When uttered on a Tuesday, what does "this weekend" mean? It's intriguingly ambiguous! With the help of verb tense, it's obvious in the case of the entry title that I'm referring to the weekend just past, June 20-21. But if I said, "I'm going a reptile show this weekend," I would just as obviously be referring to the future weekend, June 27-28.

So we can all agree that verb tense clears up the ambiguity. Then we introduce the phrase "next weekend" and throw everyone for a loop. If "this weekend" refers to June 27-28 then "next weekend" must logically refer to July 4-5. Right? However, "next weekend" can also be used to mean "this weekend," and different people will use it that way on different days of the week.

Don't believe me? Bring it up with friends and family and brace yourself a really rousing quarrel! But wait, before you do, let me actually tell you where I wish I was this past weekend (note the clever addition of a modifier for extra clarity and verbosity!):

TONMOCON III. That is a conference about cephalopods. Need I say more? Okay, a little more: Tonmo.com is "committed to being the best resource available for all things cephalopod" and that is really all you need to know about it.

TONMOCON III was in my very own hometown, and my very own friends and co-workers were among those giving talks. But I, the cephalopodiatrist, was not in attendance. Shame! Sorrow! Regret! Instead, I was in San Diego, sorting plankton. And that is what I will continue to be doing for most of the summer. I am a plankton-sorting beast. Of which--more to come soon, in another blog post.

Anyway, I missed Tonmocon, and I have never been to a Tonmocon, and this year it was so close and yet so far, and next year it will probably be in some awful place like Chicago. (Just kidding! I love you Chicago! And your deadly temperature extremes!) So this is a lame post about how I am sad I wasn't there.

But, I also wanted to say that my labmate and sometime arch-nemesis did make an appearance; in fact he performed a Humboldt squid dissection. I can only imagine that this was the highlight of the whole weekend. Especially for the two kids who were there; one went home with the beak and the other with the pen and a cup full of ink. (The "pen" of a squid is a stiff internal rod that gives its body shape, unlike the amorphous blob that is an octopus. It is believed to be a vestigial shell. The ink, of course, is used by the squid for defense and by schoolchildren for awkwardly writing their names on "I Dissected A Squid" certificates.)

The dissection was supposed to be webcast live, which didn't work, but when they post it online, I'll try to remember to link it here.

Maybe next weekend.

This is important.

I'm not being puerile, prurient, or (worst of all!) pedantic.

I recently saw the Vagina Monologues for the first time. But I'm not here to discuss the horrific, heartbreaking stories of Bosnian, and, this year, Congolese women and girls. And I'm not going to speculate on or contribute to the controversy surrounding the play.

Instead, let's talk semantics.

Here's a vocabulary lesson: the vagina is the female reproductive orifice, which functions in copulation and birth. The vulva is the external female genitalia, including mons, clitoris, and labia as well as the vaginal opening.

The Vagina Monologues are, for anyone who hasn't seen them, absolutely and unarguably about vulvas, and are also committed to promoting accurate and open communication. For such a theatrical piece to abandon a precise, anatomically correct term in favor of an ambiguous, inaccurate one is nothing short of a disappointment. To me. Personally.

I am aware (and have become more so during recent discussions on this topic) that the colloquial usage of vagina has usurped the definition of vulva, and that vagina is in fact the word that most people learn first and use most often. E.g. on the playground: "Boys have penises and girls have vaginas!" Okay. I know that language is fluid, that vocabulary re-invents itself, and I realize that languages constantly adopt new words and meanings while shedding those that are obsolete.

But I'm not giving up vulva without a fight.

The word vulva fills a real need in the English language: to describe the female external genitalia. We have excellent and unambiguous words for male genitalia. No one says "penis" and means "scrotum," or vice versa. Why can't we keep "vulva"?

Most of my friends are in the midst of their childbearing years. I make this plea to those who do, in fact, bear children: Let our daughters learn to name their vulvas (vulvae) at the same age they learn to name their elbows.

I did. Thanks, Mom.


Update

A friend lent me Vagina Monologues, the book. There are more monologues written than are presented in any single performance, so I knew I hadn't seen them all, but I didn't know that I'd missed "The Vulva Club". Eve Ensler introduces this piece by copying a letter she received:

As the honorary chair of the Vulva Club, we would be more than pleased to make you a member. However, when Harriet Lerner developed this club over twenty years ago, membership was predicated on the understanding and correct usage of the word vulva . . .

