No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

montereybayaquarium

Try as she might, MacKenzie Bubel just couldn’t satisfy the baby comb jellies.

The aquarist was attempting to spawn a species called Mnemiopsis leidyi—a ghostly-looking little creature native to the Gulf of Mexico—in the Aquarium’s Jelly Lab. She tinkered with variables like water temperature, salinity and light exposure.

“We did some wacky stuff to get the conditions perfect,” she says, “but they weren’t doing as well as we’d hoped.”

Combing through the science, Senior Aquarist Tommy Knowles first began culturing ctenophores—or “comb bearers”—in 2012. His early attempts were mostly unsuccessful, but they provided a foundation for his team to build on.

Since the mid-90s, the Aquarium’s jelly team has learned how to raise nearly two-dozen species of cnidarian jellyfish—the “classic” jellies we often think of, like sea nettles and moon jellies. Comb jellies, in the phylum Ctenophora, represented a very different challenge to culture.

Figuring out how to grow jellies in-house is a big deal in the scientific world. Not only does it allow aquariums to display these animals for public education without impacting wild populations, it opens the door for labs and researchers to study these elusive, fragile and seasonal animals in greater detail.

“We don’t know what all their ecological roles are in the wild because comb jellies are so under-studied,” Senior Aquarist Wyatt Patry says.

In wild studies, scientists can only observe “snapshots” of comb jelly life. But in a lab, they can study the animals through their whole life cycle. This start-to-finish overview of ctenophore development can help researchers better understand comb jelly behavior in places like the Black Sea, where invasive Mnemiopsis have decimated fish populations.

And beyond the ecological benefits of understanding how comb jellies make more of themselves, learning about what makes a comb jelly may help improve our picture of how life on earth began.

“Comb jellies are getting much more attention these days because of work in the past 10 years tracing the ancient ancestor to all living things,” says George Matsumoto, senior research and education specialist for MBARI, “We don’t have a good idea of what this ancestor looked like, but the first group of animals diverging from the tree of life looks like the ctenophores.”

For these scientific reasons and to satisfy their own curiosities, MacKenzie and the jelly team continued to toil away behind the scenes on the combination to unlock the comb jelly code.

Then, like a pulsating row of cilia, a chance encounter at sea sent the dominos of ctenophore culture falling, one after the other…

Stay tuned for Part 2 and the thrilling conclusion!

Can’t handle the suspense? Click here to watch MacKenzie and co. crack the code of comb jelly culture.

Come Hang Out at Star Trek Las Vegas!

trekkiefeminist

It’s almost time for Star Trek Las Vegas and if you’re going to be at or near the con, here’s where you can find me!

1. Women at Warp Meetup! This meetup will be outside the ticketed area, so even if you don’t have a con ticket, you can come hang out with the Women at Warp crew! Right now this is scheduled for Friday, August 5 at 5:30 p.m. at the Rio’s Masquerade Bar but the time is subject to change. Best way to stay notified is by RSVPing to our Facebook event.

2. 50 years of women in Star Trek panel, featuring Kate Mulgrew! On Saturday, August 6 at 10:50 a.m. on the main stage, I’ll be back with my STLV women co-panelists (pictured above): Amy Imhoff, Kayla Iacovino and Mary Czerwinski. Also joining us to celebrate 50 years of women in Trek will be Kate Mulgrew! I’m so excited I might pass out.

3. Earl Grey Super BridgeMates - The Earl Grey podcast will be holding a “Super BridgeMates” competition on the Roddenberry stage in Quark’s Bar on Friday, August 5 from 12:30 to 1:15 p.m. and W@W co-host Andi and I will be bringing back our team, The Council of Mistresses. We’ll be up against team “Free Enterprise” (Darren Moser and Daniel Proulx) and “Team Lizard Babies” (Charlynn Schmiedt and Tristan Riddell) in a fun-filled, comedic game show involving fans, cosplayers, and audience members. Not only will the teams compete in hilarious trivia, but those in the audience will participate by acting out selected scenes from our favorite Star Trek moments and cosplayers will help create puzzles for the teams to solve.

So, who all’s going to STLV? Hope to see you next week!

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technology related sensory memories from my childhood

sliding the metal cover on floppy disks
the slight resistance of inserting cassette and video tapes
ripping off the strips of holed paper off of dot matrix printer paper
rolling the wheel on a disposable camera to take another photo

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The heaviness and rubber texture of the roller ball in a computer mouse, and the little ring of lint

Unkinking the curly cord of a telephone while you talked

The -peww sound and slowly fading image of a crt monitor turning off, and then running your finger through the static on the dusty glass

The crunch of opening or closing a plastic Disney vhs cover

The sound effects in kidpix

Extending and collapsing metal antennas and using them as magic wands

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Manually rewinding cassette tapes by spinning them around my fingers

Playing with the rubber casing of the buttons on a Walkman–pulling them away, rotating them, slipping them from side to side on the stiff posts of the buttons

The audio and visual static at the end of a videotape

The satisfying thwap-thwap-thwap as you page through a well-filled CD sleeve book

How weird and small and light the first cordless phone felt