Kevin Miller

I think you have to look at the world around us and say, we're moving towards a more digital economy overall. And that is ultimately kind of the biggest driver for the need for data centers and cloud computing.

Yes. We are continuing on our path to meet our climate goals by 2040.

The idea is that the prey are drawn to the lure and they don't see the anglerfish attached to it and they get eaten.

There are over 200 species of deep sea anglerfish. The one in Finding Nemo was modeled after what's known as the football fish. But Elizabeth and Rose told me others look very different. Some are long and thin, like eels. Some are squat. Some have huge prehistoric looking teeth, while others have big eyes set far back into their heads.

And the majority of them live in the bathy pelagic zone, the deep deep sea.

It's a huge expanse of space in total darkness, high pressure, cold temperatures, food limitation.

But in this zone that is so cold, so homogenous, and so devoid of sunlight, somehow the anglerfish still ended up looking very diverse. And researchers wanted to know why.

It is a mystery. It's not clear why one anglerfish species would be shaped one way and while a different anglerfish species would be shaped a different way.

So today on the show, the big anglerfish mystery. Why do these science fiction-y fish look so different from one another? What spurred this divergence in anglerfish body shape and size? And what can that tell us about the deep sea as a whole? I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. The first time I ever saw an anglerfish was on the big screen. It appeared first as a warm, glowing light. I see a... I see a light.

All right, Rose and Elizabeth, the deep-sea pelagic anglerfish, what were the big question marks for you, and what did you want to figure out?

So we can look at images of anglerfish, and it seems obvious to our eyes that they're different shapes, but we needed to... to quantify that variation so that we can analyze it in an evolutionary framework. And what I mean by an evolutionary framework is understanding how all of that diversity evolved. Did it evolve very quickly? Did it evolve gradually?

Those are the big questions. And Rose, at the time, you were an undergrad student at Rice University in Elizabeth's colleague's lab. Can you explain what you did on this project? What was your role?

Yeah, I will say 111 points is a lot. It's even more difficult when you've got these fish that have such bizarre skulls. The work that Rose did is really tremendous, and it was all done by hand.

So you all set about building a family tree for anglerfish. So cool. How do you even go about building something like that?

So to back up a little bit, the big family tree is what links all of these species together. And the methods to do this are the same for pretty much any organism. You extract DNA from the tissues of these organisms. What makes it difficult in the case of the anglerfish is getting those tissues.

Right. This isn't a 23andMe situation. You can't just ask anglerfish to spit into a tube for you so you can collect their DNA.

That's correct. And finding the fish is no small feat, as you can imagine. It relies on careful planning of people who regularly go out to sea. to do surveys of fishes in general, not necessarily targeting anglerfishes, and making sure when an anglerfish is found that it's preserved in the proper way. It needs to be kept on ice and kept cold pretty much as soon as it's brought up.

Yeah, over there.

It needs to be preserved in alcohol and put on a shelf in a museum. And that's the basis of the CT scans or the three-dimensional x-rays that we used. And then the tissues were the basis of the Family tree.

Okay. So while Rose was mapping all these three-dimensional x-rays, plotting points onto the skulls to see where the anglerfish were visually similar, it sounds like, Elizabeth, you were extracting the DNA and seeing where they were genetically similar.

That's right. That's exactly right. And so from there, I use fancy statistical models and basically it tells me what the differences are from species to species and the significance of those differences as far as like how closely or distantly related the different species are.

Wow. Okay. Rose, can you talk a little bit about how you and Elizabeth got access to all these specimens and CT scans? I heard all this was done with museum collections, kind of like... an interlibrary loan, but for museums?

Rising out of the dark with bulbous eyes and pointy teeth, this fish gets a villain moment in the 2003 Pixar movie Finding Nemo. It's so pretty.

So you are going deep into anglerfish history, in a way, in looking at these samples. I want to go all the way back to the original anglerfish ancestor. What did that ancestor look like, the one that started it all?

I'll give some context that anglerfish, the deep sea anglerfish we've been talking about, are all part of this group with a scientific name, Lopheiformes.

