Alison Sinclair

Cross-posted from Kayak-Yak.

Once upon a time in Brentwood Bay, while drifting over rocks studded with orange and purple starfish, and past huddles of starfish in crevasses at the waterline, it occurred to me to wonder why they were these colours, that purple, in particular. The starfish in question were the ochre star, Pisaster ochraceus, and the answer, after intermittent and desultory trawling through the web and the scientific literature, turned out to be (a) carotenoids and (b) maybe what they eat.

The Royal British Columbia Museum Handbook Sea Stars of British Columbia, Southeast Alaska, and Puget Sound, told me a lot about the anatomy, hunting and mating behaviour, but does not account for the colours: P ochraceus is the most common intertidal sea star, with territory from Prince William Sound, Alaska, to Cedros Island, Baja California (lucky it!), and from the intertidal zone to nearly 100 m undersea. It likes rocky shores, waves and currents. I’ve seen plenty in the Broken Islands, the Gulf Islands, and around Saanich Penninsula. P ochraceus eats mussels, barnacles, limpets, and snails. It is the paradigm of a “keystone species” in that its presence and predation significantly affect the numbers and distribution of other species, especially the California mussel, Mytilus californianus; in the absence of P ochraceus, M californianus takes over the beach. Pisaster spawn in May to July, releasing millions of eggs, which turn into larvae, first floating free in the plankton and then (those that survive) attaching themselves and turning into juvenile sea stars. Juveniles grow to adult size and maturity over about 5 years. Larval P ochraceus have a chemical defense that induces filter-feeders to spit them out (got to look that up). The only known predators of adult sea stars are seagulls and sea otters.

Harley et al, 2006 (full text available) looking at the colour variation, note in their introduction that “at least two caroteinoid pigments mytiloxantin and astaxanthin, sequestered in the aboral surface, produce these colors in Pisaster and other asteroids.” Aboral is the upper side side of the sea star, and starfish belong to the Class Asteroidea, under the Phylum Echinodermata. Caroteinoids as a chemical class are named after their best known member, the yellow pigment in carrots, and have in common a long carbon backbone with many concatenated double bonds which generally absorb light at the blue end of the spectrum, hence the orange colour. Mytiloxanthin was named after M californianus, part of P ochraceous’ preferred diet, from which it was first isolated, so it was assumed to be dietary in origin. Astaxanthin arises through “several distinct metabolic pathways”, and is orange. I’m still not sure from my reading what the pigment behind the purple is, though reading descriptions of 1940s-style chromatography makes me oddly nostalgic for undergraduate chemistry.

However, knowing the pigments doesn’t explain why individual starfish should be orange, ochre, brown, or purple, or why starfish on an exposed, wave-beaten rocky coast like the west coast of Vancouver Island should be predominately orange (6-28%) and brown (68-90%), while those in the sheltered waters of the South St Georgia strait should be almost entirely that brilliant purple so familiar on our paddles (95% in the samples collected by Harley). The answer is apparently not genetic: DNA studies don’t suggest that the populations sampled (from Alaska to California, with lots of attention to Puget Sound) are isolated from each other, and conversely do suggest that there is flow of genetic material between them. It’s not apparently to do with wave action, inasmuch as scientists have been able to reproduce in the lab the difference between turbulent water and calm. It may be dietary, in that the distribution of colours correlated with the pattern of prey: in the more exposed waters (where purple starfish are in the minority), P ochraceus preferentially eat M californianus, the big California mussel, whereas M calfornianus is uncommon to absent in interior waters (where purple starfish are in the majority), and the Pisaster there tend to prey on barnacles and bay mussels. So, eats purple mussels -> orange; doesn’t eat purple mussels -> purple. Hmm. And that still doesn’t explain why purple and orange starfish could be found within yards of each other. Another paper by Raymondi et al, 2007 (only abstract) found that the frequency of orange in a population was constant with latitude, but tends to increase with the size of the individuals in that population. So all is not quite explained.

