DEATH on the shore - PLUS
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NOVEMBER
MONTH 2018
2020| WWW.THE-SCIENTIST.COM
| WWW.THE-SCIENTIST.COM
WHEN PREDATORS RETURN
PLUS
SHOULD PEER
REVIEWERS GET PAID?
BONUS PROTECTIONS
FROM SOME VACCINES
EXPOSING PREDATORY
JOURNALS USING POKÉMON
DEATH
on the shore
RESEARCHERS INVESTIGATE RECENT GRAY WHALE
STRANDINGS ALONG NORTH AMERICA’S PACIFIC COAST
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2.15.080420.0
The Scientist’s annual
Top 10 Innovations Competition
We showcase the best of this year’s cutting-edge, life-science technology, as determined by
a panel of expert judges. The winners will be the subject of a feature article next month in
the December 2020 issue of The Scientist.
• Judges chose from more than 45 cutting edge products to arrive at the Top 10
• Tune in to The Scientist to see which products won!
NOVEMBER 2020
Contents
THE SCIENTIST THE-SCIENTIST.COM VOLUME 34 NUMBER 11
© TERESE WINSLOW; © ISTOCK.COM, LOWMOTIONGLI; © LUCY CONKLIN
Features ON THE COVER: © SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, CHRISTOPHER SWANN
20
Vaccines with a Bonus
28
A Gray Whale Murder Mystery
36
Rewilding with Teeth
For decades, studies have found hints For the past two years, the charismatic Can reintroducing apex hunters
that some vaccines help protect against marine mammals have been washing up reinvigorate damaged ecosystems?
pathogens they weren’t designed to on Pacific shores in record numbers, BY KATARINA ZIMMER
target. Researchers are now striving to spurring scientists to investigate.
understand how such inoculations might BY ASHLEY YEAGER
be used to save more lives.
BY SHAWNA WILLIAMS
1 1 . 202 0 | T H E S C IE N T IST 3
PODCAST
BY SCIENTISTS FOR SCIENTISTS 1. Birds on the Brain: The Neuroscience Behind
The Scientist Speaks is a new podcast Songbird Communication and Human Speech
produced by The Scientist’s Creative the-scientist.com/TSS-episode-1
Services Team. Once a month, we bring 2. The Buzz About Genetically Modified Mosquitoes
you the stories behind news-worthy the-scientist.com/TSS-episode-2
molecular biology research.
3. Tackling Antibiotic Resistance: Viruses to the Rescue
the-scientist.com/TSS-episode-3
4. Hidden Hitchhikers: Lessons Learned from
The Human Microbiome Project
the-scientist.com/TSS-episode-4
NOVEMBER 2020
Department Contents
9
14 FROM THE EDITOR
Looming Change
As the world comes to grips with the new reality wrought by COVID-19,
the risk of catastrophe from a warming planet persists.
BY BOB GRANT
12 CRITIC AT LARGE
I Published a Paper Claiming Pokémon Caused Coronavirus
In the midst of an infectious disease pandemic, a science publishing experiment
exposes the danger of predatory publishers.
BY MATAN SHELOMI
14 NOTEBOOK
Researchers dissect the microbial communities on and around shipwrecks;
high-speed cameras capture tiny spiders using silk catapults to launch themselves
xx at prey
JOHN MCCORD, UNC COASTAL STUDIES INSTITUTE; MARK STONE, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON; © ISTOCK.COM, ERHUI1979
51 48 THE LITERATURE
Herbivore body size influences grazing behavior and poop quality; why centipede
venom kills prey but only stuns rivals; birds that go barren during drought have
improved survival
51 SCIENTIST TO WATCH
Chelsea Wood: Parasite Hunter
BY AMANDA HEIDT
52 CAREERS
Show Me the Money
Should peer reviewers be paid for their work?
BY SHAWNA WILLIAMS
xx
57 READING FRAMES
The Fire Beneath Evolution
xx
52 The idea that proteins can self-assemble into molecular
machines may shift our view of life’s origin.
ANSWER
BY JEREMY ENGLAND PUZZLE ON PAGE 11
60 FOUNDATIONS S N I V D B
The Paper Nautilus, 300 BC–present S E QU E NC E W I L D
X L B C A U
BY JEF AKST
CO I L OU T B R E E D
L R O F
IN EVERY ISSUE J O H A NN RH I N A L
8 CONTRIBUTORS G V S N
10 SPEAKING OF SCIENCE
Z Y GO T E L UMB A R
G D I P
58 THE GUIDE MU T A T I O N BO H R
F D S K O A
F O UR OV E RDO S E
S O N D Y E
1 1 . 202 0 | T H E S C IE N T IST 5
NOVEMBER 2020
Online Contents
THIS MONTH AT THE-SCIENTIST.COM:
VIDEO VIDEO VIDEO
Worm War Origins Reimagined Whale of a Problem
Chelsea Wood, a University of Jeremy England, this month’s Reading Here’s what researchers know about the
Washington parasitologist and this Frames author, explains his views on unusually high numbers of gray whale
month’s Scientist to Watch, gives how life may have started not with a strandings on the US West Coast in
an overview of her research on primordial, disordered soup, but with recent years.
schistosomiasis in Africa. smart protein assemblages.
AS ALWAYS, FIND BREAKING NEWS EVERY DAY ON OUR WEBSITE.
Coming in December
• Could manipulating dreams help scientists better understand them?
• The Scientist will announce the Top 10 Innovations of 2020
as judged by independent experts.
© ISTOCK.COM, MLADEN ZIVKOVIC
• Metabolomics analyses could help make nutrition research
more objective.
• The pharma industry looks to the International Space Station for drug
research and development.
