Qualified Perceptions

[I started out writing this bit of preamble below, but as you'll observe, I then found I had a lot of things to remark about, after all!]

It was a busy one, but a lot of the busy-ness wasn't particularly remarkable. I guess some weeks in life are just like that.

Tuesday's lab involved the characterization of breathing in fish and reptiles. It is always a long lab that takes the full 4 hours for each lab section, because it involves gradually warming the animals up to see how temperature affects their breathing rates (fun fact, breathing volumes in both groups don't change very much, so their primary method for getting more oxygen as metabolic demands increase is to breathe faster). We also investigate how hypoxia, and in the case of the reptiles, hypercapnia (elevated carbon dioxide), affect breathing rates. This year I tried to emphasize the distinction between fish and reptile responses; fish show a pretty clear and dramatic response to low oxygen, and in species that can, it will often cause a switch to air-breathing. In contrast, like us and other terrestrial animals, reptiles respond much more quickly and dramatically to hypercapnia.

Wrangling the reptiles is always a wild card. Here's Gary the Gehrrosaurus major with a small piece of tape as a largely symbolic restraint against wiggling:



Sometimes he has an opinion about being cooled down, but most of the time he is exceptionally chill. This year, though, we observed that he has learned my ways when it comes to hypoxia and hypercapnia exposure! The way I expose each reptile to a different air composition is by using a gas pump to flow air through a 60-mL syringe with the plunger removed; I have students put the open end of the syringe barrel in front of the reptile's face for a few seconds at a time so that most of the air the reptile is getting is coming from the syringe. We start out just exposing each reptile to room air, then I plug a gas bag full of either nitrogen (hypoxia) or carbon dioxide (hypercapnia) into the gas pump. In general, our reptiles respond very quickly and dramatically to hypercapnia, but not by breathing faster: they instead hold their breath, aka use apnea to avoid the high carbon dioxide.

Well. This time around, when we brought the syringe near Gary's face, before changing the gas composition, he just went straight to apnea. It was a repeatable response, too. I think we tried it three times. So I had to conclude that Gary has learned my tricks over the years, and we had to skip that part of the lab.

Now, in contrast to Gary, here's an Anole:


I have stopped trying to acquire Anoles for now, because it's really hard to keep them happy in our lab setup. I think I just haven't managed to dial in the humidity correctly for them. But they're adorable, and also a lot more wiggly than Gary. So they require both a more delicate touch, and more taping so they stay in place.

The leopard geckos and skink, however, are usually the most challenging reptiles to work with. For several years I've been trying to use some gauze so we aren't directly putting masking tape onto reptile skin, but this year we went back to just straight-up tape, because the gauze method gives the reptiles just a little too much leeway to wiggle loose. We then use mineral oil to free the reptiles from the tape at the end of the procedure.

One of the three leopard geckos was pretty well-behaved this year (Shadow Luna, named by the students). Trinity and Baby Gramps, however...Trinity tried to bite me while I was trying to free her at the end, and Baby Gramps actually succeeded in drawing blood this time around. At least he didn't bite a student!

I kind of wish this bite mark would turn into a scar, because that would make it feel a little more worthwhile: a little, circular gecko bite scar.



I doubt that will actually happen, though.

Anyway, also on the lab front, towards the end of the week, two packages I'd been concerned about safely arrived. Whew. One contained a small bottle of citrated cow's blood, which we're after for the fresh hemoglobin it contains. The other contained two more horseshoe crabs!



These are Gulf crabs, and the styrofoam box they arrived in had a big sign on it that said to keep it at or above 70°F. When I opened the box...let's just say the crabs definitely weren't at 70°F. Sigh. They sat somewhere significantly colder than that for a while on their journey north from Florida. Sigh. After a bit of time to warm up, they started to perk up, so I added them in with the last one of last year's crabs, as pictured above. If Methusalah makes it until Tuesday, that will be the first time I've managed to keep a crab going for the entire year. I'm trying to do the best I can with them, but it's difficult in the midst of 500 other responsibilities.

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So then on Thursday, my institution had an all-day symposium that's part of a series titled, "Earth's Cry, Humanity's Call," motivated by the Laudato Sí encyclical letter written and released by Pope Francis, calling for people to take action in the face of global environmental crises. I somehow wound up as a faculty representative on the symposium's organizing committee, so it seemed like a good idea to attend as much of the symposium as I could. (As a faculty rep I feel like I played only a bit part in the organizing, but it was still an important bit part because it involved recruiting colleagues and students from our School of Science to participate). The theme for the year was focused on "integral community development," which is also a focus of my institution's Business School, so the sessions were on a series of topics related to business and finance, but notably, NOT "make as much money as humanly possible at any cost." I wasn't able to go to the first session of the morning, but the second session featured a speaker named Kirsten Moy, who has recently been working to apply ideas from complexity science to community development.

So, that got to be pretty interesting. Just to point out why, at one point while she was giving an overview of what complexity science is, she listed "Ant Colonies" as her topmost example of a complex system. I was reminded of the time I spent interacting with colleagues in graduate school as part of our institution's Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, and I've also known multiple people who have spent time at the Santa Fe Institute engaged in that sort of work. Anyway, here's an interview with Kerstin in the event you're interested in understanding more about her analysis of why lots of community development initiatives wind up having all sorts of unintended consequences (tied to thinking about communities as complex systems).

I could go on, but really, the overall consequence of the symposium on Thursday was that it led to a second weeknight where I didn't leave campus until after 8 pm (also happened on Tuesday because I had a rowing club online Board Meeting immediately after the back-to-back 4-hour labs ended, sigh).

Other than those items, we've reached a point in the semester where a good number of my Animal Physiology students have realized that they could maybe benefit from some more help with their statistical thinking and decision-making. This is really, really great for them to be realizing, but it also means very busy office hours for me. And a lot of what happens in those office hours isn't particularly new or interesting. But hey, that's just often the nature of teaching life.