Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 00:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects!, where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the Exhibits Team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and I’ll be your host. Today, I’m speaking with Shoyo Sato, an Invertebrate Biologist who just finished his PhD at Harvard. Shoyo is an old friend to HMSC. He’s been volunteering at the Museum of Natural History for 15 years since he was 12 years old. I wanted to talk to him today about that experience, what it has been like to grow up in the museum, how both he and the museum have changed, and what it’s like to look back on the time he spent with us as he steps into a new era of his life. Here he is. Shoyo Sato, welcome to the show.
Shoyo Sato 01:15
Thanks for having me. I’m really happy to be here.
Jennifer Berglund 01:21
You’ve had a close connection with the outdoors since you were a kid. What initially sparked that interest?
Shoyo Sato 01:28
Definitely my parents. My dad is an outdoorsman. He wrote books and articles about camping and cooking outdoors, doing product reviews back in Japan. My mom was also a very outdoorsy person. Before I was born, they would ride their motorcycles up into the mountains of Japan for a weekend and do camping trips out there. Ever since I was a kid, I spent a lot of time outdoors with them. They were fishing or just going to local parks. I think my first fishing trip was when I was 13 months old. My mom would carry me on her back and she would be fishing, so started from a very early age. And it’s all because of my parents.
Jennifer Berglund 02:12
And it was fly fishing, right?
Shoyo Sato 02:13
It was fly fishing, yeah. My dad is a professional fly tyer.
Jennifer Berglund 02:18
What does it mean to be a fly tyer?
Shoyo Sato 02:20
A fly tyer makes the lures that we use to catch fish. They can, you know, imitate other fish or little insects, or they cannot imitate anything at all.
Jennifer Berglund 02:31
Just something that will attract the fish or appear as prey or an irritant or something…
Shoyo Sato 02:37
Exactly.
Jennifer Berglund 02:38
…at the surface of the water. It’s a real art form.
Shoyo Sato 02:40
There are some flies my dad would call art flies, which are meant to be sort of framed and displayed rather than used for actual fishing.
Jennifer Berglund 02:49
And so your dad did this professionally.
Shoyo Sato 02:52
Yeah, sold his designs. We would go to symposia to make them. We talked to people about the flies, how to make them, the ideas behind what we make.
Jennifer Berglund 03:03
You had described to me before, I just love this image of you going to these symposia with your dad and him talking to people and you sitting behind him tying flies when you were a kid.
Shoyo Sato 03:15
Yeah, it was sort of the laborer. Free laborer.
Jennifer Berglund 03:19
What materials would you use to tie the flies? What does the process look like?
Shoyo Sato 03:23
We used a wide variety of things, both natural and synthetic, different types of feathers primarily from chickens that were dyed different colors, different types of fur. We also had synthetic materials like foam, and wigs.
Jennifer Berglund 03:39
Wigs, really?
Shoyo Sato 03:40
Yeah.
Jennifer Berglund 03:41
How very cool. And so what is the process look like?
Shoyo Sato 03:44
So you start with a bare hook and some thread, you use a vise to sort of hold the hook in place so it’s easier to work with, and then you use the thread to lash different materials onto the hook. You just sort of build it up from the inside out.
Jennifer Berglund 04:00
And so this also sparked an early interest in entomology. Can you describe how that happened?
Shoyo Sato 04:07
Yeah, so as a fisherman, you sort of want to study insects to imitate them better in order to catch more fish.
Jennifer Berglund 04:15
Because presumably you’re fishing in the lakes and rivers and streams at particular times of year, and the fish are eating particular insects at the surface at different times of year, right?
Shoyo Sato 04:27
Yeah, so different species of say, for example, things like mayflies or stone flies will hatch at different times of the year. And fish can be very particular about what they’re eating. If there are hundreds of these flies, then they sort of only go after that. I spent a lot of time looking at insects trying to make better flies so I could catch fish. If I was going to a river I would study up on what is hatching at that time. Once I get to the river if I see something that I don’t have, then I’ll go back to the car and make it up on the spot.
Jennifer Berglund 05:04
Would you ever collect insects and bring them back with you and study them?
