It's dry, it's hot, and there's no roads, more than 95% of the land of the islands is National Park, and so there is no roads. So it's not like you can drive up to your field site and unpack and go collect. So everything has to be done on foot. So we're talking about days and days and days in the field, walking with heavy backpacks because we're carrying water, food, all our equipment, camping gear. Then as we hiked from this landscape, we also stopped obviously to look up for snails. Hi everyone, welcome to the Vandal Theory, a podcast about science and research at University of Idaho. Here you'll discover the kind of work that helped you have I earn an R1 Carnegie Raking, a mark of top-tier research excellence, held by only about 4% of U.S. universities. And we are also the only one in Idaho to hold that honor. I'm your host of the day, I'm Denay Lens, and I'm the External Communications Coordinator I do by. And I am joined by Lee. Hi Denay, my name's Lee Cooper, and I'm a science writer and editor here at University of Idaho. So today we're going to talk about tiny snails and their role in evolution. And to kick us off, my question today is, do you have a favorite example of evolution? I was always intrigued by convergent evolution, which is when animals that are only really far back, they're related, but aren't closely related at all, actually end up developing not the exact same, but very similar features that have the same function. So like bat wings and bird wings, I mean, they're related way back there, but their more immediate ancestors do not look like, but they both have wings now for flying. Same thing with like the sugar glider and flying swirls, they have that parachute part of their skin between their front limbs and their back limbs to be able to kind of sail a little bit between trees. I was like that idea that nature finds a way to fill a need. Yeah, I've always been really intrigued by the idea of vestigial structures. So those are things that we no longer need. So our appendices or wisdom teeth, there's all sorts of things most, if not all, animals have these things that at one point in our evolutionary history were helpful for some reason. And they've just stuck around and they're no longer helpful. And in fact, sometimes came cause harm. And I've just always thought that that was super fascinating. I'd agree to that. So today we're talking to Christine Parent, she is a professor in the College of Science at University of Idaho, and she studies the evolutionary biology of tiny land snails. In this episode, she shares how she earned the nickname snail hunter. What is like tracking these tiny creatures across the rugged landscapes of the Galapagos and what they can teach us about how life evolves? She'll even drop a few fun snail facts that might just change the way you think about them. You ready to get into it? Let's go on a hunt. Hi Christine, welcome to the podcast. Hello, thank you for inviting me. Could you just take a second and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do? My name is Christine Parent and I'm a professor at the University of Idaho. I'm in the Department of Biological Sciences and my research focuses on evolutionary biology and more specifically, I'm interested in questions related to the formation of species, maintenance of diversity and things like that. What we're going to spend today talking about is you have the title of the snail hunter. Can you tell us how you got into that, how you got that title? I grew up in the rural area in the Eastern Canada. That is actually very similar to the rural areas here in Idaho. My parents were not farmers but they bought this big piece of land that was like in the middle of this farming area and my dad proceeded to like basically plant tree in these fields and reforest this whole piece of land and so this basically created this backyard for my sibling and I where we were highly encouraged or even like it's a force to spend time outdoors and explore. Anything that's like exploration, the sense of adventure and this love for biology that I have, I've had it forever like since I was a child. This led me to study biology and in the world of biology, what I really was interested is in this topic of evolution because it's so fascinating to think about how species are formed and how these communities come together and how these species are maintained everywhere on the globe and so I guess to like make this longer a story of it shorter as I ended up being very interested in this process of species formation and really the best place to study that in detail is on island systems because island systems, they're basically a mini version of the world where you have a better grasp of what is going on because there's a smaller number of players, a smaller number of species, the land is smaller so you can kind of have a better shot at capturing the processes that are happening. I knew that I wanted to study island systems and I was looking for something that I could study on islands and then I basically came across this group of land snails that was very understudied in Galobagus and honestly at the beginning it was out of convenience in terms of trying to address these questions that are important in evolutionary biology. I wanted a system where there's a lot of species where they're easy to collect and snails are slow right and there's a lot of them so you can easily go in the field and get a record of that diversity that is across this landscape and measure it and so on and so that's how I became interested in this group and the title snail hunter came a bit later on where in Galobagus I was doing a lot of work, it feel work and there's like you know people who do conservation biology, there's people doing evolutionary biology, ecology and so on and there was one day I was at this bar after the long expedition where we were really tired and we were just like you know celebrating the end of this expedition where we had discovered new species, new population and so on and at this bar this dude that I'm not actually going to name, he came to our group and was you know bragging about all this great work and I think like he thought that we were tourists maybe and so like he was like bragging about all this conservation work that he does and where he is shooting introduced feral goats from helicopters and doing this all this very rugged work and he was like what are you, what do you do? I kind of like in with this attitude and so like I just turned around and replied right away well I am a snail hunter and so like after that like obviously the crowd really liked it and it kind of stuck and I became the snail hunter. Can you describe these snails for me? Okay so the one I study are very small and I think