Science
Finding a Retirement Home for 466 Frozen Flatworm Fragments
Marian Litvaitis, a professor emerita on the College of New Hampshire, determined to retire in December 2019. And he or she puzzled what would occur to her worms.
Not simply any worms: marine polyclad flatworms. They’re visually placing, from the skunk-colored ruffles of Pseudobiceros gratus to the gold-rimmed fuchsia physique of Pseudoceros ferrugineus.
Dr. Litvaitis had studied the worms for many years, touring to the Caribbean and Indo-Pacific seas to gather a whole bunch of samples of their tissue and DNA, which had been all saved within the minus 80 diploma Celsius freezer in her lab. However labs at her faculty are cleared out as soon as researchers go away, and there are sometimes no programs in place to make sure that irreplaceable collections of scientific arcana don’t find yourself in a dumpster alongside outdated papers and damaged lab tools, which they usually do. Dr. Litvaitis remembered a few of her colleagues scrambling to discover a place for a whole bunch of hagfish swatches or cabinets of bobcat skulls.
Taking them house wouldn’t work both.
“I didn’t wish to maintain them within the freezer in my basement,” Dr. Litvaitis stated of her flatworms, including that blackouts will not be unusual in her New Hampshire neighborhood. She reached out to the Ocean Genome Legacy Heart, a marine DNA genome financial institution close to Boston that’s a part of Northeastern College, to see if it would need her assortment of samples from 466 worms.
That made Dr. Litvaitis’s assortment the primary entry in a brand new program on the heart referred to as the Genome Useful resource Rescue Mission that hopes to alleviate retiring researchers of their hard-earned marine collections that don’t have any different place to go. The challenge now holds hundreds of donated samples from three researchers.
“Only a few individuals have plans for his or her collections,” Dan Distel, the director of the middle, stated. “We don’t take into consideration this stuff till the time comes, after which it might be a bit too late.”
Organic collections could appear static, conjuring pictures of pinned butterflies or jars of pickled fish. However they require area and upkeep — empty rooms for the bobcat skulls and ultracold freezers for flatworm DNA — ongoing bills that universities might attempt to offload as soon as the collectors’ researching days are completed.
Collections tied to particular analysis initiatives usually lack funding for long-term upkeep and storage, in line with a 2020 report by the Nationwide Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medication. These collections might be “orphaned” — retained with out maintenance or consideration, which might harm the gathering past restore, the report stated. And the scientific neighborhood is notified haphazardly when these collections could also be discarded or in any other case deserted.
“The destiny of such collections is commonly idiosyncratic, relying on a relationship a collector has with a pure historical past museum, area, funding, how the brand new materials would possibly contribute to an establishment’s mission, high quality of the gathering provided as a present,” James Collins, an evolutionary ecologist at Arizona State College and co-chair of the committee behind the report, stated in an e-mail.
Dr. Distel is just not conscious of different packages just like the Genome Useful resource Rescue Mission, however added that researchers typically reached out to museums to donate their collections after retirement. In 2017, the octogenarian entomologists Lois and Charlie O’Brien donated their non-public assortment of a couple of million weevils and 250,000 planthoppers to Arizona State College.
“Nevertheless, it may be fairly troublesome for researchers to search out properties for collections that don’t have any public show worth,” Dr. Distel stated. Complete weevils are simple on the attention, however frozen tissue samples are much less visually placing.
Preserving collections for posterity is a tenet of fine science, Dr. Distel stated. It’s additionally good for conservation of pure sources.
Accumulating organic samples requires eradicating organisms from their pure atmosphere, an inherently damaging follow. “It’s a Wild West mentality,” Dr. Distel stated. He stated some researchers had gathered samples “with out first considering, ‘Has another person collected these supplies?’”
The extra samples preserved, the less organisms which will must die for science sooner or later.
Assortment can also be costly, usually achieved on analysis expeditions funded by grants. H. William Detrich, a professor emeritus of biochemistry and marine biology at Northeastern College, is donating a part of his assortment of Antarctic fishes, together with the clear-blooded icefish, to the middle. Buying this assortment required journey to Palmer Station in Antarctica and cruises on a analysis vessel.