AND MUCH MORE
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11. 202 0 | T H E S C IE N T IST 7
NOVEMBER 2020
Contributors
Jeremy England remembers learning about proteins and protein folding in high school and being struck
by how biology works at the molecular level, where biology, chemistry, and physics intersect. England
graduated from Harvard University with a degree in biochemical sciences in 2003, then received a Rhodes
Scholarship and studied physics at the University of Oxford. He then completed a PhD in physics at Stanford
University in 2009 and worked as a postdoc at Princeton University before joining the faculty at MIT. There,
he set his mind on studying self-copying and self-replication of cells and organisms, aiming to derive rules
that constrain when those processes can or should happen. From this research, he pieced together a theory
to explain the spontaneous emergence of life based on how collections of molecules learn to obtain and use
energy more efficiently—a process he calls dissipative adaptation.
“Once you study life as a physicist and you see, from the perspective of physics, how impressive life is at
accomplishing very complicated functional tasks using just a combination of the right physical principles
and how they interact in some particular architecture, it’s really quite marvelous,” England says. In 2019,
he left MIT to work at GlaxoSmithKline as one of the company’s senior directors in artificial intelligence
and machine learning. England also maintains a research position in physics at the Georgia Institute of
Technology. On page 57, England takes a deep dive into dissipative adaptation and reconsiders life’s origin.
Matan Shelomi was in the third grade when he learned the word “entomologist.” “I decided I needed to
memorize it,” he says, “because that’s what I wanted to be.” As a child growing up in Queens, New York, Shelomi
didn’t have the opportunity to see many wild animals—besides the ants in his family’s apartment, he jokes—
but he did have access to Pokémon, the multimedia franchise that allows players to collect and evolve fictional
creatures, some of which resemble real insects. In 2014, after receiving his bachelor’s degree in organismic and
evolutionary biology at Harvard University, Shelomi completed a PhD at the University of California, Davis,
studying the digestive physiology of stick insects. Shelomi next moved to Germany for a postdoc at the Max
Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology before accepting a professorship at National Taiwan University in 2017.
Like most academics, Shelomi frequently receives emails from predatory journals asking to publish his
work. Eventually, he became so frustrated that he decided to submit a fabricated, Pokémon-themed article to
Plant Biochemistry and Physiology in 2019. Shelomi has since had almost a dozen papers accepted in nine
predatory journals, each manuscript containing fictitious references to pop culture and directly calling out the
journals’ bad practices. In March of this year, Shelomi published a piece claiming that SARS-CoV-2 stemmed
from a bat-like Pokémon (see “I Published a Paper Claiming Pokémon Caused Coronavirus” on page 12)
to demonstrate how damaging such misinformation can be, and to teach others how to spot it. “What these
journals are doing is fraud,” Shelomi tells The Scientist. “If anyone can publish anything and call it a scientific
paper, the door is wide open for anyone to make false claims.”
KATHERINE TAYLOR; MATAN SHELOMI, MPI-CE; JANE WINSLOW
From a young age, Terese Winslow loved to draw, but she also loved science. Her mother was an art
teacher and three of her sisters graduated from art school. Winslow took a slightly different path, majoring
in biological sciences at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Upon graduating, she worked in a lab
at Duke University researching muscular dystrophy, and then at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center’s
Neuropsychopharmacology Lab (while employed by Harvard University). Ultimately, she was able to combine
her interests by enrolling in Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s Art as Applied to Medicine program, where
she received a master’s in medical and biological illustration in 1984. Since then, Winslow has maintained a
medical and scientific illustration business, and her art has appeared in textbooks, journals, magazines, and
electronic media. Winslow says she is particularly proud of her work for the National Cancer Institute, where her
illustrations can be found on the webpage summaries for most cancers. Both of Winslow’s parents, three of her
siblings, and ten other relatives all had cancer, she says. “I have a personal interest in helping people with cancer.”
She admits that she often uses her family members as models for her illustrations. She’s used her son as
a model in illustrations of head and neck cancers, for example, and her daughter for a drawing of thyroid
cancer. “My poor husband is in colonoscopy illustrations,” Winslow says. On page 24, she illustrates how
vaccines train innate immunity; for this infographic, she used her daughter’s neighbor as a model.
8 T H E SC I EN TIST | the-scientist.comFROM THE EDITOR
Looming Change
As the world comes to grips with the new reality wrought by COVID-19,
the risk of catastrophe from a warming planet persists.
BY BOB GRANT
I
n this topsy-turvy year, the world has been waylaid by a viral pan-
demic. But a larger and more intractable menace churns in the
background, continuing to wreak havoc while humanity’s atten-
tion is diverted. Climate change remains arguably the most press-
ing threat we face as a species. And despite signs of hope earlier this
year as lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic grounded
airplanes, shuttered businesses, and garaged cars, the problem is not
abating. Humanity must be able to fight disease while simultane-
ously keeping our sights trained on the persistent and snowballing
effects of global warming. If we are not up to this task, the hell of
2020 will pale in comparison to the challenges we’ll face.
