Monthly Archives: March 2023

Diving into the Unknown: Exploring the Role of Viruses in Coral Reef Health

When you think of a coral reef, what do you picture? Perhaps you imagine colorful branching structures jutting out of rock and the sea floor, with flourishing communities of fish swimming about. Or if you’ve been paying attention to news about global warming for the past decade or two, maybe you picture desolate expanses of bleached corals, their bone-like structures eerily reminiscent of a mass graveyard.

What you might not picture is a zoomed-in view of the coral ecosystem: the multitude of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and algae that occupy the intricate crevices of every coral. While corals are indeed animals in their own right, they belong to a complex symbiotic relationship with these microorganisms: the algae, which are more specifically dinoflagellates, provide energy to the coral through the process of photosynthesis. Bacteria occupying the mucus layers cycle nutrients and play a role in defense against pathogen invasion through the production of antimicrobial peptides.

One lesser-known member of this community, or the coral ‘holobiont’ as it is called, are the viruses. It’s probable that, like other members of the holobiont, they contribute to the health of the coral in some way, but this role is as of yet unclear. Our guest this week is Emily Schmeltzer, a fifth year PhD student in the Vega Thurber lab in the Department of Microbiology, and these elusive viruses are exactly what she is trying to uncover.

Emily Schmeltzer, PhD candidate in Rebecca Vega-Thurber’s lab, takes a sample of a coral

“We don’t know a ton about viruses on coral reefs,” says Schmeltzer. “ We know that some probably cause disease or mortality through infections, but we don’t really know exactly what a lot of them are doing, because marine viral ecology is such a relatively new field,” she explains.

It’s not surprising: viruses, while the most abundant and diverse entity on earth, are incredibly tiny and difficult to detect in environments where other organisms also thrive. Part of the challenge is that they have no universally conserved genes: that is, no easy way to tell the genes from viruses apart from the genes of other organisms. When studying bacteria, a gene called the 16S rRNA gene can be used as a sort of ‘name tag’ – every bacteria has this gene, whereas other organisms do not. There’s no such thing for viruses, making them difficult to study if you don’t already know what you’re looking for.

Schmeltzer is studying the viruses that live on corals and their response to climate change. To do this, her PhD research has involved a massive spatiotemporal study (spatio = across different locations, temporal = across multiple time points) looking at nearly 400 individual coral colonies of three different species over 3 years. All of these colonies are off the coast of the Moorea, a small island in French Polynesia in the South Pacific. The ultimate goal of the project is to contribute to the ongoing data collection for the Moorea Coral Reef Long Term Ecological Research project, and to characterize virus community diversity and potential function  in the health of these corals.

Studying coral reefs is a big leap for Schmeltzer, who hails from the land-locked deserts of New Mexico. She was always interested in biology, which she attributes to her dad bringing home dead scorpions to look at together when she was a child. Arthropods ultimately ended up becoming her first research subjects: as an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico, she worked in an insect and spider taxonomy lab, before pivoting to working on West Nile virus.

So how did this insect-loving desert-dweller end up studying viruses that live on corals in the ocean? To learn more about Schmeltzer’s career trajectory, her love of corals, and the challenges of viral research, tune in to Inspiration Dissemination this Sunday, April 2nd at 7 PM. Listen live at 88.7 FM or on the live stream, or catch the episode after the show wherever you get your podcasts! 

Local Game Developer and OSU Alumni Leads Second Annual TTRPG Fundraiser to Support Trans Advocacy Groups in Florida

Rue Dickey (they/he) is a returning guest to ID this week. You may remember Rue from last year as the organizer who helped raise over $400,000 for two trans rights organizations in Texas via Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPGs). Well, they’re back at it this year and we’re here to tell you all about it!

In February, 2022 Texas governor Greg Abbott called for teachers and members of the public to report parents of transgender children to authorities, equating providing support and medical care for trans youth to child abuse. This combined with a climate of increasing anti-trans legislation across the US, led Rue to take action. Rue is an Oregon State University alumnus and a freelance game developer, designing games for Hitpoint Press, Cobalt Press, and publishing independent work on game hosting platforms such as itch.io. Wanting to do something to help children and transgender people living in Texas, Rue decided to turn his passion for TTRPGs into a fundraiser. The online indie game hosting platform itch.io has been used in the past to create fundraisers for charities by bundling together and selling games. A few of Rue’s friends who run a BIPOC tabletop server have had experience with creating profit-sharing bundles using the platform in the past, so after he consulted them and walked through the steps, he set up a bundraiser. By the time of our interview with Rue in April, 2022 they had raised over $400,000 for TENT (Transgender Education Network of Texas, a trans-led group that works to combat misinformation on the community level through the corporate level, offering workshops as well as emergency relief funds for trans folks in need) and OLTT (Organización Latina Trans in Texas, a Latina trans woman-led organization focusing on transgender immigrants in Texas, assisting with the legal processes of immigration, name changes, and paperwork.) In addition to this they had been interviewed by several national news outlets, including NBC, Gizmodo, and The Mary Sue, as well as gaming-centric websites like Polygon, Dicebreaker, and GamesHub

Rue is a 2019 graduate of OSU’s Communications and Microbiology programs.

This year Rue is continuing the fundraiser, but focusing on Florida which has garnered national attention for anti-trans legislation such as the Parental Rights in Education Act, which restricts schools from including LGBTQ+ topics in curricula. The proposed expanded provisions to the act would ban teachers from addressing students by pronouns that differ from those they were assigned at birth, and staff would also be unable to share their own preferred pronouns if they deviate from those assigned at birth. Additionally, the Florida Board of Medicine enacted a rule that bars minors from starting puberty blockers or hormone therapy, essentially banning transition for those under the age of 18.

