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S3E04 - Diatoms (Diatoms)
#Diatoms #DONA #Ludoliminal #Microbiology #BoardGames #Science
In this episode we're going microscopic to talk about everything Diatoms! Starting from the game by Ludoliminal and going through the classic (and obscure) Victorian art form of arranging these beautiful glass-shelled organisms on microscope slides, our special guest Laura Aycock--collections manager at the world's *largest* diatom herbarium--helps us understand all the beauty and wonder of these tiny, shimmingering marvels. From tepid ponds to hot springs to arctic ice, diatoms are everywhere, and they do a lot for us while looking absolutely fabulous. So grab a microscope and prepare to never look at pond scum the same way again!
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This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.
Full Transcript
(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )
Brian 0:00
Jason, hello and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about science behind some of your favorite games.
Jason Wallace 0:10
Today, we will be talking about diatoms by ludoliminal Games. All right, everyone, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason. This is Brian, and today, for our special guest, we have Laura Aycock. Laura, can you please introduce yourself?
Laura 0:25
Sure. I'm Laura Aycock. I am the Collection Manager of the diatom herbarium at the Academy natural sciences in Philadelphia that's affiliated with Drexel University. And I've been working with diatoms for about 15 years, and I find them fun and enjoyable.
Brian 0:38
That's really cool. Thank you for coming on, Jason. How did you manage to get the exact right person to come talk to us? Good job
Jason Wallace 0:44
being very persistent with emails.
Laura 0:46
Theres also not very many of us
Jason Wallace 0:49
there is that when there's actually a website called diatoms.org, that has all the nation's top diatoms scientists linked to it, somehow, it's not that hard to find someone. So before we get into this lovely game about absolutely beautiful, microscopic creatures. Let's start with our fun science facts. So Laura, as our guest, we usually pass the privilege to you to start. Do you have something you'd like to share with our audience?
Laura 1:09
Sure. My favorite fact about diatoms is they produce about a fourth of the oxygen we breathe. So they're very important to life on Earth, and we wouldn't survive without them.
Brian 1:16
So trees get all the credit, but they're stealing that
Jason Wallace 1:19
we talkabout plant blindness, where people just don't look at plants. There's definitely what macroscopic bias, where we just don't think about all the things that aren't within, you know, human size scale. So yeah, trees get all the credit, but all these little microbes are actually doing a whole bunch of the work there.
Laura 1:33
Yeah, diatoms, along with other groups of algae, actually produce about half of the oxygen we breathe, so they are as important, if not more important, than land plant, but no one thinks about them, sees them, or really acknowledges them.
Brian 1:44
So let me think. Then I'm thinking about this track of carbon dioxide that we've been seeing sort of dip and rise and dip and rise and dip and rise. Now that dip and rise that's from the like Alpine forests in the northern continents, right? But the stable activity that's presumably all the algae in the ocean, right? Or do they also fluctuate on an annual cycle?
Jason Wallace 2:04
I'd assume they'd also fluctuate annually, just because of temperature, if nothing else.
Laura 2:07
It depends on the environment. So diatoms in the ocean are relatively consistent, but I think it does fluctuate with temperature. I actually don't know too much about marine diatoms, because my expertise lies in benthic freshwater diatoms.
Brian 2:19
Benthic freshwater. So that means, like, the things that live in the muck at the bottom of fresh water environments,
Laura 2:24
yeah, the brown slime you see when you go to creeks. That's what I love to look at.
Brian 2:28
Oh, you're a slimologist. That's awesome.
Jason Wallace 2:30
All right, Brian, your turn. What fun fact do you have for us today?
Brian 2:33
Well, funny enough, I also brought a diatoms one I was looking for something recently about diatoms in the news. It's a press release out of Stanford, about diatoms remaining active down to negative 15 degrees centigrade, so cold, basically, in solid ice isn't as solid as you'd think. Actually, it can have these little micro fluidic chambers within it, sort of threads of liquid water. And the diatoms were actually not only colonizing these but moving through these chambers. I didn't even know diatoms could move. I guess they have like little actin filaments that they use to move on slime. I want to know more about this, and I'm hoping that Laura can explain it.
Laura 3:08
Diatoms are very capable of active movement. Not all of them, though, they have to have a slit in the center of the cell, which is called the raphe and they can secrete mucilage. And they glide along like slugs.
Brian 3:18
So you can tell just by looking at them if they're going to be able to be mobile?
Laura 3:21
yep,
Brian 3:22
Do all the ones with Raphe have mobility? Or do some of them have the Raphe and are not mobile?
Laura 3:26
No, all of them have mobility. The raphe can vary in its placement on the cell, whether it's in the center of the cell, along the sides, if it's on one half of the valve. Because diatoms are made in two parts, they're kind of like a box where you have a top half and a bottom half. So when they're dead, they split apart. So you'll see the raphe on one valve and not the other. But they do have their Raphe.
Brian 3:43
That's really cool, man. So diatoms are kind of like mimics in D & D. They live in a box.
Jason Wallace 3:48
They are a box, a glass box. They make themselves.
Brian 3:51
That's okay. These are very cool organisms.
Jason Wallace 3:53
They are. So let's go on to this game, then, because this game is a beautiful game about these beautiful creatures. So diatoms is a game by Ludoliminal Games and published by 25th century games. It actually won a 2025 Mensa select award, and I like the tagline on the publisher's website. It is a stunningly beautiful game about making art from algae, which is not something you would think about, but the whole metaphor of this game is about Victorian diatom art, which is this obscure art form, where, back when microscopes, well, microscopes for the masses, were a new fangled thing, and people were trying to sell them. They wanted to sell things that you could look at right away. And so they would sell these little slides you could put under and they had diatom art on them, which is what you're making in this game. We'll talk more about what diatom art is in a little bit for the game itself, its basic stats. It's for one to four players, obligatory single player mode, although I'll say this is one of the few games we've played where I actually have played the single player mode, and I can attest it's actually quite fun.
Brian 4:51
Yeah, I was gonna say you actually said you liked it like you enjoyed it.
Jason Wallace 4:54
It's very calming. And ages eight plus about 30-45, minutes to play. Suggested retail price is $55 a lot of that is probably going to the very high quality components. So there's very high quality chipboard, most of which has foil embossing on it in some degree, oftentimes, lots. The game is played in two sections. You have your tile placing one where you've got these hexagonal tiles that have colors coming off of them. So every hexagon consists of six triangles joined at the tip. And so those six triangles can be any one of a number of colors. They've got five different ones, red, yellow, green, blue and purple. Some of them are white as wild spots. And it's a typical like color matching game. You have the hexes down on the board, and then you try to place new hexes so that the colors match. That part is fairly straightforward. The thing is based on the colors you make at that intersection. So when you place a hex down next to two other tiles, it forms a point where all three of those tiles touch, and where, therefore there are six triangles around that central point. And the size and distribution of the color patches determines which diatoms you then collect. Metaphorically, this is you like looking at a patch of water under the microscope, and like sucking it up and being able to grab some diatoms out of it. The second half of the game, every player has their own little player board, so everyone's working individually. Here you've got the shared water tiles, but an individual board, and you're placing those diatoms on the board in order to make arrangements. And the board has all these cutouts where I haven't counted the number of spaces. There's probably like 40 or 50 of them, each one of them can only hold one of two shapes, and they've got it drawn out. So you can say, Oh, this spot can either hold a triangle or a star, but it cannot hold a circle, or this one can hold an oval or a circle, but it can't hold a square, that sort of thing, because the diatoms, in addition to coming in five colors, also come in five shapes, and those shapes are based on the size of the color patch you made when placing those tiles together. The idea is you're trying to place these down artfully. And of course, because it's a game, it's not just aesthetically pleasing. They have rules for how you gain points. And when I have taught this game to other people, which we did at a few conventions last year, keeping track of the scoring rules is the hardest part of this game. People get the tile laying pretty easily. People get getting the shapes and collecting the diatoms. Remembering the many, many different ways you can score points is actually the hardest part, because you can score points based off of how many of different colors you have. More diatoms of a single color gets you more points. You can get them based off of where they are. So the board is circular. It has kind of three rings. You have your inner ring, your middle ring and your outer ring. And then, based on the diversity of shapes you have in those, determines points there. And then there's all these lines of symmetry, so horizontal and vertical and diagonals. And if you have matching pairs of diatoms on those on the same ring, the score sheet for this is, thankfully very well put together. There are literally, like, 20 or 30 spots for you to write down. Oh, here's how many points I got for this particular arrangement here, and then this one here, it walks you through. If you just go through the score sheet, you will have everything. And it makes tallying it up at the end easy. It does not make keeping all those rules in your head during play any easier. That is still quite hard. And I think a lot of people, at least a lot of people I've played with, reach the point where they focus on a few things and they just kind of don't worry about the rest, even after several plays, when I'm looking at this, like, okay, I can keep a few things in head, but I can't keep all possible ones in head. So sometimes it's just like, Well, I'm just going to play this here, get a few things, and then I'll figure out where I can place them well.