The first few months of the pandemic provided a glimpse of
what a planet given respite from the relentless pressure of mod- While a pandemic the size and scope of COVID-19 demands
ern human inhabitance might look like. In April, people in Pun- immediate attention, action on climate change and other environ-
jab, India, snapped photos of the Himalayas, more than 100 miles mental crises cannot be shelved. Wildfires in the western US and
away, a sight usually obscured by smoggy skies. The International hurricanes in the South remind us that even though we’re busy try-
Energy Agency published a report that same month that the globe ing to address a pressing public health emergency, global warm-
was on track to reduce CO2 emissions by 8 percent compared to ing isn’t put on pause. This persistent concern should inform how
2019 levels—an unprecedented drop. we strategically emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and enter a
All this sounded like a rare spot of good news in an otherwise world where we live with the chronic problem of SARS-CoV-2 and
disconcerting year. But alas, the sense that nature might be able likely future epidemics. “Any economic recovery packages designed
to quickly heal over the scars of human activity was short-lived. As to help economies fully rebound need to focus on zero-carbon cli-
economies reopened, we took back to our petroleum-fueled modes mate resilient investments that address unemployment but avoid
of transportation, and fossil fuel–powered factories revved back up to locking us into a new high-carbon future,” Bob Ward, a policy direc-
continue their belching of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. By tor at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the
mid-May, levels of several air pollutants in China, including ozone, sul- London School of Economics, told The Guardian in June.
fur dioxide, and fine particulate matter, had rebounded to concentra- I was heartened to see that, in both the US presidential debate and
tions above levels recorded in April and May of last year, according to the US vice presidential debate that have been held as of this writing,
an analysis by the Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and climate change questions were posed to the candidates, something
Clean Air. And globally, CO2 emissions have been creeping back up as that did not occur in the debates running up to the 2016 US election.
the planet’s human inhabitants return to something close to business After the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is behind us, humanity
as usual. By early June, global emissions had rebounded to within 5 must learn to navigate a world changed by the ravages of a novel virus
percent of mean 2019 levels, up from an average 17 percent reduction at the same time that we address not-so-novel problems with how
in early April, according to data published by the Integrated Carbon Homo sapiens affects our planet and the organisms we share it with. g
Observation System.
There have also been negative effects of the COVID-19 pan-
demic on the environment. Pre-pandemic, humans were already
dumping an unbelievable amount of plastic—8 million metric tons
per year—into our oceans, the eventual destination for much of our
ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
waste. But with the uptick in the use of products such as dispos-
able plastic packaging, bags, and cutlery as well as personal protec-
tive equipment, this year is set to outpace 2019’s outflow of plas-
tic waste by 30 percent, according to a paper published in June in Editor-in-Chief
Environmental Science & Technology. eic@the-scientist.com
11.2020 | T H E S C IE N T IST 9Exploring Life,
Inspiring Innovation
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of multimedia content.QUOTES
Speaking of Science
1 2 3 4 5 6 The federal government is paying
Dr. Bright, one of the nation’s
7 8 leading experts in pandemic
preparedness and response, and
an internationally recognized
9 10 expert in vaccine and diagnostic
development, to sit on his hands
during a global pandemic that has,
to date, killed one million people
11 12 13 14 globally and over 210,000 people
Note: The answer grid will include every letter of the alphabet.
within the United States.
—An amended whistleblower complaint filed
15 16 17 by attorneys representing Rick Bright, an
immunologist who last month (October 6)
resigned from his post at the National
Institutes of Health
18 19 20
You have a deeply polarized
electorate, an authoritarian
president who wants to use
21 22
the levers of government to
give himself an advantage
electorally and a pandemic in
the middle of the campaign.
BY EMILY COX AND HENRY RATHVON
—Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government at
Harvard University and an expert on the US Food
and Drug Administration, talking to The Washington
Post about the politicization of COVID-19 treatment
ACROSS DOWN and vaccine development (October 11)
7. Order, as of the nucleotide bases 1. Subject of research by Masters
in a DNA molecule and Johnson
8. Living in a state of nature 2. Zero value; like a nonfunctional allele
9. Shape of a DNA package 3. Present at nativity, as a trait
10. Produce offspring from stocks 4. DNA molecule carrying foreign genetic
not related material into another cell
11. Gregor Mendel’s middle name 5. Short stature by dint of achondroplasia
13. Relating to the nose 6. Pigment rare among animals
15. Cell formed by the union of two 12. Chemist Amedeo with a constant
gametes named for him
17. Of the vertebrae directly above 14. Stage in mitosis
the pelvis 16. Inventor in Menlo Park
18. Sudden variation in an inheritable 17. Connected, as traits inherited together
characteristic 19. Aerial phenomena defying explanation
© JONNY HAWKINS
20. Niels who said “A physicist is just an 20. Anatomist’s study
atom’s way of looking at itself”
21. Number of classical elements or Answer key on page 5
fundamental forces
22. Dangerous mistake in self-medication
11. 2020 | T H E S C IE N T IST 1 1CRITIC AT LARGE
I Published a Paper Claiming
Pokémon Caused Coronavirus
In the midst of an infectious disease pandemic, a science publishing
experiment exposes the danger of predatory publishers.
BY MATAN SHELOMI
O
n March 18, 2020, the American
Journal of Biomedical Science
& Research published my paper
claiming that eating a bat-like Pokémon
sparked the spread of COVID-19. This
paper, “Cyllage City COVID-19 outbreak
linked to Zubat consumption,” blames a
fictional creature for an outbreak in a fic-
tional city, cites fictional references (includ-
ing one from author Bruce Wayne in
Gotham Forensics Quarterly on using bats
to fight crime), and is cowritten by fictional
authors such as Pokémon’s Nurse Joy and
House, MD. Nonetheless, four days after
submission, editor Catherine Nichols was
“cheerful to inform” me via email that it had
“received positive review comments” and
was accepted for publication.
