This article comes from “Tide Bites”, the monthly newsletter of UW Friday Harbor Laboratories. “Scanning All Fish!”, by Adam Summers, with Kory Evans-Jackson and Malorie Hayes: read the full article at the FHL website.

Friday Harbor Labs

Recently, FHL became home to the Karel F. Liem Bio-Imaging Center. The centerpiece of the shared research facility is a very capable micro-source CT scanner from Bruker, a model 1173. The scanner can image radio-dense tissue at resolution as fine as 5 microns, and because of variable magnification geometry it can also image specimens about the size of two grapefruits. Having the machine right down the hall from my office led to experimentation with high-speed workflow. And that led to a project called #scanAllFish. Born from a series of tweets from @fishguy_FHL, the idea is to CT-scan every species of fish and put all the data up on the web for everyone to access free of charge. We aim to democratize CT data and ensure that in this corner of vertebrate comparative morphology, access to a scanner is not a competitive advantage. The Foundations who donated the bulk of the money to buy the machine asked that it be available to anyone who is visiting FHL, free of charge. This generosity enables the #scanAllFish project. Our strategy is to offer scan time to scientists who have a large diversity of species they want scanned. They bring lots of specimens and a small team to the Labs and spend an intensive few days or weeks scanning everything they are interested in. People have come from around the country to take advantage of the offer, and in the process we have scanned over 1,200 species of fishes. You can read more about the project by searching the web for #scanAllFish — it has made a small media splash. If you’d like to help support Adam’s goal of scanning all fish, you can donate to the Karel F Liem Fish Biology Endowment which supports the Karel F. Liem Bio-Imaging Facility at FHL.

[read the full story at FHL Tide Bites #42]

from “Tide Bites“, the monthly newsletter from Friday Harbor Labs

An Intertidal Compass!

by Julia Sigwart

Dr. Julia Sigwart is an Associate Professor and the Associate Director of the Queen’s University Marine Laboratory in Northern Ireland. She is currently back home on the west coast on an extended research sabbatical at University of California, Berkeley, funded by the European Commission. Her research on the evolution of chitons and other marine creatures covers many different aspects, from fossils to neurobiology, which provides a good reason to do all sorts of fun experiments all over the world.

J. Sigwart

When you are trying to find your way home from a new place, you probably reach for your phone or GPS to ask for directions. Other animals don’t have the option of technology, but they do manage some extraordinary navigation. Birds, sea turtles, termites, and many other animals have a magnetic “sixth sense” that allows them to detect the Earth’s magnetic field, and align their direction on a migration path. This ability to sense magnetic fields, or having an “internal compass,” is termed magnetoreception.

Pioneering work on animal magnetoreception was done at Friday Harbor Labs starting in the 1980s using the seaslug Tochuina tetraquetra (formerly called Tritonia diomedea). Special equipment at FHL called a Merritt coil can manipulate electric currents to determine the force and direction of the magnetic field inside a cube that measures 6 ft on each side. This way, we can change which direction is “north” inside the experimental cube. Two members of our team, Drs Shaun Cain and Jim Murray, use this equipment for their research and for teaching a summer Neuroethology course (which will be offered again in summer 2017). In these experiments, we aimed to test for a magnetic sense in other, more primitive molluscs.

[Read the full article at FHL Tide Bites]