It’s been a looong time since I’ve blogged with you, so welcome back to both of us! Here are some updates on my ongoing research: 1) Ovary updates My “ovary project” as some might affectionately call it, has wrapped up and was submitted for publication. After half a year, a set of 3 reviewers informed me my manuscript needed major revisions before being considered for publication. I am working on many tedious aspects of editing my manuscript some of which include: removing periods from figure captions, adding scientific names to common species I refer to (like humans and white-tailed deer), coming up with ways to soften the wording I used to interpret results, making color images black and white, italicizing mathematical equations, deleting large sections of text that I thought were informative to the reader and so on. Ok so science writing can be pretty bland, BUT it’s important! The scientific peer-review process ensures that the science being done is done correctly, that the methods are understandable to those in that field and are repeatable so that the results from one study can be compared to those of future studies. A published peer-reviewed paper means that the study conducted has merit. I recently came across this quote a professor in my college has as part of his signature on every email he sends to staff, students and faculty alike: "Claims that have not gone through critical review by a jury of scientific peers-or have gone through it and failed-are not scientific, and do not deserve equal time in a scientific debate." -Oreskes and Conway in Merchants of Doubt 1) Comprehensive exams In the fall I took the dreaded Ph.D. comprehensive exams. “Comps” as they are affectionately called, are akin to the Bar for law students. They are the gold standard that ensures an individual is fit to be called a Doctor of Philosophy in (fill in the blank). However, they differ from the Bar in that they are not standardized, and are not administered by strangers that have no bearing on your success on the test. The comps for Ph.D. students are tailored to topics the student is expected to be an expert in (or at least conversant to fluent in) and given and graded by their Ph.D. committee (essentially it is a grilling. The way the test is carried out varies by college and department. In the Fisheries Department at my university, the committee can choose the topics you will be tested on, how you will perform the exam (written/oral, alone/monitored), whether or not it is open or closed book and under what timeline they expect you to complete their portion of the exam. Fortunately, I got to make some decisions too including when I chose to take the tests (spanning one or two weeks, back-to-back or days off and my start time) and the order in which each exam was given. Each of my five committee members allotted me 24 hours, open book. PHEW! In some cases I was done in 8-10 hours. Others took 21. Topics included biochem, statistics, co-management of marine mammals, endocrinology, evolution and marine mammal fossils and understanding the Marine Mammal Protection Act (of 1972) as well as the Endangered Species Act. I’ll be honest, they were terrible. I mean I got sick and was up all night blurry-eyed sifting through literature and library books, rapidly creating bibliographies. I was stuck inside during the nicest fall I have ever seen in Southeast Alaska while friends were out catching coho and camping. My car battery died one day, leaving me stranded. But the support was outstanding. My awesome fiancé, then boyfriend, drove out to the lab, took out my car battery and then replaced it with a new one in the parking lot while I was testing. My friends and lab mates cooked me pre-made dinners and gave me chocolate and electrolytes and walked my dog. It was a long, stressful, tenuous ten days. The day after my nearly two weeks of testing were up a friend called me up and invited me to Eagle Glacier cabin for a night. It was like awakening from hibernation. The devils club was golden and an array of constellations painted the sky that night. I must have slept for 12 glorious, uninterrupted hours. Weeks later I received word that I passed with flying colors! I am now a Ph.D. Candidate. Sleeping like a rock Golden
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Today is the day. And I'm pretty excited about it!