Shoyo Sato 05:08
I’ve done that. I had aquaria when I was a kid and collected tadpoles and aquatic insects and that kind of thing. I would collect the molts, so when these insects hatch, they leave their nymphal skins on the rocks, and then the adults will emerge, and I’ve collected those skins and had sort of boxes and boxes of those. Yeah, definitely. If I’m not catching any fish, I’ll look at the insects. So I always had fun.
Jennifer Berglund 05:36
Yeah.
Shoyo Sato 05:36
Sort of a backup plan to catch insects and observe them.
Jennifer Berglund 05:40
When you are tying the flies, what kinds of features would you try to emulate in your flies?
Shoyo Sato 05:47
A lot of it is size, color, and shape. Those are sort of the main features. They’re not super realistic. They can be sort of impressionistic imitations, and that’s usually good enough, but yeah, mostly color, shape, size, sort of throw in some semblance of legs, tails, if they have them.
Jennifer Berglund 06:09
That’s really cool. And then also fly fishing, too, it’s a very active activity. There’s an art to throwing the line out into the water. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Shoyo Sato 06:20
Yeah, it’s sort of therapeutic in a way, and my favorite type of fly fishing is trout fishing, especially in the Northeast, small brooks, trying to catch really beautiful small trout. And we’re constantly walking upriver, so we’re never staying in one spot. So it’s not, you know, this sort of typical image of like a lawn chair, drinking a beer.
Jennifer Berglund 06:45
With a can of worms.
Shoyo Sato 06:46
Yeah. It’s very therapeutic, clears the mind.
Jennifer Berglund 06:51
And there’s a lot of movement, too.
Shoyo Sato 06:53
There is, yeah. Sort of every 10 to 30 seconds, we’ll make a new cast, and we’ll do a couple casts in one spot, then take a couple steps upstream, then hit the next pool, always moving around.
Jennifer Berglund 07:06
It’s so cool that you grew up doing that with your dad and your mom. You moved from Japan, when you were five years old to Cambridge?
Shoyo Sato 07:20
Yeah.
Jennifer Berglund 07:21
And you’ve been basically in Cambridge…
Shoyo Sato 07:23
For 20-24 years.
Jennifer Berglund 07:26
Wow. So eventually, you end up volunteering at the Harvard Museum of Natural History when you were 12 years old, which that’s very young for a volunteer at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Tell me a little bit about how that came about. How did you end up in the museum, and how did you end up working there?
Shoyo Sato 07:45
I had been going to the museum since I was maybe seven years old or so, basically, just to have an activity, get me out of the house on the weekends. My parents would take me to the museum almost every weekend, I think. And on the weekends, there would be volunteers out in the galleries, and I would talk with them. I would bring in skulls that I found or feathers or bones that I found, and ask them questions like, “Oh, what is this? Like, can you tell me about this?” And I met a volunteer. His name was Fred, and he was the one who actually recommended that I join the volunteer program, and I was around 12 years old. I think the minimum age was 14, but he had vouched for me to the head of the volunteer program, and so they let me in.
Jennifer Berglund 08:35
That’s awesome. What kinds of activities did you do as a volunteer? Like, what did you start out doing, and what was it like?
Shoyo Sato 08:42
My first gallery that I got trained in was the Great Mammal Hall. The first activity that I did was a skull activity, where I would take out skulls of different animals, things like deer, or beavers, or mountain lions, and just talk about what you can learn just by looking at the skull, what these animals eat, whether or not they’re predators, or prey, how strong their bites are, where their muzzles attach, that kind of thing. That was my first activity. That was sort of like a safety net. I was just a kid. I felt nervous talking, especially with adults, and having a cart made it easier, because people would approach you. You wouldn’t have to go in cold and strike up a conversation, so that was sort of my safety blanket, having a cart. As I got more comfortable, I preferred to ditch the cart and walk around the gallery and talk about anything that the visitors wanted to talk about or anything that, you know, they were looking at.
Jennifer Berglund 09:47
You must have gotten some interesting questions over the years.