“The logistics and help of my single program over 30 years, it’s thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of {dollars},” Dr. Detrich stated. “I really feel morally and ethically obligated to ensure that they get used sooner or later.”
In Dr. Distel’s eyes, Dr. Detrich’s collections are notably pressing to protect as a result of they seize a snapshot in time within the Antarctic — an ecosystem that is without doubt one of the quickest warming areas on Earth.
Which will make such collections the one information of what biodiversity seemed like in previously pristine ecosystems, permitting scientists to match populations over time and levels of degradation.
Over the course of her profession, Dr. Litvaitis has watched because the tropical waters she sampled from the Caribbean grew to become degraded by overfishing and local weather change. This destruction is a part of the rationale she selected to give attention to polyclad flatworms, that are depending on specialised habitats akin to coral reefs and may simply take up pollution via their physique partitions. Dr. Litvaitis donated a number of duplicate samples — swatches of the identical species of worm taken from completely different geographic places — as a file of the place the worms as soon as lived.
“Simply to know what we’ve got on the market earlier than we kill it off,” Dr. Litvaitis stated.
The Ocean Genome Legacy Heart makes its samples accessible to researchers from around the globe. Open collections permit new researchers to verify or problem outcomes drawn from samples and guarantee extra strong findings, Dr. Distel stated.
Dr. Distel hopes the collections rescue program can even encourage researchers who will not be near retirement to start out considering proactively about the way forward for their samples. Planning for retirement is troublesome whereas juggling grant functions, paper submissions and precise analysis. “It’s sort of a rat race,” Dr. Detrich stated. “You’re attempting to maintain your head above water.”
However the earlier researchers begin excited about preservation, the earlier they’ll begin documenting their collections in methods which can be significant and accessible to the final neighborhood, Dr. Distel stated. “In order that once they get to the tip of their profession, it may be a trivial activity to donate supplies to a group,” he added.
After retiring on the finish of 2021, Dr. Detrich continues to be organizing his samples for donation, matching the samples in his freezer to handwritten notes made in fishing logs and dissection information. “You may think that over about 30 years, precisely the place samples had been would possibly get a bit dicey,” he stated.
Dr. Detrich began off with 4 full freezers stuffed with samples; he’s now down to 1 and a half freezers.
The Ocean Genome Legacy Heart didn’t have sufficient room to take all of Dr. Detrich’s samples, so he has despatched some to colleagues conducting energetic analysis. One among his former colleagues, Jacob Daane, now a researcher on the College of Houston, is heating icefish embryos to foretell how local weather change would possibly have an effect on their improvement.
Dr. Litvaitis is blissful to now not be the caretaker of the fragments of 466 long-dead worms. “I’ve pivoted my pursuits to different issues,” she stated, like writing bedtime tales for her grandson, researching her household historical past and knitting.
The middle has already digitized her assortment, so anybody who needs to check her marine polyclads can accomplish that. “That’s the way in which we will develop science,” Dr. Litvaitis stated. “With out the work of earlier individuals, what do we’ve got?”
Another long-term concern is pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive disease in which scarring thickens and hardens lung tissue, making it difficult for oxygen to move into the bloodstream. Dr. Elsayegh describes a lung with pulmonary fibrosis as “a stiff balloon from the party store” — your face flushes as you try to force air inside, but it simply refuses to inflate.
As a former Palisades resident intent on returning to the neighborhood, Dr. Elsayegh is also doubling as a trusted confidant, drawing on his personal experience to help his patients face uncertainties and find solutions — or next steps, at least.
“In an ideal world, I would go in there and say, ‘Everyone that lives in the Palisades and in L.A. County, let’s all move. Let’s all go somewhere else and we don’t have to worry about this,’ ” he said. “That’s not reality. I’m trying to find this unbelievably difficult balance of helping us return to normalcy or return to our life, but doing it as safely as possible.”
In early February, Dr. Elsayegh pulled up a chair next to Dana Michels, a cybersecurity lawyer and healthy mother of three who had gone to check the damage at her house and now could not shake a cough.