Brian 8:21
I think that's everything in the game. When you're talking about components, one of the things they have are these little petri dishes that you get to keep all your pieces in. Except I can tell you, if you've ever worked with actual petri dishes, these are much nicer than regular petri dishes. These are actually like your normal petri dish. If you handle it wrong, it immediately cracks. These are actually meant to hold up over time.
Jason Wallace 8:32
Yes, these are not meant to be disposed of after a few days.
Brian 8:35
No, for sure,
Jason Wallace 8:36
and they have a few other things. So they have, like every player has their own little like score guidebook so that you can look through and you can see how the scoring works. They've got this cute little magnifying glass so you can, like, isolate the little six point section that you created so you can more easily track because some people have trouble mentally sectioning that off from the larger tiles in order to get it. And several the people that I taught they actually really liked using that tool.
Brian 8:59
Oh, really,
Jason Wallace 8:59
they liked using it because it because it made it much easier for them to figure out how many of each diatom and each color they needed to get.
Brian 9:06
I could see using it for just the role play purpose of looking like you're holding up your little magnifying glass to the water to show the section you're working on. But interesting, I figured that was just for fun.
Jason Wallace 9:16
No, it's actually quite useful for many people, and that's most of the rules. It's actually a very simple game. It's a very elegant game. You can bring in additional judging rules to make it even more complicated, if you want. And one thing is that once you set a diatom down on your board, which you have until it comes back to you. So this game could take forever, if you had to wait for someone to place their diatoms before the next person went but you don't, you have until it's your turn again. But once they're down, you can't move them, which, while being a nice standard game mechanic of like, you have to commit, I also really like it because of the metaphor. Because the metaphor is you are gluing these to a microscope slide. Once they're glued down, you can't move them. And so I think it actually works really well doing double duty there.
Brian 9:51
So we got this game, I think I picked it up at some point, because it was, it seemed like it was thematic. It. Is extremely pretty. But we actually had discussions, is this a game we can talk about? Because this game, the metaphor, is really about an obscure Victorian art form, more than it is about diatoms. But we also thought, when else are we going to get the opportunity to have somebody on to tell us about diatoms? So we should just take this opportunity and talk about it anyway.
Jason Wallace 10:18
I'm much more liberal about what can go on as long as it has science in it, somewhere that we can talk about, I'm fine. And definitely this is a science light game. It is inspired by science. In fact, reading the designer diary, the tile laying component is a very early part of the game. That was sort of what the core was, but the diatom veneer, so the theming of the game was actually a very late addition. The designer actually says how she was playing with the game. She had the tile laying down. It was fine. It was actually like collecting fractions, because it originally was something to do about, like math fluency due to some fellowship she'd gotten, but it really wasn't quite jelling. And then she took her child to the aquarium, and they had some poster about diatoms. And unfortunately, the link to her picture was broken, so I couldn't see what the poster actually said, but apparently it talked about, like these microscopic silicon-based algae that made these beautiful structures. And she just fixated on that. She started doing deep dives and researching, and she found this beautiful art form. And then apparently the rest of the game just fell together after that, like it made perfect sense. She redid where you placed your little fraction things. Originally, it was some sort of like bingo board into the actual diatom one. And that's fascinating to me, because the metaphor feels like it goes so deep into this game in terms of how you actually play things. It's just fascinating to me that was actually the last addition to it interesting. But anyway, that's enough about the game, per se. Now we're going to go to the actual science here. So Laura, this is where you're gonna need to help us. Because even though we both study microscopic things, we're both kind of bacteria people, well, plants and bacteria, and my understanding is that a diatom is neither of those. So what is a diatom?
Laura 11:54
That is a question I get asked more than probably any other question in my career. And a diatom is neither a plant nor an animal. It is a protist, however, is algae, which, if you've ever looked at a phylogenetic tree of life, you'll notice there's the three main kingdoms. Algae actually spans all three. So it's not monophyletic, which is the term we use. But diatoms are a particular group of algae, and they're all share the trait that they have a cell wall made of glass or silica.
Jason Wallace 12:17
Okay, so protist protists are single celled eukaryotes, so they're not bacteria. They actually have complicated cells like we do, that has a nucleus and all the organelles.
Brian 12:26
but that's okay. We're not going to hold that against them.
Jason Wallace 12:28
My understanding is that most eukaryotes are protists. This is another case where we are very biased by animals and plants and fungi, because we can see them. But the vast majority of the Tree of Life of eukaryotes, of anything like us, is actually microscopic, and we kind of ignore it. So you mentioned that they make a cell wall out of glass, out of silica. Why silica? It's like cellulose all over the place, chitin for fungi, peptidoglycan for bacteria, silica, glass. Why silica?
Brian 12:57
And it's there. Actually it is their cell wall in the same way that, like a plant cell wall has cellulose and pectin, they make their cell wall out of silicates?
Laura 13:05
Yeah, they do. So they don't make the silica itself, which, if you think about it, that causes them to not have to use as much energy as it would to make an organic component. They pull it from the environment and then build the silica cell walls. So it's really readily available in the environment, which is a easy resource for them to grab. It's hard. It protects them from predators. It's opaline, and it has the ability for them to have pores, which allows for greater sunlight penetration, for photosynthesis. So there's a lot of reasons why they have these silica cell walls.
Jason Wallace 13:33
So opaline? transparent?
Laura 13:34
Yep, they're opaline. They're not fully transparent. Of course, we don't really know, because it's really hard to see a diatom and what it actually looks like. But the common belief is that if you were to look and you know what an opal looks like, they're probably similar to that, where they kind of have this milky exterior that is radiant, and then it has these beautiful colors to it. But we don't really know they're so tiny we can only see what we can see through the microscope. And they are see through. So when you look at them alive, you see the chloroplast, you see all the organelles, you see this beautiful golden brown color when you look at them, because you're not seeing the actual cell wall, because it's mostly see through and transparent.
Brian 14:07
So I have two questions. One question is, what does the name mean? What's the origin of the name diatom?
Laura 14:13
The name diatom comes from it being two parts. So it has two halves, because diatoms are shaped like a box where they have the top half and a bottom half.
Jason Wallace 14:19
Okay, so probably Greek diatomos or something like that.
Laura 14:22
That sounds right.
Brian 14:23
The other question was, so they're photosynthetic, but they're not related to green plants, is that right?
Laura 14:28
Correct? The algal group that is most closely related to plants would be green algae, but diatoms are not green algae. They are in their different kingdom.
Brian 14:35
okay, different kingdom. So they're, they're brown algae, right?
Laura 14:38
No brown algae would be seaweeds. Oh, they're called golden brown algae. Is their common name.
Brian 14:43
Okay? There's too many flavors and colors of algae. I guess there's a reason they span, you know, so many different branches. Golden brown algae.
Laura 14:50
Algae literally fits in every kingdom of the tree of life.
Brian 14:54
So algae is a little bit like when you say tree, lots of different things make trees, right? An algae is just a way. Of being a living thing.
Laura 15:01
Yep, traditionally, they're photosynthetic. I think that's the only characteristic that really pulls them all together.
