Webinar: Teen Earth Optimism – Using Environmental DNA to Study Biodiversity
Aired May 26, 2020
Meaghan Cuddy:
Hello. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Welcome to our Teen Tuesday Earth Optimism Program. My name is Meaghan Cuddy and I am a museum educator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. And while our museum is closed, I am coming to you live from my home in Washington, D.C. So thank you for joining us today, and a special thank you to our generous donors, our volunteers, and all of our partners who enable us to discover, create, and share new knowledge with the world today and every day free of charge.
So like I said, today is our Teen Tuesday program. And our program today is all about how scientists are using tools to understand global biodiversity, not by studying organisms themselves, but by finding clues that they leave behind in their DNA. We're going to be getting started in just a few minutes, and while everyone is joining us today, you can use that Q&A button that's located on the bottom of your screen to tell us where you're joining us from. So that's the button with two speech bubbles, and we'd love to hear who's joining us today and where you're from. So let us know.
And while everyone's joining our webinar and finding that Q&A button, I'm going to go over a couple details about today's program. Our program today is live captioned, so you can turn on captions by clicking the close caption button on the bottom of your screen. All right, and I see everyone joining us. Hello to people from New York, from Brooklyn, from Virginia, from Colorado, Houston, Texas, Scarsdale, the Ifkids are joining us from Maryland, New Carrollton, Dallas, Texas, Sophie from Derby. Hello to everyone. Thank you all for joining us today. Someone from Austin, Texas. I used to live in Texas, hook them. Arizona. All right, welcome everyone. I see you're all getting familiar with that Q&A button, and that's also the button that you're going to use to ask questions to our scientists. You can submit your questions at any time during the program, but we're going to be asking them to our scientists during the second half so make sure that you stick around until then.
We also have two Smithsonian scientists today, Sarah and Allen. And they're going to be answering your questions in the Q&A box if we aren't able to get to them live on air. And you can also use that Q&A box to answer our questions for you. But keep in mind that your comments are only going to be visible to Smithsonian staff, so definitely keep them on topic. All right, we have a couple more people joining us. Pamela from North Carolina, Emma from D.C., another one from Austin, Texas. Hi, Maddie. All right. And just as a reminder, we're always interested in hearing from you, so after this program, you're going to get a link to a survey and we'd love your thoughts on how we can make this a better program for our team audiences.
Looks like everyone is here, so we're going to get started. Today's program is all about earth optimism. And a lot of you watching probably know that our planet is facing a lot of different threats right now from a lot of different human behaviors, but around the world and here at the Smithsonian, scientists and lots of experts are working really hard to understand these problems and to come up with some really creative ways to deal with them. So today we're going to explore some of this work with Dr. Chris Meyer, who is a researcher and curator in the Invertebrate Zoology Department at the Natural History Museum. And Chris is going to tell us about his research studying biodiversity, and how new DNA tools are helping us understand biological communities in new ways. So I'm really excited to introduce our scientist for today, Chris Meyer. Chris, how are you?
Chris Meyer:
It worked. Good, I'm doing great, Meaghan. Thanks for having me on and thanks to everybody for joining us.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Thanks for coming, and great job turning on your camera. Great to see you. Chris. You are a research zoologist and the curator for mollusks and other marine invertebrates at the Natural History Museum. And when you're not at home, your work has taken you all over the world to marina freshwater habitats in the U.S. and all the way in French Polynesia. But right now I'm assuming you're not in the South Pacific. So where are you joining us from today?
Chris Meyer:
I'm joining you from right here in D.C. Pretty close to the museum there, doing my best to help flatten the curve and grow a mullet. As you can see here.
Meaghan Cuddy:
I know, mine is also growing out. My little bits that are usually out of my ponytail are much longer than usual. So before we get started, Chris, do you want to tell us a little bit about what you do as a scientist at the museum?
Chris Meyer:
Sure. I'm a research zoologist. I'm going to see if I can get my screen to share here for a second. I'm a biologist and a marine biologist, focus mostly on ocean stuff. And my job, I consider myself to be a bit of a biodiversity accountant, and our job is to go out there and document the animal species that live on our planet. So I get to do a lot of time underwater looking and studying of things. But I'm also a curator, so that means I'm in charge or I help to maintain ... Oops, let's see if I can get this going forward, sorry ... the National Collection. So I'm with a bunch of other really dedicated and passionate staff are in charge of the world's largest shell collection, which is a really fun thing to be at. So the curator's in charge of the National Collections. So it's a fantastic job to have, super. I used to collect lots of things as a kid, so.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Very cool. That is a very impressive collection. Much more impressive than my shell collection than I had when I was a kid. All right, so Chris, some of our viewers are wondering how you became a zoologist.