“Sweetheart, you’re not moving air at all,” Dr. Elsayegh said, listening to her lungs through a stethoscope and quickly ordering a breathing test and a nebulizer, to start. A pulmonary student asked to take a listen, then glanced up at Dr. Elsayegh, looking confused.
“I’m not hearing anything,” the student said. Dr. Elsayegh gave a single nod.
After years of renting, Ms. Michels and her husband got their first mortgage almost four years ago; it was a family milestone. Now, with their Palisades home smoked through, the family is split between two rental apartments in Marina del Rey — one for boys, one for girls — and they are navigating a new school, new insurance paperwork and new prescriptions to manage the wheezing.
An 11-foot alligator that tipped over a canoe and killed a woman in Central Florida on May 6 served as a reminder that, while alligator attacks on humans are “extremely rare,” as a state wildlife official said, they do happen, sometimes with fatal results.
“This serves as a somber reminder of the powerful wildlife that share our natural spaces,” said Roger Young, the executive director of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Florida had an average of eight unprovoked alligator bites a year over the 10-year period that ended in 2022, according to the commission. Many of them were serious enough to require medical attention.
The commission has been urging people to exercise caution in or near the water during alligator mating season, which runs from early April to June. The risk of an attack is higher, it said, because alligators tend to be more aggressive, active and visible during this time.
The agency and other wildlife commissions offered these tips for avoiding or staying safe around the reptiles, which can grow up to 15 feet long.
Where are they?
Alligators can be found from central Texas eastward to North Carolina, according to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
Louisiana and Florida have the largest populations — more than one million each. Georgia has 200,000 to 250,000 alligators and South Carolina is home to about 100,000.
Morgan Hart, the alligator project leader for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, believes alligator attacks have increased in the state over the years because of “the sheer growth in human population in the coastal plain of South Carolina.”
When new housing developments are built, artificial lakes are often created with them and then quickly inhabited by alligators.
Be alligator aware.
If you encounter an alligator on land, “you can simply back away from it,” Ms. Hart said.
“Alligators will also hiss if they feel someone is too close and they can’t get away,” she said.
People should be wary of any alligator that approaches, she said, as it may be a sign that it has been fed and associates humans with food.
Humans should also keep at least 30 feet from alligators at all times, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission.
“They rarely chase people, but they can outrun or outswim the fastest person for the first 30 feet,” the agency said, noting that alligators can sprint up to 35 miles per hour for short distances on land.
Watch your children and dogs closely.
Alligators prefer to pursue prey they can easily overpower.
“Pets often resemble alligators’ natural prey,” said Lauren Claerbout, a spokeswoman for the Florida wildlife commission.
People should keep their pets on a leash and under control, and not allow them to swim or exercise in canals, ponds or lakes that may have alligators.
“The sound of dogs barking and playing may draw an alligator to the area,” the Florida wildlife commission said.
Be careful where you swim.
Wildlife agencies suggest that people swim only in designated areas during daylight hours, and without a pet.
“Alligators are most active between dusk and dawn,” Ms. Claerbout said.
If you encounter an alligator in the water, remain calm and do not approach it, according to the Florida wildlife commission.
Don’t feed them.
It is illegal, and dangerous, to feed alligators in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas (except during that state’s hunting season).
The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries said that people should not throw fish scraps into the water or feed other wildlife in areas where alligators congregate.
“As long as people don’t feed them,” said Donald Houser, the general manager at Gator Park, which is just south of Miami and features shows with alligators. He added that an alligator loses its fear of humans after three days of a person feeding it.
“Just stay away from it, basically,” he said.
How to fight back.
You should fight back against an alligator only if it gets hold of you, officials said.
“In that case, aim for its eyes, nose or throat, which are its most sensitive areas,” according to Everglades National Park in South Florida, adding that people should “hit, kick, or jab with as much strength as you can muster to try and force the gator to release its grip.”
Still, if you are grasped in an alligator’s jaws, there is a slim chance that you would be able to escape, Mr. Houser said.
“You better have someone close that knows what they are doing,” he said.
“Alligators don’t eat people,” he said, but they may bite someone and then spit the person out. By then, it may have held the person under water too long, he said, “and it may be too late.”