I intended to get out of bed around 7. I dismissed my 3 or 4 alarms and rolled over to see not even the faintest beams of light through my shades. I allowed myself 20 more minutes. “Today is the day,” I thought. Today is the day I nail it. My very last go-round in the endocrine lab. I don’t think I’ve ever ran an assay and had every sample come out successfully. But this is not my first or second time with these particular samples. No. This is the third time for most of them. I slipped into my slippers, greeted my dog on the way to the kitchen, and poured myself a glass of water to wash down the ball of sunshine my body is deficient of for about 5-6 months out of the year. I put together a cold sandwich. The Dean is visiting our campus today and a student lunch is provided but the chances of me pipetting over the lunch hour are too high to risk going without. I reach for the coffee pot, second in line of the joys of dark mornings (first being the thick ruff of my Hedlund husky that I scratch and bury my face into each morning). Here I come to a cross-roads. In the summer I could go on my merry way without the dark liquid. But on a frosty December morning such as this, my day’s happiness and productiveness depend on it. But I must be cautious. No one wants the shakes when they are transferring microliters of precious samples that have traveled hundreds of miles and gone through a dozen steps to be dropped anywhere outside the pencil eraser-sized cup (a “well”) in the assay tray. I settle on a half cup.
A row of "wells."
I run out of the house to start my car. Two days ago I opened my back door and it resisted, so I cranked a little harder. The entire panel of my passenger side back door popped off. I threw it in the back. Today, my driver’s side door is frozen shut. I have to crawl through the back. I can’t be bothered to take this thing in as long as it’s getting me from point a to point b.
Half an hour later I’m in the lab rooting around in the fridge. It’s jam packed with blue and yellow boxes labeled, “testosterone,” “cortisol,” and “corticosterone.” I remove a few of them to get to the one labeled “progesterone.” A beaker of clear liquid labeled “fecal extraction” wobbled precariously. I hadn’t noticed it there. I would like to say my lab mates should know better than to leave something like that balancing in the fridge, but the truth is, I should know them better. I riffle through the progesterone kit and begin my hodge-podge assembled of my assay, pulling out buffer from the side door in the main fridge, grabbing the control solution from the mini fridge, and piecemealing together unused well columns from a recycled tray. Often we don’t have enough samples to use up an entire assay plate, so we save and label the leftovers and use them up later. Kits are costly, about $250 for each individual progesterone kit. Conserving materials is wise and limiting mistakes is necessary!
An assay tray.
Sample prep. Thawing out my dilutions and allowing the assay buffer to thaw to room temperature.
A couple hours later and I have my fingers crossed that this assay will be a success. I have been running these damn things on and off for more than a year. Some, because we obtained new samples (wahoo!), but mainly they are redos that I must recalculate over and over again. You see the trouble is no one has done this before, ran progesterone on walrus tissues. And these aren’t just any old piece of tissue (the skin, blubber etc.); the part of the ovary I am observing (the Corpora Lutea or CL) is the source of progesterone production itself. I have yet to find literature looking at progesterone concentration in the CL of any mammal. This makes it tricky to blindly guess. Luckily for me, our lab has an excellent technician who’s been invaluable at assisting students in endocrinology studies. But today I am on my own.
Plate is ready to shake!
The plate shakes and by some miracle the 2-hour time window of shaking falls during the student lunch! Yay for Chinese food! Of course, the food arrives late and the Dean is behind schedule so I only have enough time to dine and ditch before time is up and I must complete the next step. In the next step I dump all of the liquid out of the wells and wash them out with something similar to a detergent. This step gets rid of all the “junk” floating around that isn’t progesterone. The progesterone molecules (antigens really) have spent the past 2 hours binding to their respective antibodies. The antibodies come with the kit. They are stuck to the bottom of those tiny cups we call wells and sit upright, arms wide open, waiting for the progesterone antigens to bind to them.
The blue antibodies are stuck to the bottom of the wells, the red antigens are the progesterone molecules from my walrus tissues floating around. They will bind to the antibodies. Source: http://www.ducksters.com/science/biology/antibodies_and_antigens.gif
The plate is washed, I follow the chemical recipe and now the plate is sitting. No shaking for this last part. I am anxiously waiting. I don’t allow any negative thoughts or potential mistakes to enter my mind. I look down at the fortune cookie I saved from lunch. Nope. I’m not even going to open that, could be some bad mojo in there. I’m acting more like some superstitious baseball pitcher before playoffs than a scientist. Instead of letting my mind wander in all the wrong directions, I let my dog out and catch some air. I’ll head up early to prepare for the final steps.
Check out this video on what it looks like to "wash the plate."
