Get to Know a Scientist!

Welcome to a new blog series with Shark Fin Swim. I’m Hope, the founder and ocean illustrator behind Shark Fin Swim. Our small business helps raise awareness for ocean conservation through our hand drawn colorful prints perfect for ocean lovers. Using eco friendly materials and production practices we are bringing ocean advocates a more sustainable option for swimwear. As a biologist and purpose driven small business owner this blog series is going to give you an inside look of what it’s like to be a Marine Scientists Biologists, Diver, Professional mermaid and so much more! Let’s meet our scientist for this week!

find Meg on Instagram here!

I am a molecular biologist who studies octopuses and RNA editing. It is a molecular process that all organisms do (including us), but octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish do it to a much higher extent than any other organism we know of. For octopus, squid, and cuttlefish, RNA editing allows them to modify their proteins in real time and can even help them acclimate to changing environmental conditions. 

My favorite medium has changed a lot over my lifetime, but pen and ink is easily the one that stuck around and kept my attention the longest. Though watercolor is a close runner-up. Favorite piece I've made is a difficult one, because as of late, most of my art is digital, and for some reason in my brain, that makes it less worthy of favoritism? However, I do like the poster I made for Skype A Scientist, which teaches the public about ways they can take action in their everyday lives to help the ocean. Funny enough, I truly hated that poster when I was making it. Primarily because it looked a lot different from the finished product, and the changes that I had to make to make the poster more legible, I very much disagreed with. But now that all of that is over and I'm less attached to it, I can appreciate it and, more importantly, appreciate the value it brings. 

My beef with ocean documentaries primarily came from the fact that the information you learned in these documentaries felt like the same information over and over and over again. It was very surface-level information that was repeated throughout multiple documentaries. I craved depth and new knowledge, and wanted to create documentaries for those who craved more. Now I've veered far off the ocean documentary path I originally had in mind, but I do think I've slightly achieved that goal in my science communication endeavors. Which is nice to reflect on. 

Honestly, my favorite experience was the time I spent in a COVID-19 diagnostics testing lab. I helped process hundreds of tests a day for Santa Cruz County, which doesn't sound like the most exciting work. But the lab was entirely made up of women and has been one of my most positive experiences in science. We would go to a dive bar after work and spend more time together, even after working for 8 hours. It was that same dive bar we went to to cry together when we found out the lab was being shut down (we thought we were all about to receive holiday bonuses, but instead got fired). This lab was also really committed to being as environmentally friendly as any lab can be. Which was a great learning experience for me on how to be more environmentally sustainable in lab, but also meant we loved to use leftover parafilm to make little sculptures that we put up around the lab and on our extremely expensive robots (I made a bird that hung off the robots arm so everytime it moved the bird looked like it was flying). Those women became some of my best friends and closest mentors, and we all still chat to this day. One of them just so happened to share a birthday with me and a similar career path, starting as an artist and becoming a scientist. We even look a little similar, both being short white women with long brown hair and bangs. She's one of my closest friends, and it was so serendipitous that our paths crossed. I'll never forget my time there, even if it was short. It really changed me as a person and showed me what great lab culture can look like and how to build it. 

My next favorite experience is probably slapping elephant seals with brooms that have hair dye on it to tag them for research. Truly a once in a lifetime experience (especially because I can't see myself doing marine mammal research anytime again).

They were maybe a bit more later in life than most would think. I started as a shark-obsessed child, so you know I love your brand. I loved visiting my grandparents in Florida and finding shark teeth. From there, I fell in love with wolves, and almost all my art from my childhood features wolves. My bat mitzvah was very wolf-centered, and I donated my monetary gifts to my local wolf conservation in Missouri. Cephalopods came around when I was maybe 13? I remember watching Richard Hammond's Miracles of Nature on YouTube, where they showed a cuttlefish perfectly camouflaged against a checkered background, and from there, the rest is history. 