Hah. Apparently, the letter prompted Ms. Ensler to write another monologue, but not to make any concessions on her pre-existing usage of vagina.

If, as I was, you're wondering whether that letter is only a tongue-in-cheek jest on the part of a private disgruntled citizen like me, check out this article by Dr. Harriet Lerner.

There are some pretty great octopuses in the world. New Zealand has the Maori octopus (not tattooed, unfortunately) and Haliphron atlanticus. The deep sea has given us the ever-adorable Dumbo Octopus. The Pacific Northwest houses the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus--er, I mean, the Giant Pacific Octopus.

At the top of the awesome list are the Indo-Pacific's Mimic Octopus and Wunderpus. You may have heard of them, or seen them on a nature show. They're quite famous (as octopuses go). The science blog Pharyngula presents an excellent array of annotated pictures and videos of the mimic octopus, so I needn't delve into that species here.

Instead, let me tell you about Wunderpus. Photographs and the occasional specimen of this remarkable creature began circulating globally around the 1980's. I don't know who was the first person to call it the Wunderpus, but I know why. Because it is a wonder, and the German "wünder" is way cooler than the English "wonder".

So people've known about Wunderpus for a couple of decades. And they loooove to take pictures of it. But it proved pretty difficult for scientists to find the necessary specimens for a description of the species. You may be thinking to yourself, "Heck, I could describe that species right now from those pictures you linked. It's got crazy brown and white stripes, really long arms with little webs between them, and funny-looking horns over its eyes. Also, it's probably huge."

(Well, you'd be wrong that it's huge. The mantle (the central blob that's more spotted than striped, containing all the internal organs) is only about two centimeters, and the whole length of the beast, arm to arm, is about ten times that. I can't find any Wunderpus pictures with anything like a thumb in them for scale, but here are some pictures of one in an aquarium, which may help.)

Setting aside that easily corrected mistake, your description, however accurate and articulate, still won't cut it for science. "Describe" is one of those ordinary words that biologists have hijacked for their own purposes. When we say "description," we mean an article, published in a peer-reviewed journal, that provides a detailed catalogue of all information about a species: geographic distribution, internal and external anatomy, behavior, ecology, and so forth. It also includes a set of detailed measurements, drawings, and perhaps photographs of a holotype for the species.

What is a holotype, and how is it different from an ordinary type? Here's a list of types of types for fun, but suffice it to say here that every described species has (or ought to have) a holotype sitting in a jar in a museum. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a specimen in the hand is worth two in the... whatever. The point is that other scientists, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps a hundred years from now, can look up the holotype and be absolutely certain they know just who Wunderpus is.

But didn't I say scientists were having a hard time finding Wunderpus specimens for typing? They were, but in 2006 they finally got enough information together to publish a description of Wunderpus. It's actually two descriptions in one, because Wunderpus is not closely related enough to anything (even Cousin Mimic) to share a genus. So it gets its own genus and its own species.

It shouldn't be surprising that they chose to call the new genus Wunderpus, since everyone knew it already and it's such a delicious name. But what to name the species of this marvelous octopus?

Wunderpus photogenicus.

Are you kidding me? Is this for real? Did they actually call it photogenicus? No, yes, and yes. It is for real. It is in the Literature. Here's the peer-reviewed article, which I believe is freely available, so you don't need any kind of privileged access. (Let me know if I'm wrong.)

It pleases me to know that there's still room for whimsy in science.

I like to tease mathematicians for their propensity to turn perfectly ordinary, useful English into 100% incomprehensible jargon. Not that other fields are in any way innocent of creating incomprehensible jargon, but often they are much more straightforward about it. They just make their jargon up. Chemists find an enzyme, and name it ribulose 1,5 bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase, affectionately nicknamed rubisco (short but nonsensical, you won't confuse it with your shoe). Physisicts measure some material property and call it viscoelastoplasticity, which twists your tongue around as a sort of warning that it's about to kick your brain in the privates. Biologists have invented the most exclusive language of all by naming every organism uniquely, usually with as many syllables as possible. Maybe you recognize Felix or Canis as your loyal household friends, but how about Tursiops? Carassius? Melopsittacus?

But mathematicians are sly. They talk to one another with deceptively simple words, words you thought you understood, words like "set" and "real", "trivial" and "and". After a few minutes of listening to this, you realize that, like high schoolers, they have turned your native tongue into an utterly unknown foreign language.

