Interview with Margaret Smith

Once I learned that Margaret has a degree in Evolutionary Biology, I knew that she would be a great person to talk about colonial organisms with! A couple of big picture ideas that came out of our conversation were:

• Maybe nailing down exactly what a colonial organism is, or isn’t, doesn’t really matter. I was feeling the need to put this concept in a box, but maybe it’s okay if the idea of a colonial organism is a bit more fluid than that. After all, the term “colonial organism” and its classification is all based on decisions made by humans. The organisms themselves don’t necessarily care how they’re classified! Lots of organisms live in colonies, and are dependent on one another. And maybe that is the more important thread to pull at, over determining if a bee is a colonial organism or not.
• On the other side of that coin though, it is very interesting to zoom out and consider if all earth itself, all living things are colonial in some way. For much of human existence, the species weren’t able to survive without other living things, or continue the species without each other. I’m now reflecting on how to some extent that is changing, with modern science we are able to generate food in a lab, have a child without a partner, etc. The colony of living things on this planet is certainly changing.
  • A couple other terms we touched on, that I’d love to do some additional research on are:
    • biome
    • superorganism
• When Margaret worked in a lab, her focus was on dictyostelium discoideum, an amoeba known as slime mold. We specifically talked about several life cycles these amoeba, and spent some time looking at their social cycle. This is a cycle that the amoebas go through when they need food. They start out being individuals and aggregate, changing into several different shapes to eventually form a sort of fruit. When the fruit erupts, so to speak, it’s spores are transported to a place where there is hopefully food.
  
  Once piece that is particularly fascinating about this is that only the amoeba in the fruit survive this cycle. The rest die, and sort of sacrifice themselves so that the ones that are in the fruit can survive. In the lab, Margaret and her colleagues found that the fruit was not an equal split of the different genetic material in the aggregation. Are the amoebas that die sacrificing themselves for those that are more genetically similar? Is it cooperation or a competition?
• Based on the above, it’s clear that the systems involved in how dictyostelium discoideum live, are complex. I also learned just how difficult it is to compare the life cycles of organisms to each other. At first, I thought that perhaps humans have more cycles than dictyostelium discoideum, since we are larger, more complex creatures. But Margaret questioned maybe humans have less cycles that  dictyostelium discoideum – we cannot reproduce asexually! It makes sense, but was still an interesting revelation to see how human-centric my thinking is.