To me, there are two reasons why RNA editing research is important. One is because the way cephalopods utilize RNA editing is so different from any organism that we know of. Humans and other organisms edit their RNA primarily to fix mistakes before they occur, it's to stop unwanted immune responses, and occur in areas of our genetic blueprint that don't affect the proteins in our bodies. Cephalopods, on the other hand, primarily have editing occur in regions that affect proteins. That's kinda the whole point for them. Modification of their proteins via RNA editing allows them to acclimate to their environment on the fly. And I think simply from a curiosity standpoint, it's important to understand how organisms can be so incredibly different from us. The fact that scientists discovered this phenomenon in cephalopods shows us how life can exceed our expectations. Things we never could've imagined for ourselves are out there in nature just waiting to be discovered. It really changes our understanding of how organisms can evolve and change. 

Secondly, and I think this is the point that really most would care about if you don't care about curiosity-driven science, is the medical benefit of studying RNA editing. From studying RNA editing in cephalopods, scientists are able to create medicine that benefits humans. These are things like gene therapies, similar to CRISPR, if you've heard of that. But whereas CRISPR technology is modifying your DNA, RNA editing would, of course, modify your RNA, meaning that the changes you make wouldn't be permanent. The other, which a lab has been working on that has now been defunded due to the Trump administration, is non-addictive alternatives to opiates. Which utilizes everything we have learned about RNA editing from cephalopods, to positively benefit humans who are seeking pain relief without the devastating addictive side effects of opiate medication. 

What this type of research looks like in a lab is far removed from what people expect marine biology to look like. I primarily spend most of my time coding on a computer to do these huge analyses of octopus DNA and RNA, and spend the rest of my time in a lab to confirm what I've found via a computer. Octopuses typically start in this process to get the initial samples, but once you've gotten those samples, you can spend a lot of time asking questions and doing analyses that don't ever really require you to go back to those octopuses. That's why with my Master's thesis, I never required any octopuses, because previous lab mates had already done the initial experiment, and I simply just worked off of those initial samples. 

Octopuses are benthic animals, meaning they live on the seafloor. Videos and photos that have gone viral on social media in the last few years show octopuses floating in open water in slow motion. They look like very beautiful shots, and when the public is as obsessed with octopuses as they are, it's easy to see why they gain so much attention. But what so many people don't understand, and why I've made the videos I have, is that to get those shots, octopuses have to be handled and harassed. You won't just find an octopus swimming around the water column with no sea floor in sight. That's because this is dangerous for an octopus. They have no protection from predators in the water column (where they aren't at the surface but also aren't on the ocean floor, occupying the space in between). To get an octopus into the water column, divers either have to scare them into the water column or snatch them off the seafloor and throw them into the water column. Which is why those videos are slowed down, so you can't see the octopus in distress (inking and getting out of there as quickly as possible). This is super stressful for the octopus and exposes them to predators. Having to jet to get back to the seafloor exhausts them, which means that if a predator came by, they would have an easy snack on their hands. At the end of the day, it's bad diving behavior (we are taught to never touch or handle animals while diving) and just bad human behavior (exploiting an animal for clout). 

Cephalopods are aliens is probably the misconception I see the most online. It's always hard to decipher whether people are just making jokes or genuinely believe that. Mainly because it's a fact that has been tried to be validated by poor science (one paper has been published that continually gets picked up by the media, even though it's repeatedly been debunked and full of misinterpreted science) and bad actors (like ancient aliens). It also doesn't help that cephalopod scientists have been quoted in the media saying they are the CLOSEST thing we have to aliens, which is, of course, taken out of context and then shortened to "they are aliens". Though I can't blame them, I think and have said the same thing. 

I think my favorite fact will always be that they edit their RNA way more than any other organism we know of. It's why I got into research, and I just think no fact can beat that. Favorite species is hard, there are so many great options to choose from. My top 3 are flapjack octopuses (opisthoteuthis), magnapinna, and grimalditeuthis (a squid that has a modified tentacle that acts like a little squid puppet to lure prey).