After the process of growing algae at my home for the first time, and waiting almost a week. I can finally start investigating  how actually these half plant half animal glow at “night”. But there is a big problem, they are really hard to capture by camera so last week my work have been basically looking for luminous macro lenses and adjusting values in the camera to capture the light. It is kind of frustrating because the glow a lot in “eye perception”, but apparently they are not so photogenic. Anyways, by shaking the lab flasks and actuating motion in water the algae glows greatly. For now I am just testing with plain old hand movement for shaking just to have a good perception on how they react. Again, I have experienced swimming in these in their natural habitat but my research will cover how they will be behaving in their new micro habitat context. I will be documenting the process.

UPDATE: Apparently I am starting to get the camera values right or at least close to right. Although they are a little unfocused. I have to work on it, but here are some pics. Awesome stuff.

As a procedure after having maintained my algae in small flasks and a fan pointed to them, here is the process of the transplantation into bigger flasks, with more space, filtered air and clean salted water with minerals for the algae to reproduce freely in their own micro habitats, they will then be faced with the “circadian hacking” to control their “sleeping hours.” I hope to soon make a post where they are glowing. A week or so has to pass so they get used to their new homes. I guess, after all this, if they are glowing, is that I did everything correctly. Doing this makes me have a strange feeling. Kind of being part a crazy lab scientist, part an agriculturist, and part a normal human being who is bringing a new pet home. Which is very interesting, that my first interactions with these little guys are feelings and the act of waiting to see if they are alive and happy.

 The algae arrived on Saturday by surprise from the Experimental Phycology and Culture Collection of Algae at the University of Goettingen (EPSAG). They arrived faster than I thought. For now I will post pictures of what happened. After all this is controlled I will make detailed posts on my experience on how to domesticate or create a micro environment for the Pyrocystis lunula. The ability to produce luminescence is strictly dependent upon the day/light cycle.  In a 12 hour light/12 hour dark cycle, dinoflagellates will only flash brightly during the dark phase.  Light emitted is brightest after several hours of darkness.  Early in the morning, glowing activity is reduced and they no longer react  to luminesce upon shaking.  During the day, the dinoflagellates appear as ellipse shaped cells, pigmented red, indicating the presence of chlorophyll which enables photosynthesis to occur so they may harvest light from the sun. So the first thing I wanted to do is to create a ‘homemade emergency cardboard incubator’ with a light, a fan, and a thermometer (I had no access to an actual incubator on saturday).  The next steps would be to know how to take care of this microalgae and knowing how can they propagate in a healthy way. The basics of what they need is provided right now which is light, temperature and CO2.

Pyrocystis fusiformis and pyrocystis lunula is a marine dinoflagellate. Dinoflagellates are marine unicellular planktonic organisms. A few species are found in freshwater environments, however 90% of dinoflagellate species are marine. These organisms are found throughout the world’s oceans. Dinoflagellates can perform photosynthetic metabolism, heterotrophic metabolism, or both. P. fusiformis is a mixotroph, meaning that it conducts both photosynthetic and heterotrophic metabolism. As photosynthesizing organisms, dinoflagellates produce a substantial amount of the world’s oxygen, and consume a large proportion of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide. Dinoflagellates can be found in large numbers in the ocean, and as a result consume a considerable amount of carbon dioxide. Their consumption of carbon dioxide creates a major carbon sink in the carbon cycle 5. This carbon sink is crucial for the function of the global carbon cycle. Dinoflagellates are also important in marine food webs and ecosystems. Dinoflagellates consume other planktonic species, as well as provide a food source for marine filter-feeding organisms such as fish, whale sharks, and baleen whales. Dinoflagellates contribute to the producer trophic level of the marine food web, and help to maintain the diversity of marine organisms seen in the marine ecosystem by providing an essential food source. Some photosynthetic dinoflagellate species live as endosymbionts in marine invertebrates such as sponges and corals. The Lunula, which is the one I will be experimenting with, is much larger that the bahamiense (the one from Vieques, Puerto Rico, talked about earlier), let’s see how that works. They also grow in less density.

These dinoflagellates have a circadian rhythm which controls their bioluminescence and photosynthesis on a 24-hour basis, i.e. they only photosynthesize when they “think” it’s day and they only produce bioluminescence or flash when they “think” it’s night. So, you need to grow them on a strict light schedule, otherwise their natural rhythms can’t synchronize with the light cycle and they won’t know when to flash and when not to flash. This would be an exercise I want to experiment with. Hack the algae’s circadian rhythm. To see if its psible to manipulate the algae to have similar “working” hours as  I have (my day is their night).

Ideally, they should get 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness every 24 hours and at the same time every day. If you can do this, the dinos will be brightly luminescent whenever they are in their “night phase” and they will be pretty much non-luminescent when they are in their “day phase”. Access to a grow light or T5 FLUORESCENT lamp is important, because then one can really control when they get their photosynthetic light.

I was born and grew up in Puerto Rico. An island full of natural wonders, and we happen to have some “bio bays”. Saltwater bays surrounded almost completely by mangrove plants. They (the mangrove) create a magnificent ecosystem inside the water. A good example is Vieques’ BIO-Bay. This unique bay contains up to 720,000 single-celled bioluminescent dinoflagellates per gallon of water. These half-plant, half-animal organisms emit a flash of bluish light when agitated at night. The high concentration of these creatures (Pyrodimium bahanense) can create enough light to read a book from.

Eighty percent of all known bioluminescent groups inhabit the world’s oceans. At certain depths, nearly all organisms glow. On land, things are quite different. There are bioluminescent fungi and insects, but no flowering plants, birds, reptiles, amphibians, or mammals that glow.