It’s not the only fake paper on Poké- They appear legitimate, but practice no peer review,
mon I’ve had published or accepted for no editing, not even a reality check.
publication, covering creatures from
Pikachu to Porygon. Some would argue
that editors cannot recognize Pokémon range from less than $100 to several cited my article, but also cited one of my
names, but lines in the text such as “a thousand dollars. (I have not paid a made-up references, “Signs and symp-
journal publishing this paper does not penny so far, as some of these journals toms of Pokérus infection,” as the paper
practice peer review and must therefore publish submitted manuscripts before that first identified SARS-CoV-2. When I
be predatory” or “this invited article is in receiving payment.) Predatory journals asked the author how this happened, he
a predatory journal that likely does not are just expensive blogs, no more reli- failed to see any problem with citing
practice peer review” would have tipped able as sources of scientific information a paper he never read while writing a
off anyone who bothered to read the arti- than a celebrity’s Twitter feed, yet unfor- paper outside his field, and was unaware
cles. These papers did not slip in under tunately equally trusted in some circles. of the difference between open access
the radar; they were welcomed in blindly. To make matters worse, my Pokémon- and predatory journals. The difference—
The journals that accepted my papers inspired paper on the novel coronavi- editing and peer review—is critical: when
are predatory. They appear legitimate, rus has already been cited. A physicist it comes to public health, fake journals
but practice no peer review, no editing, based in Tunisia published “The COVID- are a real danger.
not even a reality check. Publishers such 19 outbreak’s multiple effects,” which While evidence shows that the major-
as BiomedGrid (which publishes American claimed that COVID-19 was human- ity of authors publishing in predatory jour-
Journal of Biomedical Science & Research), made and is treatable with “provincial nals are naive researchers from develop-
SONJA PINCK
OMICS, or Longdom Publishing will herbs,” in another predatory journal, ing countries, ample opportunity exists to
accept anything so long as authors The International Journal of Engineering use such venues deliberately to push fraud
agree to pay the open access fees, which Research and Technology. He not only and misinformation. What is stopping
12 T H E SC I EN TIST | the-scientist.comsomeone, using their real name or a fake equally eroneous drivel, and then publicly
name (or your name!), from publishing citing that paper as evidence? The answer
a paper claiming that kale juice prevents is nothing. It’s been done, with quacks pro-
AIDS, that vaccines cause transsexualism, moting the thoroughly debunked, fraudu-
that certain races are inferior, or any other lent, fake diagnosis of “chronic Lyme” in
predatory and post-publication review
journals (which accept and publish all
manuscripts under the assumption that
A. Pikachurin
readers will review them later). One should
not automatically trust all documents for-
matted as a scientific paper.
Don’t real journals publish fraud
and nonsense too? Yes, but once the
fraud is discovered, they can retract the
paper (though far too many do not). So
far, more than 30 articles on COVID-
19 have been retracted. My paper and
the one citing it have not, and never
will. Silver lining: they can be used in
science ethics classes to educate others
LIKE US ON
B. Pokemon
about predatory publishing, and have
inspired some researchers, such as Car-
FACEBOOK
thage College’s Adam Larson, to write
Pokémon papers themselves. Did you know that
How, then, to catch a predator, besides
checking Beall’s List? First, assume all more than 2 million
journals or conferences that email you
unsolicited submission invitations are
people follow
predatory, especially if they are outside The Scientist on
your field, cover overly broad subjects,
promise rapid review, or flatter you with Facebook? Like
compliments such as “eminent researcher.” our page to see the
Any journal with multiple email domains
is predatory, as are absolutely all journals latest news, videos,
C. Pikachu the Pokémon
that list the worthless “Index Copernicus”
infographics, and
number on their website.
There are no shortcuts in science. If more, right in your
you want to be taken seriously as an aca-
demic, do not give predatory journals
news feed.
your business, especially as institutes
wise up to the problem and stop accept-
ing such articles on CVs or applications.
Although, if any institute wants to grant
me an honorary degree in Pokémon
Studies for my eminence in the field, I
would cheerfully accept. g
Matan Shelomi, who writes fake articles
under the pseudonym Mattan Schlomi,
Adapted from a figure that appeared in another is an assistant professor of entomology
paper, “Expression of the Pokemon gene and
at National Taiwan University. Trade-
pikachurin protein in the pokémon Pikachu,”
that Shelomi got published in the Academia marks here are for the purposes of educa-
Journal of Scientific Research this July. tion and parody under fair use.
facebook.com/
TheScientistMagazineNotebook NOVEMBER 2020
Sunken steel hull under his feet. As the direc-
tor of maritime studies at East Carolina
SHIPWRECK MICROBIOLOGY: Microbiologist
Erin Field (center) holds a shipwreck core that
Microbial
maritime archaeologist Nathan Richards (left)
University (ECU), Richards had studied
drilled from the hull of the Pappy Lane, while
hundreds of shipwrecks over the years, Field’s student Kyra Price holds a sterile bag
Treasure and had even drilled core samples of
some, but this was the first time he’d
for its collection.
A JOHN MCCORD, UNC COASTAL STUDIES INSTITUTE
rmed with a battery-powered gone in search of microbes.
underwater drill, maritime Richards has been interested in this Despite having been sitting on the
archaeologist Nathan Rich- particular wreck for the better part of the seafloor for just half a century, the wreck
ards ducked his face into the Atlantic past decade. His exhaustive investigation— is extremely corroded compared with
Ocean. It was a sunny afternoon in Sep- funded primarily by the North Carolina other sunken vessels in the area, Richards
tember 2017, and Richards was stand- Department of Transportation because a notes. Like many marine archaeologists,
ing in waist-deep water atop a wrecked planned bridge project would run right by he has studied the galvanic corrosion
ship called the Pappy Lane, which ran the wreck—revealed it to be an amphibi- known to occur on shipwrecks as the
aground off the coast of North Carolina ous assault vessel from the Second World boats’ metals exchange electrons with
in the 1960s. With students looking on, War that had apparently been converted to one another once submerged in the con-
Richards peered through his mask and an oil barge before being intentionally run ductive seawater. “But that’s an electro-
skillfully applied pressure to push the aground to help rescue some other barges chemical process that doesn’t really take
1.5-inch circular drill bit into the ship’s stranded in a storm. into account all that much microbes. . . .
