In this episode we explore the work of Western Washington University biologist Dr. Robin Kodner. She studies algae populations from the peaks of mountains to beautiful bays.
Dr. Kodner’s work combines the disciplines of computing (Bioinformatics) and astronomy (Astrobiology). She also has a great idea about how algae can be the plot of a disaster movie.
This episode was edited by Victoria Highley. Check out her other work at Spoons for STEM
Image Courtesy of Dr. Robin Kodner
Click Here for Transcript
>>Here we go!
[? Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
? Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
? As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
? Cyclotron and any and every mic
? You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
? Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow
? Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
? I’m every element around
(Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff) Welcome to spark science where we explore science of human curiosity. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff and today we’re in the Digital Media Center here at Western Washington University. We are talking with my good friend Dr. Robin Kodner and we are going to talk about Ski 2 Sea algae. Welcome to our show.
(Dr. Kodner) Thanks for having me on, Regina.
(Regina) I wanted to bring you on mostly because I have been meaning to for a while now. Lena, our collaborator has been on this show but you do amazing work with algae in the mountains and in the bay. Can you give us a really short description of what you do and your position here at Western.
(Dr. Kodner) I’m an assistant professor in the biology department. What I do for my research is, I’m interested in microbial communities and what diversity of organisms there are in those communities and how they change over time. I started off studying them in the bay. I mostly worked in marine systems.
(Regina) Here in this bay or in your undergrad, other bays?
(Dr. Kodner) Well, I’ve always worked on algae but I started doing this kind of work when I was a pot doc at the University of Washington. I was working in this region, in the Salish Sea. I specifically started working on Bellingham Bay when I came to Western. Then, through that project I realized that I was actually very interested in algae that lived on snow because I spend so much time in the maintains. There hadn’t been very much work done in the algae communities that live on snow. Specifically using the modern DNA sequencing techniques that I use.
(Regina) So, there’s not a lot of people going up to maintain tops.
(Dr. Kodner) Very little. In fact, there’s no publications at all for using these DNA sequences technologies for characterizing the communities in the North Cascades or really the whole Cascades.
(Regina) Are there any mountainy, snowy . . .
(Dr. Kodner) People have started publishing work, like there’s a paper from Russia and there’s a paper from [unintelligible] up in the arctic in Europe. It’s a place like Norway. There’s a lot of work done in Antarctica. Actually shockingly, there’s more work done on Antarctica than there is in the North Cascades.
(Regina) Which is maybe easier to get to.
(Dr. Kodner) A little easier right. You can just drive up the road for an hour and a half and you can be there from Bellingham. I’m in the mountains a lot. I originally started doing this work in marine systems and now I’m putting a lot of effort into studying them in the mountains.
(Regina) We will come back to that. We will come back to this idea of this process from the mountains to the bay. I want to bring this up. I like to use the beginning of the show to humanize scientists because we are very scary to people sometimes.
(Dr. Kodner) I’m especially scary to people. Very scary.
(Regina) Why is that?
(Dr. Kodner) My stature is so intimidating.
(Regina) Right. For our listeners and our viewers, I’m not that tall. I’m 5’4” but I hang out with you and our friend Lena and you’re both shorter than I am. I feel like a giant. Yes, we are very intimidating for the community. You, Lena and you, Lena is another biologist here at Western, check out our past show, science of smells, you both were in a Ski 2 Sea team last year. Can you tell me just a little about this as we’re humanizing you?
(Dr. Kodner) We were on a team together for a couple of years. The team was called the Whatcom Women Scientists. A couple of years ago there were not enough teams in the Whatcom women’s division to keep the division going. There was a big push by some leaders and leader athletes in the community to get a bunch of women’s teams. A friend of mine, another professor at Western, went to the meeting and we decided to form a team. Then we pulled a couple of more people into the team. We were trying to think of a theme for the team and we realized we were all scientists.
(Regina) Let’s tell our listeners and viewers what Ski 2 Sea is.
(Dr. Kodner) Ski 2 Sea is this relay that goes from the Mt. Baker ski area to Bellingham Bay. It’s a big event that happens every year. When I first moved to Bellingham, I didn’t do it my first year but then I felt really left out so I’ve done it every other year.
(Regina) I grew up here and I’ve never done it.
(Dr. Kodner) Rachel Severson and I decided to start this Whatcom Women’s team and we pulled all these other Whatcom woman scientists to join us. What was cool was that we were not all professors. We were scientists in different ways. We had a geologist who was a working geologist. We had a fishery biologist who does consulting work. We had a couple of professors. We had a grad student. So it was a mix of different kinds of woman scientists.
(Regina) What was your leg? So it goes from the mountain and you’re skiing, and then what’s the sequence?
(Dr. Kodner) There’s the cross country ski leg, and then a downhill ski leg, then a road run that’s in the mountains. You start running down the Mt. Baker highway.
(Regina) For how long?
(Dr. Kodner) 8 miles. Then that person hands off to a road biker who rides for maybe 40 miles.