References

• Harley CDG, Pankey MS, Wares JP, Grosberg RK, Wonham MJ. Color Polymorphism and Genetic Structure in the Sea Star Pisaster ochraceus. Biol Bull. 2006 Dec 1;211(3):248-262. And here’s marine biologist Christopher Mah (full name from his Twitter feed), on the Echinoblog, with a crisp and colourful synopsis, complete with photos and diagrams; if I hadn’t written a chunk of this entry while back before I found his entry, I’d just have said, go there!
• Lambert P. Sea Stars of British Columbia, Southeast Alaska, and Puget Sound. 2nd ed. UBC Press; 2000.
• Raimondi PT, Sagarin RD, Ambrose RF, Bell C, George M, Lee SF, et al. Consistent Frequency of Color Morphs in the Sea Star Pisaster ochraceus (Echinodermata:Asteriidae) across Open-Coast Habitats in the Northeastern Pacific. Pacific Science. 2007 4;61(2):201-210.

When: Thu 12:30
Title:  Bio-Ethics
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair, Judy T. Lazar, Laura Anne Gilman,
Russell Blackford, Tomoko Masuda
Moderator:  Laura Anne Gilman
Description:  Medical experiments, drug companies, cloning, insurance,
bookies and you.

When: Fri 12:30
Title:  Alison Sinclair Signing
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair
Duration:  0:30 hrs:min
Language:  English

When: Fri 20:00
Title:  Mad Social Scientists
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair, Sparks, Shariann Lewitt
Moderator:  Sparks
Description:  Why do the chemists get all the fun? Why do you have to
be a physicist to destroy the world? The panellists discuss the
possibility of using social science to destroy the universe.

When: Sun 10:00
Title:  Science for SF Writers
All Participants:  Julie E. Czerneda, Alison Sinclair, David Clements,
David D. Levine
Moderator:  David Clements
Description:  Where can you get crash courses on science for science
fiction writers? Is it actually useful?

When: Sun 11:00
Title:  Food for Writers
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair, Jon Singer, Sharon Lee, Debra
Doyle
Moderator:  Jon Singer
Description:  So you have 90000 words to write, tthree months to do it
in, and the fridge is bare. What foods keep you going?

When: Mon 10:00
Title:  Author Reading
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair, Edward Willett, Heidi Lampietti

(Cross-posted from Reality Skimming.)

It seemed to come together late for all concerned, but it came together: Con-Version 23. I’d decided to be a lurker at this con and not volunteer for any panels, and I headed over to Calgary a day early to have a chance to hang out with Rebecca Bradley (science GOH) and Marie Jakober. Coming in to land from the north, I didn’t get much sense of Calgary’s growth, which I am assured has been prodigious; it was certainly as green as the coast, testifying to a wet summer. No mosquitos, because of the cold, change from Westercon.

First event, after a side-trip to the UofC library to polish off a little work, was Rebecca and Robin’s party, attended by the Con GOH Jack McDevitt, the singing IFWAns (more about them later), Edge notables and assorted others such as Marie and myself. Though blurry with fatigue (How can someone get jet-lagged on a 1 h time change? – I blame the altitude) I was up until midnight, having fascinating back-deck and buffet-table conversations on a huge range of subjects, and eating too much of the yummy food. I finally got to thank Jack McDevitt for giving me my one and only Nebula award nomination, years ago, for Blueheart. Lynda Williams, Jennifer Lott (Lynda’s daughter) and Nathalie Mallet arrived from PG around 9 pm, all full of beans despite having driven all day.

The Show’s Not Over ‘Till the Captain Sings

The con itself kicked off the following evening, with the opening ceremonies, which I skived, and with the musical: “The Phantom of the Space Opera”, which I am very pleased I did not, though I arrived after the start and missed seeing the chair at the front Marie had saved for me. Stood at the back, and took digital pot-shots of the action, most of which turned out blurred. Either the subject was dancing too hard, or I was laughing too hard.