Chris Meyer:
So am I, actually. I've just always been fascinated with diversity ever since I was a kid. My mom would drop me off at the museum in Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Museum, and I would just sit there and stare at the diversity of birds and animals. I found this picture from wow, 1978 I think, looking under rocks on a beach in St. John's and collecting things again, I have that weird collector gene and I was always that kid asking why. And so a museum job is a perfect place for me to end up. I also love fishing and being outside and exploring, creeking, all that kind of stuff. And I still do that today quite a bit.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Very cool. So I know in your work you use cutting edge tools to learn all about biodiversity. Basically, what species are living where. And I know today we're going to talk about using DNA. So to get us started, Chris, what exactly is DNA and why is that something that's important for studying biodiversity?
Chris Meyer:
So let's see you open another slide. So DNA is probably the most amazing molecule on the planet, right? It's this simple string of nucleotides that code the blueprint of life and it's found in all our cells and it's pretty simple to read, it's pretty amazing. It's like a Lego instruction manual, but instead of having these thousands of pieces, we just have four simple letters and using those letters, they help build this amazing diversity on the planet. And we can decode that through different technologies these days and use it to better understand and describe all the animals and plants and fungi that exist. Much like a barcode scanner you use at a grocery store or whatever, you can imagine, we can focus in on one little region of this genetic code to tell different species apart because we all have a little bit of different mutations through there. And so we can use that to determine one species from another.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That is so cool. It's amazing that we have this teeny-tiny molecule that can give us so much information about the world around us.
Chris Meyer:
And what's even more amazing is that now that we have these sequences, we can ask amazing questions that you would've never ever thought to ask before. You can go into habitats and environments and filter those habitats. You used to be able to go collect individuals, but now we can actually just filter the water and actually get the DNA coming out of it. I kind of like to think of it as when you're driving along in your car and you smell that skunk, and you know there was a skunk there, but you know it was a skunk. That's kind of like environmental DNA, because all animals, like if you're in your house, all the dust in your house, a lot of that dust comes from your own skin and the dander you have, which is old skin cells. It also comes from a lot of insect molts and cuticles and stuff like that. And just like that, they leave a trace behind in their environment that we can sample and sequence and tell what was in it.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That is so cool. It's amazing to think that the dust around me is actually made up of me and of all the other living things around me.
Chris Meyer:
It is. So actually there was a question we wanted to ask folks about how we would sample DNA in the water. And it's great because the water, unlike in your house, you would take a swab of a thing, but in the ocean or in water systems, we basically take a liter of seawater, this is about a liter of seawater right here. And then you run it through a little filter, you pump a little water through it and push it through this filter like that. And it traps the DNA on this filter right there as you pump it through. And then we extract the DNA from that filter.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Very cool. So students, we have a question for you guys watching. So we know that Chris is collecting this DNA from the water, from the habitat that he's interested in, but how do you think that the DNA gets there? What are some of the ways that you think fish would lose their DNA or would shed in their environment? And you can type your ideas or your answers into the Q&A box and we'll read some of them out.
Chris Meyer:
Be very curious [inaudible 00:10:17]
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, I'm curious too.
Chris Meyer:
And while people are trying to come up with answers, fish are one of the great ones to monitor in marine communities, particularly because we can look at the impacts of setting up marine protected areas and analyze how effective they are by whether species are returning to various places. So from a conservation standpoint, it's a pretty good way to monitor what's in that system.
Meaghan Cuddy:
It's a really cool application of this. And Chris, we are getting some really cool answers. A lot of our students think that you would find this from scales. We also have some people who think it would happen by animals decomposing or throwing up or pooping in their environment.
Chris Meyer:
I like the poop answer.
Meaghan Cuddy:
It's true. They do do it. Chris, what do you think of those answers?
