Experiences in Integrative and Comparative Biology
Planting a Seed
Richard Satterlie, SICB
President-Elect
Frank Hawkins Kenan
Distinguished Professor of Marine Biology
Center for Marine
Science
University of North
Carolina at Wilmington
My fifth grade teacher,
Miss Steinberg, gave Marilyn Monroe a run for her money, at least in
my mind. And I credit her with planting the seed for my journey into
marine science. She planted another seed for me, but the
endocrinology of a fifth grade boy is another story.
I don't remember much
from that time, but one event stands out in a general, hazy way.
Miss Steinberg had the courage to take a full class of pre-teens on a
field trip to McClure's Beach on the Northern California coast. I
remember nothing of the bus trip, which was a couple of hours each
way, and I don't remember the specifics of what animals and plants
were pointed out that day. In fact, the entire event went into a
deep sleep for me, and I can only recount it in small snippets that
pull me back to Miss Steinberg and McClure's Beach, real or
imagined.
Rich Satterlie at Friday Harbor in the summer of
2008
But a seed was planted
there. I'm sure of it, even though it didn't germinate and grow
right away, like the other seed she planted. In my retrospective
mind, it was more like the seed of a desert plant, with an ultra-hard
seed coat that requires several scouring trips down flooded washes
during summer thunderstorms, tumbling along the gravel and rock to
etch a soft spot for moisture penetration.
In other words, nothing
happened after the field trip. I had no special aptitude or interest
in Biology through junior high and high school. And only when my
community college basketball experience revealed that I was not major
college transfer material did I turn to academics as something more
than a good way to meet girls. For the first major scratch in my
seed coat, I acknowledge my Human Anatomy and Physiology teacher at
Solano Community College, Mr. Bert Jacobson. From him, the material
made sense to me, and his encouragement kept the seed tumbling.
Still, though, Marine Biology remained hidden, just as the young
college ladies pushed Miss Steinberg to my deepest memory vault.
The seed encountered a
deep gash when I was accepted and enrolled at Cal State Sonoma, just
an hour commute from my home in Vallejo. Gas was $0.299 at the time,
and I had a brand new 1969 Volkswagen Beetle. By luck or some
special Miss Steinberg karma, I was assigned to an advisor named Dr.
Colin Hermans (who is well known to SICBers). He and Dr. Joe
Brumbaugh took me on a journey of marine invertebrate zoology that
gave me a strange sense of déjà vu. I have to admit that Miss
Steinberg never entered my mind throughout that time, but with some
of the species names, I just felt the kind of connection that allowed
me to instantly embed the name in the most accessible regions of my
memory-like one trial leaning. Cryptochiton stelleri,
Acmaea digitalis (that's what it was called back then),
Anthopleura elegantissima. These names were alive to me as
soon as they were read or said. And I thought I was just a good
student.
These two
instructors/scientists/friends tumbled that seed better than a whole
season of desert flash floods. If my footprints were to suddenly
turn red, the whole of Bodega Head would be solid crimson. Beware
stomping the phoronid beds, and watch for a little glisten to see the
polyclad on the bottom of the rock. The learning was touching,
seeing. Unfortunately for me, it was also drawing (sorry, Colin).
But it was comparing above all. And from that teaching framework of
comparison, another deep scratch formed in my seed coat. I became
interested in the structure and function of invertebrate nervous
systems, mostly the simpler ones. My earliest interest was in the
flatworm brain, although I was fascinated by what cnidarians could do
with my over-simplified conception of nerve nets.
Once again, that lucky
rock in the stream bed put a big nick in my seed coat. I was
accepted into grad school, in Jim Case's lab at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. From there, and following the example of
not only Jim, but also two grad student colleagues, Peter Anderson
(now Director of the Whitney Lab), and Michel Anctil (University of
Montreal), the final groove in the seed coat allowed penetration of
the moisture known as research. My dissertation was on colonial
coordination in octocorals and led to several publications, including
one side project on a main thrust of the Case lab-bioluminescence.
Now, try growing a
plant in the desert. With my postdoc at the University of Alberta in
Edmonton, and a subsequent tenure track job at Arizona State
University, I became a Mountain Time Zone Marine Biologist. But an
important taproot drove deep into the soil. Andy Spencer, my postdoc
advisor, made sure I never saw the size of summer mosquitos in
Edmonton. We packed up both summers for a trip to a pristine fishing
village on the west coast of Vancouver Island-Bamfield Marine
Station. There, he introduced me to the world of jellyfish
neurobiology, and the taproot found water. From this experience, I
was introduced to Friday Harbor Labs. In fact, that first summer
there (the last of my postdoc), I found out how much a mentor is like
a real father.