Jason Wallace 15:06
And then you said that you're the collections manager at a diatom herbarium. Now I'm familiar with plant herbariums, where people take plant samples and they'll press them in paper, and then they record like where they were recorded and when and such. And people use that to study the distributions of plants and such. I assume a diatom herbarium is similar. But can you explain to us, like, what exactly is a diatom herbarium and what's it used for?
Laura 15:30
The diatom herbarium operates very similar to the botany herbarium. We actually do have a botany herbarium in our institution as well, but we're not a part of it just because we are diatoms and just diatoms. That being said, we actually do have radiolarians and other things, but that's another topic for another day of just collections in general, but we have the largest collection of microscope slides in the entire world. So we have about 300,000 accessioned microscope slides. And we have accessioned means that it's officially cataloged into collection. We have a ton of other microscope slides that have not been formally added to our database, given a catalog number, and don't even know, probably another 100, 200,000 of those. And then we have the materials used to make the slides. So when we say materials, it's usually organic or digested material. And what we mean by that is when you go collect an algae sample. So algae is found everywhere, fresh water, salt water, there's even terrestrial diatoms. And you collect the sample, and then to actually see them, and to see the intricate structures of the cell wall, we have to soak them in acid to remove all the organic materials you find inside the cells, because they're see through, we can't see any of the structures about doing that. So then we preserve the materials, which is the digestive material, our sample. And so we have that as well in the collection, and we probably have about 100 to 200,000 samples, and all of our slides and samples are from all over the world, and how they're used is that researchers will contact us if they're trying to study diatoms in a specific region to look at what was there 150 years ago, to see how that compares to what's there. Though, also we have a lot of type slides. So if you get into taxonomy, in order to describe a species, you have to select a single specimen, which is a whole debate in the diatom world that I don't think we have time for today, to use as the type specimen. So we have about five to 6000 type slides. So if you're trying to describe a new species, you want to look back at the original type specimen to ensure that what you're describing is not already been described, and then also to look at comparisons of morphological features.
Jason Wallace 17:20
You have the diatom holotypes.
Laura 17:22
We have a lot of them.
Jason Wallace 17:23
We talked about the game holotype and dinosaur holotypes About a year ago. So, so what's your job as collections manager entail? Are you entering all these into the database, the ones that haven't been cataloged? Are you fulfilling order or is like, what do you do as your day job?
Brian 17:37
Is your collection digitized at all? Or is it all
Laura 17:40
Oh, boy. So that that word digitized. So yes, we are digitiz ed. We do have an online database, which is a bit of a it's been chaotic. So we had one database in a format that wasn't functional for many years, and then we moved to a different format in which we're having to rebuild it and get it back to where it's fully functional. A lot of our data is digitized in the sense of, we have the metadata. We have a lot of other stuff too, such as, like pictures of the specimens on the slides, which counts as digitized data. We actually have 3d microscope slides available online, so we have scans of our slides that you can operate, similar to looking at a microscope, where you can focus in and out at different, well, not different magnifications, but you can zoom in and out of that scan, which is at 400 times magnification. We also have a ton of other just stuff. We have a library, which we have digitized as well. We have records of that, and I have to manage all of that, organize it, maintain it. I have to care for the slides to make sure they're being properly stored and not getting damaged over time. Repair slide that they're broken. If I can repair them, I have to send loans out if other scientists request that they want to see slides or take images of type materials to send to them. It's a lot. The better question is, what don't I do as the Collection Manager? Because on top of all of that, I also am a researcher myself, and try to publish papers and work on research projects various different topics. With diatoms, I primarily focus on phylogenetics with them right now and taxonomy, but I also do ecological research as well. It's a lot.
Jason Wallace 19:06
And so if you remember from our talk about Holotype, I think we talked about phylogenetics and taxonomy there. Phylogenetics is the process of figuring out what is related to what, and then taxonomy is the process of like assigning names and species. And it sounds like trying to tell two species of diatoms apart is about as problematic as trying to tell two species of bacteria apart, which is to say that the natural world laughs at these artificial divisions that we humans have made upon them.
Brian 19:32
But they've got all the cool structures. So I unlike bacteria, you've got a lot of morphology to look at, right?
Laura 19:38
Yes, they have numerous structures that are so immense that you wouldn't even be able to comprehend how many there are, and we're discovering new ones each day. When we look at them in a scanning electron microscope, we can actually see the very detailed structures of the cell wall at a level that we wouldn't be able to see under a light microscope, we can see the internal features because they have features on the external part the internal part on. The sides, they're held together by silica bands. And even those can have features that can distinguish two species. Diatom taxonomy is really complicated. It's really hard to distinguish them. There's debates about what is a new species, what isn't and then when you start adding molecular data, which is the DNA, we finally have started doing DNA work on diatoms. We're very behind on that compared to other organisms, but we work on that too. You would think that would add more clarity, but sometimes it creates more confusion. There's a ton of cryptic species, which are species that you can't tell apart morphologically by how they look, but they have different DNA sequences, which would indicate they're different species. And there's the ecological species concept of maybe these two diatoms have identical morphological features and identical DNA, but however, they only exist in completely different ecological environments. So are they two different species, or are they the same? Diatoms just are the epitome of all of the issues with taxonomy and what is a species and what isn't.
Jason Wallace 20:55
So are they sexual, or are they just asexual?
Laura 20:58
They do both. So they reproduce by binary fission, which I think is the primary mode of reproduction. So how that works is they have a top half and a bottom half, those will split apart, and the top half becomes the bottom half for the daughter cell. However, if you think of a box or a petri dish, one half is slightly smaller than the other. So as they produce they go through this size shrinkage. So you'll have a great size variation, which also creates some difficulties when trying to identify them within the same species, and can actually affect the morphological structures as well and how they look. And in order to get back to the original size, they have to undergo sexual reproduction, where they produce an egg and a sperm, mate and then create an Auxospore that can pull silica from the environment to get back to the original size.
Brian 21:38
That's crazy. It actually vaguely reminds me of telomere degradation. Jason, explain what that is.
Jason Wallace 21:45
So telomeres are the tips of your chromosomes, which is what your DNA is bundled in. And because you can't copy all the way to the end of them, they tend to shrink over your lifespan. And there are complicated mechanisms to help take care of that when children are conceived and such. And that is not my area, so they don't know what those are, but this sounds amazing, that basically every time they divide, they technically get a little smaller, until they finally need to do sexual reproduction. So they could they start over, so they can so they can get back up to normal size. That's just fascinating.
Brian 22:14
That's so cool.
Jason Wallace 22:15
How long have diatoms been around? I mean, something this diverse and this widespread, I'm thinking hundreds of millions of years silica shells, those have got to be very well preserved in the fossil record. How long have they been around?
Brian 22:25
And I imagine from a species depiction, if you're using the silica shell, then you can be doing using the same species characteristics for our fossilized silica shells from a long time ago versus the ones that are out right now.
Laura 22:38
Yeah. So the current belief for how old diatoms are is from the Cretaceous Period. They're actually relatively new on the evolutionary scale. So dinosaurs came here first, and then diatoms showed up sometime afterwards, towards the Early Cretaceous period. And the reason we know this is because the silica cell wall preserve so well. They are heavy. So when diatoms die and they lose their buoyancy, they drop to the bottom of the water body that they are existing in. So whether that be a river, a stream, a bay, an ocean, and they they lay on top of each other and create a structure similar to like a sediment core. So when you take cores that which is like a giant cylinder that you can put into the core, pull it up, and then you have different layers, you can actually see how the diatom community has changed over time, especially in water bodies that are more stagnant, such as lakes or bays, we've been able to date the sediment, and that's how we can figure out how old diatoms are. And the current findings is that at the Early Cretaceous period, but diatoms have changed rapidly since then. So what we see from the older diatoms, they look remarkably different than what we see in today's modern times.