Congress is forging ahead with its budget for next year, but the most controversial program on the chopping block — Medicaid — is causing a rift within the Republican Party.
Earlier this year, Congress passed a budget blueprint that contains billions of dollars in cuts to federal spending, which House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) promised did not touch Medicaid. But as lawmakers hammer out the details of the spending plan, changes to the popular government-funded healthcare program are looming.
Republicans are scrambling to find creative ways to fulfill budget cuts they voted on without gutting Medicaid, a politically risky move that would endanger healthcare for more than 71 million people nationwide and lead to cascading effects for hospitals and nursing homes.
So far, the options being floated — ramping up eligibility and work requirements and limiting access for immigrants — would have a drastic effect on Medicaid, even as Republicans brand their vision as tackling “waste, fraud and abuse,” a popular line used by Trump administration officials who are downsizing federal government departments and programs.
The GOP is “strengthening Medicaid for people who need it by eliminating things like fraud, waste and abuse, which is a huge problem in the program, including removing illegal aliens,” Johnson said at a news conference Tuesday.
Other options that lawmakers have considered involve drastically cutting how much money the federal government gives to states that expanded Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act. If the minimum threshold were eliminated, California could lose as much as $156.5 billion in federal funding for the program over the next 10 years, according to an analysis by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
“States can’t really raise that kind of revenue in general,” said Kathy Hempstead, senior policy officer at the foundation. “What states will do is maybe raise some revenue, but they’d have to start cutting services.”
Johnson indicated Tuesday that he’d moved away from that consideration.
Still, advocates warn that other options clamping down on eligibility will inadvertently disadvantage millions of people who qualify for the program.
The budget Congress passed included an order for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which governs spending on Medicaid, to slash $880 billion over 10 years. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said that level of reduction is possible only by cutting into Medicaid.
In a letter to committee leaders Wednesday, the CBO outlined how federal changes to Medicaid would result in a shrinking of the program.
It anticipates that states would spend more themselves on Medicaid, reduce payment rates to healthcare providers, limit optional benefits and reduce enrollment.
Last week, the committee postponed a planned meeting on the bill over continued disagreements among its members. Matt Herdman, state director for Protect Our Care California, saw the delay as a partial win.
“They’ve clearly noticed they have a huge problem on their hands. They have a ton of vulnerable members,” Herdman said. “They would not have pushed this back if they thought this was a done deal.”
But Johnson dismissed the idea that the postponement was “a snag,” saying that after meeting with President Trump over the weekend and reviewing numbers, they decided “it just made sense for us to press pause for a week … to get it right.” The speaker said he is still aiming to pass the budget by Memorial Day.
In the meantime, Johnson is wrangling members from the far-right flank of the party, who support defunding and reforming Medicaid, and other Republicans, who are beseeching party leaders to avoid forcing them to vote for the cuts.
Twelve members who represent districts with high Medicaid populations — including California Reps. David Valadao (R-Hanford) and Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills) — sent a letter to House leaders last month, warning that a vote to cut Medicaid would jeopardize their hard-won districts in future elections.
“We cannot and will not support a final reconciliation bill that includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations,” the letter read, adding that the lawmakers support reforming the program. It concluded: “Communities like ours won us the majority, and we have a responsibility to deliver on the promises we made.”
Valadao told Politico that he texts and meets with his colleagues in Congress regularly, working on alternative solutions. Valadao has serious motivation to save the program — he represents the California district with the highest percentage of Medicaid recipients, and he lost his congressional seat after voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017.
His office declined an interview for this article.
Protests to preserve Medicaid have been sweeping the nation for weeks. The Service Employees International Union, home to many care workers in the U.S., organized several demonstrations outside Republican congressional offices in recent weeks, including Kim’s.
“I’m seeing unbelievable energy about this,” Herdman said. “I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite as large in person since the pandemic on a legislative issue.”
Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), who sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee, told reporters Tuesday that she’s been hearing from constituents in her district who rely on Medicaid to sustain their healthcare.
“Medicaid is a lifeline. It keeps children healthy, it helps parents work and it cares for seniors in nursing homes,” Dingell said. “The American people cannot afford Medicaid cuts, especially as the economy is being crashed around them by President Trump.”
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