However, during lunch the other day I realized (with a combination of delight and horror) that biologists have managed the same feat. It happened during a discussion of geniculate corallines. A friend asked me to collect some Calliarthron for him, and I confessed that I often confused Calliarthron with Bossiella. So far, so good--the casual listener has no idea what we're talking about, and he knows he has no idea, because the words make no sense.

Then my friend told me how to identify Calliarthron. "Their wings have teeth," he said.

The field of microbiology is incredibly exciting and has way too many words for the things it professes to study. More on those words in a moment! Let us first attempt to describe microbiology in the most general terms. "Micro" just means "small" (or, if you want to be precise, 10^-6), but microbiology is not merely the study of small things. It is the study of microscopic things, things too small to be seen with the unclothed eye. Of course, individual human cells are (mostly) microscopic, but studying them is cell biology, not microbiology. So, let us qualify further: microbiology is the study of whole organisms that are microscopic. That still leaves us a mind-boggling array of study organisms:

animals
plants
fungi
bacteria
archaea
viruses

Heck, that's just about every kind of life you've ever heard of (and maybe one kind you haven't, unless you've been reading). Wait a sec--are viruses organisms? Well, most viruses are bacteriophages (yum, yum, bacteria!) and they have a pretty notable impact on bacterial populations, so just from that perspective, it seems like folks that study bacteria ought to care about them.

Now let's get back to those "too many words," because they get thrown around all the time. Some of this terminology is taxonomically outdated, but it sticks around due to a combination of practicality and linguistic inertia.

Microbe is the most general term, and it includes--you guessed it--all microscopic organisms. Eukaryotic microbes are all called protists although they have very little in common with each other; they include the protozoa (similar to animals), algae (similar to plants) and (similar to fungi)*. Prokaryotic microbes include the domains Bacteria and Archaea, which, like protists, are only superficially similar to one another.

I really wanted to sort all that out, but actually the only microbes I'm going to talk about are bacteria. Marine bacteria, to be specific, because the coolest stuff is always in the ocean.

However, as cool as the ocean is, it is also a very difficult environment to study, and thus the field of marine microbiology is only a few decades old. We've only just begun to characterize the diverse** microbial fauna of the seas. So, most of our knowledge of detailed bacterial behavior comes from the bacterial poster child: Escherichia coli. It's big, it's easy to culture, and it's everywhere. It uses flagella (powered by nature's only true rotary motor) to swim around. Different species of bacteria can have any number and distribution of flagella.

E. coli have peritrichous flagella, which they use to swim with a strategy called "run and tumble". The bacterium wraps all of its flagella up into one propeller, swims in one direction for a little while, then suddenly flings the flagella apart, which halts its progress and reorients it in a random direction. Rinse and repeat. If you want to explore a given area for tasty things, this is a pretty decent way to do it; it's more or less a random walk.

Marine bacteria, on the other hand, exhibit a different behavior, called "run and reverse". It's just what it sounds like: swim in one direction, then turn around and swim back. This sounds like a great way to get nowhere fast, but wait! Marine bacteria are tiny. Much tinier than our friend Escherichia. They are so tiny that the Brownian motion of water molecules becomes relevant to them, and they end up constantly bombarded with H₂O. So whatever direction they think they're going in, they'll almost certainly be headed off in another direction. In this context, the run and reverse strategy is totally reasonable.

To conclude, I present a mindblowing calculation from Fuhrman (Nature, 10 June 1999). Quick background: He's talking about two weird ways that microorganisms could pick up genes their parents didn't give them. Viral nonspecific horizontal gene transfer is when a virus picks up DNA from one host and transfers it to another, totally unrelated host. Natural transformation is when organisms pick up "loose" DNA dissolved in seawater and incorporate it into their own DNA.

Now. Take a second to let your mind recover from contemplating these bizarre possibilities, then read on . . .

"Although transfers of these sorts may be extremely rare, the typical bacterial abundance of 10⁹ per litre in the euphotic zone and the huge volume of the sea (3.6 X 10⁷ km³ in the top 100 m), coupled with generation times on the order of a day, implies that an event with a probability of only 10^-20 per generation would be occurring about a million times per day."

Wow.




* I've always been kind of annoyed that there isn't a separate word for the fungus-like protists. But they make up for it by including the ultra-sci-fi slime molds in this group.

