what happens when your laundry turns sentient

The man and his wife at the tea shop at the top of the mountain in Canada that accepted cash only. He offered us their seat since they were leaving, but we were like “oh no it’s okay, we didn’t bring cash with us so we can’t get anything anyway...” I saw him start shuffling in his pockets and talking to his wife out of the corner of my eye as we looked sadly at the menu and started to walk away. His wife stopped us and gave us some money to get ourselves something. I think she saw my face crumple because she quickly patted my shoulder and gave me a hug. It was so nice having a hot mug of specialty tea after a cold walk up a snowy mountain. I’ll never forget that kindness.

Those girls in 8th grade who sat with me when the rest of the 6th grade was off on the Arrowhead trip and I was sitting alone (and really self-conscious of it too, at that age). I remember one of them was named Jheel. She asked me why I was alone and when I told her, she and her friends were like “we’ll sit with you.” I’ll never know why she spoke to me in the first place, but I’ll never forget that. It made me feel like less of a loser as a shy, socially awkward teen who had to be alone for three days.

Warmother reigned supreme over those Cannon/Ez decks until they got more optimized and people started playing more varied shit. overall, can still put up a pretty good fight against most decks which is more than could be said for the time period where I just stopped playing (losing every single game was like “oh I think this meta is too fast for Warmother”)

If the partner and I are both in the same room, he’ll snuggle with one of us for a bit and then immediately go to the other for more cuddles. (He’s done this both cuddling me first and cuddling my partner first, so it’s not that he always goes to a specific person first. It’s true equality!)

To this day, he’s never woken us up for food even when we sleep in a little. He waits until we’ve woken up to come down from his cat tree, and even then it’s usually just to snuggle – no impatience or frustration at all!

He naps by the door when we go out (we’ve seen it on camera!) and greets us at the door when we come home. No signs of separation anxiety, either - he just chills in the living room until he hears our footsteps in the hall.

Never met a more curious, confident animal. Loud noises? Not even phased. Most of the time he’ll run TOWARD the sound of the noise instead of running away. (Case in point: my partner turned the vacuum on in the bedroom. Bean leaped off of me and galloped inside to see what was going on, then stood there watching.) Partner gaming in the same room? Time for a sprawled out nap on the cat tree!

He recovers quickly from almost everything. An empty box fell on top of him while he was playing with it and he just scrambled out from under and climbed on top of it for a nap. Later he proceeded to mess with another box that almost fell on him in the same way…

He actually likes going on car rides and will run toward us if we hold up his harness and leash! While in the car he’ll just climb up to the back window and watch the world as we drive. Chillest cat ever.

We can basically put him in anything and he doesn’t bat an eye. Cloth carrier? Pack him in. Cat backpack? No problem! Dark cardboard box with the lid on? No worries, he’ll just lie down and take a nap until he can come back out.

No inappropriate elimination to date, and he loyally uses his scratching posts instead of the furniture. He’s also great at not eating anything that’s not food (with one exceptional incident…). Even my tiny hair ties are safe with him!

Anyone who says cats only love us for food has never seen Bean chirp for his dinner and then ignore it to crawl into my lap purring with his food mere inches from his face.

All right, it’s about that time to check in and see how we did on this semester’s goals!

In my writerly/creative life, I would like to:

Finish the first chapter of the rewrite for SMtS. Done! I’m actually on the second chapter now :’) but having a lot of new worldbuilding ideas so progress has kind of stalled for now. I think I just need to make a choice and run with it to see how it goes. It’s always the starting that’s the hard part...

Learn how to sketch a cat. Done, sort of? I can draw a decent cat now, but nowhere near comics level.

Sketch out a plan for the first five chapters or so of the SMtS rewrite. I’m going to say that this wasn’t done since I never wrote it down. It being in my head as a nebulous amalgamation of ideas doesn’t count.

In my academic life, I would like to:

Do well in all of my classes. Yup yup, we got those A’s!

Finish all of my runs for this first paper of my research. Um....big surprise, but nah. We got kind of close? We’re getting to the final stages of runs, at least. (Feels like I say that every time).

Finish writing the methods section of this paper. I haven’t started writing yet. Sigh. This always takes longer than I thought it would (see the past like three goal posts where I had this exact goal).