Shoyo Sato 09:50
Yeah, actually, a lot of the questions are pretty similar. People end up wondering the same thing. Some of the difficult questions, I think were things like, “Do we have to kill these animals” or that kind of thing.
Jennifer Berglund 10:02
Oh, yeah.
Shoyo Sato 10:03
“How did we get them?” People are also, especially when I started doing volunteer work with the bugs, people were always like, “Oh, who would win in a fight?”
Jennifer Berglund 10:12
And you’re talking like the live bugs? Like you would carry around live hissing cockroaches or, you know…
Shoyo Sato 10:18
Tarantulas or scorpions. A lot of people, especially teenagers, would ask who would win in a fight, that kind of question.
Jennifer Berglund 10:28
What are the most common questions, you said that people tend to ask the same sorts of things.
Shoyo Sato 10:32
In the great mammal Hall, so there are these three big skeletons hanging from the ceiling that take up the entire room. And people would ask what they are, whether or not the animals in the room are real, that kind of thing.
Jennifer Berglund 10:49
Who were some of the more interesting people that you’ve talked to over the years in the galleries?
Shoyo Sato 10:54
There was one family, a parent approached me and her child had a phobia of bugs, and they must have gone to the hospital for an anxiety attack or something like that.
Jennifer Berglund 11:08
It’s like an extreme phobia.
Shoyo Sato 11:10
Yeah, an extreme phobia, enough that their primary care provider knew about it. And some doctor at Mass General told them to go to the Harvard Museum and talk to the Bug Guy, which was me. A doctor referred me and this family came to the bug gallery and asked to see some bugs. And I took this family behind the scenes, and showed the kid live bugs, these live hissing cockroaches, which are, you know, a couple inches long. They’re quite big. And yeah, he…
Jennifer Berglund 11:48
Harmless.
Shoyo Sato 11:49
Harmless but big. Can be a little intimidating. Yeah, he ended up touching the cockroaches, and he seemed to make a pretty big leap in terms of his phobia.
Jennifer Berglund 12:00
That’s really cool. I wonder how he’s doing now.
Shoyo Sato 12:03
Yeah, I have no idea.
Jennifer Berglund 12:05
How do you like it being referred to as the Bug Guy?
Shoyo Sato 12:08
Oh, I love it. I love it. There have been weekends where I would be volunteering in the morning, and then say, I would step out for lunch, walk through Harvard Yard, and people would stop me or like point and be like, “Hey, are you the Bug Guy?”
Jennifer Berglund 12:21
That’s fantastic. You went to Cambridge Rindge and Latin, so you were just local that whole time and then you went to college locally. And you continued volunteering that whole time, which was amazing. So tell me a bit about that transition from high school to college and studying biology. What was it like to work in the museum as you were in college? Did you start understanding things differently?
Shoyo Sato 12:51
I think it gave me a little more confidence, for sure, sort of taking what I learned in class and applying it rather than something that I looked up online or something. But at that point, I’d taken my role as a volunteer sort of as a person to help visitors interact with what’s in the galleries. So I didn’t see myself sort of as a lecturer, or anything like that. Definitely not as like an encyclopedia or someone with vast amounts of knowledge. Although having the knowledge that I learned in class helped, it wasn’t necessary. I sort of tried to get people to look more closely at what’s in the exhibits, and form some personal connection with it. Didn’t half to be scientific connection, it could have been a personal anecdote or some gut reaction to what they were seeing, something memorable.
Jennifer Berglund 13:52
There’s another person that I interviewed for the podcast, Breda Zimkus, who’s at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. She also went to BU, and also did the study abroad program that I did, and that you did that had a major impact on our lives. So tell me a little bit about this Tropical Ecology Program that you did at BU and how it influenced you.
Shoyo Sato 14:15
It was a semester abroad in Ecuador, and it was an intensive ecology course. So basically, the whole time, we just studied ecology, a little bit of Spanish on the side, but mostly four classes in Tropical Ecology, and although we were home based in Quito, the capital, we took a bunch of excursions out to different environments, mountain tops, the coast, different islands, the Amazon, of course. And the first time I went was back in 2015 in the spring. I studied abroad there. I also had the privilege of being a teaching assistant for that course after I graduated, and so I went back a second time in the fall of 2016.