** How diverse can it be? you ask. They're tiny! They're single cells!

But ah! I respond. The many faces of diversity! What microbes lack in morphological diversity, they make up in metabolic diversity.

Several months ago, I participated in my first extended research cruise. I spent two weeks in the Sea of Cortez, dissecting jumbo squid, extracting statoliths, artificially inseminating squid eggs, sorting plankton samples, untangling fishing lines, and watching Firefly. I slept very little, learned a great deal, and had the time of my life.

Although at some point I may go into great depth about the various scientific insights I gained on the boat, this post isn't about that. It's about a word that I learned on the boat. Maybe the best word I've ever learned.

demarsupiate

I learned this word from my bunkmate, who used it very casually in a conversation one day. We were discussing amphipods, and one amphipod in particular that happens to be a jellyfish hitchhiker (I don't recall the exact species, but it must have been a relative of this adorable beast). I believe I made inquiries about the reproductive habits of the animal. I was told that females brood their young until they land on an appropriate jellyfish, at which point they demarsupiate.

That's when I halted the conversation and demanded an explanation of this marvelous new word.

Apparently, after copulation and fertilization, female amphipods release their eggs into a brood chamber on their bellies. Thus protected, amphipod babies develop into young that closely resemble their parents, and when they are ready, their mother releases them into a suitable environment. Thus, to demarsupiate is to release offspring from a brood chamber, a.k.a. marsupium.

Amphipods clearly do not have a monopoly on marsupiums/marsupia, or on the most excellent verb, to demarsupiate. Many crustaceans retain their larvae for some time in a brood pouch* before demarsupiating. Their fellow arthropods, scorpions, ought to be able to demarsupiate, as should a number of fishes**. One fish that throws me into a bit of a semantic quandaray, however, is the seahorse.

When I introduced our lab intern to the word demarsupiate she immediately inquired if it could be applied to the male seahorse. Now, I've always heard seahorses described as being "pregnant" and then "giving birth", and I think this may be the more accurate terminology. Truly marsupial animals (and here I'm considering arthropods and fish as well as mammals) give birth to their young, brood them for a time, and then demarsupiate. Birthing and demarsupiating are temporally separate processes. Female seahorses deposits their eggs into the male's pouch, but it would be hard to describe that as "giving birth"--it's more like ejaculation. Furthermore, the male isn't just holding the eggs in his pouch the way female crustaceans hold onto their young, he's actively enriching their environment with oxygen and nutrients. So, despite my enthusiasm for the word "demarsupiate" and my burning desire to use it in every appropriate context, I am doubtful that it can accurately be applied to seahorses.

However, we are left with abundant scenarios in which it can be used, and with relish! Marsupials, of course, can demarsupiate, but I think even we placentals can demarsupiate at times. At the end of the day, I bet these parents will be glad to demarsupiate.

The last, and best, part of this post is that I may be the first person ever to use the word demarsupiate on the web.



(be warned, the footnotes are freaky today)

* This reminds me of an unrelated but awesome story about a barnacle that parasitizes crab brood pouches. The female barnacle finds a crab and injects herself into it (no joke). Once inside, she essentially takes over the animal's nervous and reproductive system. As she grows, she extrudes her own gonad into the crab's brood chamber. Male barnacles come to mate with her, and she starts to produce young. Meanwhile, the happily oblivious crab host cares for its parasite as though she were caring for her own eggs. But what if our lady barnacle happens to infect a male crab? All is not lost! She simply scrambles his brain, effectively feminizing him, so that he creates a brooding area and cares for his parasite just as a female crab would.

** Many cichlids, for example, are mouth-brooders, which sounds pretty weird at first, but then... no, actually it just gets weirder. See, mouth-brooders can be divided into larvophiles and ovophiles. The larvophiles make a little nest where the female deposits her eggs and the male fertilizes them. Mom guards the eggs while they develop, and as soon as they hatch, she takes the fry (baby fish) into her mouth to brood them for a while.

But! Female ovophiles deposit their eggs on the ground, then immediately slurp them up into their mouth (still unfertilized, mind you). Males of these species have "egg spots" on their anal fin that are supposed to look like eggs, so the female tries to slurp them up along with her eggs, and instead she gets a mouthful of milt (fish ejaculate) which fertilizes the eggs in her mouth. The eggs then develop and hatch inside her mouth. I believe this is the only animal, ever, to achieve fertilization through oral sex.