Jason Wallace 23:38
So quick aside, Early Cretaceous would be probably 100 to 100 and 50 million years ago. I had no idea we'd be referencing holotype so many times on this episode. But change drastically how? like so listeners, if you're not driving, find a place to do a quick pause. Do a search for diatom art or diatom diversity, and just spend a few minutes going down the Google rabbit hole of just how varied and beautiful these little things are. When they're mounted, they're glass shells. You hit them with a light, they turn all these beautiful rainbow colors. I look at those like we have long, skinny ones, we've got round ones. We've got ovals, stars, these weird triangle things, if you're saying they were very different than what they were, what were they?
Laura 24:15
I'm trying to think of how to describe it without showing a picture. And they have strange structures. They almost look alien. They have. Some of them have what looks like antenna, weird spines, the areolae or the pores in the cells, can look really strange compared to what we see today. And in my mind, when I think of a normal, diatom in modern time, I have the background to know what that is, but it's hard for me to describe that without using pictures of what the shapes and everything look like. But even the shapes of them back then are different than what we see to now, let me start by saying there's two main classes of diatom shapes, which is centric, and pinnate centric are more circular, and pinnate are more boxy. So centric diatoms are believed to have happened before pinnate. So that's why we'll see more centric diatoms when you look back in the cores,
Jason Wallace 24:56
I'm just thinking how every time life hits on something new, it tends to do it weird at first, which obviously is our own personal bias, but I'm thinking of, if any of you have ever seen pictures of animals recovered from the Cambrian explosion, which was when animal life first really diversified in the oceans, about 500 million years ago. I think there's some weird critters in that that we look at those days like that. That was evolution experimenting, because it hadn't figured things out yet,
Brian 25:21
so we had the diatom explosion of the Early Cretaceous, where they were experimenting with form and shape. We'll definitely try to find some pictures that we can put up with these, or point people to things on our show notes. So we can say like, this is a current diatom. This is an early diatom, so they can see for themselves how they have changed over 100 million years.
Laura 25:41
I definitely recommend doing that if you ever looking for a good rabbit hole to get stuck in diatoms. Is a great one for that.
Brian 25:43
Do you have any diatom channels you can recommend on social media?
Laura 25:47
I don't know if there's diatom channels, per se, there is the DoNA, which is the diatoms of North America, we have a webinar every other Tuesday at 12 Eastern Time, and they save all of those online and publish them on YouTube so you can watch all of the previous webinars, some of them a little bit more friendly to the novice, and some of them were geared and tailored towards researchers. There's a large variety of the different webinars, and those are fun to look over. There's also Jeffrey stone, I think he has an Instagram or some sort of social media account where he does SEM work, which is the scanning electron microscope. And I'll often show diatoms and talk about them. I think they actually have their own podcast. I'll have to do more research into that and give you the name of what they do.
Brian 26:25
Oh, that would be great. So I manage the social media for as it is for the podcast, and I know that there would be a hunger for diatoms on Instagram. There's a whole subdivision of Instagram people just taking pretty pictures of things in nature, and micrographs and close ups of plants and everything, and I think diatoms would hit big.
Jason Wallace 26:43
Unfortunately, I think our biggest contender for that, we lost a few years ago. So if you do any search for diatom art, you will eventually run across Klaus Kemp, who, until a few years ago, was, as I understand it, the at least the most famous living diatom artist, possibly the only professional living diatom artist, but he passed away in 2022 but he actually spent years perfecting a glue recipe that would take days to dry so that he could position his diatoms properly. Because there's hundreds of these things, and it takes a very long time. He built custom microscope rigs. People like, pick them up and move them around. There's a video you can look up called the diatomist. I'll link it in the show notes. It's actually well worth a watch. It's only about 10 or 15 minutes long, beautiful, highly recommended.
Brian 26:43
So if you want to manipulate a diatom on a slide are you using, like a super pulling, like a fine glass rod into like a little micro point, or like a fine needle, how do you move one diatom?
Laura 27:36
So there's a lot of people who've tried various ways to do that. I know actually decent amount about the original diatom arrangers from the Victorian time period. We have a lot of slides by Möller, who was the original or most well known diatom arranger from that time period. And so I've done a lot of research, because there's some of the more precious items in our collection, and they're fun to show to the public, or if we have any events, I've done a little bit of research into his life. And one of the things I've noted most is that the original arrangers all kept their secrets with them and how they did it. So unfortunately, we don't know what they did to create these beautiful arrangements, especially Henry Dalton, who used butterfly scales, parts of bugs and created true artwork. He has chickens, flowers there's insanely gorgeous. I also recommend searching Henry Dalton arranged slides. They're gorgeous. And there are also some diatoms on there that he died to add color to them, but Klaus Kemp was the most modern one, and he has records of how he did it, but how you move diatoms, we have to still do that if we want to do SEM work and look at a certain position of a diatom, because they look a lot different when they're sitting on their side versus when you see them from what we call valve view, which is the forward view. We used glass pipettes that we stretch under a flame so they're super tiny. We tried using that to suck them up and move them around. It's really complicated, really hard, very tedious, exhausting, stressful work
Jason Wallace 28:52
that sounds like the voice of experience
Laura 28:55
trying to make monocultures for diatoms is one of the most frustrating things I've ever done in my life, because you have to isolate one cell and move it, because they do reproduce by binary fission, and there's not enough DNA in most cells to get quality DNA sequences, so you have to isolate one cell, move it into a Petri dish with medium, and then you just pray that it grows. It often doesn't and just dies. But that isolating one from a live slide culture is just frustrating. But we actually have a student. Her name is Sylvia Lepic, and she really found these arranged slides beautiful and lovely, so she started doing that herself. And she uses a eyelash glued to a wooden rod that she will look at the microscope under 100X magnification and manipulate diatoms that way. I forgot to ask her what kind of glue she uses. I know she used glycerin, plus some lab grade gelatin. Has she tried that as well? But she's actually been really good and has made some gorgeous arrangement just out of fun.
Brian 29:48
That's really cool. I'm thinking about these other times where you see the science and art kind of coming together, like I'm thinking about the glass flowers that are on display. I think it's at Harvard, because they're so important for identification. But they don't flower all the time. So if you really want to be able to teach people how to do the identifications, you have to have the flowers, and in this case, the sort of art made with the diatoms. I don't know. I mean, like, if you could make a diatom arrangement, that would be a combination of art and science. Would you try to arrange, like a phylogenetic tree? Like, what would you make as your arrangement of diatoms?
Laura 30:18
There's actually example of what I really enjoy about the arranged diatom. So as I mentioned earlier, that we have to see certain features with the different views that you see them in, versus girdle versus valve view is there was Schultz, who was a original member of the Academy of Natural sciences, who made arranged slides, and he would take valves and put them in these different orientations, so that way they could be used to research and to really learn the morphology of the diatom. So I would enjoy doing something like that. There's also Möller was quite famous for using microphotography, where they would take a picture with the names written of the diatoms and somehow shrink it down where they can glue it onto a microscope slide, and they would place individual valves into the circles above these names. So when you go to look at this microscope slide from the 1800s you see a diatom, and under it is the name written down. And I think that is amazing, because back then, he paired up with Rabenhorst , and they actually did do art compared with science. That was amazing learning tool. They were able to help young taxonomists start to learn the name, so they have access to the diatom right next to the name.
Jason Wallace 31:18
It's lovely collaboration between science and art. We don't get enough of those, but they're wonderful when they happen in all of this. Laura, do you have a favorite diatom? I mean, you have access to the world's largest collection. Surely, you must be able to pick a favorite out of all that.
Brian 31:31
And I actually wanted to ask a slightly different question that's on the same theme. I see that you have named many you've contributed several species. So is one of those your favorite?
Laura 31:39
So right now my favorite diatom. It does change fairly often depending on what I'm working on, is I recently published a paper where I described a few new species of Penularia, and one of them was able to name after my former research advisor, Dr Kalina Manoylov. So that's very special to me, because I was able to do something special for her and give her back a little bit of how much she's poured into my life and my professional career.
Brian 32:01
That's very sweet. What is the name of that species?
Laura 32:02
It's actually not on diatoms of North America, because I need to make a page for it still, because the paper was just published recently, so I couldn't have made a page without the name being officially published. But it's Penularia manoylovy (sp?).