14 T H E SC I EN TIST | the-scientist.comA BOAT FULL OF BUGS: The Pappy Lane was
intentionally run aground in the 1960s off the
coast of North Carolina. Now it’s home to a
diverse community of microbes.
And [we’ve] always known that there’s
a microbial component to corrosion.”
So this time, Richards was drilling for
microbes to see if he and his students
could shed light on the Pappy Lane’s par-
ticularly rapid deterioration.
Along with ECU microbiologist Erin
Field, Richards and his students drilled a
total of six core samples of the ship’s steel
hull—containing both the metal structure
itself and the concrete-like layer of bacteria
and their secretions on either side—from
the bow to the stern. The team also collected
pieces of loose debris from the ship, as well
as seawater and sediment samples, all of
which were placed into a cooler for the trip
back to the lab for genetic analysis.
The data revealed pronounced dif-
ferences in microbial communities—in
terms of both the species makeup and the
metabolic functionalities—on the differ-
ent materials of the shipwreck and in the
surrounding water and sediment (Front
Microbiol, 11:1897, 2020). “I often think
about it in terms of the human micro-
biome,” Field says. “We have microbes
that live all over and in our bodies, but surroundings of oxygen, possibly inviting affecting the deterioration or preserva-
you won’t find the same microbes in your sulfate bacteria that grow well in anoxic tion of these wrecks.”
gut that you will on your skin because the conditions to further corrode the ship’s The University of Southern Mis-
environments are different.” steel, Field speculates. sissippi’s Leila Hamdan, who has been
Field was particularly interested in studying the microbiomes of deep-sea
how iron-oxidizing bacteria, which eat wrecks for a decade but was not involved
iron from the ship’s metal and produce in the Pappy Lane work, says that it’s
rust as a waste product, were contribut-
We’ve always known that exciting that the team was able to take
ing to the Pappy Lane’s deterioration. In there’s a microbial component core samples to search for microbial life
JOHN MCCORD, UNC COASTAL STUDIES INSTITUTE
the lab, Field and her team cultured bac- to corrosion. on the shipwreck itself. “In that way, you
teria from the debris and core samples —Nathan Richards, East Carolina University can ask those really specific questions of:
and found that iron-oxidizing bacteria How does microbial life exist on these
such as Zetaproteobacteria were present human-made surfaces?” She adds that
in every sample, and particularly abun- she was not surprised that the micro-
dant in samples with visible rust. “It’s The findings could have implica- bial communities varied in and around
possible that their presence could indi- tions for preservation strategies not just the wreck. “We definitely see parallels
cate early detection for future corrosion,” for shipwrecks, but for any aquatic steel there,” she says of her work on deep-
Field says. She also notes that Zetapro- structure, she notes. “Most [current] sea wrecks. Analyzing samples of the
teobacteria, as some of the first to settle preservation methods are not account- surrounding sediment, her team recently
on shipwrecks, may make the environ- ing for the microbial role . . . so we’re found an increasing abundance of cel-
ment more hospitable to other microbes. still missing that piece of the puzzle. And lulose- and hemicellulose-degrading
For example, they deplete the immediate we’re finding that microbes are definitely bacteria with proximity to two newly
1 1 . 202 0 | T H E S C IE N T IST 1 5NOTEBOOK
UNDERWATER ACTION: Maritime
archaeologist Nathan Richards drills a core
from the hull of the Pappy Lane shipwreck.
yacht that sank in the Gulf of Mexico in
1944, “and we’re also seeing this pattern
emerge around one of the two wooden
shipwrecks that we studied last sum-
mer.” Hamdan says these results will be
published soon.
“Looking at microbial communities
on shipwrecks is definitely something
new,” says Kirstin Meyer-Kaiser, a marine
biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution who studies invertebrate com-
munities that live on shipwrecks. She
suspects that, with more research on the
microbial communities in and around
shipwrecks, scientists will learn about
how those communities interact with
invertebrates, too. Just as the material of
the ship appears to affect which bacteria
settle where, she speculates, perhaps the
biofilms those bacteria form affect which
invertebrates take up residence.
Hamdan says it’s very likely microbes
are playing a role in shaping macrofaunal
communities at shipwrecks. “For you to
be able to see any corals and tube worms
and all of this gorgeous stuff that grows
on shipwrecks, the microbes have to get
there first.”
—Jef Akst
discovered wooden wrecks—one around
500 meters deep and the other nearly
around the wrecks. She’s also studied
how the shipwrecks themselves affect Spidershot
1,800 meters down—in the Gulf of Mex- the microbial communities surrounding Leg over leg, a furry brownish-black spi-
JOHN MCCORD, UNC COASTAL STUDIES INSTITUTE
ico, says Hamdan, who presented the them. Most recently, she and her team der tugs on a single silk thread, tightening
data at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in placed pieces of wood near wrecks in the the frame of its web. It pulls and pulls, as if
San Diego in February. deep sea that they later retrieved, using removing slack from a slingshot, and then
Hamdan joins Field as one of the an acoustic signal to trigger a flotation it waits. Minutes pass, sometimes hours.
few microbiologists to focus on ship- device to bring them to a research vessel Then, when an unsuspecting insect flies
wrecks. In her first such project, Ham- at the surface, to see what microbes had by, the spider releases the thread, spring-
dan and colleagues navigated a remotely grown on them. ing itself and its satellite dish–shaped web
operated vehicle to six Gulf of Mexico The results support the idea that the toward its prey. All of this happens in the
wrecks, all located between 140 meters composition of microbial communities blink of an eye, with the spider and its
and 2,000 meters deep, to collect sam- changes with distance from wrecks, she web hurtling through the air at more than
ples that could help them understand says. “We’ve seen a . . . definitive sig- 4 meters per second (9 miles per hour)
the effects of the 2010 Deepwater Hori- nature of increased biodiversity in a with accelerations exceeding 130 g. That’s
zon oil spill on the microbes in and ring around the shipwreck Anona,” a 130 times the acceleration experienced in
16 T H E SC I EN TIST | the-scientist.comfreefall, and an order of magnitude greater old and only described the slingshot The spider can usually sling-
than that of a sprinting cheetah. motion, not the speeds or g-forces shot itself several times
Those eye-watering numbers led the spiders experienced. So Bhamla before the web is destroyed.
