Drew Harvell
Appearances
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
Every one of the ones that I talk about in my book also has an important application for humans.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
There's a lot of interest and excitement, including for me, of whales.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
I mean, I think everybody who's seen a nudibranch falls in love with it just because they're so beautiful.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
Really, it's the invertebrates that make the gears turn round in terms of function and how the ocean works.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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...
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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...
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
The trick, the superpower, is that it takes them a long time and they can hang on without spending much energy. And they hang on because they have hundreds of tube feet, which are like little suction cups that grip incredibly strong. And then the other part of the superpower is their smart skin. They can basically cross-link the microtubules in their skin to make it stiff and
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
under nervous control and then hold that without it costing them anything. And so that's how they win by hour after hour, just hanging on and pulling till the clam is opened.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
Well, there's been a lot of interesting research trying to use the ideas in the smart skin of sea stars and sea cucumbers in tendon replacement therapies because of the ability to change under neural control. So all of these organisms, and they tend to be invertebrates, that have these so-called smart tissues are a lot of interest in transplantation therapy.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
You know, I think that the first step is to try to help people understand just the incredible wonder of these resources and their extreme value. And then from there to take the next step of protecting them. These spineless invertebrates have been on our planet for over 600 million years. They're phenomenal adaptations to change, to a changing climate.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
There are secrets and mysteries that they have solved that are going to be of a lot of use to us.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
Thank you. This has been a really fun session, Regina. I loved it too.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
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.