Parasites in our pets' poop
Tiny Living Beings
Microbes are everywhere, including inside our pets! This week, Ben Alverson comes on to give us a crash course in veterinary parasitology. He discusses the variety of worms and protists that can live inside mammals and cause problems ranging from being a mild nuisance to causing death. We talk about the different types of animals that get tested for these parasites including cats and dogs, zoo animals like big cats, and farm animals. Ben does a great job explaining how diagnoses are made from examining poop samples, what that process looks like, how identifications of different eggs and and...
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Is science political? - with Kevin Bird
Tiny Living Beings
American science has been under attack since this Trump administration began. Tens of thousands of scientists and federal workers have lost their jobs and the effects are starting to permeate through society. This week I have Dr. Kevin Bird on to explain the events of the last 3 months, how science is funded in the United States, why it is being attacked so aggressively, and the ideologies behind these attacks. He also gives us a history lesson on movements of the past that sought to protect the scientific enterprise. It is really important to protect science. Publicly-funded research benefits...
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The Diatom Detective - with Kirstie Scott
Tiny Living Beings
If you tuned in last week, you'll know that diatoms produce one quarter of the air we breathe (and they produced this podcast's logo), but did you know that they can also be used to solve crimes???! Rather than spoiling too much by writing a long caption here, you should just press play to hear from Dr. Kirstie Scott, a forensic diatomist and one of the most interesting people I've spoken with. In this episode we discuss how certain environments have certain cells and how these cells can travel on clothes and in bodies. We also talk about different types of evidence, testifying in court, and...
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Diatoms and dinoflagellates and dinotoms, oh my! - with Brittany Sprecher
Tiny Living Beings
Diatoms are beautiful (and weird). Dinoflagellates are weird (and beautiful). They are completely different organisms but both are protists that can both support whole ecosystems or cause devastating environmental hazards. However, only one of them inspired Alfred Hitchcock to make his famous movie, The Birds (listen to find out which). Both organisms can produce oxygen to help us breathe, and diatoms alone produce over 20% of the oxygen in the atmosphere. And sometimes dinoflagellates will ingest diatoms and use their innards to steal photosynthesis, creating a new type of organism called a...
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Sharks of the plankton - with Matt Johnson
Tiny Living Beings
Did you know that some organisms, from protists to sea slugs, steal photosynthesis? This week Dr. Matt Johnson is on the podcast to talk about his work on kleptoplasty, the process by which organisms steal plastids (photosynthetic organelles) from other organisms to become photosynthetic. These special cells with stolen plastids are mixotrophs, that is, they can both eat food and produce their own from solar energy. Matt discusses why kleptoplasty and mixotrophy are special processes that aren't as rare as we might think and how they affect the ocean and planet. He also talks about ciliates, a...
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Urine for a treat - with Owen Hale
Tiny Living Beings
Newsflash! Urine is not sterile! This week we have Owen Hale on the podcast to talk about the urinary tract microbiome, which is really understudied. We discuss which bacteria live inside us, what they do, why so many people get UTIs, and what urinary tract bacteria can tell us about evolution more broadly. Owen also points out that because UTIs affect women so frequently, this is one of the few systems in biomedical science where females have been studied more than men, and what we can learn from these types of studies. He also explains why UTIs are political and some surprising results from...
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Where did plants come from? - with Blair Young
Tiny Living Beings
Bryophytes are an ancient group of plants that include hornworts, liverworts, and mosses. They are the evolutionary link between land plants and the green algal ancestors that plants evolved from. But bryophytes are also really interesting in their own right and they are very understudied so it is lucky that I got to chat with an expert bryologist! This week, Blair Young discusses what bryophytes look like, where to find them, and why we study them. Blair is a PhD student at Rutgers University in the Struwe lab. She is also the assistant curator at the Chrysler herbarium and a field surveyor...
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4.5 billion years of Earth history in one hour - with Bolton Howes
Tiny Living Beings
Did you know the continents move at the same rate as your fingernails grow? Welcome BACK to Tiny Living Beings after a couple years off! For the first episode of the new season, I have Dr. Bolton Howes on to give a geologist's perspective on the history of the Earth that I hope will give context for all the other episodes of this show. We discuss everything from the origin of the planet 4.5 billion years ago to the first life, when plants and animals evolved, the two times Earth turned into a literal snowball, giant bugs, dinosaurs, climate change, and why it's so hard to reconstruct the past....
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Life is beautiful - with Ursula Goodenough
Tiny Living Beings
Dr. Ursula Goodenough has a scientific career that spans six decades, numerous accolades, and is a writer of both textbook and popular science books. But her crowning achievement is being a guest on this podcast. This week, Ursula and I have a conversation that covers topics like algal research, work-life balance, science communication and story telling, life-changing microscopy finds, why sex is so prevalent in nature, and relatedly--Richard Gere. We also discuss her book, The Sacred Depths of Nature, and what it means to be of the religious naturalist orientation. I highly recommend this...
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Choanoflagellates and animal evolution - with David Booth
Tiny Living Beings
Choanoflagellates are unicellular protists but they also happen to be the closest living relatives to animals. This week, David Booth discusses what choanoflagellates are, where you can find them, and the connection to animal evolution. He also talks about how these microbes are interesting in their own right, impacting whole food webs and ecosytems and interacting with bacteria. We talk about the fossil record and cover a bunch of major evolutionary transitions and how microbial life was the precursor to the kingdoms of organisms we're most familiar with today.Dr. David Booth, PhD, is an...
info_outlineWhat are the microbes in our gut up to? And how does their life affect our lives? This week, Dr. Haley Hallowell teaches us all about the gut microbiome and virome, that is, how microbes and viruses inside us affect each other and our own health! We also play a game on this episode where I make some bold claims that have gained traction on social media recently-some true, some ridiculous, some in between-and Haley becomes a professional myth-buster, using the latest science of course. Make sure to listen to the end because this episode wraps up with the two of us trying to figure out how much poop can fit in the human body.
Dr. Haley Hallowell, PhD is a postdoctoral researcher in the Suez lab at Johns Hopkins University where she studies how bacteriophages influence the microbiome and how the host immune system responds to these viruses. She is also a fabulous science communicator and you can follow her on Twitter and TikTok, where she sets the record straight on pseudoscientific health claims about the gut. Her videos are amazing! Definitely follow her!
Some resources we discuss on the episode for getting trustworthy scientific information: Pubmed, Nature, Elisabeth Bik's Microbiome Digest.
Some papers Haley mentions:
- The Gut Virome Database Reveals Age-Dependent Patterns of Virome Diversity in the Human Gut
- A microbiome-dependent gut-brain pathway regulates motivation for exercise
- The pros, cons, and many unknowns of probiotics
- The promise of the gut microbiome as part of individualized treatment strategies
- Phage therapy: From biological mechanisms to future directions
For more info on microbes and to follow updates of this podcast, find @couch_microscopy on Instagram, @CouchMicroscopy on Twitter, or visit www.couchmicroscopy.com/store for merch!
Music is "Introducing Cosmic Space" by Elf Power and "Vorticella Dreams" by L. Felipe Benites.
While some of the content on this podcast may be relevant to human or veterinary medicine, this information is not medical advice. The views and opinions expressed on this program are those of the host and guests and do not reflect the views of any institution.