Chris Meyer:
Those are great. We're still studying quite a bit about how different animals shed their DNA into the environment because that's really important to learn more about the likelihood of finding those creatures. For fishes, they have mucus oftentimes covering to keep them kind of moist. And the gills, of course, they're moving water across their gills. If they're bleeding at all, they would shed a little bit of that. If they're rubbing around in the sand or dirt, they might break off skin cells or one, something like that. So these are all different ways that we think that animals will shed their DNA into the environment. And fishes aren't unique, but all animals have DNA. So we can read those profiles of not just the fish but other species as well.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah. So they're leaving these clues of themselves behind and all the pieces of themselves that they leave behind.
Chris Meyer:
Absolutely.
Meaghan Cuddy:
So once you get these samples, Chris, what do you do with the data once you collect it?
Chris Meyer:
So the samples come out and we will extract the DNA in bulk. So the whole thing, because we can't tell one from another at that point there. It's tiny, you barely can even see it. It goes through these tiny pores and gets trapped on a filter, usually probably associated with again, cells themselves. And then we extract that and we run it through some fancy machines where we will do a couple different ways of asking questions of that DNA. We can either get the whole community profile by focusing on that little barcode and amplifying that signal and then looking in against this known reference library that we've been building at the museum and globally we've been building this barcode reference library that we can compare these environmental profiles to the things that we know to be able to assign basically who was in those environments.
So it's kind of like a license plate reader. You don't need to know the whole blueprint of the car going through if the little fast pass is focused just on the license plate. And that's what we're kind of building these environmental monitoring capability, to just tell who the drivers are in these ecosystems.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Cool. And so that's an amazing way to study biodiversity, by looking at the DNA rather than some of the traditional ways we've studied it, like collecting organisms or observing who's actually physically there. So how does this make biodiversity studies different than how they've been in the past?
Chris Meyer:
I think that's a great question. It's really amazing, actually, because I think that this is going to revolutionize how we assess and monitor ecosystems moving forward. Because you don't have to do it destructively, it's super non-invasive, right? You can go in and just take a thing of water, you don't have to disturb an animal, you don't have to actually remove it from its habitat. So it's really changing how we would assess, plus the other thing about it is because the DNA lingers for a while, it's shed and it's kind of floating around in the water, it leaves a record that's easier for us to sample so we don't have to be there right then and there when the fish swam by to count it, it leaves a trace of it for a while.
So actually the method might actually give us a better time-average perspective of who was there over a period of time. And so I think that that's really going to change the way we look at how these ecosystems are changing and how the policies and the different management practices we put into play can monitor the health of our oceans and fresh water systems.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That is so cool and I feel like would probably open up some really amazing new questions and new opportunities. So what are you using in your own work? How are you using this technology?
Chris Meyer:
We've been using the environmental DNA approach to compare it to our more standardized, like we were talking about, collecting the organisms and counting what's there. And I have one little example I can run through with everybody. We've been doing some studies in ... Let me see if I can make this go ... on this island called Tetiaroa, which is in French Polynesia. It's a beautiful island, actually. Marlon Brando bought it when he was filming "The Bounty" at that point and now he's giving it over and using it for the study system. So we've been monitoring the health of the ocean there. And if you can see this picture here, I don't know if you guys can see my cursor here, but you can see here this reef falls off right here. And so we've been monitoring the reef right there. We've been diving in the water.
Here's a picture where Tetiaroa is, it's in the middle of nowhere. If you had Google Earth and you spun it around so you couldn't see any continents, then you zoomed in, that's where Tetiaroa would be. It's an amazing place to go visit. And we've been diving there, we've been putting down these kind of biological weather stations and we've been monitoring the health of the corals, but we also want to see how that's represented in the eDNA. So we've been collecting the water when we do this as well to see if we get similar profiles. Here's a picture of us out there in the field. We usually filter the water on the boat there as you can see through a net because we don't want a lot of algae and larger things to bias what we would get. And then we run it through the syringe and filters we have right here.
And then we compare whether we get the same information we get from the benthic monitoring stations from this eDNA signal. Does that make sense? And we find some pretty wild results actually. So in that case, we sampled this over the course of a couple days and we did two different days. And the second day we went, when we analyzed after it came out of that big fancy machine, we analyzed all the DNA. We had two species that were the most common species that were completely different from just two days before and it turned out that they were parrotfish. So that was kind of strange to us. So that was kind of surprising since when we were diving during the day, it didn't look any different from the day before. So I was just curious if we could formulate a question for our viewers about why that might be the case.