In brief, the story involves the crew of the Starship Insipid, captained by one Captain Quirk, who endure a visitation by the Phantom of Space Opera (Steve Swanson), who is searching the galaxy for musical talent. One by one, in a desperate attempt to avert the consequences of having the Captain sing, the crew take turns trying to impress the implacable Phantom. Dr. Temperence “Bones” Brennan (Rebecca, perfectly typecast) standing in for Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, alas can do little for the mounting casualty count, declaring “I’m the lady who loves bones” and delegating the disposal of the inadequately skeletonized remains to Nurse Chapstick (Colleen Eggerton). Which works fine until Amanda Grayson (Danita Maslan) reveals she was standing in for her son Spork, who has returned to Vulcan on account of Ponn Farr, at which point Nurse Chapstick, who has been waiting SEVEN LONG YEARS for this, demands the keys to the space shuttle; Phantom or no Phantom, dead redshirts or no dead redshirts, she’s Vulcan-bound. Shotty (Kim Greyson) delights the audience if not the Phantom with “Pretty Kingon”, complete with lusty growl, delivered to the Klingon women on the viewscreen. The blue-collar gang receives a moment in the spotlight never granted them by the original show as the ship’s plumber and Number 2 (Val King) takes her turn at command between coffee and lunch break (got a good union, that woman), and the ship’s cook (Nicole Chaplain-Pearman) deals handily with a sudden infestation of tribbles (protein!). Even the Bored, with their multicoloured suspiciously Rubic’s cube-like ship and tinfoil prostheses, are summarily dispatched.

But the end is unavoidable – the Captain (Randy McCharles) has to sing. For a moment it seems as though the villain will be incapacitated by the sheer screechin’ sonic horror of the Captain’s highs – as indeed are all the crew and the front 5 rows of the audience – but the song ends, the Phantom rallies, and Things Look Bad for Our Heroes. Quick huddle; Captainly insight that the Phantom’s mortal weakness is that he is a male phantom, at which point Lieutenant Allura (Anna Bortolotto) is pushed forwards with urgent instructions to – well, distract him. “Can it be,” breathes the Phantom. “Can it be … talent?” While Lt. Allura hypnotizes the Phantom, Shotty and others – a little conga line – sneak up on him with the quantum technobabbleogizmo intended to neutralize his power (which looks suspiciously like a Tralthan football sock).

The Phantom bagged, he is expelled from the conveniently-located bridge airlock, and swallowed by a whale (which I know is, as Granny Weatherwax would say, Traditional, but I’m having a little bit of trouble fitting into the story). Nothing keeps a bad pandimensional being down, and the Phantom promptly reappears, and boy, is he ticked. So the story ends, very Untraditionally, in death and destruction. Or I may not have got that straight, but I was laughing too hard.

For additional entertainment, there were viewscreen interpolations of Leonard Nimoy’s rendering of The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, and William Shatner’s Rocketman, delivered in his best lounge-lizard recitative. There was also a very strange mockumentary – I hope it was a spoof – about an attempted demolition of a beached whale carcass.

Most of the cast members have been filking and singing karaoke for years. The strength of the voices varied, but the performances were consistently lively, and the words came through well. There was a continuity hiccough in the middle where a miscue sent the entire cast 15 minutes into the future, but that was quickly corrected and, hey, this is SF! And it enabled a couple of priceless ad-libs from people who were clearly having WAY too much fun. I gather the filming didn’t take, so the cast are or have reassembled to videotape it; when they do, ooh, I wants it! My photos on Flickr:

• The cast reprises their opening number “All that Jazz” at the costume competition.
• Captain Quirk confronts his nemesis.
• Space-shake, courtesy of The Bored.
• Rebecca, in motion!