Lopheiformes. Yes. Okay.

So the deep sea anglerfish, their closest relative within this broader group is a fish called the sea toad the sea toad yes that's another fun one to google if you if you have access to google the um sea toad oh i am i am coffin fishes is that another word for sea toads yeah they look very grumpy they're literally frowning

Exactly. And hanging out on the bottom of the ocean floor.

Yep. Coffinfish is another word for them. So that's the closest relative, the closest living relative to the deep sea anglerfishes we've been talking about. And so what did the direct ancestor of the anglerfishes look like? It most likely looked something like that sea toad, although perhaps something intermediate. We can't know for sure, but what it implies is that

The broader group, Lophiformes, has always been in the deep sea in some capacity. But the more significant transition was off the seafloor and into the water column.

And so ensues probably the best underwater chase scene in cinematic history.

Yeah. This seems like one of the biggest takeaways of your study. And it's amazing that anglerfish started from an ancestor that lived on the ocean floor and then made it into the water column to be the anglerfish that we know and love today.

That's correct. The bathyplagic anglerfishes seem to have arisen from a deep-sea benthic ancestor, and it was this transition off the seafloor that spurred the evolution of all of these new shapes.

And what does that tell us about the conditions of this part of the ocean that made that so? Is it just that they had to adapt super quickly in order to survive?

I think the way to think about it is opportunity. They came off the seafloor into the water column, the bathyplagic zone, and presumably there are new ways of living, new ecological opportunities, even if we don't know necessarily what they are. And so they potentially evolved these new shapes to take advantage of those new opportunities.

Yeah. I want to ask you both one last question. Why do you think this is so important to study? How does it change how you think about this field of evolutionary biology?

I think this is critical for our understanding of the conditions that diversity evolves in. We're used to thinking of biodiversity in terms of tropical rainforests and coral reefs, places that have a lot going on. And we look at a place like the deep sea and we see opposite of that.

And what we're learning from the evolutionary history of the anglerfish is that that also might be a place where you can evolve a lot of biodiversity. And that's a totally new way of looking at that environment.

I love that. Well, thank you both so much for spending time with me and helping short wavers everywhere learn more about these incredible fish.

It was my pleasure. Thank you. Thanks.

This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by Burleigh McCoy and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Kweisi Lee. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.

But Rose has had a change of heart about anglerfish because this past year, she did research about them alongside evolutionary biologist and ichthyologist Elizabeth Miller at UC Irvine. Now, Elizabeth says this moment in Finding Nemo, where Dory and Marlin are enthralled by the anglerfish's bioluminescent light, is pretty accurate to how it happens in the deep sea.

I think the evidence is compelling from those human studies that children's consumption of synthetic food dyes can contribute to increases in symptoms like inattention, hyperactivity in some children.

I think in the 1900s, we started receiving more reports from sources such as navies, commerce vessels. These are trustworthy accounts. These aren't pirates and sailors of yore spinning their tall tales like Justin was just mentioning.

And the reason for the lack of sampling is simply because milky seas tend to be very remote. And about 70% of the world is covered in ocean and there's just very few people out in any one given spot.

Yeah, I think that just adding to this a little bit of irony is that the leading idea for what causes milky seas is bacteria. Right. A form of bacteria that will glow upon reaching a critical population. But anyway, the Vibrio bacteria that are thought to be causing milky seas are also of the sort that would cause things like cholera.

and other, you know, pretty nasty things that can happen inside of our bodies. So the idea of drinking the water may not always be the best advised thing to do.

Sure. So there are a number of different strains of luminous bacteria in nature, free living in the water. But at one point in their history, they got pooped out from some creature like a fish. And they like to live in the guts of creatures in some happily ever after scenario for them. But when they're free living in the water, they're also serving the function of breaking down organic material.

That's one of the things bacteria do. And when certain bacteria will colonize, say, a speck of organic material, like a piece of algae, their population will increase. And at the same time, they are emitting into the water around them a chemical called which they can also detect as being unique. It's kind of like a key into a lock.

