Der Schrei der Natur

One of the best life decisions I ever made was taking two semesters of modern art my freshman year of college. It completely revolutionized my worldview. It taught me to embrace abstract expression. Every once in a while, I'll come across something in science that reminds me of a great work of art, and I absolutely love it when that happens. 

The screaming hydroid gonophore. Photo by Caitlin Plowman

Today, it was a microscope slide. Three holes in the gonophore of an athecate hydroid looked exactly like Edvard Munch's The Scream, and my mind went straight back to art class. Even though Munch was Norwegian, he originally titled the work in German Der Schrei der Natur, which translates to "The cry of nature." And you know what, that microscopic artwork really spoke to me today. The Surrealist dreamscape of agony captured how I felt about deep-sea hydroid reproduction. 

My major occupation this fall has been bringing half-finished projects one by one to the submission line. I've moved a couple of papers off my desk recently, so as I work my way down the list, the next paper in rotation concerns the reproduction of a species of deep-sea hydroid called Bouillonia cornucopia. I've told you about this species before. I started seeing a lot of it on fouling panels I had deployed in the Arctic, so instead of just counting the specimens, I decided to go one step further. On a research cruise in 2019, I measured all the specimens I collected and took some high-resolution photos. By the end of the cruise, I realized I had learned enough about the hydroid to write a paper. 

Except for one piece. I wanted to get a look at the hydroids' reproductive structures, but that required a technique that I don't have any experience with: histology. Thankfully, my friend and former labmate, Caitlin, is a histology expert, and she was willing to process some specimens for me. Caitlin recently finished the processing and sent me her slides, so now we get to collaborate on the paper and figure out how hydroids reproduce in the Arctic deep sea.

Let me warn you: it's kind of puzzle. Caitlin and I have been reading previously-published papers about hydroid reproduction, and while we can notice some commonalities between our species and a few others, the structures don't quite line up. There's obviously something unique about how Bouillonia reproduces, but we can't quite figure out what that is yet. It's going to require a lot more reading, a lot more thinking, and a lot more discussion.

And maybe a few existential screams.