Announcing, ORU Anthology 2

Lynda’s ORU panels have become a standard feature, and this one was special because of the release of the Okal Rel Anthology 2 from Windstorm Creative, which included stories from IFWA members, and a classy cover by none other than the Phantom himself (Steve Swanson). Lynda’s copies had not arrived by the time they made it out, but Sandy Fitzpatrick’s had [link to Flickr]; I apologise for the flash whiteout of the book cover, but in the photo without flash, the book was visible, but the faces looked like they’d been cast in a horror-movie and had just seen the monster over my shoulder! Lynda distributed more of the famous ORU buttons (I picked up the ones that said “Get Rel” and “I make bad cargo” – the latter being from Righteous Anger and referring to Horth’s being a very bad backseat driver). I read the scene from Throne Price that introduces Horth, Sandy read the beginning of her story “Return”, and Randy the beginning of his, “For Amanda”.

Lynda, Marie and Rebecca Get Religion

All in their different ways. On Sunday morning, Lynda and Marie did a two-woman panel on “Unconventional Religion and SF: The Way of the Future in More Ways than One?” The balance was more towards life than science fiction, with discussions of the need for ritual, whether religion is necessary as a moral anchor for a society, whether religion’s influence was benign or pernicious in the modern world, whether the human race will evolve beyond a need for religion, private versus public religion, etc. As is usual, on Monday, the day after Con-Version, the very first copies of Rebecca’s forthcoming The Lateral Truth: An Apostate’s Bible Stories arrived from Scroll Press; it is to be their second release, in November. Rebecca read two stories from it. The first I don’t recall, but the second “The Cares of the World, and Martha”, is a sardonic commentary on the tendency of male revolutionaries to take for granted that domestic comforts just happen. Marge Piercy (feminist author of Vida – about the radical left in the 60s and 70s – and City of Darkness, City of Light – about the French Revolution) would approve.

Rebecca’s several science GOH presentations stemmed from her interest in Alternative Archaeology, the heady brew of misdatings, misattribution, mysticism, charlatanism, and fantasy that swirls around antiquities such as Nan Madol, Tihuanacu, and the Sphinx. She entertainingly dissected the many and strange roots of the pseudo-science of Paleovisitology, as promulgated by von Daniken.

News and new releases

At one point I came into the Dealer’s Room to find a group-photo just breaking up: this was Edge, making the official announcement of its merger with Dragon Moon Press, which, with the previous merger with Tesseracts, makes it the largest dedicated SF/F publisher in Canada. And the ORU was there at the beginning: Throne Price was Edge’s third title. (Marie’s The Black Chalice being the first). I’d long admired the Dragon Moon covers, and I picked up a copy of Jana Oliver‘s Sojourn, partly because of its cover, and party because I was wondering how she’d manage to pull of what promised to be a merry farrago of time-travellers, shape-shifters, and historical serial killers in 1888 London. She did. It moves quickly, with details of a less-than-idea future deftly sketched in (adding a new twist to redundancy – being marooned in time), and two charming Victorian gentlemen (with secrets of their own) and an amiable large spider as companions to her independent time-travelling heroine.

Aside from The Lateral Truth, the other books I’m waiting impatiently for are Nathalie Mallet’s The Princes of the Golden Cage, which is gathering good reviews (see Nathalie’s blog), and Nina Mumteanu‘s Darwin’s Paradox, which is forthcoming from Dragon Moon Press.

SF is Alive and Well and Living in Calgary

A panel on “Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy” attested to the vitality of the Canadian SF scene: Susan Forrest from Red Deer Press, Brian from Edge, academic Robert Runte, Karl Johanson of Neo-Opsis, and writers Nina Mumteanu, Calvin Jim (aka helmsman Sudoku of the good ship Insipid) and Lynda. Virginia O’Dine from Bundoran Press was in the audience. What distinguishes Canadian SF: Robert’s take on it (maybe quoting, I didn’t note down): American SF ends with the character triumphant, Japanese SF has no ending, British SF ends in gloom and defeat, Canadian SF ends in a different place altogether, unsure whether it’s better or worse. Either I don’t agree, or I’m not Canadian, since my own resolutions could be best described as “the end of one set of problems is the beginning of another” (a steal from the end of Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers, by the way), which I consider optimistic – since by then the reader should know the character’s up to it. I don’t think British SF is quite as gloomy any more: in the 70s and 80s, yes, but the space opera renaissance doesn’t encourage it. The hero-as-bystander phenomenon in Canadian SF was the subject of a thread in the SF Canada listsrv recently.