that's why they kind of like have been ignored by scientists for a long time even Darwin when he wrote in his notes he described the snails as being unremarkable and not really worth a studying or not very interesting as compared to like the finches for example and the tortoises and things like that. They're also like in many ways icons of the slow life that we often refer to in everyday life you know like they're presenting this idea of like slowing down and so on and the group I study are very interesting in the sense that they are like that they are underdogs they're slow and all of this but they are highly diverse so if you go to Galapagos Galapagos is really known for the high species diversity and the unique species that you find there. If you look at the different groups you have the giant tortoises, the finches, we're talking about each group has 15, 20 species distributed across the archipelago and have differences a bit in their morphology and adaptation. Well the snails we're talking about over 80 species that we have now counted and basically surveyed and described there's more likely over a hundred of them because every time we go we find new species in the landscape that we are exploring and so in comparison there's way more diversity in terms of number of species and so this makes it like a very good group to study this process of speciation and formation of species because this process has happened many many times in Galapagos so we can try to quantify and measure and characterize what are the conditions in which this process has happened and can we predict when it's going to happen and try to describe how we have this group of snails starting basically from like probably just one or a few individual that colonized the islands over three four million years ago. What is it like when you're on the island? I'm totally picturing you going around with your team just like picking up rocks and looking under the rocks like what's it like being on the ground? It's really good that you ask me because a lot of people that are a bit familiar with Galapagos what they picture you know is like the finches again the tortoises you know and these unique species and the Galapagos are on the equator they actually straddle the equator and so it's a set of tropical islands and so a lot of people think this is going to be tropical like where it's going to be wet with like forest and things kind of like this sort of habitat but Galapagos is actually very dry and could be described as horrible actually and I'm not the only one saying that there's famous authors like for example Hermann Melville the author of Moby Dick had spent some time there and he described that as being this dark desolate bewitched areas in the literature you see this over and over again where Galapagos is described as being this very harsh environment and it is when we are in the field we need to be really well prepared because there is no water fresh water source or there is but very few places where you have fresh water it's dry it's hot and there's no roads more than 95% of the land of the islands is national park and so there is no roads so it's not like you can drive up to your field site and unpack and go collect so everything has to be done on foot so we're talking about days and days and days in the field walking with heavy backpacks because we're carrying water food all our equipment and camping gear then as we hike through this landscape we also stop obviously to look up for snails and so we oftentimes set up camp and then go with a lighter backpack and just basically survey big areas as big as we can and try to explore and survey basically what kind of snail fauna are there is across these landscapes when I started when I was doing my PhD I was doing this on my own and and started collaborating with the national park rangers and some of the research at the Charles Darwin Foundation and as I became more familiar with how this works I grew my own team of local researchers and park rangers and also started especially since I started at U of I bringing my own team so grad students undergrad postdocs and even colleagues and then the two main colleagues I work with from the University of Idaho is Luke Harman who's also a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and Brent Miller who's in the College of Education and so these collaboration have brought a new flavor to my research because all these people bring their own perspective in the field their own struggles their own enthusiasm and their own view of what is happening and what we observe and so that has created the room to develop our research program in different directions what do these snails tell us about evolution so you can really think about evolution as this process of natural selection that has been going on for hundreds of millions of years right what we have today what we can observe as this tree of life right which is a metaphor to describe the diversity on this planet and how things are related to one another and every leaf on that tree is an organism that you find alive today and so I study when leave or a few leaves that are part of this tree of life but really like if you're interested in evolution you could study any part of this tree of life and come up with your own you know studies and conclusion about what is going on but all the leaves they all share this process that they they basically have originated through this process of evolution by natural selection and so I use this part of the tree of snails like represented by snails because well sounds are really convenient there's a lot of them you find them a lot on island system which I really like to study because as I was saying earlier it's simplified and it's easier to keep track of like all the different players that are interacting with one another yeah they're slow so like it's easy like to collect them the key part is that they have the shell that they build to really serve as an interface between the organism and the environment so they use the shell to protect themselves from harsh conditions in the environment from predator from parasites and so on and so by studying the shell and how this shell has evolved over time in different conditions it's really giving us a window of how this process of evolution by natural selection is working and so this is the system I picked originally it was by out of convenience now I really love them like I think they're the cutest thing ever and I wouldn't study anything else but like different biologists or researchers might explore different part of the tree of life and find very similar conclusions that my work has that too what are the broader implications of the research that you do? I would group it into three main