Georgia Tech chemical engineer Saad enlisted the help of his postdoc, Symone
Bhamla to wonder: How the heck are Alexander, and together they “went out
these tiny spiders achieving such fast hunting for spiders in the Amazon rain-
movements? Bhamla’s lab is “obsessed forest,” Alexander says.
with ultra-fast motions in biology,” he After locating one of the spiders, the frequency of a buzzing mosquito—
says, so when he spotted one of these which measure roughly 2 millimeters and that seemed to be the only fre-
spiders flying past his face a few years in length, the researchers would set up quency that set the spiders’ spring off.
ago while he was hiking through the portable high-speed cameras with mag- “It’s just amazing that we can snap our
Peruvian rainforest, he knew he had to nifying lenses to zoom in on and record fingers and get this magical thing,”
investigate. He checked the literature their motions. Then, either Alexander Bhamla says.
and found only a few papers on Therid- or Bhamla would snap their fingers to Analyzing the footage, Alexander
iosomatidae, the arachnid family com- get the spider to catapult itself through and Bhamla could watch exactly how
prising spider species that use their webs the air. Only later did the pair learn that the spiders oriented themselves on the
as slingshots. The papers were decades a human finger-snap closely matches tension line at the front of their webs.
ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
1 1 . 202 0 | T H E S C IE N T IST 1 7SETTING UP: Chemical engineer Saad Bhamla
(left), postdoctoral researcher Symone
Alexander (center), and Peruvian field guide
Jaime Navarro adjust an ultrafast camera in
preparation for imaging a slingshot spider.
Facing away from the web, the spider
grips its silk net with its four back legs
and pulls itself up the tension line with
its four front legs, bundling it up in two
front appendages called pedipalps as
it goes. On sensing the sounds of prey
nearby —most likely via its web, which
appears to act like a small antenna—
the spider releases the tension line.
Although researchers had previously
assumed it let go of the silk thread
altogether, Alexander and Bhamla’s
videos show that the spider in fact only
releases some of the line while keeping
hold of a part of it with its pedipalps,
making it easier to reset its sling-
shot to trap its next victim (Curr Biol,
30:R928–29, 2020). Again and again,
the spider captures an insect, wraps it
in silk for later, then “comes right back
to that tension line and bundles it up
again. That allows it to reset and reload
pretty quickly,” Alexander says. The spi-
der can usually slingshot itself several
times before the web is destroyed.
The speeds and accelerations of this
spider are impressive, but so is the fact
that, unlike most web-building spiders,
it’s actively hunting, Bhamla says. “It’s
changed the function of its web,” he
says. “Instead of waiting for something
to collide with it, the spider is going
after things . . . actually catching flying
insects in midair.”
To see the video of this little spider
pull on its line, load its web, sense its
prey, and then fly through the air to trap
GEOFF GALLICE; LAWRENCE E. REEVES
it is humbling, says Sheila Patek, a biolo-
gist at Duke University who studies tiny
spring mechanisms across the natural
world but was not involved in this work.
READY, SET... A slingshot spider prepares to
launch its cone-shaped web at a flying insect.
To do so, the spider will release a bundle of silk,
catapulting both the spider and the web.
18 T H E SC I EN TIST | the-scientist.comInstead of waiting for something to collide with it, the What’s fascinating is the amount of
spider is going after things . . . actually catching flying energy the spiders can store in their web
insects in midair. —Saad Bhamla, Georgia Tech and then unleash to catch their prey,
says Sarah Han, a graduate student in
biologist Todd Blackledge’s lab at the
University of Akron. With Blackledge,
she wants to investigate how the web-
“We humans always think we’re the best Theridiosomatidae aren’ t com- bing material, typically thought to dis-
at everything, and in the natural world, pletely unique in this respect, however. perse energy, can, in fact, store energy,
those spiders are doing something that’s Spiders in the Hyptiotes genus also use a characteristic that might inform
pretty difficult.” Other critters, includ- orb webs to actively hunt. Hyptiotes the design of synthetic silk. Han also
ing trap-jaw spiders and mantis shrimp, spiders move at slower accelerations— recently began collaborating with Alex-
can move certain appendages such as a mere 772.85 m/s 2, compared with the ander, who will be starting her own
claws or mouthparts at speeds of 30 to Theridiosomatidae’s 1300 m/s 2 —yet lab at Auburn University in 2021, and
80 kilometers per hour (20 to 50 miles they load energy in their webs simi- Bhamla on Theridiosomatidae, to look
per hour), she says. But slingshot spi- larly, then rocket toward prey, unleash- at how those spiders have evolved their
ders are using an external tool, a web, to ing additional silk threads onto their slingshot systems. Now that high-speed
snare their prey, and they’re working at victims to finalize the capture. When camera footage can offer scientists a
speeds faster than their nervous systems the spider stops itself suddenly by frame-by-frame view of what the arach-
can monitor, so they have to plan ahead clamping down on its tension thread nids are doing, Patek says, “it just opens
and essentially let their spring and latch with its legs, the resulting jerk on the up a myriad of areas of research in evo-
system control what happens after they web wraps the capture threads around lution, neuroscience, materials science,
let go of the tension thread. “It’s super- its prey from all directions (PNAS, and human engineering.”
power-type stuff,” Patek says. 116:12060–65, 2019). —Ashley Yeager
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Vaccines
with a Bonus
For decades, studies have found hints that some vaccines help protect against
pathogens they weren’t designed to target. Researchers are now striving to
understand how such inoculations might be used to save more lives.
