Briefing Chat: Penguins pick up PFAS pollution

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1:19Hi listeners, Benjamin here. Welcome to the Nature Briefing podcast, the Friday show where we talk about a few stories we've read about in the Nature Briefing, which is of course nature's daily roundup of the latest science stories. And joining me this week is not one, but two of the team. We have Sharmini Bundel. Hello, double trouble today. And Maren Hunsberger. Maren, how are you doing? Hello, hello. I'm very happy to be here as always. Right. We've got a few stories, as I say. Sharmini, why don't you go first this week? What have you got? I've got penguins. I've got penguin detectives. And that is not my wording.

1:54It's not even the article I've read, it was a direct quote from one of the study co-authors that describes the penguins as our elite team of marine detectives. But no, this is a serious story. This is about environmental pollution in the penguins' habitat. And I've been reading this in Science, and it's based on a paper that came out in Earth Environmental Sustainability last month. I need someone to make an animated film about this with the penguins in little detective hats. This is just screaming for that now. I know. It'll be a really good kids film. But with an important message about pollution, about these particular compounds.

2:31So the villain of the story is per and polyfluoroalkyl substances. PFAS? The ever dreaded PFAS? Yeah. And so these are sometimes known as forever chemicals. They're toxic industrial compounds that just hang around. So this particular team, they roped the penguins in to help monitor this stuff. Amazing. I love this. This is fantastic participation from the ecosystem's cutest animal. Yeah, they are cute, these ones. They're little Magellanic penguins. So this is Argentine Patagonia. And these cute little penguins live on the beaches and dive into the Atlantic Ocean hunting anchovies and sardines and then come back to their very noisy, apparently, colonies where they live.

3:15And that makes them quite good field detectives. They go out, they fish, they hunt, they come back to the colonies where the scientists can get at them. And rather than giving a direct verbal report of their observations, they have little anklets that detect the chemicals. Ankle monitors on the penguins. This story gets better and better. My goodness. The penguins are the goodies here. Yeah, they've been tagged by these little like soft silicon bands. The researchers put them around their ankles, send them off, and then two to nine days later, get the anklets back and then take them and analyse them in the lab.

3:49Amazing. So the anklets are absorbing whatever PFAS might be in the environment, and then the scientists can then see the concentration of PFAS that that penguin was exposed to? Yeah, exactly. So the amount of the stuff and also how many different types of PFAS were detected. And on the face of it, of course, this is a cute story, and the penguins are brilliant. But I think it's wild that these PFAS chemicals can be detected in this fairly remote, I'm imagining, area of the planet where these penguins live. Yeah. And I think actually the fact that it's remote is why they are using the penguins, not just the sort of remote land, obviously out to see where the penguins are going.

4:24It's basically the kind of place that it's really hard to go out and take your samples and monitor things. So it's giving a quite valuable insight into this particular remote ecosystem and the impact on the penguins potentially and the other animals around. I should also say this is just a trial at the moment. This is a pilot study. They only did 55 penguins in two different colonies. But the fact that it's kind of cheap to do means that this is then the kind of thing that you can then replicate and then you can compare your different areas and see if there's any variation. And already, even from just this trial study, 91 % of the bands had some PFAS detected and there were nine different compounds seen, seen including some that are like now banned highly toxic legacy ones from before 2000 then also some of the newer replacement ones which are less likely to accumulate in tissues but still very persistent in the environment still have this ability to kind of hang around for a long time.

5:26Right and do the researchers think though that maybe other animals other than penguins could be used because of course there are other remote parts of the globe. Can we deploy sensors on narwhal horns. This article does mention cormorants. Amazing. And I think that's specifically because they can dive really deep over 50 meters down, which is deeper than the penguins can go. I like the fact that you can send out your different types of animal senses into different regions and be like, cormorants, go deep. Cormorants, go long. Specialized field agents. I do imagine actually having just said narwhals, it probably works best with birds because they come back.