The organizations benefiting from the bundraiser this year are Zebra Youth Coalition (a network serving youth ages 13-24, that run shelters for youth that need safety and resources) and Transinclusive Group (a trans women of color-led coalition aimed at offering peer support, access to resources like HRT, and educating care providers in how to better take care of trans youth.) The current bundle launched on March 13th and has 505 game supplements and zines, the base price of which is $5 but the top donation is $1000. The fundraising goal for this year’s bundle is $250k, but in the couple of weeks since launching there’s already been $208k raised.

The bundle is live through April 6th, so there is still time to help reach their fundraising goal! To learn more about the fundraiser, tune into Rue’s episode this upcoming Sunday, March 26th at 7 PM! Be sure to listen live on KBVR 88.7FM, or download the podcast if you missed it.

Grouper groupie: studying climate change and the Nassau grouper

During winter months, a few days after the full moon, thousands of fish make their way to the warm tropical waters off the west coast of Little Cayman, Cayman Island. Nassau Grouper are typically territorial and don’t interact often, but once per year, they gather in the same spot where they all spawn to carry on the tradition of releasing gametes, in the hopes that some of them will develop to adulthood and carry on the population.

Our guest this week is Janelle Layton, a Masters (and soon to be PhD) student in Dr. Scott Heppel’s lab in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences. Janelle’s research focuses on this grouper, which is listed as near threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Overfishing has been the largest threat to Nassau Grouper populations, but another threat looms: warming waters due to climate change. This threat is what Janelle is interested in studying – how does the warming water temperature affect the growth and development of grouper larvae?

Janelle with a curious sea turtle

Each winter Janelle travels to this aggregation site in the Cayman Islands, where these large groups of grouper (grouper groups?) aggregate for a few days to reproduce. During this time, she collects thousands of fertilized Nassau Grouper eggs to take back to the lab and study. These eggs will develop in varying water temperatures for 6 days, where each day a subset of samples are preserved for future analysis.

Spawning groupers

So far, Janelle is finding that the larvae raised in higher temperatures tend to demonstrate not only an increase in mortality, but an increase in variability in mortality. What does this mean? Basically, eggs from some females are able to survive and develop under these stressful conditions better than eggs from other females – so is there a genetic component to being able to survive these temperature increases?

The answer may lie in proteins

Aside from development and mortality, Janelle is investigating this theory by measuring the expression of heat shock proteins in the fertilized eggs and larvae. Heat shock proteins are expressed in response to environmental stressors such as increased temperatures, and can be measured through RNA sequencing. The expression of these proteins might hold the key to understanding why some grouper are more likely to survive than others. Janelle’s work is a collaborative effort between Oregon State University, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, Reef Environmental Education Foundation and the Cayman Islands Department of Environment.

To learn more about Nassau Grouper, heat shock proteins, and what it’s like being a Black woman in marine science, tune into Janelle’s episode this upcoming Sunday, March 12th at 7 PM! Be sure to listen live on KBVR 88.7FM, or download the podcast if you missed it. You can also catch Janelle on TikTok or at her website.

Finicky Fish: Investigating the impact of dams on the John Day White Sturgeon

This week we have a Fisheries and Wildlife Master’s student and ODFW employee, Gabriella Brill, joining us to discuss her research investigating the impact of dams on the movement and reproduction habits of the White Sturgeon here in Oregon. Much like humans, these fish can live up to 100 years and can take 25 years to fully mature. But the similarities stop there, as they can also grow up to 10 ft long, haven’t evolved much in 200 million years, and can lay millions of eggs at a time (makes the Duggar family’s 19 Kids and Counting not seem so bad).   

Despite being able to lay millions of eggs at a time, the White Sturgeon will only do so if the conditions are right. This fish Goldilocks’ its way through the river systems, looking for a river bed that’s just right. If it doesn’t like what it sees, the fish can just choose not to lay the eggs and will wait for another year. When the fish don’t find places they want to lay their eggs, it can cause drastic changes to the overall population size. This can be a problem for people whose lives are intertwined with these fish: such as fishermen and local Tribal Nations (and graduate students).

The white sturgeon was once a prolific fish in the Columbia River and holds ceremonial significance to local Tribal Nations, however, post-colonialization a fishery was established in 1888 that collapsed the population just four years later in 1892. Due to the long lifespan of these fish, the effects of that fishery are something today’s populations have still not fully recovered from.

Image of white sturgeon in a river. It is a large bluish grey fish. The river is a murkey dark green color.
White Sturgeon

Can you hear me now

Gabriella uses sound transmitters to track the white sturgeon’s movements. Essentially, the fish get a small sound-emitting implant that is picked up by a series of receivers – as long the receivers don’t get washed away by a strong current. By monitoring the fish’s journey through the river systems, she can then determine if the man-made dams are impacting their ability to find a desirable place to lay eggs. 

Journey to researching a sturgeon’s journey

Gabriella always gravitated towards ecology due to the ways it blends many different sciences and ideas – and Fish are a great system for studying ecology. She started with studying Salmon in undergrad which eventually led to a position with the ODFW. Working with the ODFW inspired her to get a Master’s degree so that she could gain the necessary experience and credentials to be a more effective advocate for changes in conservation efforts that are being made. One way to get clout in the fish world: study a highly picky fish with a long life cycle. Challenge accepted.

Gabriella Brill holding a smaller sturgeon while on a boat.

To hear more about these finicky fish be sure to listen live on Sunday February 26th at 7PM on 88.7FM, or download the podcast.