have a read through all of them first.

I'm quite relaxed deadline-wise and we've no space restraints, so please feel free to spend some time chewing out detailed answers. Our aim is to take the time to outperform traditional media in terms of quality information.

How did you come to be involved with this discovery?

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

There's a return trip planned hopefully for 2015, with both biologists and ANDRILL geologists. Are you intending to go there yourself?

These animals are shrouded in mystery. Some of the most intriguing questions are chemical; do they produce some kind of antifreeze, and is that orange glow in the ROV lights their own? Talk us through the difficulties encountered when trying to find answers with the specimens on hand.

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

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

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

Do you have any theories about the strategies employed to cope with the harsh environment of burrowing inside an ice shelf?

How has such an apparently large population of clearly unusual sea anemones, not to mention the other creatures caught on camera, gone undetected for so long?

Would it be fair to say this suggests there may be other undiscovered species of sea anemone that burrow into hard substrates such as ice?

Best,

Iain

BRS (Talk)   (Contribs) 19:26, 20 January 2014 (UTC) Got this reply today; I can't help highlighting "These are great questions." What can I say, I have an ego :P

Hi Iain, These are great questions. I have answered below, making mt responses with **.

Please let me know if you have any follow up questions or need anything from me. Best, Meg

Hi Meg,

Sorry I took my time replying, I spent a little longer prepping than I had anticipated. Here are my questions. There may be some overlap between them, so it may be best to have a read through all of them first.

I'm quite relaxed deadline-wise and we've no space restraints, so please feel free to spend some time chewing out detailed answers. Our aim is to take the time to outperform traditional media in terms of quality information.

How did you come to be involved with this discovery?
 * Franck Rack got in touch after they returned from Antarctica in hopes that I could help with an identification on the anemone.

What was your first reaction upon learning there was an undiscovered ecosystem under the ice in the Ross Sea?
 * I was amazed and really excited. I think to say it was unexpected is inaccurate, because it implies that there was a well-founded expectation of something.  The  technology that Frank and his colleagues are using to explore the ice is so important because, given our lack of data, we have no reasonable expectation of what it should be like, or what it shouldn't be like.

There's a return trip planned hopefully for 2015, with both biologists and ANDRILL geologists. Are you intending to go there yourself?
 * I would love to. But I am also happy to not go, as long as someone collects more animals on my behalf! What I want to do with the animals requires new material preserved in diverse ways, but it doesn't require me to be there. Although I am sure that being there would enhance my understanding of the animals and the system in which they live, and would help me formulate more and better questions about the anemones, ship time is expensive, especially in Antarctica, and if there are biologists whose contribution is predicated on being there, they should have priority to be there.

These animals are shrouded in mystery. Some of the most intriguing questions are chemical; do they produce some kind of antifreeze, and is that orange glow in the ROV lights their own? Talk us through the difficulties encountered when trying to find answers with the specimens on hand.
 * The samples we have are small in terms of numbers and they are all preserved in formalin (a kind of formaldehyde solution). The formalin is great for preserving structures, but for anemones, it prevents study of DNA or of the chemistry of the body. This means we can't look at the issue you raise with these animals.  What we could do, however, was to study anatomy and figure out what it is, so that when we have samples preserved for studying e.g., the genome, transcriptome, or metabolome, or conduct tests of the fluid in the burrows or in the animals themselves, we can make precise comparisons, and figure out what these animals have or do (metabolically or chemically) that lets them live where they live.

Just knowing a whole lot about a single species isn't very useful, even if that animal is as special as these clearly are--we need to know what about them is different and thus related to living in this strange way. The only way to get at what's different is to make comparisons with close relatives. We can start that side of the work now, anticipating having more beasts in the future.

In terms of their glow, I suspect that its not theirs--although luminescence is common in anemone relatives, they don't usually make light themselves. They do make a host of florescent proteins, and these may interact with the light of the ROV to give that gorgeous glow.

What analysis did you perform on the specimens and what equipment was used?
 * I used a dissecting scope to look at the animal's external anatomy and overall body organization (magnification of 60X). I embedded a few of the animals in wax and then cut them into very thin slices using a microtome, mounted the slices on microscope slides, stained the slices to enhance contrast, and then looked at those slides under a compound microscope (that's how I got the pictures of the muscles etc in the paper).  I used that same compound scope to look at squashed bits of tissue to see the stinging capsules (=nematocysts).