Fix my Git and Github pushing/pulling. Now to be fair, I was waiting on some help on how to do this, so the fact that I didn’t get it done isn’t entiiiiiirely on me. But yeah, I didn’t do this.

In my personal life, I would like to:

Teach Bean one more trick besides sit. Success! Bean now knows sit, stay, give paw, and high-five!

Post at least one photo a day to Bean’s IG account. Okay, so I fell off the wagon a little bit towards the end, but I think I accomplished the spirit of the goal. To date, we have 217 posts for his ~3.5 months with us!

Get my car’s AC fixed. Erm, didn’t happen, but I did get a tire pump to fix my tire pressure! Also, it’s cold now so I have 0 motivation to make this happen. [sigh]

Try to vacuum at least every two to three weeks. [cries] This was too ambitious by far.

Stick to playing video games only after 5pm. DONE! Both me and the partner have been pretty good about this. I’m proud of us!

Get better about scheduling my day. I kind of put this with #5. We’ve both been getting better about actually doing work during the workday (sort of, anyway) and then goofing off at night.  

Towards Integrating Evolution, Metabolism, and Climate Change Studies of Marine Ecosystems (2019).

Authors: Federico Baltar, Barbara Bayer, Nina Bednarsek, Stacy Deppeler, Ruben Escribano, Carolina E. Gonzalez, Roberta L. Hansman, Rajani Kanta Mishra, Mary Ann Moran, Daniel J. Repeta, Carol Robinson, Eva Sintes, Christian Tamburini, Luis E. Valentin, Gerhard J. Herndl

Published In: Cell Press Reviews: Trends in Ecology & Evolution

Goal/Questions Asked: To discuss the importance of including both evolution and metabolism in studies about how marine microbial communities will be affected by climate change.

Methods: N/A 

What I Learned: The environment affects traits in a population because of adaptation and selection, but evolutionary changes also affect community processes. Thus, the two have a back-and-forth relationship that must be kept in mind. Most studies about climate change focus on increased temperature, suggesting almost universally that respiration rates will increase with temperature more than photosynthetic rates (the ocean will become net heterotrophic). More extreme weather conditions are also predicted to occur.

Populations on the periphery of their realized niche will likely be more dramatically affected by climate change than populations in the center, as populations on the periphery will be less dense and more likely under environmental stress.

*Nekton can swim; plankton cannot. Thus, nekton can respond to environmental changes by migrating, but may be more affected by front conditions (plankton populations are often distributed according to front locations).

Neutral alleles drift randomly in a population until they become advantageous; then they can cause rapid adaptive evolution as they are immediately accessible and are present more than de novo mutations. The idea is that there are pre-existing variants within a population that may come to the forefront as the environment changes.

Future Directions: Studying the “rare biosphere” (microbe groups that persist at extremely low concentrations) and how its members might respond to environmental changes. From the paper itself, the following:

How will the interaction and/or combination of local adaptation and migration affect marine ecosystem services in response to current and future environmental changes?

Is it possible to simplify the response of marine ecosystems and their services to climate change to just the response of a few key marine species (linked to reductions or expansions in their realized and/or fundamental niche breadth)? If so, which should those key species be? What should be the parameters needed to define/select those key species?

How will these modifications of the niches of marine organisms be affected by differences in the environmental stressors and by the response of the organisms to tolerate or react to these stressors?

What can empirical and theoretical studies on past and present shifts in fundamental and realized niche breadth in response to marine environmental changes tell us about the future of marine ecosystems and their services?

Today’s paper is...

Representative diatom and coccolithophore species exhibit divergent responses throughout simulated upwelling cycles (2020). 

Authors: Robert H. Lampe, Gustavo Hernandez, Yuan Yu Lin, Adrian Marchetti

Published In: bioRxiv

Goal/Questions Asked: Why are diatoms the dominant bloomers in upwelling events? How does iron play a role in the different responses between types of phytoplankton? How does C:N ratio change and/or affect responses to the upwelling event?

Methods: Simulated upwelling conditions with representative diatom Chaetoceros decipiens and representative coccolithophore Emiliana huxleyi grown in artificial seawater. Semi-continuous batch culturing with two different iron concentrations (low iron, 3.1 nmol/L, and high iron, 1370 nmol/L). Cells were grown until nutrient exhaustion and stationary phase (late bloom conditions), then transferred to the dark (sinking out of the euphotic zone). Nutrient levels did not increase during simulated sinking. After 10 days*, cells were transferred to fresh media (simulated upwelling) and grown until stationary phase was achieved for two days, completing the cycle.

