 Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Good afternoon. We're live here on Likeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. We are coming to you today live from the East West center of the University of Hawaii. From the EcoDays conference. EcoDays symposium, I guess, technically. And we're going to be interviewing several people who are participating in EcoDays. EcoDays stands for ecological dissipations in aquatic sciences, if I recall correctly. We have with us Sarah Hu and Royce Greenard, if I got that correctly, great. Royce is from City College of New York and Sarah has just switched over from USC now to the Woods Hole Institute, Oceanographic Institute, right? We've been across the country. Excellent. So tell us a little bit just to start about what EcoDays is all about as a symposium. Yeah, sure. So what's brought us all here to Honolulu, to EcoDays is we're all our early career scientists in the aquatic sciences. And we're all coming together as younger in our fields and trying to form new collaborations. And so we're having really unique discussions that are interdisciplinary. So important these days to get the cross-fertilization from different fields and get people out of those sort of silos, right? So Royce, have you run into interesting people here and started some collaborations? Yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest thing that I found helpful is that sometimes when you're doing your research, you realize that there's areas that are lacking that you don't have expertise in, but you don't know quite how to connect with those people. And so this has been a fantastic meeting for meeting those people and forming relationships that will carry on to future research efforts. Yeah, I know just when I got a little blurred about it, they had an in-search of everyone's talk about what they're looking for and sort of complimentary expertise, right? People to fill in those areas where you may not be so strong, but also there was another section of what you're sharing, too, which was great. Because different people have different strengths. Some people are big on the quantitative and other people want some help in that line, right? Yeah. So, Sarah, you're talking your title, at least it was, and I get a lot of titles of the projects have already changed in the course of several days, but it was on genetic characterization of microbial eukaryotic diversity and metabolic potential. So can you sort of tell us in a sentence or two what that's really about in non-technical terms? Sure, sure. So I essentially study microbes that live in the ocean. Okay. And my specialty is single celled microbial eukaryotes. So there's prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Okay. And so I study the diversity of these microorganisms in our ocean systems, and I'm striving to understand why they're in certain locations, their diversity in a community, and their overall ecological impact in that system. Okay, great. Just to clarify for our audience, prokaryotes eukaryotes are two types of sort of fundamental... Fundamental microorganisms, yeah. Prokaryotes are rather primitive in some sense. Not necessarily, but bacteria and eukaryotes. Eukaryotes are all of us. All of us. Yes. Including all of the microbes. Yes. A lot of our microbes. Okay. Cool. And, Grace, you are characterizing CDOM spectral variability from sea to space, and CDOM you're telling me over there stands for colored, dissolved, organic material? Nope. All right. Hey, I got that right. So what is this stuff and why is it interesting? So I guess when I say spectral variability, you can think of anything from a coffee to a tea. And so when you put your tea bag into your hot water, it goes from clear water to having some kind of color, and so the color is going to depend on the type of material. And so if you have like a white tea, it'll be clear. If you have a black tea, it's going to be darker brown. And so that's indicative of the type of material that's present. And so what I do is I use that color signature to track how carbon cycles across different aquatic systems. Oh, okay. So even knowing where the color is coming from, what particular organism the color is coming from, you can still make use of it just by its color. Yeah. And so I guess the spectral variability part comes in that each plant can have a particular signature. And so you can use that in some ways to track where the material came from and how it's being processed by, say, Sarah's microbes that she's studying. Okay. Cool. Cool. So then, Sarah, getting back to your work there, so these microbes, these eukaryotes that live in ocean, this sort of recent thing, like they really describe, sort of this tremendous diversity of small things that live in the ocean. People really, until a few years ago, didn't have much clue about, right? We sort of thought of the ocean as being water, right? And now we realize it's sort of a teeming jungle, as it were. Yes. So there are rich ecosystems going on with viruses, with bacteria, with prokaryotes, and eukaryotes. Yes. Which are probably sort of at the top of one level of a food chain and write our food web. Yeah, in some way. Yeah. But then what other roles do they play? Yes. So micro-eukaryotes play various roles in brain food webs. It's great because they're primary producers and consumers, meaning they mediate photosynthesis. So with sunlight and carbon dioxide, they're able to create, a product of that is oxygen, and that oxygen becomes a really important part of our atmosphere. And we need that to breathe. So that's super important. And then another product is that they are producing this organic and usable carbon for all higher organisms in the ocean. So that's kind of starting the base of marine food webs, the base of the marine food chain. And so that's going to be consumed by other microbes, potentially even more microbes. And then they'll be consumed by plankton, zooplankton, and then higher organisms, fishes, top predators, sharks, and as humans. Okay. So they're playing a real vital role here in this. Yes. Indeed, I've heard it said that something like one out of two breaths of air we take are essentially due to the algae in the ocean, right? Exactly. Yeah. So that's important. You see, this is kind of some people I think do not often understand about science. And it seems sort of like you're studying an obscure topic in a way, right? And yet it turns out it's the very air we breathe, and the oxygen keeps us alive. Even though they're really small, they're a big deal. Yeah, because there's a lot of... Yeah, people don't understand that so much. So, and again, so your work actually does tie together in interesting ways, right? Absolutely. Yeah. But do you look at the... When you're looking at this color signature, you said each organism has more or less a unique set of organic dissolved materials that it puts out. Is that because of different pigments that they contain and different constituents of those cells? Yeah, absolutely. So when you think of algae, not all of the pigments that they have, but some of them will dissolve into water. So you can see that pigment signature in your dissolved organic matter pool. But there's other... I always liken it to, if you're in a temperate area and you go look at some of the lakes and streams, sometimes there's a kind of black color to the water. In fact, some of the marshes that you see around the country have black water in the title of the name of the area. And so that is essentially the material that's being produced by these systems. And it can vary based on the general structure of the material and also where it comes from. And so that's where it comes in, is that those microbes are both utilizing that material, so changing its properties and changing its color, and then also producing their own color signature. So this is a real... I see that it's not just an indicator of what form it comes out as, but how it changes over time. And it's also telling you about the activity that's going on there. So that's a very dynamic thing. So how do you... what kind of instruments do you use to... So if you want detailed information, you need to grab the water and bring it into the lab and use a pretty high-end instrument. But for broader spatial scales and temporal scales, it scales up to a satellite. So with that, there's more error and you can't tell quite as much about the material, but it does give you a view of essentially broad-scale processes that are happening that you can't get from going out in a ship or even from say like buoy measurements in the middle of the ocean. And so there's a synergy between these different observing platforms and the information you can get from them. Excellent, excellent. And so do you use similar kinds of instrumentation in your work? Yes, some of those pigments can be read from satellite images and that gives us a lot of information for what's going on on a global scale. But rather than taking things in the lab, I'm off... well, I do take things in the lab eventually. But I typically go out in a ship to collect seawater and do a lot of shipboard measurements to filter that and collect that material and do concurrent measurements. So again, understanding of what they're surrounding it, the microbial surrounding is, and then we take that material into the lab later. All right, again, this is sort of interesting that we've gone off in this direction in the current issues around on the east coast and picking around Florida having... they've had very, very bad red tides this year, which of course is these... it's the pigments in microbe track that cause this sort of reddish tint to the water when I gather it's not... it's gone beyond the west coast where it often occurs and is now up on the east coast and hitting some of Miami's beaches. Right. Any speculation as to what's causing that? Humans, probably. That's the broadest way to put it. But more specifically, I mean, it's due to, I mean, it's right into pollution. Yeah, typically nutrient runoff. So that's generally the setup for it, but a lot of these issues, especially the harmful algal blooms, like the red tides that you talk about are exacerbated by climate change. So warming system changes and sort of the basics of how it functions will ripple up into these, you know, bloom events. And I think Sarah could probably speak to that a lot because what you do is looking at that really small-scale change, right? Yeah, absolutely. So there's going to be a mix of variables that come into play for what causes the bloom and we're still trying to understand that in certain systems. I'm not as familiar with what's going off... I'm familiar with what's going off the coast of Florida that I haven't been personally studying that right now, but it's typically a mix of temperature, nutrients, wind at a given time and what's been the temperature in the last month in an area that can also impact, lead up to potential bloom environment. Yeah. So this is very, very neat. I mean, this is a wonderful example. Again, here's another way where seemingly sort of an odd, almost abstract science is tying in in a very real way to something that really impacts the lives of people. For instance, in Miami, Miami is losing millions of dollars in tourism, presumably, since no one can be out on their beaches and enjoying the water there, right? So it's a great example of how the kinds of science that you're practicing really influences the lives and impacts the lives of people elsewhere. So that's wonderful because, as I said, I think there's a broad misunderstanding of science and science really doesn't have anything to do with our lives and we're finding several different ways how it really does. Right. Ethan, do you mind, actually, if I touch on something we talked about earlier? So when I talked about the different scales, so like a satellite could give you a general sense of the scope of where that bloom is, but you need people like Sarah to really dig into that cellular level processes to understand why that's happening. So that's, I think, what EcoDase is all about, is bringing together people who have different, you know, expertise and can understand the question better by bringing in all those tools together. Yeah. Yeah. The different sort of mindsets and perspectives and expertise from the different fields can help reinforce, buttress, make a stronger case for why the red tide is where it is when it is, right? Yeah, that's wonderful. It's great that this is, this is like the 13th EcoDase symposium or something. Yeah, I think so, yeah. And this is wonderful that they put this on and get to bring all of you together. I suspect that they have like some sort of alumni association where people from the past wouldn't say in touch. Yeah, I hope so. Great. Paul mentioned that at some of the science conferences that if there's a large gathering of alumni from different EcoDase that they'll pull them together and interact and so it's not just, you know, single generations but cross generations of expertise. Oh, yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, that just keeps enlarging your potential pool of collaborators and people you can call on for advice and input and to bring some other aspect to shine light on your project. Absolutely, yeah. Wonderful, that's great. So, you know, there's a lot of talk these days about the need for more sort of resilience in our ecosystems and our sort of human ecosystem as we're facing increasing changes. I think you work really sort of, how does it contribute to that? Does it help us understand the world better? It's going to enable a better human resilience? Enable a better human resilience? Right. I think that it's important to understand what these micro-organisms are doing in our environment because we'll be able to better predict how an ecosystem might change under certain environmental conditions. So I think that ties in a lot to how we can be more resilient in the current climate for sure. Sure, we've got to know what's going to happen if you can't predict sort of what your microbe's going to do. You're not going to know much about what the rest of the world is going to do, right? The microbe's really run the whole show in some sense. Yeah. When all the algae in the ocean die or in big trouble, like our oxygen levels go screaming down. Yeah. So, that's wonderful stuff. So where do you envision taking your research there? What do you want to do with it over the next five years? How do you want to develop it? Yeah. So I actually made an interesting move during my PhD work at USC. My specialty was in time series stations, which means that we visit the same location every single month on a very regular basis. And I was involved in two time series stations, one that had been running for over 15 years off the coast of California. It's called the San Pedro Ocean Time Series Station. And then the other one is 100 kilometers north of here in Honolulu, where they've been sampling for just over 30 years now at the station Aloha. And by studying how microbial communities operate, who's there, what they're doing each month, we get an idea of what's going on in the baseline of the community. And then over time, we can understand seasonal changes in the microbial community and what that means. I did a diureal study where I actually looked at microorganisms every four hours to see how their activity changed over the course of a single day. That's right, because microbes migrate up and down in the water column a bit, don't they? Yes, but they're very intimately tied to the rising and sending of the sun in some cases. And now, so that was my PhD work, and now where I'm taking my research now is at Woods Hole, where I'm actually going to be studying the microbial carryouts associated with hydrothermal vent systems. And so that venting fluid coming out of hydrothermal vents, which from the sea floor, that's often highly enriched, really warm venting fluid, it's mixing with that sea water and it's creating this little unique environment and there's a lot of activity going on there that I want to understand. Right, those are very odd environments because their main energy source is not the sun. Exactly. It's actually heat from within the planet. Yes. So they were not really well known, well, they still aren't very well known, right? Yes. But you're helping to store that. And how about you, Bryce? Where are you going to take your work? I think in the broadest sense is that satellites right now, they're a really powerful tool but there's still a lot of uncertainty attached to what you're seeing. And NASA has plans and some of the other space agencies have plans to develop more sophisticated sensors that can give us a better picture of what's happening. And so I always like to say that it's getting closer to, from what we can see in space now, it's getting closer to what we can see in the water now, which is an immensely different amount of detail. And so what I'm focusing on is what are the tools that we can use to take that data and get some really fine detailed products that might tie in to say like Sarah's work better because they're on such different levels of information that you're gleaning. And so if we can really start to meet in the middle, I think we can get a more complete picture of these ecosystems. Excellent. That sounds like a great sort of outcome of eco-dage, right, bringing people with these very, even sort of the same issue, but from very different heights as it were, and get them to look at it together. And so your knowledge can sort of feed one another very nicely. Excellent, excellent. And so you both are relatively young, relatively recently out of the school. What kind of advice do you have for aspiring scientists, maybe people just starting out in college or in community colleges to help them along? I would say find role models. I think role models can be a great way to find your passion in a way. See someone who you look up to or you feel like your interests align and that's someone that you can ask advice of and that's someone who can also serve as a mentor perhaps that can lead you to where new opportunities might be so you can pursue your passion. Excellent. My advice is going to be follow your passions. I think if you're not finding satisfaction with where your science is at now, by doing that I think it'll be a stepping stone to where you want to be in the future. Yeah, it is very interesting that the passion that people feel for their work really translates into their success often. Scientists who are most successful are just deeply, deeply care about their work. They care about it, sort of becomes almost life enveloping for them in some cases. Something is almost a little too far, but it is a really critical aspect to get that moving, get that caring where it comes across to. And I think it's important too that you see people from this symposium presumably who care about different related things and again you can probably feed off the one mother's passion there, right? Absolutely. Excellent, excellent. So I tell you what, before we go on here, I want to break because I heard recently a cute little science joke that struck me as very appropriate for eco days and I thought if you don't mind, I'd drop it on here. Alright. So two fish swim into a bar and the first fish says, I'll have some H2O. The second fish says, I'll have some H2O too. The second fish dies. Sorry, it's a stupid science joke, but you know. So, you know, we are, I guess, wrapping things up if I understand it, and we are about out of time. Grace and Sarah, I very much appreciate you guys being here, taking time out of this symposium to talk to me and it's been great talking to you. I wish you both the best with your work and look forward to it and hope the rest of the conference goes well. Thank you. Thank you. And I hope you will come back and join us for another episode of The Life of a Science.