(Regina) That’s worse.
(Dr. Kodner) Then they hand off to a pair of canoeists and then they hand off to a mountain bike/cross bike. The cross bike hands off to a sea kayaker. The sea kayaker finishes the race.
(Regina) You won a medal right?
(Dr. Kodner) We sure did! The year before we missed getting on the podium by two seconds and it was my fault. I got passed in the last two seconds of the leg.
(Regina) What was your leg? You didn’t answer my question.
(Dr. Kodner) I did the cross bike almost two of the three years that we did the team. The 2015 it didn’t snow very much and there wasn’t snow in ski area so the legs got moved around a little bit. There was a mountain bike leg that ended the race. I’m a mountain biker so I did that leg. That’s when we lost by 2 second because I got passed at the very end.
(Regina) You were like, the next year you needed to get those extra two seconds.
(Dr. Kodner) I did! I was doing the cross bike and was like, determined to do well. This year I was like, I’m going to redeem myself from the year before. I was in pretty good biking shape. Then, in my race I got a flat.
(Regina) You did?
(Dr. Kodner) I did and it sucked. Do I stop and take the time to change the flat or change out the tube in my tire?
(Regina) Did you have the equipment to do that? Were there people on the sides to help you?
(Dr. Kodner) No. You have to do it yourself. I know how to do that and I had an extra tube and tire levers and things to change. It also take is minutes and minutes matter in the race. I rode on a flat tire for 10 minutes on rough terrain. That was my decision. I don’t know if it was the right one.
(Regina) But you got on the podium.
(Dr. Kodner) We still won third place despite my slowdowns.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Early late at night
? I wander off into a land
? You can go, but you mustn’t tell a soul
? There’s a world inside
? Where dreamers meet each other
(Regina) We’re kind of talking about this idea of algae on the top of the mountain and algae in the bay. I want to go back to how you became a scientist. We’re talking about this woman scientist Ski 2 Sea team, Wonder Woman just came out, I want to talk about this idea of kind of being inspired to be in a field where women aren’t really populated in. That’s science. In biology it’s a little complicated but there are inequities in many things. I want to talk about that.
(Dr. Kodner) That’s true. In my training, when I did my PhD…
(Regina) Where did you do your PhD, robin?
(Dr. Kodner) I did my PhD at Harvard. You might have heard of it.
(Regina) That’s one of the only schools I’d heard of when I was growing up. That and UW.
(Dr. Kodner) I did not come from an academic family so I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would end up in a place like Harvard. This is what I always tell people, especially my students. When I was an undergrad, I feel like my strength as a scientists is to be creative. Like, having a big picture idea and being creative and bringing things from different fields together.
(Regina) I think that’s why we work well together because I’m very good at organizing. I’m not good at big picture.
(Dr. Kodner) So that’s what I like. I was always like that. I had to find an advisor really quickly because I decided to do this on Friday at 3 o’clock. This was in the 90s when search engines where pretty new. I was at the University of Wisconsin in Maddison and I went to the research webpage. I had to quickly think of something. Evolution, that’s what I want to study. So I typed in evolution and I pressed return like any good sophomore in college would do. There were two hits.
(Regina) That narrowed it down.
(Dr. Kodner) It totally narrowed it down. What was shocking is that both of these professors were in their offices on a Friday afternoon and they talked to me. The first one was this guy that studied the evolution of physiology in mice. He had a mice lab.
At that time I was not interested. I was vegan and not interested. I thought I had to do it so I went there and I’m talking to him, he says, “Most of the research we look at is blood chemistry in mice so how do you feel about taking blood from mice?” I’m sitting there and I’m like . . . I didn’t know what to say. I definitely had never held a mouse before and I was pretty sure that I could not stick something in it so I could get blood out. I don’t think I could have done that.
I went to the second person, Dr. Linda Graham. She studies the evolution and transition between algae and plants. I went to her office and she was super friendly and very welcoming. She said, “How would you like to boil moss in acid?” I was like, that sounds great!
(Regina) You were like, “I’m a vegan, I love plants, let’s do this.”
(Dr. Kodner) I started working. She was interested in seeing what types of mosses would potentially preserve in relation to algae structures. I started working in Linda’s lab. She was an incredible mentor to me. I had an idea about a senior thesis project that I wanted to do. My professor supported this funny idea I had for my senior thesis project.
(Regina) What was it?
(Dr. Kodner) I wanted to look for early land plant fossils in the area around Madison Wisconsin.
(Regina) What kind of plant is that?
(Dr. Kodner) It would be kind of like a moss or a Liver Wart if you know what those are.
(Regina) God no.
(Dr. Kodner) Liver Warts are so cool, they’re real simple. They’re like the most simple plant. There are lots of them in Washington because they can only live where it’s wet all the time. Anyway, I got to publish that research in Science the journal.
(Regina) As an undergrad.
(Dr. Kodner) Right.