*from the paper, emphasis mine: “The 10 day time frame was selected based on satellite observations of timing between upwelling and as a point at which differences in lag time to return to exponential growth were observed between species.”

What I Learned: Upwelling conveyer belt cycle (UCBC) - phytoplankton at depth are upwelled and seed surface blooms, sinking back to depth when nutrients are depleted. Upwelling is anticipated to intensify from climate change. Iron concentrations in an upwelling event can be low relative to other macronutrients like nitrate.

Iron-replete: C. decipiens and E. hux both exhibited reduced chlorophyll and photosynthetic efficiency in stationary phase. Both grew near Redfield ratio in exponential growth phase and increased C:N ratio during stationary (indicating N-depletion). C:N ratios observed were as high as ~30:1.

C. decipiens and E. hux exhibited different temporal responses in terms of transcription. The diatoms seemed to upregulate genes before the upwelling event (in stationary phase), while the coccolithophores upregulated genes upon the return to light and nutrients. Diatoms are able to respond quicker, but coccolithophores may exhibit luxury uptake and ability to story excess nitrate.

The diatoms returned the exponential grown within 24 hours of returning to light and nutrients, while it took E. hux about 48 hours. Diatoms frontload nitrate uptake/assimilation genes, while E.hux downregulates nitrate transporters and upregulate ammonium transporters (E. hux has been shown to prefer ammonium to nitrate).

Iron-limited: E. hux was able to maintain a higher growth rate under iron-limited conditions than the diatoms, which may grant them an advantage under low Fe concentrations. However, they were still not able to compete with the diatoms upon being returned to upwelling conditions. C. deci’s nitrogen response did not seem to be significantly impacted by low iron conditions, but ammonium transporters were upregulated. Both E. hux and C. deci upregulated genes related to iron scavenging and iron stress.

It's about time I started doing some science posts on this blog, so here we are with a post about the basics of phytoplankton (my area of study for my PhD). And don’t forget to check out my phytoplankton “tag yourself” post here.

Phytoplankton are microbes in the ocean that photosynthesize — that is, they use sunlight and inorganic carbon (CO2) to create food for themselves in the form of sugars. Oh, and they also produce at least 50% of the Earth's oxygen in the process (some sources say up to 80%).

Phytoplankton are also the base of the food web in the ocean — they're eaten by grazers (usually larger "animal" plankton, or zooplankton) which in turn are eaten by the macrofauna we all know and love (fish, whales, crustaceans, and so forth). It's really a shame that phytoplankton are so often overlooked in favor of the more charismatic marine organisms because they're so incredibly diverse and important to what goes on not only in the ocean, but on Earth as a whole. It's pretty well-established in the scientific community that cyanobacteria (some of the oldest and simplest phytoplankton) were responsible for the first oxygenation event on Earth, eventually changing Earth's atmosphere from reducing to oxidizing and making it possible for larger life forms (like mammals) to evolve and dominate. We wouldn't be here today if not for these humble little microbes!

Besides their role as food and oxygen-producers, phytoplankton are also hugely important to biogeochemical cycling. Biogeochemical cycles are the processes through which “stuff” (chemicals) moves through the Earth through living things (bio) and nonliving things (geo)  — you probably already know about the water cycle and the steps of evaporation, precipitation, and condensation into rain that move water across the planet. Elements crucial to life like nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon also move through the planet, cycling between the atmosphere, living things, and geological features. Marine microbes like phytoplankton control pretty much all of this cycling through the ocean  — that’s right, those charismatic macrofauna barely affect them at all! Microbial activity with regard to the carbon cycle is especially relevant with climate change and carbon sequestration (to put it simply, taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and “burying” it somewhere where it won’t bother us) on the mind.

All right, that was a lot of words, but I hope it gave some insight into why these little guys are important and why we study them. Check out my full phytoplankton tag yourself post for the facts that correspond to the traits listed below!

Which phytoplankton are you? 👀

And for a closer look at each phytoplankton group and the real traits that correspond to the characteristics listed: