Hello, my name is Elaine Charlotte. And in this podcast, I'll take you on a hunt hunt for parasites, dinosaurs and other model animals.
The Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
We'll take a peek behind the scenes of this beautiful 1860 Victorian Cathedral of Science and talk to two experts on the way.
I hope to share with you some fascinating creatures and objects.
But in a way, this is also a personal journey of how it ended up opening every door and drawing the museum, searching for models of animals.
To be honest, I never thought I would find myself back at university doing a p h d.
After working in libraries and for natural history, society for many is a kind of seven year itch, perhaps.
And here I am looking at a gigantic itch might in glorious 400 times magnification.
How did I get here? Well, I climbed some very steep makeshift stairs to one of the attic storerooms of the museum.
OK. Here you are. I'm locking the door. I'm going in skulls and let's greet us.
And there are quite a few large animal shapes on the floor.
Them wrapped in plastic. So not to worry. Switching on the light straight to another door at the far end of the room.
Remind myself to light step. Here it is, an old wooden cupboard.
This is the home of some of my research interests. It seems fitting somehow out of the way they kept.
They each might suck up to Scruby cause escapee's. This is not uncommon and hugely irritating skin condition.
The mite digs lays its eggs and there is no nice way of putting it.
defaecates into the human skin. All of which makes it itch.
This wax model here beautifully captures the mites efficient anatomy.
It's tunnelled digging legs and claws like a mole digging into the soil.
Except that the mite cleverly dissolves the top layer of the skin and kind of swims in there.
Also, its mouthparts also used for digging and feeding on the host's limp.
Catching these mites from an infected person can be as casual as a handshake, although usually more prolonged skin to skin contact is needed.
Ageing is so unbearable that frequent scratching can lead to large infected wounds.
It's quite an experience to see something that is so tiny as to be all but invisible, enlarged to the size of a big fist.
Well, first of all, you immediately realise how spider or crap like it is and a rat can eat like other unwelcome
but much bigger guests in our skin takes its anatomy intuitively makes sense of the scale.
It tells us a lot about its function, how it lives and how it affects its host.
To be honest, it's Brussels a few centimetres long. Each just by looking at them.
This enlarged model is a work of art made from wax.
It was probably first produced in the eighteen seventies by an atomic model called Rudolph Ischia in Leipzig,
Germany was based on the microscopic observations and laboratory data of the leading parasitologist.
At the time would look like at. So there are other parasite models that live in this cupboard.
And this parasite here is called Trickiness for Alice.
It is a nematode worm. Not quite as exciting to look at as it might.
You would think, indeed, in real life, it just looks like a tiny worm.
Only one and a half millimetre long. But appearances can be deceptive.
This little worm is much more dangerous and unpleasant than each might.
It is widespread around the world and has a bright need life cycle once you host.
And this includes humans has consumed, contaminated or undercooked meat.
The parasite larvae burrow into the intestinal walls, mature and reproduce.
The new larvae then migrate and eventually encapsulate themselves in the host's muscles, waiting for the next animal to consume the meat.
They are sitting in and the cycle starts. The parasite often causes trichinosis an illness.
Its symptoms include diarrhoea, inflammation, swelling and fever in serious cases,
even inflammation of the heart, muscle or lungs, which can be fatal.
The life cycle of this parasite was described first in the eighteen fifties again by Likert in Germany.
The wax models were made by SQA in close collaboration with low cut, probably in the early eighteen seventies.
They show the fruits of low cuts, research experiments and dissections in glorious 3D.
So the first two models we have here showcase the adult worms, male or female.
They reveal the secrets of their anatomy and organs in startling big scale and detail and the different colours.
Each is roughly the length of a 30 centimetre ruler. But there are five additional models and I'll get one out.
So five in total. And there is one here in particular about the other five.
Show us sorry, the other four show.
That's well, it's the migration of the larvae and the hosts muscle and the formation of the cysts in which the larvae then live.
The muscles modelled in wax look so convincing. You can almost see them twitch.
The models brought to life the previously hidden workings of these parasites.
Understanding the anatomy and life cycles made it possible to avoid them, to get rid of them and treat the damage they were causing to the hosts.
These models were used to disseminate and publish, like its research alongside his scientific texts to teach students of symbology in medicine,
but also to educate and frankly amaze the public by exhibiting models in museums, fairs and great exhibitions.
So although our microscopes and other scientific tools to make tiny organisms visible are much more advanced today,
these 19th century 3D models are satisfyingly tangible.
They can be grasped even by a non-specialist. Parasites still have a lot to teach us.