Jennifer Berglund 15:06
Was this your first field experience?
Shoyo Sato 15:09
Yeah, it was my first field experience, definitely my first time in the tropics. And it was indescribable seeing all of the things that we learn about in textbooks or on Planet Earth. And actually being there, and seeing those things in person, feeling that humidity, feeling that sun, actually touching the animals, so I can’t describe how amazing it was as a budding biologist to be able to go to the Amazon Rainforest, to go to the Galapagos, and see all these animals.
Jennifer Berglund 15:44
At that point, did you know you wanted to eventually be a scientist?
Shoyo Sato 15:49
Yeah, I knew I wanted to be a biologist since I was probably about 12 years old, and specifically, I knew I want to be a biologist at Harvard.
Jennifer Berglund 15:59
Because of the museum experience, or…?
Shoyo Sato 16:01
Yeah, because of the museum experience.
Jennifer Berglund 16:03
Wow. Did you know what kind of biologist you wanted to be when you were 12 years old? Or just that you wanted to be a biologist at Harvard?
Shoyo Sato 16:12
Yeah, just that I want to be a biologist. I wasn’t tied down to bugs or anything like that at that time, so yeah.
Jennifer Berglund 16:20
As you’re sort of advancing through your academic career, and then you’re doing this study abroad, what kinds of questions did you start formulating in your mind about what you’d want to pursue as a scientist?
Shoyo Sato 16:32
It varied. I was interested in everything from ecology, and behavior, to, you know, taxonomy, and systematics, how different animals are classified. I’ve always been attracted to classification.
Jennifer Berglund 16:51
Knowing how things are related to each other.
Shoyo Sato 16:53
Knowing how things are related to each other, memorizing the names of different animals, like, the latin species names. Yeah, that for some reason, always attracted me.
Jennifer Berglund 17:05
So, also, in the semester, you go to the Amazon Rainforest, and you spend a month there, and you have to do different studies. And while you were there, you learned a little bit about social spiders. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Shoyo Sato 17:18
Yeah, so there’s a species in the Amazon, Anelosimus eximius, that is sort of the most social of the social spiders.
Jennifer Berglund 17:27
And what do you mean by social?
Shoyo Sato 17:29
We have this idea of spiders being solitary animals, where even mating is dangerous for these things, sort of this classic idea of like the Black Widow. But there are a handful of species that work together. They will build webs together, they hunt together, some of them will even take care of eggs together. But yeah, the range of social behavior is pretty wide in spiders, but there are these thandful of these of really social species, and one of them happens to be in the Ecuadorian Amazon. And I would see a bunch of their colonies, particularly at the big Save a Tree, the one with the platform.
Jennifer Berglund 18:14
Yeah, it’s just this huge, gorgeous tree with these, they’re called buttress roots, that kind of come down like a cape, and they’re like walls, essentially. And they’re all kinds of things that live on them and then there’s a canopy tower that’s built around the tree, and you can climb the canopy tower all the way up to the top of the tree, and, you know, look at all of the incredible animal and plant life on the canopy.
Shoyo Sato 18:40
I spent a lot of time there. Probably my favorite tree in the world.
Jennifer Berglund 18:44
Yup.
Shoyo Sato 18:45
But yeah, at the base of it, there were like a dozen or so colonies of these spiders, and yeah, I remember doing experiments with them. Taking a spider from one colony, putting them into another colony, that kind of thing.
Jennifer Berglund 18:59
And what would happen?
Shoyo Sato 19:00
They would accept them. They didn’t push them out or anything like that.
Jennifer Berglund 19:04
Okay. What do you think that means?
Shoyo Sato 19:06
A lot of these colonies that are in close proximity are pretty closely related, so it’s probably all the same to them and there’s probably some sort of territorial behaviors are probably just overall generally reduced. I remember doing these experiments and sort of decided that that’s what I wanted to pursue in my Ph.D. I applied to some labs that studied behavior, or spiders in general, and that’s what I started doing a Ph.D. on.
