What is a species? (featuring Dr. Scott Egan)

26:22But when you get to the top, they don't recognize each other. So that's why I use it. I use it to illustrate. But what's it like for those guys to meet each other? They must be like, you seem sort of, I mean, I wish we could, but I guess we can't. Or, you know, there's got to be some recognition there. Yeah. Birds are wonderful systems to study species because bird song is something we can hear. And it's really, really important to the birds. So it's something where human perception and the biology we're watching actually can kind of match up. There's wonderful stories, for example, from the Darwin's finches as well, where they have evolutionary changes that changes their beak shape for maybe an ecological region to eat seeds.

26:59And then, you know, that's also the way in which they sting. And so the birds start recognizing each other as well, similarly. Well, a running joke we have on the show is that anytime Daniel asks me a straightforward question about biology, I always say, well, it depends. And so we're keeping that going here. You're playing right into my hands here, Scott. That's right. And he does the same thing to me when I ask him about relativity and stuff. So anyway, it's all right. Oh, no, but in relativity, it depends. But the answers are all correct, even if they contradict each other. Oh, whatever. All right.

27:32So Scott agrees with Kelly that it depends when we're talking about biology. We are going to take a break. And when we get back, we're going to talk about if speciation ever unhappens. And probably it depends.

27:53For business owners and entrepreneurs, there's a constant challenge. Getting things done fast and done well. Why not have both? That's why Wix Harmony stands out. It's an AI website builder that helps create a website quickly without compromising your vision. A fully functional site can be built for any business just by describing the idea. Then you can choose to chat with AI or edit everything manually to get it exactly right. There's also ARIA, an AI agent available to answer questions or help complete tasks. And here's what makes it even better. ARIA doesn't just live in a chat box. You can click anywhere on your site and ask her to make changes instantly.

28:38It's these details that make creating with Wix Harmony feel seamless. Join millions of businesses already using Wix and try Wix Harmony for free at Wix.com slash Harmony. That's Wix.com slash Harmony. Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with Epiglis, a once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking Epiglis achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

29:39if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBCLIS. Before starting EBCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about EBCLIS and visit ebglis.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. Hello, hello. This is Malcolm Glabal from Smart Talks with IBM. Today, we're diving into a fascinating conversation with Stefano Pallard, head of fan development for Scuderia Ferrari HP. Your pronunciation is strongly American. It's more Scuderia Ferrari. I'm still working on rolling my R's. But what I was able to learn from Stefano was the importance of engaging the Tifosi, the Ferrari superfans in the digital age.

30:23Ferrari fans and superfans want to be part of something, want to belong to something. So they want to be part of a community and ultimately they want to be part of a winning team. You've got Ferrari, which has a long history, design history. And now you're interacting in a kind of digital space. I'm curious how you balance those two traditions. When it comes to fan engagement, it's really digital technology and digital channels are being able to create a deeper connection with our fans. To learn more about how Ferrari and IBM are using technology to build deeper connections with fans, visit ibm.com slash Ferrari.

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31:48I agree with both of you that it depends is the answer in biology. I'm just not sure I agree with you whether you should say it's shame-faced or not. Oh, I see. All right. Well, we're back. And without shame, we are going to now talk about biology. All right, Scott. So you get the process of speciation happening. Does it ever unhappen? Yes. I mean, so first off, evolution has no direction to it. It just describes change through time. So in the same way that species or populations can evolve along that continuum in one direction, they can also evolve in the other direction. That's just evolution.

32:29That's the same thing. When thinking about measuring reproductive isolation and finding populations kind of along that continuum that exhibit partial reproductive isolation, but not complete reproductive isolation, we absolutely have observed populations retreating back to something more panmictic where they're exchanging genes more regularly. So there's an example. There's a wonderful group of fishes up in the northwestern United States and Canada called the three-spined stickleback. And they're really cool little tiny fishes. And they live in all different parts of these rivers and lakes across the Northwest.

33:05Is it three or is it three-ish? It's exactly three. This one's three because there's also a nine-spined stickleback as well. So the three-spined stickleback has recolonized all these lakes that just, 15 ,000, 17 ,000 years ago were covered in glaciers. So we know when time equals zero. And they've recolonized these lakes and very quickly they commonly will adapt to different parts of the habitat. So when you go to some of these lakes, you'll see kind of an open water form that's swimming and feeding in the open water. And you'll find one that's more a bottom dweller that's feeding along the bottom.

