In my post last week, I pointed out that I haven’t read nearly as much in the past semester as I’d hoped to read. But I did read some things! In fact, as far as I can tell, I think that, during the course of the semester, I read every paper that has been published (and one that hasn’t been) on parasites that attack developing embryos of Daphnia. This has been a lot of fun. First of all: how often can you say that you think you’ve read everything that’s been written on a topic you are studying?* Second, it’s felt like a classic, old school literature hunt, and that’s been a lot of fun.
Since I was a grad student, I’ve seen Daphnia infected with a parasite that attacks the developing embryos. As a grad student, I initially would record it as “scrambled eggs” in my lab notebook, since I tried to use names that were evocative. (This also led to parasites named “scarlet” and “Spiderman”.) Over the years, I started simply referring to it as “the brood parasite”. It was something I was interested in doing more on, but I didn’t have the time and knew I would need to collaborate with a mycologist to do the work well.
Fast forward approximately 10 years to when I arrived at Michigan. Here, I’m fortunate to have a fantastic mycologist colleague, Tim James, who was game for helping me figure out what the parasite is. We recruited a first year undergraduate, Alan Longworth, to help us work on the project. In the end, the parasite has proved to be really interesting. We have our first manuscript on it in review right now.
One of the key things we wanted to do with the initial brood parasite project was figure out what the parasite was. Microscopy and molecular analyses indicated it was an oomycete, but not particularly closely related to anything that had been sequenced previously. We started thinking about what we might name it if we decided it was a novel species (twitter had some great suggestions focusing on mythological characters that killed babies!), but I also wanted to really dig into the literature.
The first two, most obvious sources to consult were Dieter Ebert’s excellent book on parasites of Daphnia, and a classic monograph by Green on the same topic. Dieter’s book has relatively little coverage of brood parasites, though does point out that they are common and highly virulent. The Green monograph mentioned a “fungal”** parasite, Blastulidium paedophthorum. To cut to the chase: all the evidence points to our brood parasite being Blastulidium paedophthorum. That’s a lot to keep typing (or saying!), and it’s too good to pass up on the opportunity to use “Bp” as the abbreviation, as that works for both the scientific name (Blastulidium paedophthorum) and the common name we’d been calling it (brood parasite). So, we’ve declared the parasite Bp.
Backing up again, the description of Bp in Green seemed like a good fit to what we were seeing, so I wanted to read everything I could about the parasite.*** This started me down a path of reading some really old papers, nearly all of which were in foreign languages. Bp was first described by Pérez in 1903, with a follow up paper in 1905. I was kind of blown away that I could easily download these from my dining room! Chatton had a paper on Bp in 1908 (also available from my dining room table!) After that, it was featured by Jírovec in his wonderfully titled 1955 paper. (The title translates to “Parasites of Our Cladocera”. I love the possessive “our”! 🙂 ). And then, crucially, it was the focus of ultrastructure work by Manier, reported in a paper in 1976.
All of the papers in the preceeding paragraph were important to figuring out whether we were working with the same parasite. None of them are in English. That added to the fun “I’m going on an old school literature hunt” feel, but also made it more challenging to read them.**** Reading them involved a combination of trying to remember my high school French, lots of time with Google translate, and, ultimately, seeking out translators. It was relatively easy to find translators for the French papers, thanks to a few people being really generous with their time. The Czech one, by Jírovec, took substantially longer to find a translator for, but a Czech Daphnia colleague, Adam Petrusek, was kind enough to put me in touch with someone who did a great job on the translation.
All semester, I’ve been thinking about how much fun this has been. Indeed, it’s part of why I really want to figure out how to set aside time to read more! But it especially came to mind after reading this recent ESA Bulletin piece by David Inouye on the value of older non-English literature. In that, Inouye talks about his own journeys through the older non-English literature, and concludes with this paragraph:
So my paper trail extends back to some of these early natural historians in Austria and Germany. Their work helped give me a much longer historical perspective than I would have had if I’d relied just on the English literature on ant–plant mutualisms, primarily from the 1960s on. Although as a graduate student I was able to track down the original publications from the 1880s in libraries, I see that some of this literature is now freely available on Web resources such as ReadAnyBook.com, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, or old scientific literature scanned by Google Books. And the translation from Google Translate I just tried with some of von Wettstein’s 1888 papers is certainly sufficient to follow most of the content. So perhaps the only barrier to familiarity with older non-English literature for ecologists now is the time required to find it. Time that might be well spent to broaden your perspective and make sure you’re not re-discovering insights from early natural historians.
I completely agree that the longer historical perspective – especially that provided by the non-English literature – has been essential. If not for those papers, we would think that this parasite hadn’t been described before and was in need of a name. And I clearly agree with the second-to-last sentence, which is very much in line with my post from last week (which I wrote before reading Inouye’s piece). So, here’s hoping we all find the time to really dig into the literature, and that, while doing so, we remember that there’s lots of value in digging into the classic, non-English literature.
* Okay, fine, it’s not like there are tons of papers on the topic. But it’s still fun to think I’ve read all of them.
** The parasite is an oomycete, and oomycetes are not fungi. But that wasn’t recognized in the early 1970s when Green published his monograph.
*** The references for this paragraph are: Pérez 1903, 1905, Chatton 1908, Jírovec 1955, Manier 1976; full references are given below.
**** I would absolutely love to be multilingual. Sadly, I am not.
References
Chatton, E. 1908. Sur la reproduction et les affinités du Blastulidium paedophtorum Ch. Pérez. Comptes Rendus Des Seances De La Societe De Biologie Et De Ses Filiales 64:34-36.
Jírovec, O. 1955. Cizopasníci našich perlooček II. Československá Parasitologie II 2:95-98.
Manier, J.-F. 1976. Cycle et ultrastructure de Blastulidium poedophthorum Pérez 1903 (Phycomycète Lagénidiale) parasite des oeufs de Simocephalus vetulus (Mull.) Schoedler (Crustacé, Cladocère). Protistologica 12:225-238.
Pérez, C. 1903. Sur un organisme nouveau, Blastulidium paedophthorum, parasite des embryons de Daphnies. Comptes Rendus Des Seances De La Societe De Biologie Et De Ses Filiales 55:715-716.
Pérez, C. 1905. Nouvelles observations sur le Blastulidium paedophthorum. Comptes Rendus Des Seances De La Societe De Biologie Et De Ses Filiales 58:1027-1029.
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