This is the graph that I presented at my most recent conference I attended in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was not really a conference but a 2-day training for young professionals associated with the National Climate Science Center (CSC) Network. I am not actually apart of the CSC Network, but none of the Alaska CSC members were able to make it and the opportunity was made available to University of Alaska students, where I expressed interest and was flown across the country to network, collaborate, learn how to overcome challenges in multidisciplinary studies and deliver a speed talk about my research. I was given 3 slides and 3 minutes. A challenge I was excited to accept! I enjoy taking my research and making it interesting and digestible to diverse audiences, plus this time I had more progressive results than at my previous talks. These were my results:
Cool…so why might this be? This is where things got exciting to me. My results were explainable! In the 1960s hunting restrictions were put in place for Pacific walruses. The population started to increase and it is thought that carrying capacity was reached at 1975 or shortly thereafter. As the population peaked, space and food became limited. Females were not able to get enough to eat and consequently could not afford to ovulate or bring a fetus to full term. Then in the 1980s, the hunting restrictions were lifted, the population was reduced and resources became more plentiful. Females had access to adequate food and started ovulating and calving more often and more successfully, hence the increase in size and number of corpora in the 90s. We don’t have much information for the 2008-10 time period but my results suggest that the population was reproducing at levels higher than in the 70s and slightly lower than in the 90s. This is great. Amazing! A grad students dream—having data that is statistically significant and trends that are explainable. “Go home and get to writing up your thesis,” I told myself feeling proud and accomplished. Me feeling proud and accomplished with the rest of the Alaska CSC group in Amherst, MA. A week after presenting this “amazing” stuff, I got to thinking and I awoke to a harsh reality. I was dreaming. I was sitting in the library in Juneau, at the same table I am actually typing this up now. I was staring at excel spread sheets and graphs of my data. I wanted to be sure that I was interpreting my results correctly, that in a few months from now when I presented this information at my thesis defense no one would point and laugh and say, “Hah, good one Jenell, but you really didn’t consider x, y and z here.” And I would be embarrassed and potentially fail. It was a good practice. I asked myself, “Is there anything else that could account for these differences in size, weight and number of corpora between samples?” The obvious thing I had been dealing with was the difference in preservatives used. Two of the three sets of ovaries were preserved in formalin whereas the smallest ovaries from 1975 were preserved in ethanol. I had already been working on a pilot study and the results from our pilot study said that there were no significant differences between treatment types. “Ok, what else? What else?” I racked my brains for a moment. Locations. That was different. The 1975 samples were from Little Diomede and the others were from St. Lawrence Island. But that shouldn’t matter. They are all samples from one population that migrates from St. Lawrence up to Little Diomede. Oh, my gosh. They migrate. They are harvested as they migrate. So they are killed as the ice breaks up first in the Bering and then up toward the Chukchi Sea. What do the harvest dates look like between locations??? I am waiting to obtain harvest date info on the 2008-10 time frame but these 2 time periods have really distinct harvest windows. Volume showed the same trend as weight of ovaries. They look different. Really different. In fact, there is almost no overlap. I hadn’t accounted for this. I am no longer comparing apples to apples here. What am I going to do?