BY SHAWNA WILLIAMS
A
s a physician-researcher specializ- vaccine (called bacille Calmette-Guérin, Kollmann didn’t wait long to begin
ing in infections in newborns, Tobi or BCG) to low-weight infants in Guinea- studying what he terms the pathogen-
Kollmann is laser focused on how to Bissau at birth cut their mortality rate agnostic effects of BCG, coauthoring sev-
stop babies from dying. While mortality for in their first four weeks of life in half— eral reviews on the topic and, more recently,
kids under five years old has dropped sub- not because of the protection it offered studying the mechanisms of the effects
stantially in recent decades, he says, there has against tuberculosis itself, but by reducing in animals. Other vaccines, such as the
been little improvement in the rate of deaths the risk of sepsis and other infections— smallpox and live polio vaccines, have also
in the first week of life. Indeed, of the 5.2 mil- it caught his attention.1 “That to me was yielded hints in observational studies that
lion children under 5 years old the World just unimaginable,” he says. Around 2012, they could provide some protection, at least
Health Organization estimates died last year Kollmann attended a meeting of research- temporarily, from pathogens other than
of preventable or treatable causes, nearly ers studying such off-target effects of vac- those they target. In recent years, some
half—2.4 million—died before reaching cines and sat in on a talk by one of the randomized controlled trials have provided
four weeks of age, and most newborn deaths authors of the 2011 study, Dutch anthro- more-solid evidence for such protections.
occurred in the first week after birth. Having pologist Peter Aaby, founder of the Ban- Despite decades of reports of vaccines’
spent time in African countries where neo- dim Health Project. Aaby spoke about off-target effects, however, the phenome-
natal mortality is common and witnessed the the history of research on two vaccines non has received relatively little attention,
frustration of colleagues there with their lim- linked to declines in all-cause mortality: and researchers have only a nascent under-
ited options for preventing it, Kollmann, now BCG and the measles vaccine, which both standing of the mechanisms. While critics
at the Telethon Kids Institute in Perth, Aus- incorporate live, attenuated pathogens. argue that some of the claims made about
tralia, says he wanted to find solutions that Kollmann “was just shocked how such a pathogen-agnostic effects outstrip the avail-
could be implemented immediately. tool that could potentially be so incredibly able evidence, Kollmann says he thinks
So when Kollmann came across a 2011 effective . . . could have been kept under many experts have been slow to embrace
study that found giving the tuberculosis the wraps for so, so long.” their potential of pathogen-agnostic
11.2020 | T H E S C IE N T IST 2 1effects because of dogmatic thinking than-expected rates of influenza and other BCG even proved itself an early form
about how the immune system works. “Peo- respiratory infections in the months after it of immunotherapy after researchers at
ple think in boxes,” he says. was given, an effect backed up by later con- Queen’s University in Ontario published
The question of how much protec- trolled trials.2 It wasn’t clear what explained a 1976 report of nine patients with blad-
tion vaccines such as BCG provide against the off-target effect, but Chumakov, Voroshi- der cancer who received an injection of
off-target pathogens, and under what cir- lova, and their colleagues found that the vac- the BCG vaccine directly into the affected
cumstances, has acquired more urgency cine raised subjects’ blood levels of interfer- organ and had a lower-than-expected
as COVID-19 sweeps the globe. Trials are ons, proteins that instruct immune cells to recurrence rate.4 The vaccine is still used
now underway testing the BCG vaccine in launch an antiviral response. to treat bladder cancer today.
groups at high risk of exposure to SARS- Other studies looking into the Sabin Another vaccine with apparent bonus
CoV-2 to see if it can provide partial, tem- vaccine’s effect on diseases besides polio protective effects was one designed to pre-
porary protection against the novel coro- supported this observation. And as it vent measles. In the 1970s, vaccinating
navirus—marking the first time a vaccine turned out, the oral polio immunization children in very poor countries against
has been trialed against a specific pathogen wasn’t unique in providing nonspecific measles wasn’t a priority for international
other than the one it was designed for. “It’s protection. In controlled trials of the BCG aid groups because, some believed, the
obviously very important to emphasize vaccine conducted between 1948 and 1961 children who died from the disease were
this does not replace a corona-specific in the US and the UK, researchers found malnourished and would have died soon
vaccine, because, of course, that’s what the an average reduction in mortality from of something else. But when Aaby and his
world needs,” says Nigel Curtis, a clinician causes other than tuberculosis of about colleagues visited an area of Guinea-Bissau
and infectious disease researcher at Mur- 25 percent among those who received the in 1979 to investigate this hypothesis, they
doch Children’s Research Institute and the shot compared with those who did not.3 found that the children who died of mea-
University of Melbourne who is leading
a trial of BCG for COVID-19. “But this
might provide a stopgap until one comes
along, because it looks like it might be
many months or years before that.”
