Biosphere 1: New Beginnings

Caltech Letters

To celebrate the launch of Biosphere, we invite you to join our conversation about some new beginnings in the microbial world and in our scientific paths. We often think that the birth of live young is a special characteristic of some animals. Mammals do it, some sharks do it, and it would totally make sense if no single-celled microorganisms did it. But that is not the case! We talk about one example of a bacterium, Epulopiscium fishelsoni, that lives in the guts of Regal Tangs, such as Dory the Fish, that nurtures little babies inside of it until they grow up, explode their parent, and move on to bigger and better things. Epulopiscium roughly translates to “guest at a fish’s banquet”. Find out if this is a banquet that you want to join in this episode! Aditi, John, Julian, and Lev, all had different experiences starting in science. For one of us, this involved a difficult choice between sea sponges and human disease. For another---lots and lots of spiders. Tune in to hear our stories. You can learn about the discovery of E. fishelsoni here: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/18/us/in-the-world-of-bacteria-a-behemoth.html You can learn more about bacteria giving birth to live young and reproducing in other weird ways here: https://micro.cornell.edu/research/epulopiscium/binary-fission-and-other-forms-reproduction-bacteria/ Find us at https://caltechletters.org/podcasts/ Contact us at [e-mail] Tweet Lev @LMT_Spoon ***The cover image is CC-BY SA 4.0 from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Regal_Tang_sketch.jpg. Not only charismatic movie stars, Regal Tangs house a lot of wonderful biology.