(Regina) For our listeners and watchers that don’t really understand the magnitude of that, that was a big deal. For one, most undergrads don’t get to do research. If you were to go to the University of Washington, these big R1 schools, it’s very very hard to get any sort of real science or research experience as an undergrad. If you come here to Western there’s a lot of research that you can actually do as an undergrad. You have some undergrad and grad students working for you. On top of that, whatever you’re doing as an undergrad, to actually get published, is huge. It’s like another tier. And then to get that in Science Magazine is like, wow!
(Dr. Kodner) It’s pretty mind blowing.
(Regina) Then you go to Harvard.
(Dr. Kodner) Then you go to Harvard. There you go. It’s funny because I was so naive when this all was happening. I was just psyched about my research and Linda Graham, I give a lot of credit to Linda Graham. She really supported me. She was like, “I think we can send this to Science.” I thought it sounded great, we were doing science, right?
We did another paper that we put in the American Journal of Botany I think. Which is also a really great journal for plant science.
(Regina) It ain’t no Science.
(Dr. Kodner) I didn’t know the difference between the two. It didn’t mean anything to me and then everyone in the department in Madison freaked out because they had an undergrad who just published in Science. I still didn’t quite understand.
(Regina) You were saying, I think I cut you off, you would tell people that you’re path to science, your path to getting published in Science, your path to Harvard, wasn’t what you were expecting but it was all about big ideas. Do you tell your students, just stick with what you’re passionate about? Be creative?
(Dr. Kodner) Yes. It’s interesting because since I’ve been at Western I’ve had to find a way to give students who want a lot of detail and structure, to give that structure to them while also creating a space for students to be really creative. That’s been my path. Someone let me come up with an idea that hadn’t, that nobody had tried before and it worked out. I think that fresh minds have the potential to come up with really great things. I try to not tell my students exactly what to do for that reason. I want them to be creative.
(Regina) We’re going to take a break. When we come back we’re going to talk about your research now and this algae that you’re looking at up at Mt. Baker and in the bay and the future of that.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
(Regina) Hello, welcome to Spark Science. We are here at the finish line of the Ski 2 Sea race. I’m going to talk to another person who is part of this team. Tell us your name, what kind of scientist you are and the leg of this race.
(Rachel) I’m Rachel Severson and I’m a developmental psychologist. I did the road bike this year. I’m an assistant professor at the University of Montana in the department of psychology. I study how kids understand and attribute minds to non-human others. In particular, how they attribute minds to robots to personify technologies.
(Katie Hancock) My name is Katie Hancock. I’m mostly a research technician. I do the research for science. I was the downhill ski leg.
(Audrey Thompson) My name is Audrey Thompson. I’m a fishery scientist with a small environmental consulting firm. I make 3 dimensional maps of how fish swim around hydropower structures. I just finished the kayak leg.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
(Regina) Welcome back to Spark Science. We’re talking to Dr. Robin Kodner for our Ski 2 Sea algae show. We just talked about your background. We talked about your awesome Ski 2 Sea win you had. It’s amazing. We want to talk about your actual research. You were just on Mt. Baker collecting samples. Tell us, what do you do on the mountain and how does that relate to the algae that you collect in the bay. What’s the connection to all this stuff?
(Dr. Kodner) The connection between all this stuff is really the methods I use. It kind of falls under the category of environmental genomics. DNA sequencing technology improved dramatically about 10 years ago.
We are able to sequence tons of DNA really cheaply that allowed us, people like me doing ecology with microbes, to go to an environment, scoop up the DNA there, sequence it, then we have millions of pieces of DNA that we put back together in the computer. We can say something about the community. The reason we have to do that is because we can’t see our organisms.
If you wanted to describe what’s going on in a forest, you would go into the forest, look around, and count the plants that you see and the animals that you see. It’s pretty easy. We’re kind of doing the same thing but with stuff that we can’t see. The way we see it is with DNA. That’s the link between the two.
The way we collect the samples are really different. On the mountain we scoop up snow and we collect it into DNA preservative. The other thing we do is we can image our cells in the field using a field microscope. It’s a cool little field microscope.
(Regina) How big is the field microscope? What does it look like?
(Dr. Kodner) It fits in my hand. What’s really cool is the company that makes these microscopes designs them to be distributed in developing nations so they can diagnose malaria in the field. You can see the malaria parasite in the blood if you have a nice microscope.
(Regina) And this is just a hand held device.
(Dr. Kodner) Yes. It’s really cool that that’s why it was developed. They’re pretty inexpensive.
(Regina) How much do these things cost?
(Dr. Kodner) About $500. It’s expensive but it’s not for lab equipment. For microscopes that’s really cheap. You take a simple, put it on the microscope and its all newfangled technologies. There’s an attachment for a smart phone so you can then image what you’re seeing in the field. It’s really great because it’s one thing to describe what you saw and draw a picture but it’s much better to be able to take a photo.