Early hints
One of the first researchers to note the
apparent nonspecific effects of a vaccine was
Soviet virologist Marina Voroshilova, who
together with her husband Mikhail Chu-
makov, the director of the Polio Research
Institute in Moscow, observed an unex-
pected benefit while spearheading large-
scale testing of a new polio vaccine begin-
ning in 1959. Unlike Jonas Salk’s famous
vaccine, which used killed virus, the new,
oral version, developed by Albert Sabin,
© SHUTTERSTOCK.COM, UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE
used live, attenuated virus. Voroshilova and
Chumakov didn’t hesitate to give the inoc-
ulation to their own children as well as to
millions of other young people. Voroshi-
lova noticed that in addition to conferring
lasting protection against polio, the vaccine
also seemed to be associated with lower-
A CURIOUS CORRELATION: An oral polio
vaccine developed by Albert Sabin (left)
with live, attenuated virus appears to confer
some short-term protection against influenza
and other respiratory infections in addition
to long-lasting protection against polio.
22 T H E SC I EN TIST | the-scientist.comsles weren’t more likely to be malnour- at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical from other causes of death. The reviewers
ished than those who survived the disease. Medicine who has written letters in the past found no clinical trials of nonspecific effects
After public health officials implemented to journals challenging the interpretations of for DTP, and all of the observational studies
a vaccination program with a live, atten- study results that indicate such effects. One addressing the question were classified as
uated measles inoculation in the area, problem with observational studies, he says, having a high or very high risk of bias and
mortality within one year among 6- to is that “vaccines in routine practice are not generated widely varying results.7
35-month-old children declined sharply, allocated randomly, and kids who receive vac- The working group concluded in 2014
Aaby and his team found—an effect not cines, in any population in the world outside that “the systematic review neither excludes
fully explained by the drop in measles a vaccine trial, are not like the kids who don’t nor confirms the possibility of beneficial
infections.5 The study was not a controlled receive vaccines. That’s been a main issue” or deleterious non-specific immunological
trial, however, so it remains impossible to that can confound results, he says. effects of vaccines on all cause-mortality,”
say if the vaccine was responsible.
To examine this apparent link between
the measles vaccine and non-measles mor- Trials are now underway testing the BCG vaccine to see
tality in other settings, Aaby and his col-
leagues later analyzed the results of 10
if it can provide partial, temporary protection against
cohort and case-control studies on measles COVID-19—marking the first time a vaccine has been
vaccination performed in seven developing trialed against a specific pathogen other than the one it
countries. The drop in mortality rates after was designed for.
vaccination ranged from 30 percent to 86
percent, outstripping the reductions that
could be explained by measles mortality
rates alone. “These observations suggest that To sort through the evidence on non- and also noted a lack of data on what the
standard titre measles vaccine may confer specific effects and what implications they mechanisms for such effects might be in
a beneficial effect which is unrelated to the might have for vaccine schedules, the World humans.8 The authors suggested that the
specific protection against measles disease,” Health Organization (WHO) convened a WHO develop standard protocols for study-
the authors wrote in their 1995 BMJ paper. working group in 2013 that included Fine, ing nonspecific effects in an ethical and rig-
They detected no such effects with two Benn, and other experts. (The WHO for- orous way, but it’s unclear what the current
other, non-live vaccines, diphtheria-tetanus- mulates recommendations for low- and status of that effort is. A WHO official told
pertussis (DTP) and a polio immunization.6 middle-income regions, but each country The Scientist in July that she would look into
It was around that time that Christine develops a vaccination schedule based on the matter but never provided the informa-
Stabell Benn, then a medical student at Aar- its own disease threats and other circum- tion despite several follow-up inquiries.
hus University, joined Aaby’s team at the Ban- stances.) As part of its research, the group
dim Health Project. She never left, and the commissioned an independent systematic Recent developments
pair has now studied the nonspecific effects of review of studies on nonspecific effects of New studies on nonspecific effects have been
vaccines together for more than two decades, BCG, DTP, and the measles vaccine. The published since the working group con-
becoming perhaps the most visible advocates review identified five clinical trials of BCG, cluded, but a full picture of the phenome-
of those effects’ significance. Through further including the study of low birthweight non has not yet come into focus. In a 2017
studies, largely in Guinea-Bissau, Benn and infants in Guinea-Bissau that had caught study of low–birth weight infants in Guinea-
Aaby concluded that vaccines made of live, Tobi Kollmann’s attention a few years ear- Bissau, Benn and her colleagues found a 43
attenuated pathogens—including BCG, the lier, that found a 30 percent average reduc- percent reduction in the mortality rate from
live polio vaccine, and measles and smallpox tion in mortality with the BCG vaccine. The infectious disease in the first 28 days of life
immunizations—provoke beneficial nonspe- review’s authors noted that “tuberculosis is among babies who received BCG soon after
cific responses, while vaccines that use bits now an infrequent cause of death in infants birth compared with those who got it at
of killed virus do not. In fact, Benn suggests and young children, so if BCG has an effect around six weeks of age, on the typical local
that non-live viruses actually make some on all cause mortality it is unlikely to be schedule.9 Meanwhile, a study comparing
kids temporarily more susceptible to illnesses entirely due to fewer deaths from that dis- the effects of live and non-live polio vaccine
other than the one they’ve been vaccinated ease.” Similarly, the review identified four on toddlers in Bangladesh found that chil-
against. (See sidebar on page 26.) controlled trials of the measles vaccine dren who received the live vaccine experi-
Critics have questioned the existence and that found an average decline in mortal- enced fewer episodes of diarrhea over the
strength of nonspecific effects, both benefi- ity of 26 percent, with deaths from mea- following year than did those who received
cial and deleterious. “A lot of the evidence is sles contributing negligibly to that finding, the killed version.10 And this September,
very weak,” says Paul Fine, an epidemiologist suggesting that the vaccine also protected infectious diseases specialist Mihai Netea
11.2020 | T H E S C IE N T IST 2 3You can also read
