From starfish and sea slugs to jellyfish and sponges, the ocean's invertebrates are some of the most ancient and diverse critters on Earth. And so are their superpowers, as marine biologist Drew Harvell calls their unique abilities. In her new book, The Ocean's Menagerie, she chronicles the amazing abilities of some of these spineless creatures and showcases how they've inspired our science and medicine. Listen to our past episode on nudibranchs — the potent slugs of the sea — HERE.Want to hear more stories about underwater marvels? Email us and let us know at [email protected] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What are the superpowers of spineless sea creatures?
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When it comes to the ocean, some species get more attention than others.
There's a lot of interest and excitement, including for me, of whales.
Sharks and dolphins also tend to get a lot of love. But marine biologist Drew Harvell fell in love with a different group in the ocean.
Really, it's the invertebrates that make the gears turn round in terms of function and how the ocean works.
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Chapter 2: Why are marine invertebrates important to ocean ecosystems?
These unsung icons of the sea have no backbones. And there's a lot of them.
There are over 34 phyla of marine invertebrates, from sponges to corals to... Octopus to sea stars. And as such a big group, they're pretty versatile. Invertebrates live everywhere, from the bottom to the top, from shallow water to deep water, from attached to the bottom and in the plankton. So they're everywhere in the ocean.
Drew was so fascinated with spineless creatures that she wrote a whole book about these ancient critters and how their long evolutionary histories have led to some interesting biology.
I think of them as kind of biological impossibilities, sort of like, you know, Superman flying or having invulnerable skin, right? For an animal to photosynthesize, that's legitimately a superpower.
And it's not the only one. Across these marine invertebrates, there's a whole bunch of superpowers. Everything from regeneration to super strength and even stealing other animals' abilities. Drew says understanding these animals' superpowers not only helps researchers understand the rules of life, the lessons scientists learn from them can transform our medicines.
Every one of the ones that I talk about in my book also has an important application for humans.
So today on the show, the strange world of the ocean's spineless creatures, what their ancient superpowers are, and how they continue to inspire human innovation today. I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Chapter 3: What fascinating adaptations do sponges have?
They're amazingly beautiful. They come in all colors and sizes and shapes from vases to runners to huge barrel sponges. And they're brown and yellow and green and red and purple.
That's amazing.
And so, I mean, I just get lost when I'm diving just watching them because they're so beautiful. And, you know, functionally, they seem to be very, very simple. But then when you look deeper, they have amazing functions. And sponges have been of great interest to natural products chemists because it was found that the highest hit rate for anti-cancer drugs was from tropical sponges.
We thought the sponges themselves made the chemicals, but we've learned that often it's the bacteria, particular species of bacteria that are housed within the sponge that actually do the chemical synthesis of these compounds.
Can you give me an example?
I love this one because a sponge that's bright green, it's in the inner tidal, everywhere, hyalocondria panacea, very common. It houses a strain of streptomyces bacteria that produces a chemical, and that is now being used in clinical trials for a whole range of different cancers, melanoma, pancreatic cancer, and renal cancer.
It's being used now?
It's being used now. They don't actually pull it out of sponges now. They've actually learned how to create a synthetic derivative. I could go on and on. And I kind of do in the book. I talk about quite a few examples of cancer drugs that have actually been discovered and produced from sponges.
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Chapter 4: How do sponges contribute to cancer research?
Let's talk about sea slugs next. Introduce us to these critters. What should we know about sea slugs?
Oh my God, sea slugs are just, they're the most enchanting of the invertebrates in many ways, just because they're a ridiculous circus of colors and shapes. Black backgrounds with lime green stripes and polka dots or yellow or pink. They have these beautiful projections that look like flowers all over their backs.
I mean, I think everybody who's seen a nudibranch falls in love with it just because they're so beautiful.
A nudibranch being like another name for sea slugs.
Right.
Yeah. And I've learned sea slugs are a relative of snails, but instead of having a shell, they have these like chemical defenses in which they can eat other animals and steal their powers. Can you tell me more about like one of those?
We have a nudibranch that lives in the Pacific Northwest that eats sea anemones. And when it eats a sea anemone, it uptakes the stinging cells that sea anemones use in their own defense. They select the immature stinging cells so they don't explode when they're eating them. They pass them all the way through their digestive system and into these little packages on their back.
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Chapter 5: What makes sea slugs unique in the marine world?
the stinging cell completes its development and is then used as a harpoon by the nudibranch. And the diversity of this particular group of nudibranchs that does this is very high. They've been very successful, particularly in our shallow waters in temperate and tropical ecosystems. So the beauty of the bright colors is a warning to fish and other predators that don't eat me. I'm dangerous.
I've got explosives, and I'll use them.
Chapter 6: What are the visual characteristics of sea slugs?
It's almost as if I were to eat a venomous snake, then somehow I could have venom or something like that. So what lessons can humans learn from that?
Yeah, I think the lessons we can learn from the ability of – nudibranchs to uptake these foreign organs from other groups is in transplantation surgery it's very hard for us to transplant kidneys for example even among different humans let alone what we try to do from pigs to humans and the way we do that now is we try to suppress our immune systems That's not what nudibranchs are doing.
They're playing around with the recognition process. And so it strikes me that there's a real opportunity there to really think a little bit outside the box about other ways to go in and optimize our transplantation surgery.
Chapter 7: How do nudibranchs differ from other sea slugs?
All right. Last but not least, my favorite, maybe yours, are sea stars? Yes.
You know, Gina, I think we share that. Okay. They are certainly one of my favorites because, I mean, first they're like Martians. They have multiple arms. They have thousands of tube feet for running around. They have eyes on each end of each one of their arms.
Yeah, all their arms are heads. I remember doing a story about that.
Right? Yes.
Yeah.
And so, you know, just as an animal, they're very, very strange. And yet the thing that just, as a marine ecologist, blows my mind is they're incredibly important ecologically. We think of sea stars as ecosystem engineers because of their power. They're predators, so they eat prey, and they eat a lot of their prey, whether it's mussels or clams or sea urchins. Right.
Recently, we've been studying one that lives in deeper waters that used to eat all the urchins and control them, but it was decimated by a huge outbreak of disease. I kind of call it the COVID of sea stars because it affected... It's the wasting disease, right? It's the sea star wasting disease and it affected over 20 species. In addition...
to the sunflower star, which is the biggest and fastest in the world. I mean, this thing is three feet across. It's huge, and it eats a lot of urchins. When you remove all those sunflower stars, the urchins explode, and they've decimated our kelp meadows. And so along the entire West Coast, from San Diego up to Washington, we've had declining...
kelp beds partly due to the removal of just this one species of sea star. And weirdly, for such a big, powerful critter, it was the most susceptible to this disease. And so it's now on the endangered species list. And we've been working for a decade on a recovery program for it.
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