Burt's Blog

Hey guys! It's Burt back again with another exciting post. Sorry it’s been a while! I’ve been busy taking care of Toni as she has been sick for the past few weeks. I hope you all have been able to stay healthy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Surprisingly, we get sick just like humans, although our response to a pathogen is a bit different. You see, our immune systems are split into two types of responses; innate and adaptive. Innate immune responses are the body’s general immediate response to a pathogen, while the adaptive response works more slowly and is more specific. This means that adaptive immunity mounts responses that are specific to the type of pathogen attacking the body while the innate immune response generally fights pathogens the same way regardless of the type or class of pathogen threatening it. If we compare innate and adaptive immunity to COVID-19, the innate response would be similar to the first responders, like doctors and nurses that work extremely hard to trea...

Hello everyone, Tyrone here to give you an update on our exciting science comic! One of the scientists named Rose worked really hard to ink all 20 pages of the comic recently. Now that it’s done, they’ve been able learn some interesting things from students who have read it I wanted to share it with you all! Just a quick reminder from a previous blog, scientists gave a pre- and post- questionnaire to students chosen to read certain materials to see whether or not there’s a difference in their attitudes towards science and how much they learn from a comic book versus more traditional formats. Students were randomly selected to read either: 1) a scientific journal article, 2) a ‘news-type’ summary of that article, 3) the comic book, or 4) nothing (the control group). The comic (of course starring myself, Burt, Toni, and Gilgamesh), journal article, and ‘news-type’ summary all told the story of how social defeat in us males has impacts on our behavior and brain, similar to what the scient...

Hello, Tyrone here! You know what’s not fun? – Being bullied and harassed over long periods of time. I’ve been picked on by dominant males before, especially Burt, and because of it I wanted to better understand the effects of this constant bullying on the behavior, brain, and overall health of a fish like me. Luckily, the scientists are interested in this too! They study the effects of repeated bullying using something called a resident-intruder paradigm. Males of our species are either dominant (like Burt) or subordinate (like me, Tyrone). Dominant males are brightly colored and aggressively defend their territory from rival males like me. In a resident-intruder paradigm, there is a tank divided into two territories by a solid barrier. One side contains an intruder male, and the other side contains a resident dominant male who is slightly larger than the intruder. If you place the intruder male into the resident male’s territory, he will be socially defeated by that resident. What do...

Hello fans! Toni asked me, Burt, to tell you all about this new study she and her other gal pals were involved in, and I have to admit it’s pretty cool! Did you know that underwater noise pollution has been increasing over the past few decades?  With more and more noise from boats, underwater drilling, and other human-generated activities, it’s getting pretty noisy for us fishes and other aquatic animals! So how does this underwater noise affect our behaviors and physiology you ask? Well, as usual, the scientists designed an experiment to test how noise impacted the ladies when they were mouthbrooding. They played loud noises from an underwater speaker during the mouth brood period and found that it impaired maternal care behaviors in mothers because lots of them either ate their babies or prematurely spit them out! These mothers also had high levels of a stress hormone called cortisol, and different expression levels of genes involved in maternal care behaviors and feeding in a sp...