33:47They have different environments. There's a different potential body shape that's better. So they start kind of diverging very quickly. In some of those lakes, scientists have been watching them, observing them. And in one lake, Paxton Lake, there were these distinct lineages that then started hybridizing and formed back into a single species. And that was likely because of human changes to that singular lake. They made the lake a little more turbid so you couldn't see as well. The fish couldn't identify the lineages very well, and they just merge back into one distinct lineage. How does that happen?

34:22I'm confused because it feels like to speciate means to move in different directions, and there's lots and lots of ways that can happen. And so it makes sense that two species go in two random directions, that's fine. But to come back together, they have to both evolve in the same direction, don't they? Isn't that totally improbable? Yeah. Yeah, so the way in which things come back together is due to this genetic exchange, the exchange of DNA. And that homogenizes to some degree the differences between them and pulls them back together. But if they were different species, how do they exchange DNA?

34:59That's a great question. So the change in this specific lake was turbidity. And so one of the ways these two fishes stayed separate is they were identifying each other by what they look like. And I think the males have different colorations between the two lineages. And so at some point, the females and the males couldn't see that anymore. And they were very, very closely related still. I'm terrified where this is going. Are you saying that they accidentally made it with the wrong people because they couldn't see because the lake was too murky? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Wow. So they could actually exchange DNA.

35:37They just didn't because they preferred not to because they could see what they were doing. Yeah. Wow. And if you take the story and go to another place where there's amazing fish diversity, like the Rift Valley lakes in Africa, like Lake Victoria has some insane number of cichlid fishes that have also evolved in the last 15 ,000 years. Some estimated as a 500 different species. Same story there. There's turbidity issues with humans being around and stirring up the water a little bit. And there's some fishes that live at two different depths. Wow. Oh, here we go. We can start talking about physics.

36:11I don't even understand the physics of it, but like red light and blue light go at different depths. And so the fishes have evolved to use that signal based on what depth they live at. And when it becomes a little more turbid, they actually can't see each other's differences anymore. And the males and females will mate more often. And so you can actually see that continuum in turbid waters. These two distinct species are in fact not. And when you get into the clearer parts of Lake Victoria, they are still distinct. And you can see that continuum as well. Do you think it got really foggy for a while in our past?

36:47And that's why Homo sapiens and Neanderthals started breeding? We were just confused. I don't touch human stories I don't get anywhere close to those We had Scott Solomon on to touch those stories Perfect And when those fish wake up in the morning and see what they've done are they like, oh no how am I going to tell my family The physics there is interesting because water absorbs light at certain wavelengths but the efficiency of it to absorb light depends on the wavelength which is why you get like red and blue light at different depths. Yay, physics. So speciation can unhappen or you can go backwards in the process.

37:29And most of what we've talked about has involved like being able to, you know, recognize based on patterns or color or song. What do you do when you don't have any of those clues as a scientist and you're like digging up fossils and you're trying to figure out species for dinosaurs? Like what do we rely on then? That's right. That's right. So the working definition that my lab uses where we study diploid, sexually reproducing insects is going to be different than someone who studies a fossil or an asexual species or some other thing that doesn't quite fit in those definitions. And so that's a good example.

38:08Scientists will use a definition that's appropriate to the organism or group they're studying. And so obviously fossils, you can still think about things that I think about with living sexually reproducing lineages. So you can study some degrees of reproductive isolation. So one thing is just geography. If they live in two different areas, they're not going to have the opportunity to exchange genes. That's in some level, a measure of reproductive isolation. And then even more specifically, if you think about males and females exchanging DNA, there is a mechanical nature to that exchange. And so mechanical isolation is actually something that's really important for extant living species.

38:49It's also important for fossil species. So if there's some mechanical difference, you could actually measure reproductive isolation as well. But then you are more likely to use something like a morphological species definition where the morphology is the only thing you have. And so you'll have to use that to define that lineage. And that's absolutely appropriate and also important for our living species as well. We use morphology as well. So Daniel has a dog that's a mixed between a German Shepherd and a Chihuahua. And so does the mechanic, can you get confused when you're imagining the mechanics?