What else?

Doing karaoke with the IFWAns until long after the last bus had gone – the DJ said he’d never known a first set go 2 and a half hours. Good food: both the Radisson Airport hotel restuarant and the nearby Thai Place were excellent. Good company: eating lunch with Rebecca, Marie, and Jack McDevitt; eating breakfast with Lynda, Jenny and Marie, eating at times I’d lost track of with Marie and Jenny. Missing panels while talking about David Weber’s Bahzell fantasies with Sandy. Coming late to Jack McDevitt’s reading and being perplexed and entertained by an excerpt from his story from the forthcoming anthology “Sideways in Crime“. Talking about researching European history with Nina Mumteanu. Hanging out at the Edge table [Flickr] – come a long way from 3 books! Other things I’m sure I’ll remember once I’ve hit publish on this enormous post. I did try live-blogging via email, but found my entries parked in the ‘draft’ queue when I logged in. Time to find and change a default.

All photos on Flickr tagged with conversion23.
Con-Version 23 on Technorati: “Con-Version 23”

Waybackwhen – in other words, before Mosaic, and dot coms and all – I posted a question about fiction with women scientists in which the science was central to the story on the women in bio forum on bionet, got some great replies, expanded my list, and some years later published a short essay on women scientists in fiction, in the late, lamented HMS Beagle. I’ve recently started exploring the topic of Women Scientists in Fiction again in the form of a Tiddlyspot tiddlywiki, and am joyously distracting myself from about half a dozen other projects by rummaging around in the plethora of resources not available to me the first time – on-line library catalogues (Worldcat rocks, even although LOC indexing is baffling to the MeSH-accustomed), databases, and bibliographies from all over the world, compilations from other enthusiasts, book reviews, small publishers, etc etc, as well as the traditional forms of articles and books. I have to find out how to back up my zotero stash before the I catch the attention of the household god of undone backups (one of the Trickster gods, no doubt). The subgenre of realistic fictional portrayal of science and scientists has acquired a label, ‘LabLit’, at least in the UK, and a website, LabLit.com, dedicated to the culture of science in fiction and fact, which includes a list of novels, films, plays, and TV programs in the Lab Lit fiction genre. It’s a good list. Now if I could just remember where I put the article from ca 1983 (waywaywaybackwhen) that gave a very comprehensive survey of scientists in fiction to that date, or if I still have it, or indeed, anything about it except that it made reference to Mildred Savage’s In Vivo and David Foster’s The Pure Land. It’s all very well having a memory, but the memory needs an index!

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I’m intrigued by extremophiles - bacteria that push the limits of the survivable – and a recent research article in PLOS Biology turned up something unexpected behind the mechanism of the radiation resistance (2000x the lethal dose for humans) of Deinococcus radiodurans. Initial work assumed that it had exceptional DNA repair mechanisms, which allowed it to repair the breaks in DNA produced by irradiation. The sequencing of the genome showed DNA repair was no more or less complex or sophisticated at the genomic level than those in other, more fragile, bacteria. The difference may well be in the bacterium’s ability to protect its proteins from radiation damage, so that the DNA-repair enzymes can do their job. D radiodurans has an extremely high manganese concentration, which detoxifies the reactive oxygen intermediates produced by ionizing radiation, combined with a low iron concentration. The combination protects against oxidative damage to proteins.

• Paradox Resolved? The Strange Case of the Radiation Resistant Bacteria, is a summary of the article’s background and findings in the April 2007 issue of PLOS Biology