The demand for spermaceti to make candles increased the demand for the hunting of sperm whales. Sailors were now chasing nomadic sperm whales and committing to journeys averaging 30 months, double that of previous years, in the 1820s and 30s. Sperm whales were harvested nearly to depletion by 1840. Lucky for sperm whales and their predators, a sudden change altered their fate. A change in Paris, halfway around the globe, altered the desired prey from the sperm whale to the right whale. This change had nothing to do with oil, consumption, conservation or risk mitigation (sperm whales are known to fight back and are responsible for several lost whaling ships). What then could possibly stimulate such a transition? Fashion. Yes, that’s correct, a not so unusual change in fashion. Suddenly women were sporting these huge, cage-like hoops around their waists. These trendy hoop skirts were made of flexible, durable baleen. The sperm whale is a toothed whale, therefore serving no use for this new trend. The price of baleen or “whalebone” as it was called, doubled in 1840-44 and the pursuit of the “right whale” ensued. Selling hoop skirts: http://www.livemaster.ru/topic From 1843-45 the Gulf of Alaska west to Japan’s Kurile Islands and Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula was mottled with whaling vessels as they took more and more right whales and began the venture north for “polar whales.” Before I go delving into the over harvest of these particular whales, I would like to slow things down and zoom in on the ship and the men that were undertaking these expeditions. Whaling in the Arctic: https://allthingsliberty.com As soon as a ship returned from voyage at its homeport it was put under care of shipkeeper and prepared for its next voyage. Repairs were made and as the date of sailing drew near. The ship’s agent, the “landshark” was responsible for securing the crew of men that would undertake this journey. In the early years, it was not difficult to entice young men in New England and New York to sign up. You can image the landshark walking into a bar with the ship’s captain buying some young lads a round of beers. The boys grab chairs and the captain launches into the story of the first time he almost lost his life at sea. He speaks of adventure, new lands and the monetary rewards and swarms of women awaiting him after returning from his 3-month voyage at sea. Not only that but the landshark has already paid for their transportation to the port, room and board, and if you sign up tonight, he’ll get you completely outfitted first thing tomorrow. Sounds enticing, doesn’t it?
This account from Walter Burns describes how that morning went for him in San Francisco (Whales, Ice & Men). “I was given a sailor’s canvas bag, a matress, a pair of blankets, woolen trousers, dungaree trousers, a coat, a pair of brogans, a pair of rubber sea boots, underwear, socks, two flannel shirts, a cap, a belt and a sheath knife, a suit of oilskins and sou’wester, a tin cup, tin pan, knife, fork and spoon. That was all. It struck me as a rather slender equipment for a year’s voyage. A runner footed up the cost. “Why,” he said with an air of great surprise, “this foots up to $53 and your advance is only $50.” He added up the sum again. But he made no mistake. He seemed perplexed. “I don’t see how it is possible to scratch off anything,” he said. “You’ll need every one of these articles.” He puckered his brow, bit the end of his pencil and studied the figures. It was evidently a puzzling problem. “Well,” he said at last, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Bring me down a few curios (apparently old English for trinkets) from the Arctic and I’ll call it square.” I suppose my outfit was really worth about $6—not over $10.” Pay was not as lucrative as one might imagine. Profits were determined by the value of the ship’s oil and the current market price of baleen once the ship returned to port. Costs were deducted from costs of outfitting, piloting, port charges, tow boats and watchmen fees among other things. In 1857 when the Benjamin Tucker returned to New Bedford from her 4th Arctic voyage with 73,707 gallons of whale oil, 5,348 gallons of sperm oil and 30, 012 lbs of baleen, the ordinary seaman earned $283.25 ($3285.70 in 1982 dollars) for 2 years of work. You can imagine that as these voyages increased from months to years fewer men were willing to sign up and those that learned anything from their first voyage were probably not going to endure another. The history of walrusing Over the past 175 years the Pacific walrus population has been depleted nearly to extinction and allowed to recover 3 times. These depletion events form an interesting history and a story worth telling. This series of blog posts will cover these historical events. My interpretation of the history of walrusing comes from an excellent book titled, “Whales, Ice & Men,” by John R. Bockstoce. It was the demand for oils in the 18th century that fueled the economy around whaling in New England. Oils were necessary for lubrication of machines and tools as well as producing light. Journeys to hunt whales needed to be carried out close to shore, where the rendering of oil took place. In more northern latitudes, blubber from whales cold be stacked into casks onboard the ship for several days before turning rancid, as was the practice in Britain. American whalers on the other hand, were required to tow the whale to shore for flensing (youtube video on flensing of a gray whale) and the rending of oil. By 1750 all nearshore whale stocks were depleted and voyages increased in distance and duration. If it weren’t for two timely inventions, it is not likely American whalers would have been able to continue this fishery. The first invention was shipboard tryworks (get pic here), brick ovens containing iron pots that allowed for rendering oil onboard. The invention of shipboard tryworks not only put whalers back in business, it allowed them to become pelagic hunters. Shipboard tryworks. Source: http://www.echospace.org/ The second invention also drew Yankee whalers further from home. This invention used the wax from within a sperm whale’s head (the spermaceti organ) to craft improved candles. This invention shifted the focus of American whaling away from baleen whales and targeted toothy sperm whales. With the assistance of shipboard tryworks Yankee whalers basically monopolized the sperm whale fishery within one year. By 1755, 300 ships of Yankee whalers were hunting sperm whales from the Azores down to the Falkland Islands. Anatomy of a sperm whale head. Source: https://shwebook.com It was this great leviathan that drew sailors from their home with the New Bedford Whaling Company to scouring the Pacific, but not before 4 decades of inactivity. Prior to the War of Independence between Britain and America in 1775, oil and baleen were the colonies’ primary sources of credit to England. Once the war broke out, England embargoed American whale oil and Americans could not compete with European markets. It wasn’t until after the War of 1812 that whaling rebounded in waters around North America.