39:24Wait, he does? Yeah. Is this true? This is true. We did DNA testing. He's a rescue from Ensenada. So we were not there that epic night when this happened. Nobody knows. There's some sort of physics and biology mysteries there. So I feel like mechanics can lead you astray. And so I guess you just do the best you can. Because I can't imagine how that worked. But he's really cute. He's sort of like a smaller German shepherd with sad eyes. Aw.

39:53I have no idea about how that could work. I know. There are so many reproductive barriers I'm thinking about here. There's the mechanical things that happen before copulation. There's also these things that can happen after copulation, right, that are related to like inviolable or infertile hybrids. And one of them is With this strange combination is how a potential female chihuahua could even have a baby of that size. So there's that degree of maybe the female dies during the birth of the hybrid offspring is another barrier. Because even though genetic change occurs and even though that hybrid offspring is potentially viable, if the female dies during pregnancy, that's also gene flow has stopped.

40:39Because dogs usually have multiple puppies, right? Yeah, this is getting wild really quickly. Yeah. Okay. All right. All right. Let's move on to safer ground. Wait, but on this question of the definition of species again, now we have multiple different definitions of species, morphological, genotypical, ecological. I'm confused because which do we use? Is there no actual arbiter? Or are we just saying, look, this is kind of fuzzy in a different context. We have different definitions. Yeah, I mean, I think depending on the group of organisms you study, you have to define species within that natural system.

41:18The most commonly used definition, I would say, is this biological species definition or biological species concept, which is all about the degree to exchange DNA with individuals within other populations. So it's this reproduction that seems to be core. Whether you decide to exchange genes, whether you run into those individuals, those are all different ways in which you can measure the chance that you would reproduce. If you study asexual bacteria that are living in the soil, you're going to have a very different way of defining species. So, you know, microbiologists will define the genetic components that are part of that bacteria and maybe even a little bit about the ecological environment they live in and combine that information to define that species of bacteria.

42:08And so it just – it does depend. But you talked about like an arbiter. The U.S. Endangered Species Act, of course, has to have a definition of species in it. And it, for the most part, uses this biological species concept. It uses measures of reproductive isolation as a way to measure what is and what is not a species. So that actually has a legal definition and is applied in courts within the U.S. and other countries have their own definitions. And when you have any protection for an endangered or a threatened species, you need to define what that is. So can I ask you a question about the animal that appears on the flag of the best state in the United States?

42:50Boo, California. I don't recall there being a bear on the state of Texas' flag. Oh, slice. There's just a big star. We have an animal on our flag, and I think that's better, obviously, because we're pro-biology here. I love it. But in any case, I want to ask about grizzlies and polar bears. Tell us about the history here. Are they different species? Can they interbreed? Why don't they? And is that even more outrageous than chihuahuas and German shepherds? Yeah. No, it's a great question. And it's really getting back to some of the things we've already talked about. So you have the grizzly. You have the polar.

43:25They are, in all intents and purposes, living historically in different environments, adapting to different conditions. But those conditions have changed, just like the turbidity in a lake. And it's causing these individuals to run into each other more often. And so some of those barriers have been observed to break down to some degree.

43:48After a crazy night out, the polar bear wakes up next to a grizzly, you're telling me. It doesn't mean that those two species will collapse. It just means that there's some degree of hybridization, but some degree of gene flow is allowed, even under a biological species concept. It just means that you can allow so much hybridization, but as long as those differences can still be maintained, that is an allowable amount of hybridization. So this process is ongoing. Environmental change is ongoing, especially for the polar bear. And so we don't know what's going to happen with these two lineages, but you are seeing a little bit of a breakdown in those barriers that is happening in real time.

44:29So there really are bears out there that have like one polar bear parent and one grizzly bear parent. And what do they look like? They are, as most will show, there are intermediates. Wow. Incredible. So you talked about RNA viruses and you talked about asexually reproducing bacteria. And so all of these things have genetic sequences in them. So why can't we just say, if you're 5 % different at the sequence level than another population, you're a different species. And then everybody could agree. Why can't we do something like that? I'm sorry. I have to interrupt because I Googled grizzly polar bear hybrid and discovered that they're called growler bears or pisley bears.

45:13Pisley bear is pretty cute. I like that. And they look pretty awesome. All right. Back to your regularly scheduled question. Sorry. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So the genetic thing is a good question. And genetics is an important way of measuring differences. So it is incorporated into a lot of studies of speciation and it is incorporated into sometimes how we are defining what is a new species. It's one piece of information. The challenging part is depending on what group of animals or plants or bacteria you're studying, that magic, let's say 5%, is going to be different for every group. So there are insects that are living almost cosmopolitan across the globe, one single species.

45:58So there's genetic differences that are pretty strong between them, but they, for the most part, are still one singular species, just linked by a very widely distributed population. That might be very different than a small little endemic plant that just lives in a couple different canyons in, let's say, California, where they don't exchange genes very often. So they have a pretty strong differences. So you have a global population with little differences. You have a very close geographics lineage that has pretty distinct genetic differences. And so it's really hard to find a magic number that fits everything.

46:33And then if you bring in things like asexual reproduction or the weird thing that, you know, bees, wasps, and ants do, the haplodiploid thing, That creates genetic differences between lineages that are very, very strong. And so there's just no one size fit all for the genetics. And then even if you look within the genetics, you look at one gene, they might be completely the same. You look at another one and they're almost completely different. And so it's hard to capture that with just one magic metric of DNA. It depends. It depends. Sorry to be so boring. No, no. I love it depends. To me, that means ecology and evolutionary biology is always interesting.

47:14There's always some fun reason to dig into a system a little bit deeper because it's probably different than what you were doing last week, even though you thought it would be the same. Yeah. And I don't know. I love that. Same. All right. We're going to take another break. And when we get back, Scott is going to actually walk us through the process he went through to identify one of the over 20 insect species that he has named.

47:43For business owners and entrepreneurs, there's a constant challenge. Getting things done fast and done well. Why not have both? That's why Wix Harmony stands out. It's an AI website builder that helps create a website quickly without compromising your vision. A fully functional site can be built for any business just by describing the idea. Then you can choose to chat with AI or edit everything manually to get it exactly right. There's also ARIA, an AI agent available to answer questions or help complete tasks. And here's what makes it even better. ARIA doesn't just live in a chat box. You can click anywhere on your site and ask her to make changes instantly.

48:27It's these details that make creating with Wix Harmony feel seamless. Join millions of businesses already using Wix and try Wix Harmony for free at Wix.com slash harmony. That's Wix.com slash harmony. Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with EpGliss, a once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about four in ten people taking EpGliss achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

49:28if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBCLIS. Before starting EBCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about EBCLIS and visit ebglis.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. Hello, hello. This is Malcolm Glabal from Smart Talks with IBM. Today, we're diving into a fascinating conversation with Stefano Pallard, head of fan development for Scuderia Ferrari HP. Your pronunciation is strongly American. It's more Scuderia Ferrari. I'm still working on rolling my R's. But what I was able to learn from Stefano was the importance of engaging the Tifosi, the Ferrari superfans in the digital age.

50:12Ferrari fans and superfans want to be part of something, want to belong to something. So they want to be part of a community and ultimately they want to be part of a winning team. You've got Ferrari, which has a long history, design history. And now you're interacting in a kind of digital space. I'm curious how you balance those two traditions. When it comes to fan engagement, it's really digital technology and digital channels are being able to create a deeper connection with our fans. To learn more about how Ferrari and IBM are using technology to build deeper connections with fans, visit ibm.com slash Ferrari.

51:20All business. PayPal Open. Grow today at PayPalOpen.com. Loan subject to approval in available locations.

51:37All right, and we're back. And so we've talked about a bunch of different ways that you can go about making the argument that two different lineages are actually different species. And so, Scott, as somebody who has identified tens of species, which is super awesome. Amazing. Can you give us like an example of, you know, here's the species you identified and here is the multiple different pieces of evidence you brought to bear to make that argument? Sure. Yeah. Happy to do it. Certainly, historically, the way in which species have been identified for millennia is based on what they look like. So that's their morphology, their physical features.