categories and like one of it is this species or a diversity discovery that we do so beyond the fact that we're studying the process of evolution like the fact that we're in the field that taking the time to explore these areas surveyed these areas that where sometimes nobody has been allows us to add to this inventory of life on the globe it is crazy to think but we don't know yet like not even 10% of the diversity on this planet and so like I think like any effort by researchers or anyone to go out there and just take the time to observe and think notes and and share that is really important because how are we supposed to understand these processes or even protect these species if we don't even know what's out there so I think like that is one very important and kind of broader implication by research the second part is a bit like more what I was telling you about this idea that the snails are a good vehicle to study evolution and it provides us like another system to develop like the kind of like these rules of life how does evolution creates and lead to these different population and these population to become different and eventually these different species to come together and form these communities I think if we're going to understand this process better we need examples from everywhere from the tree of life from different taxonomy groups so the snails are just adding to that body of work with my colleagues and in the last bit I think that my research does is really dig into how species interact with one another and the snails are good for that because as I was describing them they're slow and so like you can actually sit down and capture a lot of what they're doing easily one thing that we are very interested in for example is how they use the mucus the slime you know that they produce how they use that to communicate with one another how they use that to find their mates how they they use that to identify competitors or potential predators and we also look at how they use their shell to get rid of parasites so that's another species interaction where like the snail is interacting with its parasites and keeps a record of these parasites in their shell because what they do is they actually trap the parasite in their shell so we can go back in time collect these shells these older shells and extract DNA out of the shell and the parasite that was interacting with the snail even way after that the snail is gone and the parasite is dead we have all these ways of capturing a record of these interaction and I think that is also something that is that has broader implication in terms of understanding better how communities are helped together and when we start losing species for extinction and so on like it can help us understand what are the consequences of that like if you're losing a node in this network how is that going to impact the community on the longer term now I want to open the floor to you to just give us some cool snail facts I know that there's stuff that we haven't talked about yet like I'm going to need you to explain what it loved art is oh yeah of course so anyone who knows the tiny bit of snails usually become really interested in the the six live of snails the snails are just they're great like I talk about the shells and like communication but really when you come to look at things that are more unusual and unique the six live of snails is really interesting snails are hermaphrodites and that they're not unique in that a lot of species are like that hermaphrodite means that basically they have the female and the male reproductive parts in a single individual so every single individual has both like the reproductive system for a female and the male so that the snails I study cannot reproduce with themselves they still need a partner so when they reproduce the way it goes is basically the snail is like okay time for a production it's raining it's beautiful like okay let's get out there and try to find a mate they're really good at finding their mates but then when it comes to actually reproducing they have this big dilemma like am I going to be the male I'm going to be the father of this next batch of this progeny or am I going to play the role of the female and you can think like okay well why don't they flip a coin or something but like it actually has implications because playing the female part is way more costly producing the egg to form a new offspring is more costly than producing sperm for the same purpose there is this fight actually they would much prefer to contribute to the next progeny using their sperm because they could produce way more progeny in that way so when they encounter each other they have to figure out like who's going to be the male who's going to be the female several groups of snails the way that they figure this out or they are solving this I don't know even how to describe it this like how do this challenge in terms of determining who's going to play what is that they they have this internal pouch in which they carry a love dart and so the love dart is basically a knife that is made of calcium carbonate so it's the same material that they use for their shell and they basically produce that little knife and they have it or sword and they keep it internally and when it's time to mate then they each get their sword out and I wish I could show that to you but like it basically swing this out and then they start stabbing each other and we're talking about not just one good stab we're talking about thousands of stabbing events in a mating event and so obviously like if you observe that if you see snail mating and you see that you'd be like oh my like what's happening here so obviously it's been studied and like there's been a lot of hypotheses that have been proposed for why on earth are they doing that right because it does not look nice it looks actually painful and sometimes they end up leaving the mating event with their sword still impale like in their body it's clearly potentially damaging and so there's been various hypothesis but the main hypothesis or the leading hypothesis is that this sword or dart is covered in chemicals and these chemicals when they are injected in your mating partner will make so that it will influence the partner to use the eggs instead of using its sperm in that reproductive event so what we think is happening is that this sword is basically a needle of some sort to inject these chemicals and influence the the outcome of this encounter so that the snail that is stabbing right and stabbing a lot is getting the advantage of using the sperm and getting the reproduction event like the offspring out of a sperm instead of using their eggs and it's interesting because so like if you look into this across the