Analyzing Anemones: Students Discover New Species

[MUSIC]

[The video opens on an orange sign reading “Invertebrates” with an arrow pointing right hangs from a ceiling. Two young adults, Elena and Sebastian, walk past rows and rows of cabinets into a doorway.]

SEBASTIAN (Science Research Mentoring Program Class of 2017, American Museum of Natural History): Before I came into the SRMP program, the only thing I knew about anemones was "Finding Nemo." And that was it.

[An anemone sits in a small glass dish under a microscope. We see microscope slides of pink slices of anemones, and another anemone in a small square dish.]

ELENA (Science Research Mentoring Program Class of 2017, American Museum of Natural History): I didn’t know how many unknown species there were. I thought like, oh, everything’s already found. The world is like this, 'cause that’s what they teach you in school.

[Sebastian sits at a microscope, looking over his shoulder at something Luciana Gusmao is showing him on the computer screen. The camera cuts to a wider shot and we see Elena standing behind Luciana, looking at the computer screen as well.]

LUCIANA GUSMAO (Post-Doctoral Researcher, Department of Invertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History): I worked in the Science Research Mentoring Program in the American Museum with Elena and Sebastian, and our project involved the description of deep-sea anemones off the coast of Brazil.

[The camera focuses on jars with anemones in them, and large tags hanging off the sides of the jars. Text appears on screen: “American Museum of Natural History. Analyzing Anemones: Science Research Mentoring Program.”]

GUSMAO: We have about 80 specimens. These are among the only specimens that were collected in that area of the world. So they are very important for us to be able to start identifying.

[Dr. Gusmao puts large jars of anemones down on a lab counter. The camera pans over a few of the jars and we see the strange, colorless pieces of anemones inside.]

ELENA: A bunch of these collections haven’t been named. And you’re like, "Oh, that could be me who charts where these species have come from."

[Elena looks at an anemone in a jar in the museum’s collections. Then we see Sebastian holding a microscope slide up to the light and pointing out features to Dr. Gusmao, who stands beside him.]

SEBASTIAN: I chose Luciana as my mentor for the Science Research Mentoring Program because anything that has to do with the marine biology, it’s like a new discovery, so I really wanted to be a part of that and I wanted to like also analyze specimens as well.

[Dr. Gusmao, Elena and Sebastian stand in the Invertebrate Zoology collections and look at jars of anemones. Luciana points out some features in the jar she is holding.]

GUSMAO: Most of these specimens were not fixed appropriately for DNA studies, but in anemones we do not usually describe them based only on DNA.

[A sign reads “Histology Laboratory.” Elena sits at a lab bench and measures parts of a white anemone with a wooden ruler, then writes down the measurements in a notebook. Then we see Sebastian looking through a large stereoscopic microscope. An image of an anemone flashes on screen, and the image zooms in.]

SEBASTIAN: So the first thing that we did was physical features. We measured each part of the anemone, and then afterwards, we looked at them through a camera that really zooms into the anemone itself. Then after that, we got into an even smaller scale, and we started looking at the cnidae, which is the microscopic level of the anemone. And then a few weeks later, she taught us the histology method which was embedding the tissue into a paraffin block and then analyzing it through a series of dyes.

[Elena looks through a microscope and we see images of the cnidae of anemones, which are oblong oval shapes, some with spiral shapes on the inside. Then the camera focuses on a series of wax blocks containing whole anemones and anemone parts. Elena sits at a slicing machine, which slices off very thin layers of wax, which she picks up and moves to a warm water bath. We see finished histology slides with pink circles of anemone sections.]

GUSMAO: I think it was toward the end of September that I first met Elena and Sebastian. Two or three months after they started, they were already doing histological sections.

[Close-ups of histological sections flash by: they are pink, blue, and white cross sections of tissue layers. We see Sebastian looking at one of these layers through a microscope, with the layer image projected on the computer screen next to him. Dr. Gusmao indicates something on the screen for both students to look at.]

ELENA: I expected it to be like really hard for me and like, very science-y and I wouldn’t be able to understand the jargon, but they really stressed that like, "It's fine if you don't know what this is. We're here to teach you that."

[Dr. Gusmao gesticulates towards an anemone collection jar. Luciana and Elena stand together looking at a screen and count off numbers of something unseen offscreen.]

[BACKGROUND DISCUSSION]

GUSMAO: We knew that we had something different in about January.

[On screen we see an anemone growing inside an octocoral polyp. The colors are white and peachy-pink.]

SEBASTIAN: The one that we were looking at is a type of anemone that grew on an octocoral, and that's something that hasn't really been seen before.

ELENA: Luciana found a bunch of the anemones that it could possibly be, and we went through all of the criteria - it didn't really match any of them. So we determined that, "oh, this has to be new."

[A hand holds up a jar containing tiny dots of specimens of this species of anemone. The camera pans over an open book that Sebastian and Elena are looking at.]

SEBASTIAN: We basically already know that it's a new species, we just need to write the paper. We all see, "This person discovered this, this person discovered that," and you know, we might not be in one of those pages, but it gives you an idea, like, that's how those people felt.

[Sebastian looks at a large jar of anemones in the collections. He smiles and laughs while looking at a paper. Elena pulls wax histology sections from a warm water bath with a microscope slide. Sebastian looks into a microscope.]

GUSMAO: I think what they're doing here is almost like undergraduate level research. To talk about, you know, the external anatomy, to be able to talk about different muscles and be able to describe it, I think it's amazing how much they have learned.

[Elena points out features on a microscope slide to Dr. Gusmao. Elena and Sebastian laugh together at a lab bench. Elena uses a micropipette to draw liquid from a vial, with Dr. Gusmao watching on.]

ELENA: Besides discovering the new species, I've discovered myself. This project has made me feel like a real scientist. Even though I haven't even graduated high school, it really does make me feel like a part of the STEM community.

[Elena focuses on picking up a delicate layer of wax histological sections. Elena and Sebastian smile and laugh in front of their final scientific poster, titled “Identifying sea anemones (Cnidaria: Actiniaria) from the South Atlantic deep-sea.”]

[Credits roll.

Support for the Science Research Mentoring Program at the American Museum of Natural History is provided by Christopher C. Davis; The Shelby Cullom Davis Charitable Fund; The Pinkerton Foundation; the Bezos Family Foundation; the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; the Solon E. Summerfield Foundation; Inc.; and the Adolph and Ruth Schnurmacher Foundation.

Video
AMNH / L. Stevens

Images
Luciana Gusmao

Music
“Hideaway” by Peter John Nickalls (PRS) and Christopher Timothy White (PRS) / Warner Chappell Production Music

“Peppy Humor” by Alexander Andrew Lamy (PRS), Maxwell Speed (PRS), Marshall Say (PRS), Slick Danger (PRS), Giorgio Falconi (PRS) / Warner Chappell Production Music

© American Museum of Natural History]

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