52:15that is still very, very important to this day. But my lab tends to do something called this whole area of naming species and classifying species, we call this taxonomy. And my lab tends to adopt something called integrative taxonomy, where we take as many pieces of information from disparate areas of biology to come together to make a conclusion about whether something's a new species or not. And so that obviously is going to involve their morphology that's going to evolve their, um, potentially their DNA. So looking at genetics, behavior, ecology, geography. So those are all the things we're thinking about when we're trying to define a new species.

52:56Uh, but then let me walk you through one of ours because, um, strangely enough, even though I have described or our lab as a team has described many new species, I am not a trained entomologist. I'm an evolutionary biologist that studies a very intricate system of trees and the the weird herbivores that live on them and the predators that attack those herbivores. So just like a food chain you learned about in elementary school. Plant, herbivore, predator. Just to interrupt real quick, they must be very confused in the United Kingdom because they named you a fellow of the Royal Entomological Society.

53:29So I think you get to say you're an entomologist. Not after they hear this podcast. All right. Okay. So anyway, go on. I call you an entomologist as well as other hats. But anyway, go on. But you have to say it in a British accent if you do it, Kelly. Thank you. I really appreciate that. So I'll actually take you through the very first insect we discovered. And that can help you kind of understand the way in which we approach this process, because I really didn't know how to do it either. So it starts off, as Kelly alluded to earlier, when I was on vacation with my family, I was walking around some sand dunes on the coast of Florida with my daughter when she was about four years old.

54:10And we observed this unique pattern, discovered something kind of unique, which I can get into the biology of this critter later. But ultimately, it was weird enough that I brought it back to the lab. Something crazy crawled out of these samples I took. And so I had something that I'd never seen before. And that started this process of, is this new or did someone else observe this in the past? What was it doing that caught your attention? Okay, we can do that too. So it was a beautiful, iridescent, green, almost purplish, tiny wasp about a millimeter or two that was attacking a group of herbivores that my lab studies called gall wasps.

54:52Now, gall wasps in and of themselves are really interesting because they are little tiny wasps that attack oak trees and induce the oak to grow a little tiny tumor or home and the insect the juvenile insects live inside that tumor where they feed they're protected from the environment and ultimately emerges an adult unless they're attacked by a predator and so this is one of the predators this predator also happens to do something really interesting though because it manipulates the behavior of the gall wasp. So the gall wasp feeds and grows to an adult. It starts cutting a little tunnel out of the wood, but ultimately stops during that process and cuts a hole only about 25 % smaller than normal size.

55:35So the head gets stuck. Oh my gosh. And so this is what we found in the field and brought back to laboratory. And then And weeks to months passed, and another little wasp was living in those same little galls. It burrows its way through the body of the gall wasp and emerges through its face. Oh, my God. So cool. Wow. Even for people who've listened to lots of Parasite Life Cycles, that's pretty shocking. Yes. And so lucky for me, my colleague, Dr. Kelly Wienersmith, was right down the hall at the time. And I showed her all of this stuff and said, you know, I know you study parasites and how they manipulate the behavior of their hosts.

56:15Could anything like that be happening here? What is going on? And so she and I dived into this for years and published some cool papers about this work, including some really nice experiments to see why this manipulation was important. Basically, these measly little predators can't cut themselves out of the wood on their own. So they really need the host to burrow its way first. And then they just emerge through the body and cut a hole straight through the face and emerge right through it. So, wow. Yes. And now I can see why Kelly got that look of expectant bemusement when I asked this question.

56:47She knew what was coming. I didn't know what example he was going to pick. Well, I like this one, Kelly, because it's the first one. So, it caused me to really ask this question myself. So, we get this crazy biology. Kelly helps with all the cool work and she leads this really cool research project that we publish. But then ultimately we're left with this critter and asking, okay, we observe these differences, but is this something that's new? And that's where, you know, this kind of, how do you even define and decide what is a new species? And so, you know, the first step for us was finding out even within the courses scale, what is this?