Jennifer Berglund 19:38
While you were in the rainforest, and this research station in the Amazon is like super deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and they have satellite internet now, which is extremely slow, and it’s spotty. It’s probably better now than it was when you were there, but this is when you were submitting graduate school applications, right?
Shoyo Sato 19:57
Yeah, so this station is super remote. It’s an hour flight from the capital, and then a two-hour boat ride, a two-hour bus ride, and then another two hour boat ride. So it’s pristine rainforest, which is fantastic. I was applying for graduate schools while I was there. I did some Skype interviews in Quito, but I remember submitting my application to Harvard at the station in the middle of the rainforest with this really spotty WiFi. I remember hitting submit on the online application, and the page just sort of stalling out. And then I had to refresh it. And then it said, “Thank you for your submission.” And I’m like, “did it actually go through? like is this okay?” So yeah, it was a little anxiety-inducing, but it worked out.
Jennifer Berglund 20:56
And you applied to Gonzalo Giribet’s Lab. Tell me a little bit about how you connected with him in the work that he does in his lab.
Shoyo Sato 21:06
I’d seen his research in the galleries, of course, and his photography, but there was another volunteer who was a grad student in his lab, and when I was in, probably junior year of college, right when I was starting to think about next steps, she recommended that I apply to Gonzalo’s lab, and she’s the one who introduced me, and so she’s the reason why I’m where I am now. She put in the good word for me.
Jennifer Berglund 21:40
Well, she just made the connection.
Shoyo Sato 21:43
I think I owe her a lot, yeah.
Jennifer Berglund 21:46
That’s very cool. And what interested you most about Gonzalo’s lab?
Shoyo Sato 21:50
I mean, seeing his research in the exhibits was so cool that this professor, this researcher at Harvard, was involved in communicating that research to the public. Yeah, I valued that in a PI.
Jennifer Berglund 22:08
I think that’s so interesting how this is a thread for you, right? You know, you are studying science, but your experience in a museum, from what I understand, has always made you want to focus a little bit more on working with the public and that science communication aspect of it.
Shoyo Sato 22:28
Because of my experience, as a volunteer, I’ve always had this teaching or communication aspect to what I do, and it’s affected how I give talks at scientific meetings and how I write papers, and ultimately, my career goals. I’m thinking of going into more of a primarily undergraduate institution where it’s more teaching oriented rather than researching oriented. But yeah, this vein of teaching has sort of run through everything that I do.
Jennifer Berglund 23:09
You just completed your Ph.D. at Harvard. Congratulations!
Shoyo Sato 23:13
Thank you.
Jennifer Berglund 23:14
You ultimately studied velvet worms, not social spiders. Tell us a little bit about what are velvet worms and what did you learn about them?
Shoyo Sato 23:24
So velvet worms are a very weird group of animals. They are very closely related to things like arthropods, so that includes your insects, spiders, crustaceans, centipedes, that kind of thing. And also closely related to tardigrades, or water bears.
Jennifer Berglund 23:43
Which are microscopic creatures…
Shoyo Sato 23:46
Yeah, microscopic animals…
Jennifer Berglund 23:48
…that eat algae…
Shoyo Sato 23:48
…yeah, that eat algae or even other microscopic animals. Yeah, so these velvet worms, I guess they sort of look like caterpillara, they’ve got stumpy little legs, two antennae, and they are very slow. They walk around on the forest floor. They live inside rotting logs, and under stones. They require these sort of moist habitats to survive.
Jennifer Berglund 24:13
How do they hunt and what’s interesting about their behavior?
Shoyo Sato 24:16
The coolest thing about them is definitely the way they hunt. They shoot this slime-like glue from a pair of modified legs on either side of their mouths. The stuff is super sticky, and they use that to sort of ensnare other bugs, and that’s how they catch their food. They also use it as a defense, so if you poke them, they’ll also sort of spray you.
Jennifer Berglund 24:40
So you’ve gotten sprayed before, I presume?
Shoyo Sato 24:42
Yeah, a bunch of times.