diversity of snails there's all sorts of shape and size of these love darts and so those have been studied to try to understand like is it the mechanic of it or different shapes better at stabbing than others or better at like carrying these chemicals and transmitting these chemicals and so on so there's a whole diversity world out there that has nothing to do with like the shell or the slime or anything like that it's just focus on these little darts that they are carrying in their pouch and that they use per reproduction. I love this so much. Is there anything else we desperately need to know about snails? One thing that would have mentioned is that snails is like really just a vehicle and it's a really good one to slow down and observe the world around you and to engage what you're doing and so you could use it like as a metaphor that everyone has a snail in their backyard it's just a matter of finding it and and spending time to observe and really capture what is happening what are like it's a snail or if you're biologist if it's a plant or if you're an author or you're like if you're like a physicist it doesn't matter like find a snail that you're like meteor metaphorically that is really of interest to you and take the opportunity to slow down and not just necessarily focus on the snail but look at the habitat and how this the snail is interacting with the world around it. Snails are kind of like naturally doing this and so I've been using this as a way to try to communicate this idea that in this crazy world we're in like we're way too fast in terms of like moving on from one thing to the other and like we're losing and missing out on a lot I think by doing that and so like everyone can find their backyard snail and focus their attention for a minute you know and then try to engage with that I think everyone would be better off. We're almost done here but I just wanted to put it out there is there anything that I did not ask you that you wanted to talk about. One thing that I want to talk about a bit more is that this is a work of collaboration and so I've been working on this research for over two decades and there's no way that like I would have done all I've been able to accomplish without the help of so many people. The work has benefited from the people local people in Galapagos that I mentioned before like the park rangers the researchers there the colleagues the students at the University of Idaho have been so important in the development of this research program I have current students that are involved in that research so for example I have my aggression the luxe who's focusing on trying to understand the chemistry of the slime in snail and slugs and super interesting and it pushes me in areas that like I would not go to otherwise because this is not the questions that I came up with they came up with these questions and come to me with these ideas and also I have colleagues in the department of geology for example Eric middle set like I've been working with him for several years and we are developing this framework where we are combining ideas about the dynamics of the geology on islands with the dynamics of biology and trying to create this framework where we can study both at the same time to better understand how the landscape influences how biology is formed but also take information from the biology and look for signature in the diversification process in the biology and the lineages and see if those can inform how in the sequence of events that happen in the geology the the geological dynamics that are involved in the formation of these islands there's no way I would be able to do this on my own and so I think like this collaboration with the colleagues with students is really at the center of everything I do yeah now that's wonderful thanks so much for being on the podcast this has been awesome yeah you're welcome this was fun for me too all right Lee what did you think of that conversation oh I have always loved Christine's work um I once she gets to go to the Galapagos so I've always just been insanely jealous of her but um I mean I remember learning about the Galapagos as a kid and obviously the example everyone uses to talk about evolution is the Finches of the Galapagos and how depending on where you find them they have developed different you know types of beaks and things like that to survive on their part of their individual island and it's always Finches they never talk about any of the other animals or plants and things and I just love the what the fact that um she's studying snails not the Finches and that she's showing as true with so many of the other critters and plants on those islands that the same pressures that are working on the Finches and and causing the Finches Finches to evolve are working on all the other ones as well so I just love the fact that we're showing that it's not just Finches all these critters are going through evolution with a lot of the same forces and it's wonderful just to be reminded that it wasn't a one-off these Finches weren't just this weird quirk in nature this is happening across all these islands to all of the species living there mm-hmm yeah I thought that was a good reminder as well I just found everything about this story so charming like from beginning to end but mostly I just I love the mental picture of her and her team just wander around the rugged landscapes and picking up rocks and looking for snails and then I've heard of snail love darts before but I couldn't actually tell you what they were and tell this conversation I don't know I just love them she definitely brought me around to liking the snails honestly before I didn't really have strong feelings either way but now I'm imbeared I was also really touched by the you know take a note from the snail and slow down and you know find some inner snail piece I just was out of town and it had been a crazy summer and early fall and I I gave in I bought off of the Instagram those little I don't know if anyone else seen these these little travel watercolor kits and was forcing myself every day to do a watercolor not well I'm not claiming well but to slow down and take in the environment and I I really appreciated those moments so this this is my new snail trait is is practicing watercolor I love that it's definitely a lesson that we can all take with us from this conversation for her okay well thank you so much for listening to the vandal theory you can visit our website at uidaho.edu/vandalthiri for more about our research email us at
[email protected] we are on all of the usual podcasting platforms please rate and review and subscribe I'm Danelle Uns and I'm Lee Cooper thanks for joining us. you
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