57:27So we knew it was an insect. We We knew it was a wasp. We knew it was likely a group of parasitoid wasps in this group called the calcidoids. So we got a little bit farther down the taxonomic nomenclature. But at that point, we were struggling. So we reached out to some experts. We reached out to some folks that are trained in that group. They said, yeah, it's probably in this family. It might be in this genus. And then we started digging a little deeper. ultimately we did find some morphological features of this very tiny wasp that led us to this one group and luckily for us there was a specialist in that group that had written a nice dichotomous key and these are wonderful they're like kind of like choose your own adventure but for what kind of critter you're looking at so it gives you choices does it have are its antennae on the top of its head or on the side of its head does it have seven hairs on its back legs is it green does it have this or that?

58:21Choose, go to step three. Or greenish. If it's greenish. Go to step four if it has this. Go to step seven if it has this. And so we, even as non-specialists, were able to kind of follow this path. But what was really exciting is every time we followed this dichotomous key to its ultimate end, it never resulted in the thing we were looking at under the microscope. It just didn't fit. We would get to one end of the dichotomous key and going to say, you have found species X from Nova Scotia. And we were sitting in the middle of Texas. Or you have had species Y, and it's from Costa Rica. So each time it didn't actually pan out.

59:00So somebody had written a guide to figuring out which kind of wasp you have. Right. Every time you went through it, you ended up on the different wrong wasp. Yes. Right. Right. So that was one step. So then we complemented that morphological work with some genetic work. We sequenced a short region of the DNA and tried to compare it to all the other sequences of the same region of DNA that had been sequenced across the world. And again, we found something that sort of matched, but wasn't exactly the same. So each time, kind of the same answer. If you combine that with then this very interesting behavior, so we could call this generally their ecology, their living environment, that also didn't match with anything that had been described from this genus before.

59:44So collectively, all of these pieces of information, geography, ecology, behavior, genetics, and morphology led us to the conclusion that we had in fact found something that we thought was new. We wrote this up in a paper, and then there's the ultimate arbiter, which is peer review. The scientific review process is wonderful. This is sent off to a journal that specializes. It's wonderful. Well, for this, I didn't know what I was doing. Have you only had positive experiences with peer review? It's important. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yes. I get all that and it's not perfect. But for this process, we were treading in waters and we were just trying to find our way.

1:00:25We needed a little bit of oversight. And so we sent it to a journal that specializes in this area of taxonomy. And it went to some specialists anonymously. They reviewed our work. that definitely said it seems like we were amateurs in the review process, which they were right. Fair, fair. But they agreed that our version of the story, which I wrote the scientific paper almost like I'm talking to you right now. It was kind of like we did this, then we did this, then we did this, and we determined it was new. But they agreed. And so they gave us some feedback. we modified our documents to be a little bit more in that realm of taxonomy and that paper was published and we were able to name a new species and it was really fun and kelly and i even got to choose the name okay and scott picked the coolest name and so scott go ahead why did you what did you name the species so it's in the genus eudaris which we mispronounced for the first year we uh We're describing the thing.

1:01:28And its specific epithet, so the species part, is Eudaris Set. And Set is named for the Egyptian god of evil and chaos, who also happened to cut up its brother Osiris and put it in a crypt and cut it into many pieces, which is exactly what this little tiny wasp does within the crypt it lives in, within these oak trees. It cuts up the gall wasp into its itty-bitty pieces. It's very, very similar. So Euderaset is the name of our new species. That was when Scott was like, oh, you know, I've got an idea. I was thinking, what if we name it after the Egyptian god Set and he trapped his brother in a crypt and scattered his body parts?

1:02:09And I was like, my mind was blown. I was like, we don't have to think about this anymore. That is absolutely the name that we're picking. And anyway, yes, props to Scott. That was amazing. Well, that is an incredible story. So does this mean that you have particularly keen eyes for identifying new insects or that we are surrounded by undiscovered insect species or both? It's definitely more of the latter. We don't know even the species within some major U.S. cities. We're discovering species within the city limits of Houston, which is the third or fourth largest city in the United States. we're discovering them on the oak tree just outside the front door of the biology building at rice university so we're finding them everywhere and and so that's the main part especially when you start thinking about things that are very very small and then flipping to the first part we rely on specialists to really get down to the nitty-gritty of some of these new species whether it be a gull wasp or one of these peristroid wasps or i even work a little bit in a a group of beetles.