How did bioluminescence evolve? Scientists are still working on this question. Bioluminescence is the visible creation of light by an organism through a biochemical reaction. It is produced by the sudden transformation of a high-energy molecule into a lower state of energy. The difference in these energy levels is emitted as one photon of light. Luciferin and its enzyme Luciferase are the only compounds it produces of interest for its bioluminescence properties. The reduction reaction luciferase has on luciferin uses oxygen to produce the glow. The exact process of how mechanical stimulation can causes Pyrodinium bahamense (as well as other bioluminescent dinoflagellates) to glow is still unknown. Once known, this could have potential use in research and other applications. The reaction is highly efficient, turning 98% of its energy into light, and only loosing 2% as heat. Both luciferin and luciferase are generic terms rather than the names of certain chemicals, meaning that lots of different substances can lead to the reaction and it is estimated that bioluminescence has independently evolved at least 40 to 50 times among existing organisms.

This reaction is what gets me interested in them, besides other animals or bacteria for instance. These dinoflagellates that produce bright blue light when stimulated by movement. How can subtle human manipulations can use these reactions as actuators of light and even as natural sensors of movement and vibrations? I know somehow how they react because I swam in the bays many times. Now, what kind of interactive behaviors and applications can they bring in terms of experimentation of human-nature interaction? Thats what I want to find out. First I have to find them or grow them…

The Secret Life of Plants – Tompkins and Bird by TheOccultTruth.com

The Secret Life of Plants (1973) is a book by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. The book, which is generally regarded as a pseudo-scientific work, discusses the alleged unusual phenomena regarding plants such as plant sentience, as well as alternative philosophy and alternative farming methods.The book was the basis for the 1979 documentary of the same name directed by Walon Green and featuring a soundtrack by Stevie Wonder, later released as Journey trough the secret life of plants. 

These theories transcend science and proof, and, for the extend of my research, will be understood as a philosophical approach towards interaction between human and nature. The perpetual consciousness towards nature is something that should not be tried to be explained as a scientific matter (if it can not be proven), but maybe there is a space for cultural or artistic ways of understanding ourselves and our original place as a species in this world. I see in this way all the experiments done in the documentary and the book.

It is interesting deriving for my project the way persons perceive natural components in their life. There are human interactions with nature that can be tangible. Like the act of having dogs or houseplants. Even in the most dense cities people have pets and plants, and these are volunteer actions in which we’ve looked for and achieved a way of creating micro habitats for natural components. In my opinion we have been successful. These “secrets” are not that invisible anymore, when we see it that way.

Last month I began my journey to find inspiration and texts for my thesis project. Even though the understanding of a scientific exploration is clear, I have started my research in the poetic or magical part of understanding nature. This mind of thought was an exercise started in Alejandro Tamayo’s workshop “Nature and Technology”, which I found very interesting as a point of birth.

Alfonso Borragan handed me this piece of text  called “The Man who planted Trees” by Jean Giono. After reading it I understood it was perfect to start my reflections towards the intervention of human hand in nature. The text is very famous and has been translated into 15 languages. It’s certain that the story is product of the author’s mind, but, the context and time in which it was written determines effectively that what happens in the story could be true. Not that it was true but that, again, it could be true in a “magical” or mysterious way.

The narrator walks through the french alps at 1500 meters of altitude, in where he finds himself in a cold deserted and empty place, apparently abandoned by a previous village. After observing a bit he finds a shepherd, with some sheeps. The narrator stays a night with this shepherd in which he learns a lot from him. He thought the shepherd was a nice person, in contrast from people of closeby villages, who always were angry and had suicidal epidemics. These angry people’s work is to cut trees to make coal from the wood.

By this time the narrator can tell that the shepherd did the opposite. He was collecting seeds to plant trees. The shepherd took a route every day to plant them in his loneliness. In total he had planted 100,000. His name was Eleazar Bouffier.

The next day the narrator and the shepherd go apart for their lives. The narrator tells how the next year he was an infantry soldier who went to war, and when it ended he decided to go back and find Eleazar Bouffier. And there he was, undisturbed by war at all. Still panting trees. He even got rid of some of his sheep.  He planted by himself an “awesome spectacle array of trees” measuring 11 km by 3 km. All this with no technological advancement in his tools. His efficiency was based solely on his connection, conviction, and understanding of his context in nature, where his hand where the tools but the spectacle was the trees. Nothing in between. In the narrator’s words: “… men can be as effective as God in other things, not only destruction”. This lonely man had made a chain of reaction in nature where rivers started to flow again, where everything seemed natural even if it was started by himself. The effect of the work of his hands started to be seamless to the eyes of hunters who visited the area.

At the end the narrator goes to visit this “desert” again. He finds it totally unrecognizable  And even people of the mean communities had changed a lot. Perhaps this connection with nature of Eleazar Bouffier was contagious by his own work. I share the narrator’s reflection on thinking that it is possible to materialize God’s Oeuvre, this being a metaphor of nature’s greatness of possessing “magical qualities”. Eleazar Bouffier represents the admirable human condition of someone who was capable of extracting nature from it’s context and applying a subtle manipulation of it. These caused a chain of reaction not only in the natural context but also in the human context.

 I find the idea of subtle manipulation very interesting, and also the effect of the natural context of this manipulation. But at the end the most important idea is the interaction and narrative between them. Something as simple as planting trees can tell a story. Bouffier’s experimentation was in a “low tech” laboratory of growing trees. But he was amazed by them and by their power to change human context. My experimentation will be with some more microscopical eukaryotes which “magical” condition is known as bio-luminescence.