5:57Yeah, that is quite key. The penguins have their colonies and they will come back to their colonies. And the other thing that the researcher said is that the penguins are quite charismatic. They are, as we mentioned, quite cute little penguins. So that is quite useful potentially for getting people's attention and maybe getting across the issue because the researcher does say we don't really know what these chemicals are doing, but penguins are in trouble. Well, absolutely. We've had a few stories in the not too distant part about penguins and penguin colonies being under various sorts of threats.

6:28So detective penguins doing good work there. Let's move on to our second story this week. Maren, why don't you go next? What have you got? Well, it's not quite penguins, but it is still a little bit of a mystery detective case. A case report that came out last week in Med details the situation of a woman who was suffering from three separate debilitating autoimmune conditions, which have since been completely resolved for about 14 months by CAR-T therapy. So we've talked about CAR-T therapy on the podcast many times before. But just to recap, it's a therapy where the patient's own T cells, which are a kind of immune cell, are taken out of their body and engineered to attack and kill a specific target.

7:08And it's most often used as a therapy for diseases like blood cancers, where the T cells are engineered to attack certain signatures on cancer cells. But there are many clinical trials underway around the world to see how it could also be used to treat autoimmune conditions. Yeah, Nick covered a CAR-T story not so long ago, and I didn't realize that it was more than just cancer. Yes, you can engineer these cells to also be on the lookout for signatures on other kinds of cells. It doesn't have to be cancer cells. And in this particular case, the patient's autoimmune diseases were being caused by problems with her B cells, which is a different kind of immune cell.

7:44And these B cells were essentially in overdrive, mistakenly attacking her own red blood cells, which, as you can imagine, causes quite a lot of problems, leading to primarily an autoimmune disease called autoimmune hemolytic anemia, which just means you just have no red blood cells. It was also causing these related issues. Her B cells were attacking her platelets, which are really important for blood clotting. And they were also attacking some fat binding proteins that also play a really important role in clotting, but in the opposite direction that makes your blood more sticky, which is, again, a problem.

8:14So she was struggling with these three separate autoimmune conditions, but all caused by the same root issue of these overactive B cells. I mean, that sounds like life must have been very tough for this one. Absolutely. I mean, at this point when she came to the doctors who wrote up this case report, she wasn't able to work. She was bedridden. She had to receive blood transfusions every single day, at least an average of one bag a day, up to three bags a day. So this was a very life-threatening condition, according to Fabian Mueller, a hematologist where she was treated. And one of the co-authors of the report, he says that her disease had gotten completely out of hand.

8:50And you said that this particular experiment has been a big success. Yeah, it's not often on the pod or in general in science that we get to say something so black and white, but she received a single dose of CAR T therapy that was personalized for her own overactive B cells. So these engineered T cells went in and basically took care of these B cells that were causing all of the problems. She received a single dose of this therapy as well as two chemotherapy drugs to support and amplify this treatment. And it's been 14 months and she is in complete remission. And this is particularly impressive because she previously had received nine different treatments that were aimed at trying to treat her B cell problem, none of which had helped or had any long term effect.

9:30So the contrast between the previous attempts at treatment and this treatment is pretty stark. You're right. It's good to have a good news story. I mean, I hate to be a Debbie Downer here, but we know there are some downsides to CAR-T therapy, like it's very expensive, for example, and it has ultra-personalized. This is N equals 1, a good one, admittedly. But what does this mean for other folk who may be experiencing the same things? Absolutely, Ben. Yeah, one of the main downsides of CAR-T therapy is that, obviously, it's an incredibly intensive and long process to extract a patient's cells, engineer them in a lab, re-infuse them.

10:02It's ultra personalized. You can't scale this up to larger populations because it is predicated upon the patient's own genetic uniqueness. So it's a great demonstration that this therapy works. And it'll be interesting to see, especially as more clinical trials are investigating this kind of treatment for autoimmune conditions of many kinds, how that might be able to be applied to treatment of individuals and if it will be sustainable or practical to treat large numbers of people who are struggling with this. Although the flip side of that is that many of these autoimmune conditions are incredibly rare.