1:03:13Specialists are so important to this. My role is that my lab, undergraduate, graduate students, postdocs, we study a system, a system that involves an oak tree, a group of peculiar herbivores that I've always found interesting called gall wasp that induce this weird tumor that they live inside. And then because they live in this kind of predictable thing in space and time, this gall, this resource, they've attracted a huge, diverse community of natural enemies of predators that eat them during different times of the year. So this little system, we are specialists in that system. And we're good to get to the point where, hey, have we ever seen this before?

1:03:52Maybe not. We should reach out to someone. And so then we link up with specialists in whatever group, whether it be a parasitoid wasp or a gall wasp or even a plant. Sometimes we find weird parasitic plants attacking our galls. And all of those are a combination of our natural history observations in nature, which we work hard at, and linking those observations up with specialists. And then we also do the DNA sequencing, which really helps seal the deal. I also want to put a little plug in for museums here, because when I was a kid and I went to the Smithsonian, I was like, oh, they've got dinosaur bones.

1:04:28And I guess I assumed that most of the stuff they had was out there for you to see. But actually, they have loads of experts that are like watching over massive collections behind closed doors where, you know, only other experts get to see. And they've got like drawer after drawer after drawer of insects where you can go and be like, I'm pretty sure my insect is different than this other insect. And so you go and you bring pictures of your insect and then you can compare it to the actual insect that was used to describe, you know, another species a while ago. And I probably should have just passed this over to Scott because he knows much more about this, but I got very excited.

1:05:01And there's loads of stuff behind those doors that are like massively useful for scientists when we're trying to describe biodiversity. Yes, 100%. Like right here in the US, the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History, those two museums have been so important to our research. And then even regionally, a huge university just to our north, Texas Am, has a huge entomology collection, insect collection. And all of those are such great resources for us to compare and to link up with these specialists that work on these groups day in and day out. Yeah, extremely helpful and important.

1:05:35Yeah. So we got this amazing question from a listener named Boris, and let's go ahead and listen to it now. Hey, Kelly and Daniel. I recently watched a video about something called canine transmissible venereal tumor or CTVT. and it was presented as, I quote, a single-celled, brainless, boneless, asexually reproducing species in the genus Canis, that is dogs. I think that's really fascinating. Its genome split off from dogs about 11 ,000 years ago and in this short time has changed dramatically. So my questions are, do biologists normally consider this a species of dog? Could it continue to evolve in the long term and eventually give rise to a whole branch of new species?

1:06:17Do we know of other similar cases where evolution happened with a sudden dramatic change? And if something like this were to happen a long time ago in the history of a species, would we even know? Yeah. Wow. That's a great one. Yeah. So very briefly, as some background, because I think these transmissible tumors are fascinating, but also like absolute nightmare fuel. So the idea here is that there's a cell in the host body that has mutated and it started to become cancerous. It's reproducing like crazy. And usually cancer sticks with the person who got the cancer. You know, you can't usually pass a liver tumor onto your husband.

1:06:57But in a very few cases, there have been self-cells, like Tasmanian devil cells, that have become cancerous and have picked up the ability to jump from one Tasmanian devil to another. And so when Tasmanian devils fight with each other, they bite, there's a lot of blood that's passed back and forth, a lot of saliva that's passed back and forth. And I know more about the Tasmanian devil facial tumors than the other example. So I'm sticking there. But anyway, this tumor is passing between Tasmanian devils and it's a Tasmanian devil cell that now produces tumors on all of these other individuals and makes it hard for them to breathe and eat and stuff.

1:07:33And so they die. And so I guess the question is these cancerous cells, and this is the same thing with CTVT that jump and can now do something totally different than normal dogs do, but it's a dog cell. What, yeah, what would you call that? Was that a different species? Well, that's a fun exercise. And it certainly illustrates this whole important thing about defining a species, right? And how one defines a species then would frame how you would view CTVT or any of these, what I will say are probably, you know, rare gray area exception to the rule type things. But as long as you follow the definition, you should be able to determine whether this entity, whatever it is, is a species or not.

1:08:20It makes me wonder though, because it doesn't have the ability to survive and reproduce if it's not in its host. So it seems to fill that same area as like a virus, which we have a discussion in our evolution class. What is life? How do you define life? And one of those prerequisites that many of the students come up with is you should be able to reproduce on your own. Viruses can't do that, right? They require the reproductive machinery of their host to do it. So I will not stay one way or the other, but I will say that that is an interesting example of something that's in that gray area and challenges how we define species.