Brian 32:15
Okay, well, let us know. We'll point people to it when it's out. Okay, we can at least put it on our Discord.
Jason Wallace 32:20
Going back a little bit, you talked about how diatoms stick around. And when I was researching, I came across something that I've run into previously, which is diatomaceous earth, which is apparently dirt made from diatoms. Can you explain to me what this stuff is?
Laura 32:35
Yes, so it deposits the diatoms that there was a body of water that had an abundance of diatoms. As it dried up over time, all of the silica would sink to the bottom, and then you just have this massive deposit of pure silica dust, and it appears white and chalky, and it's just crushed up frustules, which is what we call diatom cells. And it has a lot of applications. It's used a lot for commercial use. It's a very valuable resource, and it's also beautiful to look at because it's just a whole bunch of diatoms. And I know of a few things they use it for. Is like a dynamite stabilizer. It's used for filtration to make beer and wine and fish tanks. They use it as an abrasive, so for fine sanding, because it is slightly abrasive, it found in some toothpaste, because it is a gentle abrasive,
Brian 33:15
we use it for pest control in organic farming. It's the insects don't want to walk over it or something. I don't know.
Laura 33:22
What it does is it gets into the skeleton of the bugs and breaks it apart. So it kind of is like a whole bunch of tiny glasses attacking the bug.
Jason Wallace 33:30
Tiny glass knives being shoved into the bugs exoskeleton got it,
Laura 33:33
but it's organic and won't harm us as humans.
Brian 33:36
Like eating glass. Is it bad for humans, or it's just it's too small to hurt us?
Laura 33:40
You can buy food grade diatomaceous earth, and there is a difference between food grade and non food grade, where it's fine to ingest in small quantities, it's not fine to breathe in, and actually can cause lung damage if you do breathe in too much of it, because it is just tiny shards of glass.
Jason Wallace 33:55
Okay, so okay to eat, not okay to breathe. Got it also, part of me just chafed at the idea of a silicon based substance being called Organic.
Brian 34:03
That's a different episode
Laura 34:05
that depends on the definition of organic.
Brian 34:08
Yes, it does.
Jason Wallace 34:09
Yes, I know. So one of the facts I ran across when researching for this episode is that, apparently the Amazon rainforest gets fertilized by diatom dust from Africa that gets blown across from the Sahara, from where there used to be a bunch of lakes, and they've all dried up. Now, can you confirm that?
Laura 34:26
I do know about that. I don't know a ton about it. I know very little bit. But if you do go and you collect some of the sediment off of the top of the Sahara Desert, you'll find diatoms in it. And diatoms are remarkable organisms and can withstand years of desiccation. So there are believed, confirmed instances where they've been able to rehydrate diatoms from the Sahara Desert, which would have allowed for that repopulation if it gets blown in the wind or gets carried up in the clouds and then dropped on the Amazon rainforest. The whole idea of diatom dispersal and how it travels around is a very complicated topic.
Jason Wallace 34:57
Okay, Brian, diatoms have just surpassed tardigrades in terms of my favorite cute, microscopic organism,
Brian 35:02
okay,
Laura 35:03
they don't look like bears. The Tardigrades are adorable.
Brian 35:06
Yeah? So, like, what are the Okay, so I was gonna ask about the DNA thing, but then I figured it might be like a touchy subject. I'm also thinking about how everybody's taxonomy got rewritten by DNA. For bacteria, it's mostly settled down the fungi people are going through it now, but for the diatoms, it seems like it's even worse, because the problem now is that you've got a morphological species concept that you've been able to apply back through time, but you can't do that with the extinct ones. So what you're going to have is two parallel species definitions for the same groups of organisms. That's going to make things complicated.
Laura 35:37
I would say that is a touchy topic, and there is two different sides or parties that believe certain things. So diatoms are used as bio-indicators, which is the biggest applications for them in environmental research. So a bio-indicator is an organism that you can based on its presence or absence in the environment. Can give you ideas about how healthy or clean or unhealthy the environment is. So diatoms are used as bio indicators, and that's all been based on morphology for the past, however long we've been working with them, but now there's this meta barcoding and e-DNA that's coming up, and you can use that to make water quality research using diatoms. However, you lose that very important connection between how they look and the DNA sequence, because eDNA doesn't allow that connection to morphology, unless you have a reference library that was done through monocultures to be able to compare the sequences,
Jason Wallace 36:27
all right? And so eDNA just means environmental DNA. It's DNA you get from, like taking a water sample or a soil sample, instead of taking it from a specific organism.
Laura 36:36
So there is this debate on, do we need to connect the data? Do we not need to connect the data? And it can get a bit dicey between people on this debate. And generally, the diatom community is very friendly and cohesive. However, debates do happen in any scientific community, so this is definitely one of them that happens fairly frequently, and there are people who just do diatom DNA and don't really know anything about morphology. So it's a strange and complicated topic.
Brian 37:03
I feel like if the diatomologist and the artist can get together, then the molecular and the morphologist should be able to find common ground as well, right?
Laura 37:10
I would hope so. And I definitely am on the party of we need to figure out how to connect the morphology with the molecular data. And there are a lot of people that are working towards that and stand in that middle ground. So there is progress moving forward.
Brian 37:23
Diatoms united.
Jason Wallace 37:24
So you mentioned that they're indicator species, and you mentioned previously that they fix a lot of oxygen for the world. So what else do they do in ecosystems? What other roles are they playing?
Laura 37:35
So diatoms are the primary producers. In almost all aquatic ecosystems, if you think back to fifth grade science, when you learned about primary producer, and then the grazers, and then you have the predators. So everything eats everything, and the energy flow through an ecosystem all starts with plants, well diatoms and other photosynthetic organisms play that role in aquatic ecosystems. So they're very important, because without them, you wouldn't have the energy flow through the ecosystem.
Jason Wallace 37:59
So they're the basis. They capture the sunlight and it flows through. And because they're largely microscopic and just kind of like the brownish slime that we see on rocks and tree stumps and stuff, we just ignore them, but it's actually a really important component for how energy flows through the environment.
Laura 38:15
Yes, and diatoms in particular are interesting because they have lipid droplets, which is oil in them. There's this whole idea to use them to milk for oil. But again, that's another topic that requires a lot of conversation.
Brian 38:26
Did you say milk? Are we milking diatoms?
Laura 38:28
I did say milk. So when they get stressed, they produce lipid droplets and oil. And so the idea was to get a whole bunch of diatoms in a pool, stress them out, and then milk the oil out of it.
Brian 38:37
Oh, wow. Is there society for like, protection of diatoms. This sounds cruel.
Laura 38:42
No, the problem is, is, it takes so much energy to get to that point where you actually get a usable amount of oil. Is, it's not really any benefit. It's actually worse than the regular oil that we use now. But they've been referred to as the hamburger of the ocean because they have those oil droplets. Is, they're very nutrient dense, though they're beneficial for organisms to eat them, especially the macro invertebrates or the small fish they eat them.
Brian 39:04
Do the lipids contribute to buoyancy and keep them up in the photic zone? Or is that just just, am I just making a connection to something that isn't actually there?
Laura 39:14
I have to go back to my plant cell anatomy, but I think it's primarily to use for storage, because they do it when they're stressed, when the environment. So I think it the storage or way to keep them alive under stress.
Jason Wallace 39:24
Okay, so what is the weirdest environment that you have a sample from?
Laura 39:30
So I don't personally have any, I mean the collection. I think we have some from some hot springs in Japan. My boss here, the curator, Dr. Marina Potapova, has a lot of Arctic diatoms in her collection in some highly harsh environments, that they also look a lot different than what you see, such as like temperate areas I Philadelphia region, but I would say the hot springs probably is one of the most interesting samples we have, because you would think it's quite strange that diatoms can survive really intense temperatures, but they can.
Brian 39:57
There's something really lovely about the thin, Brown. Lime layer. And then when you look at it under a microscope, it's this incredibly gorgeous complex.
