Jessamyn Fairfield

speaker

401 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 30 Aug

Jessamyn Fairfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea · Is photographic memory a real thing? · 5 Jul 2026 podcast

And they're named the sea squirt because if you take them up out of the water as a defensive mechanism, one of the first things they do is squirt out a bunch of the water at you, which isn't really a great defense mechanism.

But one of the problems that sea squirts have is that they are delicious.

And lots of things eat them.

Lots of things eat them.

Oh, not for us, but for other organisms.

Well, actually, people eat them too.

They are considered a delicacy in some places.

But so sea squirts have this problem that they get eaten a lot.

And there's a type of sea squirt that's based in Antarctica that was the subject of this recent study from the University of South Florida.

Basically, they spent six weeks doing dives off the coast of Antarctica around Anvers Island trying to collect these sea squirts.

Shane can't keep a straight face.

But the reason that they're interested in them is that, like I said, sea squirts get eaten a lot.

And so one of the ways that they've not necessarily evolved but, like, developed a symbiotic relationship with another species is that there are this kind of bacteria that live in sea squirts that produce a really strong toxin.

So if the sea squirt itself is attacked, this toxin gets released not necessarily from the sea squirt itself but from this bacteria that lives in it, which then drives off, you know, things that would want to eat the sea squirt.

And it turns out that this toxin, this bacterial toxin that comes from these specific sea squirts, is a good way of treating melanoma.

So it both kills the cancerous cells in melanoma.

Melanoma, of course, a very aggressive form of skin cancer.

And there's about a thousand people a year in Ireland that are diagnosed with it.

Very hard to treat.

But crucially, this sea squirt toxin also doesn't damage living cells.

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