1:08:59Yeah, I think we're always doing the best that we can, but nature doesn't care that humans would really like to have nice boxes to put things in. And I don't know, that's like 90 % of the fun, I think, of being in ecology is trying to figure out what nature did and what's the best framework for understanding it. Yeah. I mean, I think we have the answer at hand. It's clearly dog-ish, right?

1:09:24Yes. Yes. So Scott, I want to ask you, if we find life on other planets and we meet alien biologists that are studying their own variety of life, do you think those alien biologists are going to have something in analogy to the concept of a species? That they're going to have your same sort of thought experience walking through the park and noticing trees are different from cats, except now they're alien trees and alien cats. Or do you think that this is possibly a function of life on Earth and that life on other planets could be fundamentally different in ways that make the whole concept of a species an Earth-bound idea?

1:10:00That's a wonderful question. I don't know what they would do. I certainly think if you were to just forget all the knowledge as biologists that we have accumulated on planet Earth, and if you were to ask us to restart evolutionary biology, I think we would again come across the definitions of species and why they're important for this understanding evolution as a whole and the evolution of biodiversity. So I think if you were to replay the learning of humans and our understanding of planet Earth, I think we would again come up with species again. If we were to go to another planet and ask if some other intelligent life form would define species and find them in the same way we would, my answer would probably be yes.

1:10:49I think the first thing we'd want to know is what are the relationships between the life on Earth and the life on this other planet? They may share themselves a common ancestor. We still don't know exactly where life started on planet Earth. And one of the potential hypotheses that I love is panspermia, where it actually came from somewhere else and seeded life on planet Earth. We're all descended from a tumor on the face of an alien dog. Oh, no. Yes. Wouldn't that be beautiful? That would be something. Yeah. And even to take a step back earlier than that, you know, there's all these wonderful experiments exploring how biomolecules may actually form through natural processes right here on planet Earth.

1:11:32And that same process could happen on a moon around Saturn or on another planet in another solar system. Those are all possibilities. And so if they formed in similar ways, then I also think these discontinuities that evolve seem to be a natural outcome of evolutionary biology. And so under all those conditions, I do think an alien life form would find species and be excited about variation and see that. But there is a really big universe and a lot of opportunities there. So I will only say that's my guess. Well, I hope we get to find alien life. And then we get to discover what happens when you put like alien fish and earth fish together in a lake and then make it too murky for them to make good decisions.

1:12:18Yes. I do too. Maybe one day. All right. Thanks so much, Scott, for being on the show. We hope to have you back in the future. And this was a lot of fun. Thanks, Scott. Yes. Fun for me, too. Thank y 'all. Thank you for that wonderful interview, which highlights the great truism of biology. It depends. In the case of dogs, it seems we adopted the concept of breeds, rather than declaring every very good boy and girl a different species, since genetically they're still close enough for horseshoes, as it were. If there's ever an opportunity for extended discussion on the genetics part, I'd be curious to understand what it is, or what selective breeding from humans over the ages has done to allow dogs such a wide variation in appearance, behavior, size, while remaining reproductively compatible?

1:13:06Or, in the vein of Daniel, if we discovered an alien planet filled with space corgis, poodles, and boxers, besides it being a very cuddly place, how would astrobiologists classify these extrasolar canines? Oh, gosh, that went places. I knew it was going to be a complex answer, but that was fascinating. ring species, dogish nightmare fuel, and an absolutely gorgeous wasp with an amazing name. Next time I walk in the park and admire the discontinuities, I'll have a much greater appreciation for all the twists and turns of how they got that way. Daniel, please pet your baffling dog for me. And thank you so much, all of you, for a fascinating episode.

1:13:48Thank you for tackling this unusual question. The discussion about the meaning of species was very interesting. And all these edge cases that stretch the definition are fascinating. So thanks again, Kelly and Daniel, and also Scott.

1:14:08Thanks everybody for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, DNK Universe. Come engage with us. You can email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. We really do want to hear from you. And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

1:14:48And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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