Whitman College Professor Receives More Questions Than Answers In Quest To Identify Mysterious Deep-Sea Creatures
WALLA WALLA, Wash.-- Can you name these creatures?
When biology professor Paul Yancey placed mug shots of several mysterious deep sea creatures on his web page at www.bmi.net/yancey in 1997, he had hopes that someone out there in cyberspace would recognize and help him classify the unidentified species he and his students had caught while trawling the ocean floor near Newport, Oregon, on the research vessel Wecoma.
What the Whitman College professor got was a deluge of questions--especially after Yahoo discovered the page--from web- surfing middle schoolers asking for help with biology reports due "tomorrow" to Hollywood scriptwriters wanting expert opinion on "The Perfect Storm" to panicked movie goers wanting information on the deep sea monsters that wreaked havoc in "Deep Rising."
"This little project just blew up, and I wound up giving out lots more information than I was getting," said Yancey. Although it was fun, said Yancey, responding became a time- consuming community service project/hobby that he pursued late at night after teaching, writing and researching all day. Being an educator, Yancey wanted to answer all the questions he got, but out of self defense he eventually started adding information to the web page in an attempt to answer the questions before they were asked. The web page now has an index for pages that include: 1) Life In the Deep; 2) Deep Sea Animals; 3) Research at Sea; 4) High Pressure--How Life Copes; 5) The Oceans in Trouble; 6) Mail; 7) Index of Specific Terms and Names; and numerous animal pages.
This web site has become an on-line text book on marine biology and is used by instructors teaching middle school, high school and college courses. His web page address has been published in several textbooks and magazine articles, and Yahoo has it hot-linked to the world. The good news is that all but two of the mysterious species have been tentatively identified; Yancey might get to name a "new" starfish he dredged up from the deep; and a scientist at the Smithsonian is interested in studying the swimming sea cucumber the team found.
Yancey's web-page-related emails are down to only about three or four per week, he said; about one per week is intended to help him, the others are requesting his help. Yancey, meanwhile, continues to pursue the research that took him and his students out to sea in the first place-- how deep sea animals withstand the immense water pressure deep under the ocean. Yancey's research, reported in The Journal of Experimental Biology, New Scientist, Yes Mag (Canada's science magazine for kids) and on Peter Benchley's Ocean Report on National Public Radio, shows that deep-sea animals contain more of the compound trimethylamine oxide (TMAO) than animals living in shallow water. TMAO helps to stabilize the animals' proteins so they keep their shape under crushing pressure from the water, thereby allowing some species to live up to thousands of meters under water at depths that would crush a human.
Although the full significance of the discovery of TMAO is not yet known, scientists at the University of California at San Francisco have used TMAO to save proteins damaged by cystic fibrosis. "Even though humans don't have TMAO, it seems to be a universal stabilizer," said Yancey. "The idea is that it could be used medically also to work on all sorts of proteins."
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