Meaghan Cuddy:
This is a great opportunity for us to come up with a really interesting hypothesis. So viewers are watching, why do you think Chris and his team found parrotfish DNA in their water samples even though they didn't see parrotfish? You can type your answers into the Q&A box and let us know what you think what happened here?
Chris Meyer:
We did see maybe one or two, but it didn't look any different than the day that we were out there before. But it was very, very striking.
Meaghan Cuddy:
It seemed like they'd pretty noticeable fish.
Chris Meyer:
Yeah, you'll see them cruising around and doing stuff. But again, from our perspective it didn't look terribly different. But when we analyzed the DNA, it basically said 20 percent of everything out here is parrotfish. And that wasn't quite the same picture we got.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, that's a lot. Twenty percent seems like a lot.
Chris Meyer:
Any ideas out there?
Meaghan Cuddy:
All right, we are getting some really interesting answers, Chris. Some of our viewers think that maybe a fish died and decomposed nearby, releasing its DNA, or maybe some of the fish were having babies and that was what you were reading, maybe they were peeing or pooping in this environment. What do you think? What do you think of our viewer's hypotheses?
Chris Meyer:
I think one of those three is right.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Really? Which one?
Chris Meyer:
Yeah, I feel pretty strong about this. So it turns out that parrotfish will spawn, they'll have these spawning aggregations and they'll throw up sperm and eggs at a certain time of the year. And it's pretty well known that this usually happens a few days after a full moon and it's a big event. And it turns out, I said, "Well, that's weird." And they have buoyant eggs. They have eggs that have these little float sacks in them, so they would've been at the surface. And so we went back to our calendar and looked at the day that we collected that water and lo and behold, it was four days after the moon cycle when they were supposed to spawn.
So that was a nice piece of detective work where we could be kind of like CSI put the pieces together as to why we were getting the signal that we saw.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That's amazing.
Chris Meyer:
Yeah, that was pretty neat. And so you can learn something by these processes that we weren't there to see. We learned the timing of the reproductive cycle for these animals. So if you want to protect sites and prevent fishing from the critical times, that's a really important thing to learn about for marine protected areas and stuff. So learning this, the pattern of life through these kind of analyses is super important.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, that's an amazing application of this that not just what animals are actually there and organisms are actually visible, but learning more about their behavior and how they're living in that environment is a really cool application of this.
Chris Meyer:
I'm just going to throw one more sign because two of the other organisms that were super-abundant and common in those eDNA samples are these two urchins, and urchins live on the bottom. They burrow into the reef and stuff, but these were the next two abundant things we detected and it just goes to show that you don't have to be right down there on the bottom to pick up signal from the creatures that are actually living on the reef at any one time. So that was a really powerful test to the method to show that we could actually detect the benthic species that we were getting from our sampling of the bottom communities. We were just up at the surface and detecting them as well.
So again, like we were talking about, this effort is really going to revolutionize our ability to ask questions of areas we talked about maybe how to monitor for marine protective areas, but you can imagine other uses. We could try to build ways to detect protected species, especially people are using this currently now to look at stream systems and looking at protected amphibians if the stream that we might not see from sampling, we can also detect invasive species, things that we didn't know were there but we should be worried about. So it's a really exciting time to have this tool available.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, it sounds like this is a really amazing and really rapidly growing field, so it must be really exciting to be working on these types of new questions.
Chris Meyer:
It is, and again, I think it's a natural extension of what we do at natural history museums. Natural history museums are the libraries of life. If you get something that you don't know if it's a new thing, the museums provide that point of reference. You bring your specimen in, based on the creature with its color and its size and its shapes, and you compare it to what we have in our museum and our collections. Whereas now, a big part of my job is to develop that reference library using these DNA sequences so when we go out into the world, we can compare in this new way and kind of democratize this process. So it's super-exciting.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, it's amazing that our museums are historically like these big repositories of those physical collections items you showed us at the beginning, but now we're also holding these amazing collections of DNA and we can use it in all these really cool ways.
