Oyster pseudofeces and you.
Oysters poop. This fact is one of the pillars upon which I expect to eventually rest my thesis, the gold star sticker of academic glory. In sifting through oyster feces my plan is to get a better idea of the type of microorganisms which live in their gut, the individual oyster gut microbiome, which has a good chance of being associated with the health of farmed shellfish.
Once a week I head out the lab on the island, collect oyster feces, extract DNA, and run through a genetic sequencer to get a snapshot of these microbiomes. Sound easy enough right? I've got my MoBio PowerFecal DNA kit and everything.
In science one always starts with a simple enough question, such as 'I tend to see A and B at the same time or place' (correlation), or for the more ambitious there is also the variant of 'I tend to see B given A' (causation). However, since nature abhors a vacuum, and a vacuum containing nothing is the height (depth?) of simplicity, then it can be reasoned that nature abhors simplicity. These complications, like infernal epicycles, will quickly work their way into any supposedly simple scientific project. In my case it turns out oyster poop is not always oyster poop.
This is one of those facts I could have probably gone to the grave without knowing. It is one of those complications which comes up when you're at least three decades into life, having made peace with being unemployable, and begin reading 'Scatalogical Studies of the Bivalvia (Mollusca)'. It turns out that shellfish, such as oysters, have the ability to detect which bits of crud they suck in from the sea are digestible and which are not.
How they do this without a brain is not entirely understood, but the filters they use to ingest food can also sense if what they've drawn in is a piece of sand or a type of algae they can't break down. At this point the oyster covers all of the indigestible bits of marine flotsam in mucous and expels the mass as something called pseudofeces (Diagram below).
The problem for the sad marine biologist is then trying to sort this pseudofeces out from the feces. It turns out this can be using the following procedure:
1. Frown. Make sure enough people in your lab see you doing this.
2. Ask someone on Twitter how to tell the difference between feces and psedofeces.
3. Get an answer. Wow, Twitter, really? I thought people only used it to harass each other over gender dynamics in video games.
4. Get a microscope and look at the oyster secretion under about 10x magnification. If you can still see intact cells of algae then its pseudofeces. Feces under a microscope pretty much looks like feces, so that's reassuring.
5. Freeze the real feces for all of the gene sequencing later on.
Well, now I've got this part of my project down.
Thanks goes out to Carina M. Gsottbauer for helping resolve the pseudofeces versus feces issue.
Once a week I head out the lab on the island, collect oyster feces, extract DNA, and run through a genetic sequencer to get a snapshot of these microbiomes. Sound easy enough right? I've got my MoBio PowerFecal DNA kit and everything.
In science one always starts with a simple enough question, such as 'I tend to see A and B at the same time or place' (correlation), or for the more ambitious there is also the variant of 'I tend to see B given A' (causation). However, since nature abhors a vacuum, and a vacuum containing nothing is the height (depth?) of simplicity, then it can be reasoned that nature abhors simplicity. These complications, like infernal epicycles, will quickly work their way into any supposedly simple scientific project. In my case it turns out oyster poop is not always oyster poop.
This is one of those facts I could have probably gone to the grave without knowing. It is one of those complications which comes up when you're at least three decades into life, having made peace with being unemployable, and begin reading 'Scatalogical Studies of the Bivalvia (Mollusca)'. It turns out that shellfish, such as oysters, have the ability to detect which bits of crud they suck in from the sea are digestible and which are not.
How they do this without a brain is not entirely understood, but the filters they use to ingest food can also sense if what they've drawn in is a piece of sand or a type of algae they can't break down. At this point the oyster covers all of the indigestible bits of marine flotsam in mucous and expels the mass as something called pseudofeces (Diagram below).
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| Image courtesy of A Snail's Odyssey. |
The problem for the sad marine biologist is then trying to sort this pseudofeces out from the feces. It turns out this can be using the following procedure:
1. Frown. Make sure enough people in your lab see you doing this.
2. Ask someone on Twitter how to tell the difference between feces and psedofeces.
3. Get an answer. Wow, Twitter, really? I thought people only used it to harass each other over gender dynamics in video games.
4. Get a microscope and look at the oyster secretion under about 10x magnification. If you can still see intact cells of algae then its pseudofeces. Feces under a microscope pretty much looks like feces, so that's reassuring.
5. Freeze the real feces for all of the gene sequencing later on.
Well, now I've got this part of my project down.
Thanks goes out to Carina M. Gsottbauer for helping resolve the pseudofeces versus feces issue.
I am feeling reassured, now. Thank you.
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