Jennifer Berglund 24:44
What’s that like?
Shoyo Sato 24:45
It’s surprisingly fast. You almost can’t even see it happening. You just poke them and then suddenly there’s this goo on your finger. It’s really sticky. It takes quite a bit of force to sort of pry your fingers apart. I can see how small animals can get caught in that.
Jennifer Berglund 25:03
Seems like there might be some sort of technology that can be adapted from velvet worm slime.
Shoyo Sato 25:10
Yeah, I’m not sure if there’s anything done with worm slime, but, I think, as like an adhesive…
Jennifer Berglund 25:16
Yeah.
Shoyo Sato 25:17
… and that property of how quickly can solidify and that kind of thing, I think is being researched.
Jennifer Berglund 25:23
It’s being researched.
Shoyo Sato 25:25
Yeah, there are papers on the physics of the slime, like how it works, the fluidics of it and everything, so…
Jennifer Berglund 25:31
Oh, wow, that’s super cool. Where can you find these things, in what part of the world?
Shoyo Sato 25:31
So there are two families of velvet worms. One of them you find around the Tropics, so in the Neotropics, from Mexico to the Amazon. You find them in West Africa, you find them in Southeast Asia. And then the other family is Southern Hemisphere, more temperate distribution. You find them in places like Chile and South Africa, Australia, New Zealand.
Jennifer Berglund 26:01
You studied basically their relationships, and so what did you learn about the two families?
Shoyo Sato 26:09
Families are very ancient, and they’re tied to the breakup of the continents. So in one of the families, Peripatopsidae, which is the Southern Hemisphere family, you find them on land masses that were once connected over 100 million years ago in landmass called the Gondwana. You know, a long time ago, South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, were all joined together. And then as they split apart, the continents carried those worms with them, and the relationships within that family still reflect that breakup.
Jennifer Berglund 26:48
How do you study that?
Shoyo Sato 26:50
A lot of the work that we do is we sequence their DNA and use those sequences to infer how closely different species are related to each other and reconstruct these sort of tree diagrams to sort of represent those relationships.
Jennifer Berglund 27:06
What kinds of surprising things did you learn from that?
Shoyo Sato 27:10
I’ve primarily focused on the other family, the tropical one. And we sort of knew this before, but the taxonomy in that group is a complete mess. Basically, different species from around the Neotropics were described in different groups based on basically body size.
Jennifer Berglund 27:34
Oh, interesting.
Shoyo Sato 27:35
And it turns out that in one location, it turns out that the species are more closely related based on geography rather than something like size, so…
Jennifer Berglund 27:45
Which makes a lot of sense, because it’s not like they’re moving very fast.
Shoyo Sato 27:48
Yeah, these things don’t move at all. They’re very poor dispersers. But you know, say you have an island that has three species of three different sizes, they’ve been placed in three different genera, but turns out, yeah, they’re all more closely related to each other than other members of the genera that they were placed in, and so this Neotropical group is going to require a whole revision of the group.
Jennifer Berglund 28:19
Is part of the work going to be looking at these genetic relationships, and the ecology element of it? I would imagine that once you sort of understand the relationship, the next step would be to sort of understand how behavior reflects their relationship with each other in their ecological niches.
Shoyo Sato 28:39
All of these worms are pretty similar.
Jennifer Berglund 28:41
Yeah.
Shoyo Sato 28:42
That’s sort of like their niche, how they behave. We’re more interested in what’s called biogeography, so how the species got to where they are, how do we explain their distributions, so…
Jennifer Berglund 28:54
Yeah.
Shoyo Sato 28:55
…that’s sort of more of the angle that we usually take.
Jennifer Berglund 28:58
And Gonzalo’s lab, they do this with lots of different animals, right? They do it with spiders, which is what you started out with, and what other kinds of things? Crustaceans.
Shoyo Sato 29:09
Our lab is an invertebrates lab, so we study all invertebrates, except insects. So that’s just a huge amount of diversity, but the two main groups that we work on are velvet worms, and harvestman or daddy long legs. We also do, you know, of course, work on things like mollusks, other groups, but those are the two main ones.