Chris Meyer:
And we're learning that we don't know. There's a lot that we still have to learn out there and all my students and all the folks listening out there, this is a super-exciting time to be out there because there's a lot to do still there and there's some really cool places to explore that we're finding out that we don't know that much about. And so it's just another tool and it really, really is lowering the threshold for being involved to better understand the natural world and your place in it.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, I think that's a great segue to my final question for you today, Chris, which is, since this is a program about Earth optimism, is there something that makes you optimistic when it comes to studying biodiversity in this way?
Chris Meyer:
I'm optimistic every day. I am super-lucky to have a job where most of my days I'm going to see something I've never seen before and the level of discovery. But also the things that we've seen over the course of our study, even in that island in French Polynesia, it was decimated by a crown of thorns event, which is this nasty sea star that eats the coral reef, and then they got hit by a massive cyclone. And so there's this long term ecological research program going on there and they've been monitoring the coral reef for decades and the French have been there for 50 years now, and the coral reef was doing really well and it went from maybe 70 percent coverage to down to the single digits, maybe a few coral heads here and there. It was really, really looked terrible.
But just in a few short years it's bounced back and the marine world is incredibly resilient and everything that we're seeing shows, and especially this time of now during the pandemic and COVID, with less people out there engaging, we're seeing marine life come back in ways that are incredible. And it gives me a lot of cause for positivism and optimism that if we take better care and we do a better job in managing and keeping our water quality good and maybe not fishing as heavily, that we have a good chance for these systems to return to a little more productivity and diversity that we can see, and we can tell and watch it happen using these new tools.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Absolutely. I think that that is so cool and a great reason to be optimistic. So Chris, thank you so much for sharing all of your science with us today. Do you have some time to answer some questions from our audience?
Chris Meyer:
Sure, absolutely.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Okay, so viewers, we're going to open it up to your questions now. You can ask Chris about his career as a marine scientist, about eDNA and all of his really cool work studying biodiversity, marine organisms, anything that you're curious about, you can type your questions into the Q&A box on the bottom of your screen and we're going to try and get to as many as we can. And Allen and Sarah are also going to be answering your questions, so you can feel free to type them in and we'll ask them to Chris. And Chris, we have a lot of good questions already, lots of curiosity about DNA and how your work happens. Jessica would like to know, is it true that all living things are very alike DNA-wise?
Chris Meyer:
Yeah, that's the one kind of beautiful pattern of life is that we all share a common history and it all ties back to one common organism, because that's the fundamental thread that links us to all the diversity around us. But it's changes over time with genetic mutations and stuff. Without that we would all be bacteria or be single cell things. Still be interesting, but it wouldn't look the same. But that common thread that ties all life together on the planet is what really makes me appreciate the diversity all around us. People try to value diversity for various reasons, and I think there's just this shared common occupancy of our planet that is tied through descent with modification, that it is linked through this genetic code, this planetary genome that is exciting. It makes me more excited to go out and find out more about it.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That really is amazing. It's an amazing way to think about life on our planet. Bella would like to know, do you do any work with viral DNA?
Chris Meyer:
We do, actually. I don't specifically work with a lot of viral stuff. We work with a colleague in San Diego who's done a lot of work with viruses on coral reefs, Forest Rohwer and his lab. So we're looking at the different clutches from the big organisms, the fishes and the things that you can see to the microbes, which are your bacteria that you can't see that well. And then down to the viruses and trying to figure out how they each engage and scale throughout the process. And you can use the same tools and approaches for viral discovery and sequencing right now. And there's a great example of people sequencing right now at sewage processing facilities to look for COVID-19 because they can pick up traces of that in the water and they can look for hot places and places where they should be monitoring during this pandemic.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Wow, that's a really incredible application of this kind of work beyond even biodiversity stuff. So public health too is another factor of this. Cool. Claire and Drew have a question that I've actually asked you before, Chris. Okay. How many bits of DNA do you find in a liter of water that you filter?
Chris Meyer:
Depends on how nutrient-loaded that water is. Sometimes you find a lot and sometimes you find a little. It's tiny. It's very, very small amounts, measured in nanograms. You can barely see it. Sometimes when you filter the water, the filter will stay white and you won't see a thing if you have really clear water like we had on Tetiaroa there, you don't see anything really, but other places where there's maybe a lot of nutrients in the water and a lot of algae and things like that blooming, there'll be a lot more DNA and the filter will get greenish or brownish and you can see that. It's not a lot, but it's enough. And that's what's amazing. It just blows your mind that you can go out there and sample this DNA that you don't see. It's probably in your drinking water, it's everywhere. When people try to keep it away from the water, they have to be very, very careful with sterile techniques to get rid of the DNA because it's very pervasive. It's everywhere.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Cool. Yeah, it's amazing that you can get all of that information from that little teeny tiny filter that you showed us.