Aequorea victoria
Andy dropped me off at
Friday Harbor with the expectation I would work on the neural control
of swimming in an extremely abundant hydromedusa, Aequorea
victoria (the original source of GFP, by the way), which is not
available in numbers at Bamfield. While there, my wife who helped
collect animals, brought in a strange looking planktonic critter with
a simple question, "What the heck is this?" Re-enter my Sonoma
State background. "A pteropod mollusc," I replied. "Put it in
the tank and I'll look at it later." That later sent my roots
deeper.
Clione limacina
Finished with the
Aequorea prep that day, I put the pteropod under the scope,
took two pairs of forceps and "unzipped" the body wall. A ring
of pigmented ganglia greeted me, with large neurons that gave come
hither winks. I had an electrode handy, and the first cell I
penetrated was a motoneuron that had a rhythmic firing pattern in
phase with wing movements. I hurried back to my wife and asked if
she could find more of the little beasties, and the Clione
limacina preparation was born. I spent the rest of the summer
working on Clione, doing just enough on Aequorea to
make progress. However, when it came time for Andy to return to
Friday Harbor, I was frozen with the "wait until your father comes
home" sense of dread. I was supposed to be working on jellyfish.
When I picked up Andy
from the ferry, I had a sweat stripe down my back that penetrated my
car seat. His first question, of course, was about the work. To
make a long story short, I showed him the Clione data, and we
both spent the rest of our time at Friday Harbor as molluscan
neurobiologists.
Looking back, I think
any decent scientist should be able to recognize the potential in
various available preparations, and be willing to make a switch when
a more favorable opportunity comes along. This thinking was
instilled by Jim Case, with his encouragement of side projects, and
cemented by Andy's acceptance of the Clione work. Both Jim
and Andy were good dads.
As a postscript, my
recent move to the University of North Carolina Wilmington has
brought a dream to fruition. I finally have a research laboratory in
a marine lab (the Center for Marine Science, about seven miles from
the main campus). I'm still making the annual pilgrimage to Friday
Harbor, however, I have used the special UNCW opportunity to
re-activate my jellyfish work to go along with the Clione
projects.
I don't know if our
memory for long-past events improves with age, or if our flagging
memory just grasps at whatever is available in our deepest synapses.
But these days, I find myself thinking about Miss Steinberg and the
importance of her field trip to McClure's Beach back in the fifth
grade. I can imagine how, later in my education, even the most
complex scientific names came to me after a single mention, like they
were old friends. And I see Miss Steinberg's slight overbite
drawing her tongue into an hypnotic lisp as she pointed and said,
Strongylocentrotus purpuratus." And with all that, she
really did give Marilyn a run.
References
Graduate School
(dissertation plus bioluminescence)
1978 Satterlie, R.A.,
and J.F. Case. Neurobiology of the gorgonian coelenterates, Muricea
californica and Lophogorgia chilensis. I. Behavioural
physiology. J. Exp. Biol. 79:191-204.
1978 Satterlie, R.A.,
and J.F. Case. Neurobiology of the gorgonian coelenterates, Muricea
californica and Lophogorgia chilensis. II. Morphology.
Cell Tiss. Res. 187: 379-396.
1979 Satterlie, R.A.,
and J.F. Case. Development of bioluminescence and other effector
responses in the pennatulid coelenterate Renilla kollikeri.
Biol. Bull.157: 506-523.
1980 Satterlie, R.A.,
P.A.V. Anderson and J.F. Case. Colonial coordination in anthozoans:
Pennatulacea. Mar. Behav. Physiol. 7: 25-46.
1980 Satterlie, R.A.
and J.F. Case. Neurobiology of the stoloniferan octocoral Clavularia
sp. J. Exp. Zool. 212: 87-99.
Postdoc (selected, with
Andy Spencer)
1979 Satterlie, R.A.,
and A.N. Spencer. Swimming control in the cubomedusan jellyfish
Carybdea rastonii. Nature 281: 141-142.
Spencer,
A.N. and R.A. Satterlie. Electrical and dye-coupling in an
identified group of neurons in a coelenterate. J. Neurobiol. 11:
13-19.
1981 Spencer, A.N. and
R.A. Satterlie. The action potential and contraction in subumbrellar
swimming muscle of Polyorchis penicillatus (Hydromedusae). J.
Comp. Physiol. 144: 401-407.
Initial Clione
references (first two with Andy Spencer)
1985 Satterlie, R.A,
M. LaBarbera and A.N. Spencer. Swimming in the pteropod mollusc
Clione limacina. I. Behaviour and morphology. J. Exp. Biol.
116: 189-204.
1985 Satterlie, R.A.
and A.N. Spencer. Swimming in the pteropod mollusc Clione
limacina. II. Physiology. J. Exp. Biol. 116: 205-222.
1985 Satterlie, R.A.
Reciprocal inhibition and postinhibitory rebound produce
reverberation in a locomotor pattern generator. Science 229:
402-404.