I realized a couple of weeks ago that I can also take videos. Some of the algae that lived in snow, it had been hypothesized go through this life cycle change where they can swim through the snow. No one had actually observed that directly in the field. There has been some observations but I actually took a video of swimming algae in the snow.
(Regina) That’s so awesome. So, I was going to actually ask, this is a side, we’ll come back to your research. You made a good point that I just thought of just now. How the history of biology and being a biologists and field work and categorization of species, there have been a lot of drawings. Art and biology has had this huge relationship throughout hundreds and hundreds of years. Darwin’s drawings and all that kind of stuff like animal species. Now that we have phones, is that still taught in biology?
(Dr. Kodner) No. Actually that’s an amazing question. It is not taught. I just came back from an algae conference. A woman there won an award for art and science. It is so cool, it’s called An Ocean Garden, the Secret Life of Algae. Her name is Josie. I can’t remember her last name right now.
(Regina) Were these hand drawn images?
(Dr. Kodner) She does this scanning. She takes seaweeds. Algae are lots of things algae are super divers. Seaweeds are really similar to the things that I study but I study the microscopic relatives. All of the things I work on are microscopic. This book’s about seaweeds. She’s done a lot of work to compare her scans and her photographs with these old drawings from the 1800s where scientists were originally describing these species and did these elaborate drawings that are beautiful. They’re definitely art.
(Regina) That’s amazing because she’s double checking what they were actually looking at. What if they labeled it not correctly? They didn’t know right? They didn’t have a big enough sample right?
(Dr. Kodner) Exactly. Now that we use DNA, we realize that a lot of those IDs and species descriptions based on looking at the algae aren’t actually correct because the algae can change their shape really easily. They can look really different and be the same species. There’s also this really incredible story about an artists who works on an algae that I’ve studied that’s related to Western.
(Regina) Tell me this story.
(Dr. Kodner) It’s kind of an aside from my research. This is the reason I actually came to Washington in the first place when I was at Harvard at grad school. There’s a sort of unique group of marine algae, microscopic, that paleontologists think is the oldest evidence for eukaryotic life. The oldest evidence for complex life. But no one has actually studied it. Very few biologists have actually studied it. These things look like marbles. They are little spheres without any structure.
My whole dissertation was to really investigate that for using chemical methods and all kinds of things. I really needed to collect the modern algae. They don’t grow in culture, you can’t just order them from a culture collection and work on them in the lab. You have to collect them in the field. I had called up everybody in the world who had some record of it being in the waters near them. No one could tell them to collect it accept for this one guy who had seen it in Friday Harbor in the 80s.
(Regina) What? In the 80s?
(Dr. Kodner) I’m not kidding. I told my PhD advisor that I had to go to Friday Harbor Washington. He was like, OK. Long story short I find it in Friday Harbor and I was trying to describe the species. I did stuff like characterize the chemistry of it and the cell wall but I needed to say what species I was working on and I realized it was a different species than the ones described. So it was a new species and I’m not the kind of scientist that typically describes new species. I was like, “Ugh, why has no one described this before.” It was kind of a pain for me.
(Regina) But you get to name it! Is it like the Kodner Balls?
(Dr. Kodner) I did get to name it. What’s so cool about it [laughing] is I was asking around to see if anyone had worked on this before. People kept saying, there was a guy named Maurice Dube who was a professor at Western in the 70s and the 80s, who worked on it but he never published anything because back in those days Western was more of a teaching college and professors were not necessarily publishing.
(Regina) Is he still around?
(Dr. Kodner) He died tragically in a bicycle accident on his way home from campus one day in 1989. There was this tragic history and all of this stuff seemed to disappear. I was a grad student. In 2005 or 6 I called the biology department at Western. Where’s the stuff? Everybody at Western had no idea. Nothing. I was really sad and I was wondering what would Maurice Dube say about this algae. I need to describe this species. I gave a talk at a conference and someone came up to me after my talk. She said, I recognize this algae was the one my friend Murray worked on. I was like, “Whoa, Maurice Dube you knew him?” It was my first link finally to this guy. Right?
(Regina) The Dube spheres.
(Dr. Kodner) She said, he was my friend and I have all of his stuff. She said, “I want to give it to you.” She mailed me two big cardboard boxes that had all of his research materials that had originally come from Western. I received these back in Cambridge. They were like time capsules. They were amazing. This is where the art comes in. Maurice Dube was an artists. In order to describe these things as a new species, besides DNA, they have these little intricate scales that are nanometer size that surround one of the life stages.
(Regina) These marbley things. They are marble spheres. They look like baby dragon eggs.
(Dr. Kodner) They actually produce baby dragon eggs that swim. Let’s think about it that way. Algae usually have different parts of their life cycle. This is a little swimming part. It’s covered in scales. It’s really hard to do that kind of microscopy, I’ve tried and failed. You have to be an expert and he really was an expert and an artist. He had drawn all of these beautiful pictures. I found out later that he taught a biological illustration course at the biology department at Western. Anyway, that’s a really cool story that kind of connected me to Western way before I had any idea why I would be a professor here.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Dance in the trees
? Paint mysteries
? The magnificent droid plays there
? Your magic mind
? Makes love to mine
? I think I’m in love, angel
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
(Regina) Let’s get back to your research real quick. So, you’re looking at this algae and you’re looking at trying to reproduce. What is happening in their population? What are they doing and how are you interacting with the environment?