Jennifer Berglund 29:35
It’s such interesting work that happens in there.
Shoyo Sato 29:39
There’s still so much to learn about velvet worms. We don’t know that much, still lacks some very basic information about them. So my dissertation was sort of studying them from multiple levels, from individual to interspecies, small to big scale. So my three projects were one was the first published genome for the phylum.
Jennifer Berglund 30:07
Wow.
Shoyo Sato 30:08
Yeah, their genomes are quite big. There are about 6 billion letters of DNA. The human genome is about three.
Jennifer Berglund 30:17
Wow, so twice that of the human genome. That’s crazy.
Shoyo Sato 30:22
It’s easier to sequence genomes now, but you know, the human genome took, what, 30 years to get sort of a telomere to telomere sequence. Yeah, it was quite difficult. It’s really big, and it’s complex. It’s full of repetitive elements, so these repeating sequences of DNA that make it really hard to assemble the genome. It just takes a lot of data. Another project was species descriptions. I described three new species from Western Australia. I worked on a genus called Kumbadjena. Kumbadjena means Bigfoot. These animals are less than a centimeter long, but they’ve got stumpy feet, and the three species that I named, were Kumbadjena karricola, these animals are found in patches of these relictual forest. So Australia was once covered by wet forest, and then there was a drying event, and a lot of that forest is now gone. You have this idea of the Outback, where it’s just sort of desert, and you find sort of pockets of these forests. And some of these pockets are in Western Australia. There are these remnants of this ancient forest and you find these old lineages of animals still in these pockets. And in southwestern Australia, a lot of these pockets are primarily Karri, which is a type of tree. So the name karricola, cola means inhabiting, so Karri inhabiting.
Jennifer Berglund 32:00
Okay.
Shoyo Sato 32:01
Yeah.
Jennifer Berglund 32:01
Okay, so nothing to do with a college curriculum. Okay, what about the second one.
Shoyo Sato 32:12
The second one was Kumbadjena toolbrunupensis. So “toolbrunup” is a mountain, and because things are a bit cooler on mountaintops, such as a little wetter, a lot of these forests are associated with mountain tops and higher elevation. And this was what we call the type locality for the species, so the first sort of specimen for that species was from that place, and so you name it after the mountain.
Jennifer Berglund 32:41
Oh, okay. That makes sense.
Shoyo Sato 32:43
And then the third species was suggested by a collaborator, and no disrespect, but I think it’s a little boring. It’s Kumbadjena extrema. It’s the southern most…
Jennifer Berglund 32:54
Oh, okay.
Shoyo Sato 32:55
…species for the group. Okay, hey, maybe a little more memorable, though. Yeah, extrema? I like it. What was the third project you worked on? So the third project, I developed a molecular resource to help sort of sequence these velvet worms and do phylogenetic analyses, so reconstructing those trees. It was what we call a probe set to sequence ultraconserved elements. They’re regions of the genome that are sort of conserved across species, and so it’s easier to say, “Hey, this section of DNA is homologous to the sequence of DNA in another sequence…”
Jennifer Berglund 33:35
Okay, gotcha.
Shoyo Sato 33:36
That way, we can sort of enrich for those regions. And so we don’t have to sequence the whole genome, we can just sort of selectively pull out these parts.
Jennifer Berglund 33:47
What’s next for you?
Shoyo Sato 33:48
In a couple of weeks, I will be moving to Copenhagen to start a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. I’m switching to a completely different animal. I’m going to start working with microscopic animals, things that are a 10th of a millimeter long that live in between grains of sand, what we call meiofauna, and I’m going there to sequence more genomes of these obscure animals. It’s going to be my project there.
Jennifer Berglund 34:15
What’s different about these animals, aside from the fact that they’re teeny, tiny, and why is their genome interesting?
Shoyo Sato 34:22
So we actually don’t know. This project is quite exploratory. We don’t really know what we’re going to find. But having genomic resources for these understudied groups is, I think, quite important, both for studies within that group, and also sort of broader evolutionary questions, sort of among animals as a whole. Yeah, so it’s just a really exploratory project. Any result is going to be a cool result because we don’t know anything, so I’m really excited to work on them.