Human and animal parasites can be important indicator species for underlying dynamics,
problems, immune deficiencies with regard to the individual host's health.
Corindi changes in the ecosystem in which both host and parasite live.
I've asked Professor Peter Molner from the University of Toronto to briefly explain why, from his point of view,
parasites are still important to research today and how we are using them for slightly updated versions of modelling.
So the influence of parasites on the functioning of ecosystems really cannot be overstated.
And perhaps one way to think about this to help you visualise this is to simply think about sheer numbers.
It's about 50 percent of all species on planet Earth are parasitic.
On the other half. And yet they are often ignored in many even research studies.
And if you look at a food web where you see the predators and the prey represented who eats whom,
you're going to be hard pressed to find a web that also includes all the different parasites that feed on their different hosts at different times.
There's many reasons for this,
but perhaps the simplest is that an act of parasitism compared to the act of predation is small and is difficult to observe.
And this is perhaps also the reasons that the researchers that you're looking into
started making these models back in the starting back in the eighteen hundreds.
To help us make better understand the influence of these little critters on, again, the Day-To-Day functioning of ecosystems.
Now, if you just think about humans, about well,
hundreds of millions of people are actually affected each year by some parasitic warm infections such as schistosomiasis and so on,
all from a human health perspective.
It is critical to understand or if you want to take agriculture and all the losses that come from parasitic worms.
Again, it's critical to understand it for nothing else,
for our own benefit and no climate change into the picture where all these parasites react in a very sensitive manner to temperature changes,
their development, speeding up the reproductive patterns, changing their survival,
changing all these disease patterns are also going to be changing around the globe.
So, again, we need to understand how these parents had functions, but also at a broader level, their population dynamics.
How many or find in nature how that depends on the numbers of hosts.
How one begets the other. And how do dynamically interact with one another.
And so now this brings us to, you know, more meat, perhaps a more modern version of models where we often use mathematics,
demographics and population dynamics to figure out who infects whom and what effect are they having.
One parasite that you mentioned actually is is treating spiritualist.
And we looked at a very similar parasite up in the Arctic called Chicken.
Alan, the TVA causes the same disease as Tricky.
Noah says it's just a slightly northern version of one that that is commonly known in agriculture.
And it's been actually a mystery for many years how these parasites end up in such high prevalence as in the top Arctic predators such as polar bears.
You can actually use mathematical models.
You basically figure out, given the numbers of parasites that are observing in different species, what is actually plausible?
Where could they be coming from? To explain the numbers that we're seeing.
And so the answer is a bit more complex and perhaps we don't have the time to go into this.
But the bottom line is that the models that people were looking at at the eighteen hundreds were abstractions of reality to try and help
us understand how these things are functioning and how this is affecting our health and then ultimately the health of ecosystems as well.
And today we're doing nothing different except for building on about 200 years of research and are now trying to find out the
population dynamics of parasites of their hosts and under what conditions they may be spilling over and cause diseases in humans.
Thank you, Peter, for this insight. Right.
And back in the main court of the museum, my eyes adjusting to the bright natural light from the glass Wraith.
Some models and replicas you encounter in museums like the Natural History Museum in Oxford can be more obvious than others.
Take, for instance, this model here of the Archaeopteryx, which is my favourite little dinosaur, bridging the gap between dinosaurs and birds.
Fossils of the Archaeopteryx were discovered in 1861. Only a few years after Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species,
they were hailed as key evidence for his theory of evolution through natural selection.
This eminent role has stood the test of time. Therefore, images,
reproductions of the original Archaeopteryx fossil and lifelike reconstructions of what it may have looked like based on the
best data and knowledge we have at the time of producing the model are to be found in almost every natural history museum.
This model here was made by Richard Hammond in the 1990s using actual bird feathers and appears much like any other colourful stuffed bird specimen.
If you do not read the label, you might think it was a weird looking stuff bird.
In fact, research is ongoing to determine the exact nature and colour of the Archaeopteryx feathers.
So this model shows us a stage in this process.
And if you're not just interested in what the Archaeopteryx may have looked like, but what it may have sounded like,
well, the Natural History Museum in London have an audio model of the Archaeopteryx voice on the website.
And this is what it sounds like. But there are countless other zoological models here in the museum, and I decided to ask an expert about them.
Mark Carnell is a zoologist and collections manager in the life sciences department of the Museum.
He's also one of my research supervisors. Mark, what would you say?
What is the main difference between the animal specimens you look after and models fenceline?
That's a really good question.
So I'd say the main difference between the animal specimens that we look after in the museum and models is how they used and and what they represent.