10:40So unlike cancers, there may not be large populations of people who would need this kind of treatment. Well, let's do one more this week. And I've got a story that I'm bringing and it's about an animal that I have this kind of irrational fear of even though the chances of me meeting one are very very slim and these are deep sea anglerfish generally speaking they're pretty small you know maybe the size of your hand they can grow up to a meter long they live in the inky blackness of the sea and they are full of teeth and horror when i say anglerfish to you what's the first sort of thing you think of i think that's not an irrational fear oh yeah in the kids films the anglerfish are very much there terrifying terrifying you get lured towards their light don't you if you're a little fish and then suddenly and they go for you and specifically it's female anglerfish the deep sea ones that have this bioluminescent law and it's on the end of a specialized spine and the glowing comes from bacteria that live inside it now shaman you say there that it's used to attract and capture prey and absolutely right but according to this article that i read in science based on a paper in ichthyology and herpetology.

11:52The researchers have come to the conclusion that actually the light made by the female anglerfish might be a way to attract mates as well. And they've been looking at the evolution of this organ. This is another one of those things where it's the drive for food and the drive for sex, both driving weird features. Why do they think that? I mean, that's a great question. And as I say, this is an evolution story because not a huge amount is known about these animals. And to come to the conclusion they have, the researchers looked through museum specimens, looking at some really, really old examples, and they did some computer modelling and all sorts of other things as well to try and build a family tree of these anglerfish.

12:33And I'm going to give you a whistle-stop tour of the anglerfish evolutionary story. Here we go. So their results suggest that about 72 million years ago, species living in relatively shallow water evolved lures okay now these weren't luminescent ones these were essentially just little twitch appendages right to attract and capture animals and species like that still exist but then fast forward to about 34 to 23 million years ago and by this point some of these fish had moved to the open ocean they'd moved to deeper water and at this point there was an absolute explosion in the diversity of anglerfish like suddenly loads more species evolved at a lot quicker rate so about 40 percent of the 400 living species of anglerfish are the deep sea ones these are the ones that have the bioluminescence now quite why this acceleration in species diversity happened is unclear but it could be that this law had essentially a dual action that shaped the evolutionary tree and the authors think that as well as being involved in catching prey the glowing lure could be used to communicate it was a way of attracting mates now the males are very different from the female anglerfish they are absolutely tiny but they have these kind of big eyes so it suggests that maybe this would be a useful way to see a female okay yeah especially made for spying that bioluminescent lure, I imagine.

14:07Well, there's more to it as well. So something else happened during this period. So as the fish evolved, they live in this more of a deep sea environment. The spine that the lure is attached to got longer. Okay, now maybe this was a way to mask the horror that was at the other end, right? There's no light cast upon the female anglerfish head. You can't see the teeth. The teeth are in shadow. It's so terrifying. So we have these dual pressures, you know, feasting and mating. And so this has been a driver for how this bioluminescent law has changed and evolved over time. And as I say, led to a bunch of different species of anglerfish coming into being.

14:49So is this like a praying mantis type situation? Like, are the males coming just to mate? Or are they prey in another way also? The answer is no, and it's actually even more horrifying than that. So the mating habits of some anglerfish is an example of what's known as sexual parasitism. So the tiny male comes along, bites the female anglerfish, and he holds on tight. Now, at this point, his body essentially fuses with the females, and he's getting all his sustenance from her bloodstream. his organs then dissolve entirely except his testes and so the egg and sperm get released into the water fertilization happens and off we go again it is absolutely bananas and examples of that are very few and far between usually the result of this has just been a female angelfish has been dragged up in a net and you can see these fused males but it actually has been caught on camera as well it's a incredible well i'm not sure where we can go after that i think we'll probably have to call it a day there for this week's.

15:56There are so many things that we can say, but probably not on this podcast. As always, we'll put links to all of those stories in the show notes and links where you can sign up to get even more like them delivered directly to your inbox. But until next time, I've been Benjamin Thompson, Shumlee Bundell and Maren Hunsberger. Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks. See you next time. Thanks for listening.