Jason Wallace 40:05
Yeah, I wanted to try to do our own diatom isolations in preparation for this episode, but it's a very busy time with grant proposals and such, and so we were not able to do that, although we have plenty of ponds around campus where we could go get some and I'm sure Brian has some hydrochloric acid or something that we could boil them in to clear them out. There are videos on YouTube that will show you how to do this. Just be very careful doing it at home, because you do have to, like, boil hydrochloric acid or stuff like that in order to clear them out.
Laura 40:30
Hydrogen Peroxide also works really well. Oh, that actually you don't have a ton of organic material in it. It's a softer treatment. So any diatom that's widely silicified, we have to use that for but it works pretty well, like 70% hydrogen peroxide, even like 40% hydrogen peroxide, I don't think it's the kind you can just buy from a drug store. I haven't tried that before, but it works, and you do really need a fume hood to do this. I do recommend not doing this without a fume hood.
Brian 40:53
Well, then Jason, actually, yes, I have both of those things, so bring me some pond slime, and we can do it later.Okay?
Jason Wallace 40:59
okay, so we've talked a lot about the morphology, and these things are beautiful. Now there's a bunch of shapes in the game. It's conveniently they tie the shape to the number of color patches you've gotten. So if you get one patch, it's a circle. Two it's a little oval. It has two sides. Three is a triangle. Four is a square, five is a star. Looking online, I saw a bunch of much weirder ones, where they're like, bulbous, or they're what is the weirdest diatom shape out there that you've seen? Like, are any of these things like weird fractal shapes or anything like that?
Laura 41:29
The weirdest one I always think of is campylodiscus, which looks just like a Pringles chip.
Jason Wallace 41:34
Okay, microscopic glass potato chip. Got it.
Brian 41:38
It's probably very crunchy too.
Jason Wallace 41:40
I'm sure it's very crunchy. I'm sure teeth would not like it.
Laura 41:43
There's also some too, like Entomoneis, which look like a figure eight, but they're also kind of twisted,
Laura 41:45
Like a mobius strip?
Brian 41:47
I don't know what a mobius strip is. It's like you could take a piece of paper and twist it on itself, so it technically only has one edge.
Laura 41:56
I think it's similar. So they look twisted, and they have pictures of them on DoNA which is the diatoms of North America.
Jason Wallace 42:01
There will be many, many photos linked in our show notes people, so you should check them out. Okay, so we should start wrapping this up, which comes to our nitpick corner. Brian's favorite part of the show.
Brian 42:10
Oh, I don't know, man, I don't know what to talk about. I mean, they Yes, you get diatoms out of water. Like, that's the thing. Yes, people used to arrange them on slides to make pretty murals. That's a thing.
Brian 42:16
I don't think there's much we can science nitpick in this. Like, there's not enough science in it. It's a very science-lite game. I think we can nitpick The one issue, the game pieces are beautiful and they're all foiled. But the problem is the foil actually makes it hard to see the color, sometimes a little bit. So when it comes scoring time, I was lifting up my my scoreboard, I was kind of tilting it to try to get the light right. Like, is that red? Is that purple?
Brian 42:42
The patterns of the pores, you said those are the areola.
Laura 42:44
Areolae? Yeah,
Brian 42:45
Areolae. Those are different on each shape. So you can use they're colorblind friendly in that regard. So they always have a pattern there too. It's not just the color, but you're right. Like the yellow and the green really hard to tell apart if you're in the wrong kind of light,
Jason Wallace 42:58
but that's about it. Like I said, it's a very elegant game, very well put together, very high quality, and I find it very fun. I don't know, I've toyed with the idea of going through the single player mode. So single player mode involves a bunch of cards where there's challenges and there's rules so that you can't just, like, play it forever until you get it. You only have so many spare diatoms you can pick up that don't fit the patterns you're trying to do. And they're actually really quite fun. And you start actually on the front of the board, which has all the set little pieces I mentioned, where you can only put a circle or a star or whatever. But the second half, you flip the board over where it doesn't have that, and it's free form arrangement. And so they have some of these where you're making arrangements that look like a tiny Solar System, or ones that look like a face or a tree or other things like that. Where you're putting these together
Brian 43:17
Jason is holding up cards of the different shapes. So for those of you who Jason's forgotten that this is an audio podcast,
Jason Wallace 43:51
no, no, I'm trying to get your reactions. Like I know our audience can't see, but you can at least react.
Brian 43:58
Audience, I apologize for Jason.
Jason Wallace 44:01
All right. I mean, that's really it. There's again, elegant game, very well done. So on to grades, and I'm gonna say this is, I think Turing machine was the one where I gave an undefined science grade.
Brian 44:10
I think what we need is an art historian to really grade this. I think that this is the wrong class.
Jason Wallace 44:15
Okay, I will say the science grade is undefined, but I'm definitely want to give it points for bringing attention to these beautiful creatures. And okay, it does actually do some things right. It gets the shininess of them, right. Well, it gets the shapes right. It gets the variability there. I don't want to give it a grade, because that implies a wrong standard, but I want to say that they managed to make the game and the science mesh beautifully. And I really appreciate that
Brian 44:38
we wouldn't have had a chance to talk about diatoms otherwise. So like I said, I'm not going to grade it either, but I'm glad it's out there. I'm glad it exists, not for science. We can give it a fun grade. Well, actually, Laura, what do you what do you think you haven't had a chance to play? But it sounds like you'd be more informed on this than we would be. What do you think
Laura 44:55
I'm just happy there is a board game out there about diatoms? Because I'm just happy that diatoms are getting promoted in any way possible. So I'm very thankful for that, and I have seen it before. It does look like a beautiful board game, and honestly, I think it kind of gets the heart of whole diatom arranging, and the really complicated nature is the rules, almost is a perfect analogy for how complicated and complex diatoms are. So I really like the game. I'm going to buy a copy eventually,
Brian 45:18
Awesome. Let's see, Jason, I want to hear your fun grade first because you really like this game. In fact, I bought the coffee. But you have the game because you like it so much more than I do.
Jason Wallace 45:26
I'm going to give it an A I keep using the word elegant. I love things that are elegant, that have relatively simple rules and yet have a lot of strategic depth to it, which I think this game satisfies. And like I said, it's one of the few games that we've played that has a solo mode where I've actually played the solo mode and enjoyed it, and I'm considering doing more. There may be, there may be, like, 30 days of diatoms on our Instagram feed at some point.
Brian 45:48
Jason may not want this shared, but one of his hobbies is stained glass. So I think this is merging his love of highly analytical, optimizing games with his desire to create beautifully arranged mosaics.
Jason Wallace 45:58
Oh yes, yes, the fact that these are actually made of glass. Is part of that, taking something from silica, making beautiful arrangements. And so, yes, there is a little bit synergy. Is like, Oh, this is that same thing, but on a microscopic scale, I don't think we've mentioned it. So we talk about all these diatom arrangements on microscope slides. So like a full beautiful mosaic of like 100 or 200 little diatoms in these beautiful patterns is about the size of a period. So they really can only be appreciated under the microscope, or as prints.
Laura 46:24
I Think it's even smaller than that, depending on the size of the diatom, because the largest diatom is only two millimeters wide. And then they get much smaller than that.
Brian 46:32
Wait they get up to two millimeters.?That's like naked eye visible. Where is this diatom?
Brian 46:38
It's over there. Jason, look behind you,
Laura 46:40
trying to remember what it's called, starts with an E. Think it ethmodiscus but I don't know.
Jason Wallace 46:41
exactly where it's found, Entomodiscus. Insect circle?
Brian 46:45
Is that an insect associated? Is that a thing?
Laura 46:49
I know it's a thick, circular diatom. Says it's found in the temperate zones of the world's ocean.
Brian 46:54
Oh, okay, for my fun grade, I guess I have never gotten out diatoms to play, except for you. And then you took the game so and then
Jason Wallace 47:02
I you gave me the game.