Chris Meyer:
Thousands of species right there.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Right there.
Chris Meyer:
In your pocket.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Easily transported.
Chris Meyer:
Well, it's like CSI, kind of like our job is to be CSI for the rest of the life on the planet rather than just one species.
Meaghan Cuddy:
You're "CSI Coral Reef" instead of "CSI New Orleans." All right. Montana would like to know does this technology help you identify new species or change how we organize species?
Chris Meyer:
Wow, that's a great question. It's really, really helpful for us to find places where we haven't characterized. We haven't built that reference library because we have to go out and build the library in order to ask who's in it. So we can do both at the same time and compare and contrast how well we've done to think who we've captured and who we still need to capture. So we definitely find new things. The question is, are those new things species that have been described by science but have yet to generate a barcode so we know who they are, or are they brand new species to science?
And many times it's usually a mixture of the two. There's always new species out there to find. A colleague of mine found a brand new leech right in this area around D.C. last year that you'd think we would've known about. So there's always new species to find, but there's always more species that need to build the reference library. And as far as how we think about the organization of life, it's really changing the perspective of the relative abundance of things out there. It's certainly has changed my perspective. I realized there are a lot of copepods out there in the world. Lots and lots and lots of little, tiny micro-crustaceans. They're kind of like our insects of the marine world.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Cool. Yeah, it's amazing that this technology not only shows us all the things that we do know, but also all of the things that we still don't know, which is kind of incredible how much we still don't know about what's out there. All right. So it is about 3:30, which is the end of our planned program for today. But Chris, we do have some more really cool questions. So do you have a couple extra minutes to stick around and answer them?
Chris Meyer:
Sure, absolutely.
Meaghan Cuddy:
All right, great. So Chris-
Chris Meyer:
No, go ahead. Oh, actually, I do want to say one thing to all of you out there is that, again, this is a tool that I think is going to become very common. If I were a kid and I could have taken a water sample of the lake I grew up and was fishing, and I would've been fascinated to know what was in it. And so these kits are now, they're coming online. There's kits online that you can order to do your DNA dog or do your Ancestry.com. And it's going to become a tool for citizen science, I think, into the future that will really allow us to map life and figure out what we know and what we don't know out there. And it's just really going to change everybody's perspective of their environment.
Meaghan Cuddy:
It really is amazing, and it's amazing that this is something that people can get involved in their own backyards probably at some point.
Chris Meyer:
A hundred percent.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Cool. So if you have to go today, thank you so much for joining us, but Chris is going to stick around to answer a couple questions if you'd like to stay online. So Chris, let's take a few more questions.
Chris Meyer:
Shoot, ready.
Meaghan Cuddy:
All right. So can you talk a little bit about your educational background? Some of our viewers would like to know what your degree was in and where you went to school and how you became a scientist.
Chris Meyer:
Sure. Like I said, I was a total geek as a kid, but I didn't love biology because I thought it was way too much memorization and I didn't want to do, it was just too many big words. But I took geology classes actually, and I actually got my background in training as a geologist and a paleontologist because the fact that there were these fossils and it made the story of life just much more richer and complete and it allowed me to connect all the pieces together and better understand the big questions about "why" that are out there in the world. So I went through high school and I took a really important class a summer program called Environmental Chemistry, and we went and visited power plants, water treatment facilities, did all kinds of interesting field stuff. So the more field work that you do and the more you're out there and in it, there's an expression, what was our colleague in room, in it to win it.
The more you see, the better stories you have and the better you understand life. And so I'd highly encourage people to do that. I went on to undergraduate college at Colgate University and had a fantastic advisor there who encouraged me to be curious and go outside and explore, took courses like Identification of Trees and Shrubs while Snowshoeing. I did actually, that was a real course. And then I just had really great advisors, went on to Berkeley and just happened to stumble across the timing of using DNA sequencing to explore the world was coming on board and just having that stick-to-it-ness and passion that if I'm curious, I'm sure other people will be curious and if I can tell good stories and ask and do good science, it'll pay off. And so that's been a really fun experience.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Cool. You mentioned that you have a paleo background and interest in that. Segovia would like to know, have you ever found any fossils when you've been out in the field?