I compared the things I saw under the 'scopes to what had been published on other species in this group. This step seems trivial, but it is really the most important part! By comparing my observations to what my colleagues and predecessors had found, I figured out what group it belongs to, and was able to determine that within that group, it was a new species.

It was three years between recovery of specimens and final publication, why did it take so long?
 * You mean, how did we manage to make it all happen so quickly, right? :) It was about 2 years from when Frank sent me specimens to when we got the paper out. Some of that time was just lost time--I had other projects in the queue that I needed to finish.  Once we figured out what it was, we played a lot of manuscript email tag, which can be challenging and time consuming given the differing schedules that folks keep in terms of travel, field work, etc. Manuscript review and processing took about 4 months.

What sort of difficulties were posed by the unorthodox preservatives used, and what additional work might be possible on a specimen with intact DNA?
 * The preservation was not unorthodox--they followed best practices for anatomical preservation. Having DNA-suitable material will let us see whether there are new genes, or genes turned on in different ways and at different times that help explain how these animals burrow into hard ice and then survive in the cold. I am curious about the population structure of the "fields" of anemones--the group to which Edwardsiella andrillae belongs includes many species that reproduce asexually, and its possible that the fields are "clones" produced asexually rather than the result of sexual reproduction. DNA is the only way to test this.

Do you have any theories about the strategies employed to cope with the harsh environment of burrowing inside an ice shelf?
 * I think there must be some kind of antifreeze produced--the cells in contact with ice would otherwise freeze.

How has such an apparently large population of clearly unusual sea anemones, not to mention the other creatures caught on camera, gone undetected for so long?
 * I think this reflects how difficult it is to get under the ice and to collect specimens. That being said, since the paper came out, I have been pointed towards two other reports that are probably records of these species: one from Japanese scientists who looked at footage from cameras attached to seals and one from Americans who dove under ice.  In both of these cases, the anemone (if that's what they saw) was seen at a distance, and no specimens were collected. Without the animals in hand, or the capability of a ROV to get close up for pictures, it is hard to know what has been seen, and lacking a definitive ID, hard to have the finding appropriately indexed or contextualized.

Would it be fair to say this suggests there may be other undiscovered species of sea anemone that burrow into hard substrates such as ice?
 * I hope so! What fascinates me about sea anemones is that they're able to do things that seem impossible given their seemingly limited toolkit.This finding certainly expands the realm of possible.

I've made some minor typo-esque edits that I feel can be ignored, and forwarded to scoop. BRS (Talk)   (Contribs) 13:38, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Disclosure
In the interests of absolute transparency, I'm starting to toy with the idea of corresponding further with Meg as an academic, and looking for an 'in' on this. I don't think that creates any conflict since at present the only contact between us has been that recorded above and I'd never heard of either her or ANDRILL prior to yesterday. BRS (Talk)   (Contribs) 18:14, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Puppediting - alternative lede/intro
The Coulman High Project surveys, in the antarctic 'summer' of 2010-2011, resembled a slightly miniaturized oil drilling rig inside a tent: it ran day and night to bore a hole through 250‐275 meters of ice on the Ross Ice Shelf. Once through, the geologists carefully lowered their experimental robot into the deeps, hoping to test its video abilities at such depths and under so much ice to help achieve the project's goal of drilling rock cores dating back to the Paleogene period.

Instead, the geologists found a biologist's dream - never before described lifeforms surviving in one of the most inhospitable biomes imaginable. Fish whose natural orientation appears to be "up", with the ice above serving as their 'floor'. The camera-equipped ROV collected images of polychaete worms, amphipods, and other creatures while flying upside down - it was designed to fly along the sea floor with one camera facing down and another facing ahead, but the team's ROV engineers/pilots were able to modify to suit the unexpected situation.

They also managed to improvise a specimen collection system to capture about 30 sea anemones they discovered anchored into the ice shelf. Unfortunately, weather conditions prevented proper preservation materials arriving from McMurdo base, so they were preserved with the only available material - ethanol, which eliminates the possibility of using the creature's DNA to properly identify its evolutionary heritage.

-  Amgine | t 23:24, 20 January 2014 (UTC)