Brian 47:02
I did. I have actually officially given you the game. I have been like, Jason, you should keep this game. You really like this game. I don't know we could play it a couple more times. I don't really want to ding it. I'll just say B, it's fun. I enjoyed it. You know, it's a little complicated. It's kind of two games in one, there's the selection, and then arranging the mosaics is very complicated. And you know how I feel about over optimizing I enjoyed
Jason Wallace 47:20
it, and I actually got to play it with my nine year old, and she was also enjoying helping me make the arrangement and stuff. So I consider that a win.
Brian 47:27
Absolutely. Laura, I just wanted to ask, Do you have a favorite game?
Laura 47:30
I actually love classic monopoly, just because I get to wreak havoc or chaos when I play it.
Brian 47:35
Oh, really, do you play with house rules? Or do you play by rules, rules?
Laura 47:38
Well, when I do play with my brother, primarily it's rules, rules, and we get very competitive with each other. And we actually have a long history of using my cousins as pawns to beat each other.
Brian 47:49
Monopoly, bringing families together for however long Monopoly has been around.
Jason Wallace 47:53
Does that mean you're using your cousins as like shell corporations in the game?
Laura 47:57
Yep, I have no shame over it either.
Brian 48:01
That's fantastic.
Jason Wallace 48:02
All right, we'll wrap up there. Thank you, Laura, very much for coming on and telling us about these beautiful microscopic organisms. Is there any place you want people to check you out? Do you have, like, a social media or something else to follow?
Laura 48:12
There you can check out Diatoms of North America, which is a wonderful resource for them to use for diatoms. I am a part of that. And then if they want to ever come see diatoms. We do have a very small exhibit at the Academy natural sciences in Philadelphia, which is the oldest natural history museum in the entire country.
Brian 48:32
Well, next time I'm in Philadelphia, I'll put it on the to do list for sure.
Jason Wallace 48:34
Well, now you have something for your travel plans listeners. So with that, we will sign off. Thank you very much. Have a great month and good games,
Brian 48:37
and have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.
Jason Wallace 48:39
This has been the gaming with science podcast copyright 2026 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to game with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.
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By Gaming with Science Podcast#Diatoms #DONA #Ludoliminal #Microbiology #BoardGames #Science
In this episode we're going microscopic to talk about everything Diatoms! Starting from the game by Ludoliminal and going through the classic (and obscure) Victorian art form of arranging these beautiful glass-shelled organisms on microscope slides, our special guest Laura Aycock--collections manager at the world's *largest* diatom herbarium--helps us understand all the beauty and wonder of these tiny, shimmingering marvels. From tepid ponds to hot springs to arctic ice, diatoms are everywhere, and they do a lot for us while looking absolutely fabulous. So grab a microscope and prepare to never look at pond scum the same way again!
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This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.
Full Transcript
(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )
Brian 0:00
Jason, hello and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about science behind some of your favorite games.
Jason Wallace 0:10
Today, we will be talking about diatoms by ludoliminal Games. All right, everyone, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason. This is Brian, and today, for our special guest, we have Laura Aycock. Laura, can you please introduce yourself?
Laura 0:25
Sure. I'm Laura Aycock. I am the Collection Manager of the diatom herbarium at the Academy natural sciences in Philadelphia that's affiliated with Drexel University. And I've been working with diatoms for about 15 years, and I find them fun and enjoyable.
Brian 0:38
That's really cool. Thank you for coming on, Jason. How did you manage to get the exact right person to come talk to us? Good job
Jason Wallace 0:44
being very persistent with emails.
Laura 0:46
Theres also not very many of us
Jason Wallace 0:49
there is that when there's actually a website called diatoms.org, that has all the nation's top diatoms scientists linked to it, somehow, it's not that hard to find someone. So before we get into this lovely game about absolutely beautiful, microscopic creatures. Let's start with our fun science facts. So Laura, as our guest, we usually pass the privilege to you to start. Do you have something you'd like to share with our audience?
Laura 1:09
Sure. My favorite fact about diatoms is they produce about a fourth of the oxygen we breathe. So they're very important to life on Earth, and we wouldn't survive without them.
Brian 1:16
So trees get all the credit, but they're stealing that
Jason Wallace 1:19
we talkabout plant blindness, where people just don't look at plants. There's definitely what macroscopic bias, where we just don't think about all the things that aren't within, you know, human size scale. So yeah, trees get all the credit, but all these little microbes are actually doing a whole bunch of the work there.
Laura 1:33
Yeah, diatoms, along with other groups of algae, actually produce about half of the oxygen we breathe, so they are as important, if not more important, than land plant, but no one thinks about them, sees them, or really acknowledges them.
Brian 1:44
So let me think. Then I'm thinking about this track of carbon dioxide that we've been seeing sort of dip and rise and dip and rise and dip and rise. Now that dip and rise that's from the like Alpine forests in the northern continents, right? But the stable activity that's presumably all the algae in the ocean, right? Or do they also fluctuate on an annual cycle?
Jason Wallace 2:04
I'd assume they'd also fluctuate annually, just because of temperature, if nothing else.
Laura 2:07
It depends on the environment. So diatoms in the ocean are relatively consistent, but I think it does fluctuate with temperature. I actually don't know too much about marine diatoms, because my expertise lies in benthic freshwater diatoms.
Brian 2:19
Benthic freshwater. So that means, like, the things that live in the muck at the bottom of fresh water environments,
Laura 2:24
yeah, the brown slime you see when you go to creeks. That's what I love to look at.
Brian 2:28
Oh, you're a slimologist. That's awesome.
Jason Wallace 2:30
All right, Brian, your turn. What fun fact do you have for us today?
Brian 2:33
Well, funny enough, I also brought a diatoms one I was looking for something recently about diatoms in the news. It's a press release out of Stanford, about diatoms remaining active down to negative 15 degrees centigrade, so cold, basically, in solid ice isn't as solid as you'd think. Actually, it can have these little micro fluidic chambers within it, sort of threads of liquid water. And the diatoms were actually not only colonizing these but moving through these chambers. I didn't even know diatoms could move. I guess they have like little actin filaments that they use to move on slime. I want to know more about this, and I'm hoping that Laura can explain it.
Laura 3:08
Diatoms are very capable of active movement. Not all of them, though, they have to have a slit in the center of the cell, which is called the raphe and they can secrete mucilage. And they glide along like slugs.
Brian 3:18
So you can tell just by looking at them if they're going to be able to be mobile?
Laura 3:21
yep,
Brian 3:22
Do all the ones with Raphe have mobility? Or do some of them have the Raphe and are not mobile?
Laura 3:26
No, all of them have mobility. The raphe can vary in its placement on the cell, whether it's in the center of the cell, along the sides, if it's on one half of the valve. Because diatoms are made in two parts, they're kind of like a box where you have a top half and a bottom half. So when they're dead, they split apart. So you'll see the raphe on one valve and not the other. But they do have their Raphe.
Brian 3:43
That's really cool, man. So diatoms are kind of like mimics in D & D. They live in a box.
Jason Wallace 3:48
They are a box, a glass box. They make themselves.
Brian 3:51
That's okay. These are very cool organisms.
Jason Wallace 3:53
They are. So let's go on to this game, then, because this game is a beautiful game about these beautiful creatures. So diatoms is a game by Ludoliminal Games and published by 25th century games. It actually won a 2025 Mensa select award, and I like the tagline on the publisher's website. It is a stunningly beautiful game about making art from algae, which is not something you would think about, but the whole metaphor of this game is about Victorian diatom art, which is this obscure art form, where, back when microscopes, well, microscopes for the masses, were a new fangled thing, and people were trying to sell them. They wanted to sell things that you could look at right away. And so they would sell these little slides you could put under and they had diatom art on them, which is what you're making in this game. We'll talk more about what diatom art is in a little bit for the game itself, its basic stats. It's for one to four players, obligatory single player mode, although I'll say this is one of the few games we've played where I actually have played the single player mode, and I can attest it's actually quite fun.
Brian 4:51
Yeah, I was gonna say you actually said you liked it like you enjoyed it.