So, for example, if we had a mortar shell from the modest collections that Shell is such a data
point that's been deposited in the museum and the use that we bring to today.
So we might put it on display. We might feature in a blog post. You might use it in teaching something about mosque evolution and anatomy and.
For as long as that specimen has been in the museum, it might be that some previous curators, Ray Lankester, used it in a lecture or a paper about it.
So with our typical specimens, the main focus there is is the remuda use that we bring to them.
That's fundamentally the point of a national story collection when it comes to the animal remains.
The difference with models, casts and replicas is that's part of their formation.
And there are some overlaps with partner formation catches something of the attitudes of the people who commissions made or used the model.
And this is something that specimens themselves don't necessarily record.
So going back to the Nautilus shell that I mentioned before, it, it's only secondary sources that you have any idea of the use of that specimen.
Where we're holding it for renewed use as a model tells us something about what was being shown in display or used in teaching.
What was seen as important so much as a costly and compact.
So you're not buying models unless you really want to use them. So it can tell us something about what was important in the history of biology.
What was important content to teach students in the university museum context?
I also shows us a thought process frozen in time or in the case of a model series, a dynamic process.
So it gives us much richer information, actually information that is quite poorly recorded.
Otherwise we don't tend to do a great job in nutrition museums generally of recording our own history of how the collections of music.
So I say that was that was the main difference. The other difference. On a metal level.
So when it comes to how I approach curation of these, is that biological specimens by far.
Have a more ingrained value, if you like, in how we view them and use them.
And so with many modern collections, because they start off as something that you would purchase.
Their value has changed over time.
So now where they exist, where they went kind of stripped from displays when those ideas became outmoded or when teaching changed,
where they still exist in museums,
they're really interesting snapshot not just into the history of a similar school group, but also how that group was used.
So the value prospect is another important one. And of course, I have to ask you this question, which is your favourite model in the museum, huh?
I knew you're going to ask this question and I should have prepared an answer.
What is my favourite model? I think this is the same thing.
And if anybody who works at the collection and your favourite specimen or model changes over time,
and now that we've got you working, researching on the collections,
you know, the fantastic discoveries that you've been making are are making it very difficult to pick one particular favourite over another.
But one area that I'm musicological logically interested in is those objects which we currently have in the museum now,
which perhaps we consider as props.
So things that we've bought or commissioned and are currently on display serving a very obvious function in our interpretation.
And at some point, some of those will transition to become models incorporated into the collection.
And in 50, 100, 200 years will be of interest like historic models are of interest.
Now, as to some of those some of these things that we have at the moment include things like 3D, 3D, printed brains.
We also have a bunch of very high end toys essentially that represent extinct organisms on display to show what these animals look like.
And at the moment, that's something we could pop down the road and buy from, from a toy shop or online.
But at some point, they will transition into becoming museum objects in their own right.
And and so I think that category of objects is is is my favourite, because that's part of our living history.
And although we have some control over what is deemed important and what gets preserved now,
there's often a lot of filtering and happenstance that results in the kinds of collections,
fragmented collections that end up as part of a permanent museum collection.
So is taking stock of all of those models frocks,
things that we use in our current interpretation and thinking about how how much record they
will leave of our current activity if they end up as museum models or accession to objects.
So that's my broad brush stroke. Cop out answer.
Great. Thank you, Mark. Material models of animals attempt to make the invisible visible, the hard to grasp tangible.
They're made from a vast array of materials with often astonishing skill and technologies.
They represent what we know about a particular organism. At a certain point in time, they also ambassadors.
And this is something I realised when I first held a 3D printed seahorse in my hand.
While it becomes ethically problematic to buy specimens of organisms like seahorses.
Something of it is captured and communicated in a reproduction so I can still trace its exoskeleton and marvel at its strange symmetry.
The symmetry, incidentally, is being analysed for its potential in robotics.
Seahorses have unusual tails instead of the much more common cylindrical structure that tails have a square cross-section.
And this results in a unique combination of toughness and flexibility.
And interestingly, 3D printed seahorses are used in this research.
Models on knowledge objects. They have products of knowledge and generate knowledge to trace the complex map of such relationships.
It's part of the HSC funded page project. Nature Replication.
I'm undertaking jointly supervised by University College London and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
It is a journey that has led me from civil suits to dinosaurs to parasites and beyond,
from wax plaster and papier mâché to 3D printing and optical models.
Thank you very much for joining me. This podcast was produced by parricide podcast Spill in 2020.
The Carnival of Animals by South Soul, performed by the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra, was used in the Creative Commons.
Some additional sounds whereby some Splatt.