Jennifer Berglund 34:55
So compared to the velvet worm genome, which is twice the size of the human genome, a little bit more is known about them, you’re starting something completely new. That’s really exciting. So can you tell me a little bit more about these things? What do they do? What’s their lifestyle? Do we know anything except that they exist?
Shoyo Sato 35:14
So the main group that we’re going to be working on is a group of animals called Micrognathozoans. They are very closely related to things like rotifers. Actually a pretty cool story, they were originally described from a single spring in Greenland. And that was the only one that we knew of for a while. It was originally described from a spring on Disko Island in Greenland, and then someone found what we think is another species on the Crozet Islands, which are close to Antarctica. So we presume that these are sort of polarly distributed. But then a colleague of Gonzalo’s contacted him, he is a specialist on environmental DNA, so environmental DNA is where you take a water sample and sequence it, see what you can find, and…
Jennifer Berglund 36:10
Filter out all of the particles of stuff in the water and sequence that, yeah.
Shoyo Sato 36:15
Yeah, and then you can sort of search for your sequences and databases and try to identify what animals or what organisms you have that
Jennifer Berglund 36:23
Yeah, okay.
Shoyo Sato 36:24
And he had found really strong signal in the environmental DNA of these Micrognathozoans, and he’s like, “Hey, Gonzalo, look at this. Like there’s such strong signal here.” At first, we were skeptical, but last summer, Gonzalo went to look for these animals in France in the Pyrenees with Katrine Worsaae, who is going to be my new PI, and they found them in a bog. In the mountains, following this geographical sort of DNA clue. Digging through the literature, we’ve also found records of these in other eDNA samples, things like from places like the Danube, you know, these things might be widely distributed, and we just, you know, haven’t seen them, or…
Jennifer Berglund 36:50
Wow. Wow.
Shoyo Sato 37:11
…collected them. So really cool story behind these animals.
Jennifer Berglund 37:16
Will you be involved in collection?
Shoyo Sato 37:19
We were trying to go this summer, but the station in Greenland is completely booked. So we didn’t get to go, but hopefully next summer, we get to go collect.
Jennifer Berglund 37:29
I can’t wait to follow your work. Any kind of exploration is super exciting. Just so happy for you. Thinking back to your time in the museum, your experience as a kid outside with your dad, tying flies, how would you say that those experiences and particularly your experience as a volunteer at the museum influenced you as a person and as a scientist?
Shoyo Sato 38:02
Purely pragmatically, I guess. I think I wouldn’t be here without the experience I had as a volunteer. I didn’t do research as an undergrad, and so I think this is all the time I spent as a volunteer, I think made me sort of stand out in the sea of applicants. It’s taught me so much from just looking stuff up because people had questions or from what I learned from the visitors themselves. I think that gave me such a wide knowledge base that affected how I think about biology and evolution, but also how I value teaching, I guess.
Jennifer Berglund 38:38
Teaching is an important part of your work as a scientist and how it always should be.
Shoyo Sato 38:44
Yeah, I think even within our department, sometimes going to talks of other people, it can be pretty jargony. And even for someone in the same department, it can be difficult to understand. And I think we have responsibility as scientists to communicate what we’re doing, and give back in that way to non-academics, non-scientists, and I think that’s something that’s really important. And that’s definitely something that I’ve learned from my experiences as a volunteer. Realizing that that’s important and also how to do it has been a pretty big aspect of how I approach my research, how I approach the work that I do, being able to communicate that, and it’s also I think, a nice escape from mindless pipetting trying to think about these sort of broader things.
Jennifer Berglund 39:36
Shoyo Sato, thank you so much for being here. This has been so fun.
Shoyo Sato 39:39
Thank you so much for having me. Had a blast.
Jennifer Berglund 39:45
Today’s HMSC Connects! podcast was edited by Eden Piacitelli, and produced by me, Jennifer Berglund, and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Special thanks to the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and to Shoyo Sato for his wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you like today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you in a couple of weeks.