(Dr. Kodner) We have really basic questions that haven’t been answered which is kind of fun about the science I do. We want to know who they are. How many different species are there of these small algae? How are they distributed? They tend to grow in these little patches. We don’t know anything about how they disperse. We don’t know how they get to where they are. By looking at the population structure in each of the blooming patches we can start to learn about that.
(Regina) Sorry to cut you off. Are these microbial mats that you are talking about? We had a person on this show a while ago talking about volcanic vents and microbial mats. Is that similar or not at all?
(Dr. Kodner) They’re similar. Basically the idea is that microbial communities, we tend to think, OK, here’s a plant, its one thing. In the microbial community there are lots of different things. In a hydrothermal vent all the biomass kind of squashes together and makes a mat. In my system they kind of grow in a patch.
(Regina) It’s not as dense as a mat?
(Dr. Kodner) It’s not as dense as a mat. Exactly. But it’s similar in that there’s structure in there and lots of different things that live there. We’re interested in those patches. Then, what I’m trying to do, because algae on snow make these patches that are localized, they are a good model for studying biogeography of microbial communities. This means, do these communities evolve differently to create diversity across a geographic area. We’re using the Cascades as a model for that. We’re trying to collect as many samples as possible across the Cascades this summer.
(Regina) What do they do for their environment? These microbial algae, how do they help their environment or hurt their environment? How do they help the ecology? How do they fit in?
(Dr. Kodner) They are the primary producers in the snow. So they support the carbon that they fix. They fix carbon just like any other plant would. Plants and algae are very closely related. Plants evolve from algae and the algae that live on snow are green algae. They are pretty closely related even though the algae that live on snow are pink colored, they’re green algae.
(Regina) Again, we’ll have a picture of this. I really like your pictures of these little, they look like blood vessels or something.
(Dr. Kodner) Like little red balls. They have a bunch of pigment that, again it hasn’t been studied exactly what the pigment is doing. It might be providing sunscreen but it could be providing an antioxidant like photo quenching because the algae are getting so much sun, they’re doing extra photosynthesis. They can produce too much oxygen, which can be damaging to the cell. It quenches the extra oxygen. Those free radicals!
(Regina) These patches are happening on the snow and they’re happening in the bay. You’re looking at how they form on Mt. Baker and the rest of the Cascades. Is it similar or different?
(Dr. Kodner) The biogeography question is to say, OK, are there different communities on the east side of the Cascades and the west side of the Cascades? We go down on to Mount Shasta and Mount Hood. Then up to the Washington volcanoes to see how those are different. We’ve collected samples from Peru and I’m going to France in a couple of weeks to collect samples. We’re kind of broadening our sampling but looking at how these communities are related because that’s really what we do with things like plants. We look at the flora in different environments. It tends to have some geographic ranges.
(Regina) What kind of questions will that answer once you get a larger simple? What do you want to kind of find out once you have actually gotten a great sample of everything, other than if they’re similar or different?
(Dr. Kodner) We want to understand how complex communities of algae form and how diverse they are. The diversity of a community helps us understand something about how stable it is and something about how it functions. That’s kind of an ecological evolutionary type question. How do these communities form and how do they evolve. Then, you also ask, what are they doing in the environment? We believe that snow algae, there’s been some studies that they change the albedo on the snow. When they bloom they help the snow melt faster because they absorb heat.
It seems like we have some anecdotal evidence from Peru that they’re just starting to get algae blooms on snow which might be related to climate change. As our environment changes and warms, we might have conditions that are better for algae to grow high up on glaciers which would be a problem because glaciers are already melting. This would increase the rate of melting if algae are growing faster. Our secondary goal is to understand how they get around and what conditions are most favorable for their growth.
With my studies in the ocean, we have similar questions about community diversity. But, as you probably know, the currents move around, especially in an inland water system like where we are in Bellingham and Bellingham Bay. It’s so dynamic that you can’t actually go to one place and sample the algae and then go back to the same place and sample the same algae because it’s the water that’s moving around. We do similar things but it’s much harder to draw the same kind of conclusions.
We still want to understand how changing environment changes the algae community structure. Because the environment is so dynamic we have constraints on the kind of conclusions we can make.
(Regina) There is some citizen science that you do right?
(Dr. Kodner) It takes a long time to climb a mountain. My lab group went to Mt. Baker this weekend. We were basically on one side of the mountain. We only had the ability to sample one particular area. What we want to do is sample as many places as possible.
We want to know how many places snow algae are blooming and then we also want to know who’s in that bloom. How diverse is it and is it related at all to some of the other things we’ve sampled? To do that we’ve created these citizen science collection kits and we’ve been calling it climber’s science or hiker’s science because we’re recruiting people who get out into the mountains to take out little sample tubes with us and scoop pink snow into them and mail them back to us. That will expand the number of places we can simple this summer.
Hopefully going into subsequent years because in order to ask these questions about how climate change might be effecting these communities we have to watch them change over time.
Me and my lab group can only be in a few places at once or we can only sample so many places in a summer. If we get all of these other groups to help us sample, we will be able to get way more samples and get closer to accomplishing miracles.
(Regina) For our listeners and viewers that may not know this term, the idea of citizen science is that basically anyone can go out, take your kit and go to the mountain, collect that snow and send it to you. But there’s other things. There’s Zooniverse, a citizens astronomy web site where you can go and you can help astronomers categorize galaxies and all that kind of stuff. You can look at images. There are so many things that people can do. You don’t necessarily have to have PhDs or go to Harvard.
(Dr. Kodner) Not at all! This is great. It’s appropriate for anybody. Folks that are going on little hikes with their kids in the early season and they see pink snow patches. Everybody’s like, “Why is the snow pink?” That’s a great time to take a sample. We are also recruiting guide services and groups like the mountaineers that are going out and climbing big mountains to get samples that are higher up on the mountains that are hard to get to.
(Regina) That’s awesome. Could people just go to your website, the Kodner lab?
(Dr. Kodner) We have a citizen’s science tab and it says everything about what we’re doing and how to get a kit. We’ve been putting calls out for citizen scientists through different social media outlets, posting on web boards for backcountry skiers, etc. Folks have been responsive. I’m really excited. I’m sending out kits tomorrow to the first round of people. I have about 30 kits that I’m sending out.
A lot of people who are getting out into the mountains, I’ve gotten a lot of responses from people who have a PhD and are not doing science any more. I’ve gotten responses from people who are homeschooling kids who are looking for things to do with their kids. There are people who are just like, “I really love science and I’ve always been curious about what the pink snow is. I’m excited to contribute to something while I’m doing my climbing trip.”
(Regina) That’s awesome. We’re going to take a break. When we come back we’re going to talk about how biology, algae, how has that been represented in popular culture, films, movies, books, etc. We’re going to talk about your other TV appearances that you’ve told me about.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
(Regina) Dr. Lena Dahlberg has been on our show before. She was the science of smells episode. You are also on this awesome team, the women scientists that are sponsored by Spark Science.
(Dr. Lena Dahlberg) I did the cross country ski leg. That meant getting up at 4:25 in the morning. I am a cellular neuro biologist. I work on olfaction. That’s the sense of smell
(Kelly Colvager) My name is Kelly Colvager [sp?] and I am a PA or physician’s assistant. I work in health care. I have a background in chemistry and I also used to teach high school science. I did the canoe leg today with my friend Callie [sp?] and we had a great time out there on the windy river.
(Regina) Your canoe partner is?
(Kelly Tepper). My name is Kelly Tepper and I have a background in exercise physiology and nutritional science. I am a registered dietitian. I was in the canoe with Kelly and we had an awesome time. We paddled hard.
(Kristi Lemm) my name is Kristi Lemm, I’m a social psychologist and I did the running leg.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
(Regina) Welcome back to Spark Science. We’re talking with Dr. Robin Kodner and we’re talking about algae and citizen science. Now we want to talk about pop culture. Before we do that, I forget to ask you about this new term in science, bioinformatics.
(Dr. Kodner) It’s how biology meets big data. As we’ve been sequencing genomes and all the DNA and RNA, we have so much data in biology that it required the biologists work with commuter scientists. They had to. That happened to me. I got some data back and tried to open it in Excel. Excel was like, can’t do it, sorry. I didn’t know what to do. I went to computer scientists and was like, what do I do?
(Regina) Well I think it’s hilarious that you have biology, which is known at least now to have 60% female graduates. Then you have CS, which is now known 10% female graduates. It’s getting better. The 10% is getting higher but still you have these two fields in science that are having real issues with inclusion. A [inaudible] and biology it’s very very different but you have them working together. I think that it’s awesome and I think there are so many more interdisciplinary things happening now.
(Dr. Kodner) It’s true. The majority of bioinformatics are male because they are often communicating form computer science. I’ve been on grant proposals where I’ve been described by a female by a bioinformatics. That’s a thing. I’m providing some diversity to the proposal which is interesting. I’ve had a couple of women in CS and math come and work in my lab. Somehow I attract a lot of women. I have a majority female lab. It’s awesome to support these young women who are programs to work the interface of biology and CS. They use their creativity in CS.
(Regina) So you’re working with bioinformatics. You’re working with this big data. Is there anything that you have found challenging going from, like you said you were struggling with Excel and then you worked with CS, what was that transition like?
(Dr. Kodner) That’s a hard transition. I learned that I love computers. I like baby program. The heavy programming is done by my graduate students and by collaborators.
(Regina) That’s what collaboration is for.
(Dr. Kodner) I work closely with the computer scientists. I can get by with my programming skills to get a lot of what I need done, done. I wish I could program better than I do. I often encourage all of my undergrads that are interested in the science we do in my lab, to take programming classes and learn how to program because it opens up a world of what you can do with your data. We talked about creativity before. That avenue for being creative in our data analysis is blown open if you can do your own programming.
(Regina) What do you program in? What’s the programming you do?
(Dr. Kodner) Me? I mostly just write unicell scripts. That’s what I mean by baby programming. Most of our pipelines run on python. Python is the thing to learn. Every summer I think it’s the summer I’m going to learn python.
(Regina) Can we learn python together? I did python for my dissertation but like baby. I love your description of baby programming because it was basically baby programming. Python is huge in astronomy now. It’s like, the thing to learn.
(Dr. Kodner) That’s the thing in bioinformatics to learn too. What’s cool at bioinformatics is that people don’t always have to be a trained software engineer or computer scientist. If you come with strong programming skills and a biology background you could put them together. I learned on the job. As a post doc I learned because we had some computer science technicians that worked in the lab. I also had a friend that I collaborated with and developed some software with who helped me learn along the way. I learned that I really love that kind of work. But, now at Western, we have a group of faculty that are non-computer science faculty but who use the CS resources in the cluster. When I go to those meetings and we’re all trying to figure out ways to create more interdisciplinary programs here at Western. Whenever I go to those meetings I’m the only women.
(Regina) Let’s transition to something that’s a little more happy. That’s pop culture. That’s what I like. It’s also male dominated. Let’s talk about our biologists and if bioinformatics has even been a thing talked about in movies or TV or any video games.
(Dr. Kodner) Video games? I don’t know. This is really new. As you know I’m kind of like, not up to date on pop culture.
(Regina) Not like me.
(Dr. Kodner) I missed a decade of movies.
(Regina) There’s Pandemic and it’s a board game and it is a video game as well. It’s a game in which there’s an illness or a various and it spreads across the world and you need to stop it.
(Dr. Kodner) I don’t know how much they have bioinformaticians featured, but all of that research relies heavily on bioinformaticians to find out what strains are similar to each other and predicting how they are going to spread.
(Regina) So any zombie movie.
(Dr. Kodner) Yes.
(Regina) I’ll help you.
(Dr. Kodner) I heard about bioinformatics on my way here today on the radio. It wasn’t pop culture it was kind of in the legal system. They were talking about people on death row not being able to get into the data that convicted them because the software that made the DNA matches is proprietary and the companies that make the software say, “That’s our IP and we can’t share that.” Of course legal advocates for people who are convicted are like, “That is not cool, we need to have access to the data and it’s not fair that its proprietary.” There is a lot of discussion going on now about that. That’s bioinformatics right there.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? The grass grows inside
? The music floats you gently on your toes
? Touch the nose, he’ll change your clothes to tuxedos
? Don’t freak and hide
? I’ll be your secret santa, do you mind?
? Don’t resist
? The fairygods will have a fit
? We should dance
? Dance in the trees
? Paint mysteries
? The magnificent droid plays there
(Regina) During the break, you were saying that there are ideas you have for a movie.
(Dr. Kodner) Right. I feel like places where people here a lot about algae these days in the news, I ask my students that too when they come to algae class on the first day, a lot of people say slimy, stinky, pond scum type stuff. People are starting to hear about it as a biofuel alternative. Have you heard of that? It has gotten popular in the last decade to try and grow algae for biofuel. You can grow it in anything. You can grow it in wastewater.
(Regina) It’s very fast growing.
(Dr. Kodner) It grows fast and has lots of lipid. That might be better than farm we could grow food on, to make biofuel. I worked on that a little bit in my past. I sat on some grant proposal panels to evaluate what other scientists want to do. The engineers especially, they are not biologists, they want to genetically engineer algae to grow really fast and then export the oil out of their cells, so really easy to harvest the oil can make biofuel. That sounds great unless you’re an ecologists and you know that those algae, growing in a pond or a tank, are going to get out and they’re going to take over and be like an oil spill everywhere. The engineers always say, “No, no, no, no, no, we’re going to genetically engineer them so there’s some kind of kill gene.” So if they get out of their tank, they’re just going to die.
(Regina) We’re just going to push a button and they’re all going to stop.
(Dr. Kodner) I was like, that’s not going to work, have you heard of evolution? That’s how algae communities evolve. They evolve really quickly. So even if you put a gene in there that’s going to make it die if it gets out of its tank, it’s not going to stay there very long. It’s going to kick that gene out.
(Regina) Someone’s going to walk off towards a pond with algae on their boot.
(Dr. Kodner) That algae is going to get rid of that kill gene and then they’re going to take over the water supply and then we’re not going to have any, that’s my idea.
(Regina) It’s very Jurassic Park.
(Dr. Kodner) Yes. When people talk about that, that is a recipe for a really bad sci-fi movie.
(Regina) Someone should take that and direct it for credit. I guess we have been telling everyone that we work together but we don’t say what we do. Robin and I, and Lena who we’ve talked about a couple of times, science of smells, check it out, we work on an equity and inclusion workshop specifically focused for STEM faculty because sometimes people in STEM don’t talk about feelings or how to talk to other people.
(Dr. Kodner) We’re teaching people how to communicate, be open minded, understand their identities, understand other people’s identities, etc.
(Regina) The problems we have in science.
(Dr. Kodner) To tie it back to some of my person goals about being open minded and creative in science, I feel like creating a culture in science that’s more open to creative thinking and letting different types of ideas mingle together to be creative is something that helps our science and helps us make new discoveries. It also helps everyone feel comfortable being a scientist.
(Regina) That brings us back to your show idea, your movie idea. If you have a group of people who are engineers who may all come from the same background and all had the same upbringing and training as other engineers, they’re like, “This algae is going to be great and everything is awesome”, until you have somebody different who says, “This could kill the world.” You were talking about how you were interviewed by the discovery channel. You had to find somebody’s house and watch it on cable. I want to hear this story.
(Dr. Kodner) I had done a citizens science event at the North Cascades National Park that had to do with characterizing biodiversity on snow. I met a geologist there who studies all the glaciers in the park. He had been contacted by the Discovery channel to do a show on life on icy worlds. Like Enceladus and Europa. He was like, “you should contact Robin Kodner” and she’s looking at the biology.
So that’s how they got in touch with me. I filmed for a few days with a film crew that was doing this piece on icy worlds. We went up near Artist’s Point. We couldn’t go very far into the mountains because they had a lot of heavy camera equipment. It turns out you can’t do any filming for anything commercial in wilderness areas. The area near Artist Point is not technically a wilderness area. So they filmed me collecting algae samples and me talking to them about snow algae communities.
(Regina) Then what happened after they filmed you?
(Dr. Kodner) Because they did put it on the web, for me to see this clip I had to go to a friend’s house that had cable. I knew when I was supposed to be on so we went. Her family and I made popcorn and watched it. It was like a three minute segment. It was pretty good.
(Regina) Three minutes is pretty long for TV.
(Dr. Kodner) Yeah. At the end they had rolled the camera after they told me I wasn’t on camera. They caught me doing something silly. I held up a tube of algae and was like, “I love algae.”
(Regina) The media, they love it. I was in this article and I was like, “go science.” They made that their headline.
(Dr. Kodner) They pick the thing you are most embarrassed about. It’s true.
(Regina) You were talking about Enceladus. I want to take a minute to talk about Enceladus and why was that so interesting and why did they go to you for algae and an icy moon somewhere?
(Dr. Kodner) We’re thinking about finding life somewhere else in the universe and somewhere else in our solar system. The best way to think about that as humans is to compare it to what we know about life on earth. NASA has a NASA exobiology and astrobiology programs support a lot of research that looks at organisms that live in extreme environments on earth and try to understand how that realities to how that life could possibly survive or evolve in a place like Europa. Europa has a frozen ocean we know that life likes water and we look at what we can learn about the physiology of the organisms that live in those types of environments on earth. That’s the connection.
(Regina) Enceladus had this plume that one of our space crafts or missions, Cassini, went through so they may have collected more information than we had before. Is there anything I didn’t ask you, that you wanted to share with our listeners and our viewers about your work and how they can embrace science and not be afraid of it?
(Dr. Kodner) I would say that science is all around us. Being curious about the world will lead you to be a scientist.
(Regina) I think it’s amazing that you have this connection with astrobiology, bioinformatics, your doing this work that’s intersectional and interdisciplinary and your doing so much. I want to thank you for coming here telling us about it and teaching me all about biology, which is something that I know nothing about.
(Dr. Kodner) Thank you. It was really fun.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
? This is your land
? This is my land
? We belong here
? Stay the night
? I am so inspired
? You touched my wires
? My supernova shining bright
(Regina) Thank you for tuning into Spark Science Ski 2 Sea Algae. If you’re interested in citizen science and collecting snow samples go to kodnerlab.wordpress.com. This show was produced in collaboration with Western Washington University and KMRE.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
(Regina) Today’s episode was recorded at the digital media center at Western Washington University in Bellingham Washington. We air weekly on 102.3 FM in Bellingham or KMRE. We’re streaming on Sundays at 5pm, Thursdays at noon, and Saturdays at 3pm. Our producer is Regina Barber DeGraaff. Production was also done by Darian Brown, Suzanne Blaze, and the DMC crew. Our theme music is Chemical Calisthenics by Blackalicious and Wondaland by Janelle Monae.
[? Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
? Iodine nitrate activate
? Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
? Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in
? Careful, careful with those ingredients
? They could explode and blow up if you drop them
? And they hit the ground
(Regina) Thank you for watching.
[End of podcast.]