Recognising Silent Acute Pain In Animals - Assorted Species Grimace Scales:

panic! at the lab

ft hit songs such as

i write scribbles not lab reports

nine in the afternoon (nine in the evening? morning?) (oh it’s a 12 hr time point)

mad as grad students

high hopes (dissertation version)

For decades, scientists have been capitalizing off discoveries made from Henrietta Lacks’ family’s cells. That may change.

Henrietta Lacks' family finally gets say in genetic destiny. Can we control our own?

Urine sediment from a 6 year-old, male-intact, Rottweiler.  The patient has a multi-year history of recurrent urinary tract infections.  He recently presented to his primary care veterinarian for being unable to urinate.  Radiographs showed no bladder stones, but a penile ultrasound showed many obstructing the urethra.  The dog was then referred for surgery to relieve the obstruction…

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The surgeons were kind enough to snag us some urine!  The urine was full of these hexagonal crystals….consistent with cystine crystals!  Yes, the amino acid cystine.  In addition, there were all shapes of sperms (see them swimming in the background!) along with many inflammatory cells and some bacteria.

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Diagnosis:  Cystine crystalluria.  This is a very rare occurrence in veterinary medicine!  Such patient’s often have a genetic defect in the metabolism or transport of cystine, allowing the amino acid to accumulate in blood.  Once it filters into urine, cystine will polymerize into crystals and sometimes form stones.  Cystine stones do not obstruct x-rays…hence they cannot be found on standard radiographs (termed radiolucent).  The patient is recovering well following surgery, and may require a special diet to help with his disease.

underappreciated form of humor: using incorrect long forms of proper names i.e. Craigory, Bobert, Barold, etc.

Cutaneous mass on the right flank of a 2 year-old, female-spayed, black Labrador Retriever.  The owner noticed the mass approximately a week earlier, and it has been growing in size every day.  On palpation, the lesion was quite painful.  The dog also had a fever, at 103.5°F.

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Fine needle aspiration revealed copious inflammatory cells.  Mainly neutrophils, with lesser numbers of macrophages.  Notice how some of the neutrophils appear ragged, some borderlining on unidentifiable?  Such changes are consistent with a degenerative change, which usually occurs in the presence of a bacterial agent.  And speaking of bacteria, there are TONS.  A mixed collection of cocci and filamentous rods (red arrow).  The presence of filamentous rods is often associated with plant foreign material (like a ‘grass awn’ or ‘cheat grass’).

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Diagnosis: Marked, septic, suppurative inflammation with necrosis.  Basically an abscess.  A key piece of history…the patient is a hunting dog and partook in some field trials a few days before the mass developed.  The patient is slated to have the mass surgically explored in hopes of finding planet debris.

Thumbs Up For Science

The cover of the legendary journal Nature from February 1879, featuring this thumb microscope, yours for the low, low price of three pounds. 

(via Ptak Science Books, which you should really check out)

“What’s that on the beach?!" 

Monterey Bay beachcombers and divers were treated to a huge bloom of salps this weekend! Salps are gelatinous filter-feeders that drift with and feed in the plankton. Wind and waves sometimes blow these open-ocean emissaries onshore by the thousands, a feast for fishes, invertebrates—and for the eyes of curious naturalists!

There were several species of salps in this weekend’s bloom, including these in the genus Salpa. Salps do not sting—in fact, they’re more closely related to fishes and people than they are to other "jellies”! The brown/orange orb is the salp’s gut. Pumping muscle bands push water from one end of the animal to the other through an internal plankton-pasta strainer.

Salps have an incredibly successful reproductive strategy, allowing them to explode in numbers when conditions are right. Ready? Here we go: Salps can be found as solos, or as a chain of dozens of individuals attached together. Same species, two different body morphs. The solos produce the chain asexually, and the individuals in the chain are all clones. 

OK, still with us? The next part is a doozy: A young chain is female, and each female clone produces another solo salp from an egg that is fertilized by older male chains. The older male chains are female chains that changed sex as they aged—this is called sequential hermaphroditism. This whole process allows salps to produce new generations at an incredible rate, to take advantage of fleeting oceanic conditions. Phew, we did it!

Salps are thought to have an outsized effect on the flow of nutrients in the ocean’s food web. Because their fecal pellets sink, salp poop delivers vital nutrition from the ocean surface to the deep seafloor, and helps take carbon from the atmosphere to the deep, which helps regulate the planet’s climate. Spent salps from these huge blooms become food for countless organisms throughout the water column. Certain deep sea communities may even depend on these ephemeral feasts to survive in the desert of the abyssal plain, according to research by our colleagues at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI).

This weekend’s salp bloom is a jiggly reminder of the vast community of gelatinous drifters—the gelata—that drift in the open ocean, connecting the surface to the deep and adjusting the Earth’s energy flow, unseen by most until a chance encounter on the shore.

Photo: Charles Schrammel Gif: Alison Smith

Menstruation products* but yeah real safety would be making them free as they should be 🙃

Nothing spices up your love life like the scientific method!