This was in part due to its only competitor—Britain—losing its footing. Industrialization took hold in England before America and textile manufactures replaced whale oil with rapeseed oil. Furthermore, coal oil and coal gas were far less costly to acquire. Meanwhile, America was growing and the market for oil remained strong. Whaling crews launched from ports in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Long Island setting sail throughout the Atlantic and now into the Pacific following routes that the British had laid for them. The big, bold letters jumped off the screen of my iphone Saturday morning. Ah-hah! I did it! I thought. Finally! It was a reward I never received last year, although I was flying on a near monthly basis to attend conferences and trainings, go out in the field and visit family and friends. I felt proud. For a moment. And then some words hit me that I had heard two days prior when I was speaking to Scott Laursen, Technical Project Specialist with the University of Hawaii while attending a training in Amherst, Mass. He was one of the guest speakers/facilitators brought in by the National Climate Science Center’s Student and Early Career Training. I was moved and motivated by his talk and wanted to speak to him about his current job, how he got there. I approached him during a break while he was fumbling with his jacket on the coat rack. He was more than willing to chat with me and launched into his background, which had not so much to do with science, but about the things he felt science included but scientists did not. His passion for outdoor education and speaking with our actions, incorporating feelings and thoughts from all community members, both native and non-native locals. He had a lot to share with me and I tried to keep up with the flow of his narrative. It was less like a riding a wave and a whole lot more like being jostled in turbulent waters. He spoke of community involvement, how he essentially created his position, his connection with place and water which led him to tell me, “I don’t leave much. I don’t really like to travel. I think about all the carbon and resources to get my butt all the way from Hawaii to here.” It goes against the grain of our message. That’s what he was really saying. We keep talking about how we need to limit carbon emissions to slow warming in the Arctic. And then the same people that study the effects and say these types of things are hoping on planes the next day. I realized I was one of those people. Maybe not at the Alaska Airlines tier of the “Million Mile Flyer.” I do not hold access to the exclusive board room and benefits of first class and free beverages like many of the bigwig scientists to which Scott was referring, but still I’m now toward the upper rungs of that ladder. I must say I hadn’t thought much about it until now. Probably for a whole suite of reasons. First, almost all of my travels are in “the name of Science.” I am usually traveling to further my education or someone else’s by sharing knowledge I have. I travel to collaborate and have face-to-face facilitation with museum curators, agency employees and community members. Second, I’ve never been the only person on a plane. Often the planes I fly on are so packed I end up voluntarily checking my carry on because there is not enough room onboard. It creates this line of thinking where I say, well this plane would be going whether I booked this seat or not. Lastly, and probably the most convincing argument is that, in order to collaborate with various stakeholders, in order to build trust and increase our understanding, face-to-face meetings are necessary (http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/09409.pdf). If you ask me they are invaluable. So what then? What can scientists and policy makers do to not be one of the top contributors to increased carbon emissions? I don’t think we can cut out professional and personal travel. But, perhaps we can cut down. Figure out what relationships are sound and where videoconferences and skype sessions are feasible. Decide to meet annually instead of quarterly. Bring your own water bottle instead of using 4 of those plastic cups that the airlines dole out every 45 minutes. And decrease the emissions resulting from shipping goods from faraway places (shop locally or regionally). Bring your reusable bags to the story every time you shop. And stop putting your fruits and veggies in those plastic bags—they don’t need them! And shop