Chris Meyer:
Indeed. Yeah, some of our first field trips, again, both of my undergraduate advisor at Colgate and I did a paleontology master's at Berkeley, so I spent a lot of time looking for fossils. I've been working with colleagues and looking myself, I studied cowrie shells, that was my Ph.D. They're these beautiful shells like this and they fossilized really, really well.
So a lot of my work was built on the shoulders of a lot of others who had done a lot of the paleontological work, but we certainly looked for them ourselves. You can find them in fossil deposits in Florida, and they actually still have original pigmentation patterns on them. If you hold up a black light, you can actually see those patterns. It's really amazing that that's preserved for millions of years. And there's some great fossils to find everywhere. Actually, it's one of our mantras is you're not too far from a fossil, and so you can get outside and find fossils too.
Meaghan Cuddy:
That is so cool. That sounds like some really amazing experiences and those cowries are so beautiful.
Chris Meyer:
They are.
Meaghan Cuddy:
All right. You talked a little bit about how students can get involved and people who are not scientists can get involved in this. Bella would like to know, are eDNA kits available for students who are interested in doing work like this?
Chris Meyer:
There are a couple startups that are starting to get them out there. There's a company, a buddy of mine that works with, called Jonah Ventures. I think they have a website that you can check out. They're running them in beta right now or still working on some of the methods. But it's really great because again, all you have to do is sample the water and push it through a filter and put it in a little plastic mailing envelope and have a little app on your phone that'll come back in a couple weeks, maybe a month, maybe a little longer, especially today with people not being able to go to work as quickly.
But it'll tell you the profile of the fish community in your region. It can also do algal profiles to look for algal blooms and things like that. And I think that more and more of those things will be available. And if anything, the prices for these, they do cost something. And so sometimes there are grants and there's other ways for students to do this, but it's going to get cheaper and cheaper and it's going to be just like taking a family snapshot. It's going to be taking your local aquatic system snapshot. So whether it's your creek, or your pond, or your river, or your bay, or your ocean, our goal is to get it into everybody's hands and have everybody be a citizen scientist contributing to this information.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah, that's amazing. And it's so cool that this really amazing, super-high-tech science is something that actually all of us can do. We can all be scientists and all be involved in learning more about our planet. Cool.
Chris Meyer:
I hope that helps though.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Yeah. One of our viewers would like to know, can DNA get preserved for many years?
Chris Meyer:
That's a good question. We do have the DNA genome sequence of a Neanderthal, so it can get preserved for a long time, but it takes special conditions for that. DNA does degrade over time, and in fact, in your cells you have a lot of enzymes that want to chew up free DNA. That free DNA floating around your body is a bad thing usually. And so there's a lot of things that will degrade DNA over time, water being one of the worst things.
So actually DNA does degrade pretty quickly in sunlight and UV light. So you want to basically dry it out and make it impermeable, kind of encase it as quickly as you can. So things like bone, things like anoxic sediments, places like that, where things like amber, they've seen Jurassic Park, things like that will preserve the DNA for much, much longer because it basically encases that DNA and protects it. It gives it like a weathering rime that prevents the degradation from happening.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Cool. That is amazing. And thank you so much for sharing all of this with us today, Chris. That's actually all the questions we have for you. So thank you so much for taking the time to answer them.
Chris Meyer:
Well, thanks to everybody who participated and hung out for so long.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Awesome. And also thanks to Allen and Sarah who answered a ton of really good questions for our viewers as well. So thanks guys too for joining us today. And thank you to all of our viewers for joining us and tuning in. If you enjoyed our program today, feel free to join us again next Tuesday. We're going to be talking at 3:00 PM Eastern Time with museum educator Heather Richardson all about sustainability. And you can also check out all of our video webinars and see our full schedule of programs at naturalhistory.si.edu. But Chris, thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed talking to you and I learned so much. I think everyone did too.
Chris Meyer:
No problems. Thank you so much, Meaghan, for making it all possible and everybody behind the scenes too, really appreciate it.
Meaghan Cuddy:
Awesome. Thanks and everyone have a great day. Bye.
Chris Meyer:
Bye.