This chemical is known as an autoinducer and will actually trigger these bacterial colonies to begin glowing at populations of about 100,000 per cubic centimeter of water. If they get to that critical population, they'll start to glow. And why would they do that? Well, it gets back to the idea that coming from whence you came.

So they make that piece of food glow like a lure in the water such that it would attract a higher order predator like a fish to come and consume that particle. And guess what? Now they're eaten, but they're exactly where they want to be, back into a gut of a creature.

You know, this is a hypothesis. I want to clarify that. We don't know for sure that this is what's happening, but it's the leading hypothesis.

We need to find a way to position ourselves to sample very thoroughly, spatially and temporally, what a Milky Sea is made out of and how it's different from the surrounding waters.

So what we're doing is forming a database, then looking for relationships between when milky seas happened and other parameters that we measure all the time, like the nuances of sea surface temperature changes and which directions the winds are blowing and the circulations that happen seasonally and subseasonally.

Yeah, that's the goal. We're watching our satellite imagery to see if something forms. And in the in-between part, we've maybe deployed some resources to that area where we're thinking one might form. Finally, the satellite hopefully sees something and we're able to strike at it, realizing that a milky sea may not last more than a few days.

We think of Milky Seas as perhaps being this culmination of this communication that's going across these different regimes of our Earth system and leading to this really remarkable kind of seventh natural wonder of the world type display, which visually is really cool to see, but

Scientifically, it's very, very cool and intriguing as well because we, A, don't understand exactly what conspires to form these things. B, we didn't think it was possible for this many bacteria to blow up overnight in any one place.

So just realizing the connection between the various parts of the Earth system, it's just really intriguing and just shows us that there's a lot more to learn about our own planet.

You're welcome. Thank you for having us.

I think you have to look at the world around us and say, we're moving towards a more digital economy overall. And that is ultimately kind of the biggest driver for the need for data centers and cloud computing.

Okay.

No.

He fucking won!

Well, I've been talking about a thing I know. We're going on a Jack Marks podcast show.

Oh, wow. I mean, well, I just remember... having to like call the doormen at the apartment and like making sure the right one was on to like sneak a lot of the gear upstairs. Like we had to really get into a back entrance of the building and trying to play off. Like we weren't actually using it to shoot something on broadcast television.

And I just, I do, like I said, remember the panic the next day of this isn't going to air. Right. I mean, we did our best. We did what they were trying to do. It's not our fault. They didn't show up.

Yeah.

Speaking of Grease Palms, by the way, I remember instead of getting a location fee for using my apartment, somehow they thought a crate and barrel gift card for $500 would be the equivalent of cash. And so somehow our accounting department said, oh, here's $500 a crate and barrel instead of money for a location fee. I don't know what the rationale was for that.

I think maybe because it was just so bad, they just maybe had a gift card lying around.

After the open closet door with just a laundry basket, several shots of that was just, I was like, oh my God, this is going to be seen on TV.

Yeah, man. Everybody's doing great. Everybody's doing great.

I am here. Kevin! Hi, guys.

I was just gonna say, there's a bus that goes by on the Big Apple tour. You can get the green Lacoste shirt, just like Daiquiri Girl wore. It is bananas. It's so funny to watch that because I forget what the premise of the original sketch was, but I just remember somebody asking if I had any weed in my apartment.

And I think they were looking for like a low rent apartment to do something with Gnarls Barkley. And then they just never showed up. Right. But it's just a real, you can see it's a real dump of a place.

Oh, we weren't even living together at this time. I had two roommates. This was like early days living in New York.

Yes, that's my Casio keyboard with a little drum beat. I still have it. And it was that and there was a smoothie machine that I think my brother got me for Christmas that was lying there. And it was just like, it was almost like a MacGruber thing where you looked around the room to see, oh my God, what can we make from this disaster?

Yeah, there were like a few people. I think there was maybe, was there hair and makeup there? I seem to remember like hair and makeup and maybe some crew there. There were wigs, so. Yeah.

Oh, that was the original idea of Bad Roommate.