less! Be a bit more of a minimalist. Does one person really need 20 pairs of jeans and 13 hand bags? More by force than by choice I have spent the past 3 years living in a manner in which I can fit everything I own in my Subaru outback. Nothing I mentioned is novel. But, everything is doable by the average individual. So, with the guilt of reaching Alaska MVP status, I want to make a few new goals for myself and challenge others to cut down. The Paris Agreement entered force last week and the action of every traveler and shopper will be needed to keep Mother Earth cool and the living conditions of many comfortable. Photo credit: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--d6-EUeo2--/uusvjtwnexmcidxv6g51.jpg
I would like to provide you with an overview of my project so you have some things to look forward to reading. My study has 2 parts, one part anatomy (looking at the shapes and sizes of organs with the naked eye) and one part physiology (using laboratory techniques to measure hormones in tissues of those organs). The organs of primary interest are ovaries. Ovaries are of course those egg-producing-machines mammals of all species possess! Let me show you a walrus ovary so you can have an idea of the image burned in my mind that I fall asleep picturing. These 2 parts serve as 2 chapters of my thesis. I am currently focusing on the anatomy chapter. This chapter asks, "how has reproductive capacity of the female Pacific walrus changed over the past 40 years?" Yeah...it's a bit daunting. To answer this question will will be looking at ovaries from 3 time frames: 1975, 1994-99 and 2008-2010. And to make this question more manageable we will be measuring 3 things in our definition of "reproductive capacity": ovarian volumes, weights and the number of scars from ovulation. My chapter on physiology will be focused on building an understanding of the factors that influence reproduction on a fine scale. I will be looking specifically at progesterone and lipids. Progesterone is the hormone responsible for sustaining pregnancy and lipids are fats. Later this week I will post a blog about my findings from measuring ovarian weights and volumes, so stay tuned!
Twenty years later and my enthusiasm for things washed ashore has not been curbed. I should have known I would end up getting my masters degree slicing through reproductive organs. Blame it on my "morbid" childhood. Growing up hunting and fishing in rural Wisconsin, I became accustomed to the harvesting and cleaning of animals. I remember as a young girl picking up the leg of a deer my father was gutting and pressing it into the dirt, watching the bones and tendons come poking out the other end. I was a curious child. I still am.
My current curiosities have pulled me to the coast. To the west coast. Alaska to be more specific, where I am studying changes in the reproductive capacity of female Pacific walruses as part of my Masters degree. Reproduction is fascinating! It's why you and I, and every other living thing on the planet exist and how every species will continue to persist long after you and I do not. Many of the factors that govern reproduction are similar across all mammals, but there are still many unknowns, especially in animals that have not been domesticated or are difficult to study. So why walrus? Well yes, for one thing they are difficult to study, making this research novel. Additionally, the habitat of this animal is undergoing rapid change due to warming in the Arctic and reduction of sea ice. How will this ice-dependent species respond? This question has stimulated a flurry of research lately. Next year (2017) US Fish and Wildlife Service will make a decision as to whether or not Pacific walruses should be added to the list of threatened and endangered species. Concerns about walruses and climate change go beyond the health of this species. These environmental changes have and will continue to impact Alaska Native communities that rely on walrus for dietary, cultural and economic well-being. It is my intent that my research on female walrus reproduction will contribute to ever-growing knowledge base on this species. This blog is designed to be an active guide about my research process to those interested in learning more about it. I hope you find it digestible, informative and entertaining :) |
AuthorHi, I'm Jenell. Biologist, student, outdoors woman and author of Mother Walrus. Archives
March 2019
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