Jason Wallace 4:54
It's very calming. And ages eight plus about 30-45, minutes to play. Suggested retail price is $55 a lot of that is probably going to the very high quality components. So there's very high quality chipboard, most of which has foil embossing on it in some degree, oftentimes, lots. The game is played in two sections. You have your tile placing one where you've got these hexagonal tiles that have colors coming off of them. So every hexagon consists of six triangles joined at the tip. And so those six triangles can be any one of a number of colors. They've got five different ones, red, yellow, green, blue and purple. Some of them are white as wild spots. And it's a typical like color matching game. You have the hexes down on the board, and then you try to place new hexes so that the colors match. That part is fairly straightforward. The thing is based on the colors you make at that intersection. So when you place a hex down next to two other tiles, it forms a point where all three of those tiles touch, and where, therefore there are six triangles around that central point. And the size and distribution of the color patches determines which diatoms you then collect. Metaphorically, this is you like looking at a patch of water under the microscope, and like sucking it up and being able to grab some diatoms out of it. The second half of the game, every player has their own little player board, so everyone's working individually. Here you've got the shared water tiles, but an individual board, and you're placing those diatoms on the board in order to make arrangements. And the board has all these cutouts where I haven't counted the number of spaces. There's probably like 40 or 50 of them, each one of them can only hold one of two shapes, and they've got it drawn out. So you can say, Oh, this spot can either hold a triangle or a star, but it cannot hold a circle, or this one can hold an oval or a circle, but it can't hold a square, that sort of thing, because the diatoms, in addition to coming in five colors, also come in five shapes, and those shapes are based on the size of the color patch you made when placing those tiles together. The idea is you're trying to place these down artfully. And of course, because it's a game, it's not just aesthetically pleasing. They have rules for how you gain points. And when I have taught this game to other people, which we did at a few conventions last year, keeping track of the scoring rules is the hardest part of this game. People get the tile laying pretty easily. People get getting the shapes and collecting the diatoms. Remembering the many, many different ways you can score points is actually the hardest part, because you can score points based off of how many of different colors you have. More diatoms of a single color gets you more points. You can get them based off of where they are. So the board is circular. It has kind of three rings. You have your inner ring, your middle ring and your outer ring. And then, based on the diversity of shapes you have in those, determines points there. And then there's all these lines of symmetry, so horizontal and vertical and diagonals. And if you have matching pairs of diatoms on those on the same ring, the score sheet for this is, thankfully very well put together. There are literally, like, 20 or 30 spots for you to write down. Oh, here's how many points I got for this particular arrangement here, and then this one here, it walks you through. If you just go through the score sheet, you will have everything. And it makes tallying it up at the end easy. It does not make keeping all those rules in your head during play any easier. That is still quite hard. And I think a lot of people, at least a lot of people I've played with, reach the point where they focus on a few things and they just kind of don't worry about the rest, even after several plays, when I'm looking at this, like, okay, I can keep a few things in head, but I can't keep all possible ones in head. So sometimes it's just like, Well, I'm just going to play this here, get a few things, and then I'll figure out where I can place them well.
Brian 8:21
I think that's everything in the game. When you're talking about components, one of the things they have are these little petri dishes that you get to keep all your pieces in. Except I can tell you, if you've ever worked with actual petri dishes, these are much nicer than regular petri dishes. These are actually like your normal petri dish. If you handle it wrong, it immediately cracks. These are actually meant to hold up over time.
Jason Wallace 8:32
Yes, these are not meant to be disposed of after a few days.
Brian 8:35
No, for sure,
Jason Wallace 8:36
and they have a few other things. So they have, like every player has their own little like score guidebook so that you can look through and you can see how the scoring works. They've got this cute little magnifying glass so you can, like, isolate the little six point section that you created so you can more easily track because some people have trouble mentally sectioning that off from the larger tiles in order to get it. And several the people that I taught they actually really liked using that tool.
Brian 8:59
Oh, really,
Jason Wallace 8:59
they liked using it because it because it made it much easier for them to figure out how many of each diatom and each color they needed to get.
Brian 9:06
I could see using it for just the role play purpose of looking like you're holding up your little magnifying glass to the water to show the section you're working on. But interesting, I figured that was just for fun.
Jason Wallace 9:16
No, it's actually quite useful for many people, and that's most of the rules. It's actually a very simple game. It's a very elegant game. You can bring in additional judging rules to make it even more complicated, if you want. And one thing is that once you set a diatom down on your board, which you have until it comes back to you. So this game could take forever, if you had to wait for someone to place their diatoms before the next person went but you don't, you have until it's your turn again. But once they're down, you can't move them, which, while being a nice standard game mechanic of like, you have to commit, I also really like it because of the metaphor. Because the metaphor is you are gluing these to a microscope slide. Once they're glued down, you can't move them. And so I think it actually works really well doing double duty there.
Brian 9:51
So we got this game, I think I picked it up at some point, because it was, it seemed like it was thematic. It. Is extremely pretty. But we actually had discussions, is this a game we can talk about? Because this game, the metaphor, is really about an obscure Victorian art form, more than it is about diatoms. But we also thought, when else are we going to get the opportunity to have somebody on to tell us about diatoms? So we should just take this opportunity and talk about it anyway.
Jason Wallace 10:18
I'm much more liberal about what can go on as long as it has science in it, somewhere that we can talk about, I'm fine. And definitely this is a science light game. It is inspired by science. In fact, reading the designer diary, the tile laying component is a very early part of the game. That was sort of what the core was, but the diatom veneer, so the theming of the game was actually a very late addition. The designer actually says how she was playing with the game. She had the tile laying down. It was fine. It was actually like collecting fractions, because it originally was something to do about, like math fluency due to some fellowship she'd gotten, but it really wasn't quite jelling. And then she took her child to the aquarium, and they had some poster about diatoms. And unfortunately, the link to her picture was broken, so I couldn't see what the poster actually said, but apparently it talked about, like these microscopic silicon-based algae that made these beautiful structures. And she just fixated on that. She started doing deep dives and researching, and she found this beautiful art form. And then apparently the rest of the game just fell together after that, like it made perfect sense. She redid where you placed your little fraction things. Originally, it was some sort of like bingo board into the actual diatom one. And that's fascinating to me, because the metaphor feels like it goes so deep into this game in terms of how you actually play things. It's just fascinating to me that was actually the last addition to it interesting. But anyway, that's enough about the game, per se. Now we're going to go to the actual science here. So Laura, this is where you're gonna need to help us. Because even though we both study microscopic things, we're both kind of bacteria people, well, plants and bacteria, and my understanding is that a diatom is neither of those. So what is a diatom?
Laura 11:54
That is a question I get asked more than probably any other question in my career. And a diatom is neither a plant nor an animal. It is a protist, however, is algae, which, if you've ever looked at a phylogenetic tree of life, you'll notice there's the three main kingdoms. Algae actually spans all three. So it's not monophyletic, which is the term we use. But diatoms are a particular group of algae, and they're all share the trait that they have a cell wall made of glass or silica.
Jason Wallace 12:17
Okay, so protist protists are single celled eukaryotes, so they're not bacteria. They actually have complicated cells like we do, that has a nucleus and all the organelles.
Brian 12:26
but that's okay. We're not going to hold that against them.
Jason Wallace 12:28
My understanding is that most eukaryotes are protists. This is another case where we are very biased by animals and plants and fungi, because we can see them. But the vast majority of the Tree of Life of eukaryotes, of anything like us, is actually microscopic, and we kind of ignore it. So you mentioned that they make a cell wall out of glass, out of silica. Why silica? It's like cellulose all over the place, chitin for fungi, peptidoglycan for bacteria, silica, glass. Why silica?
Brian 12:57
And it's there. Actually it is their cell wall in the same way that, like a plant cell wall has cellulose and pectin, they make their cell wall out of silicates?
Laura 13:05
Yeah, they do. So they don't make the silica itself, which, if you think about it, that causes them to not have to use as much energy as it would to make an organic component. They pull it from the environment and then build the silica cell walls. So it's really readily available in the environment, which is a easy resource for them to grab. It's hard. It protects them from predators. It's opaline, and it has the ability for them to have pores, which allows for greater sunlight penetration, for photosynthesis. So there's a lot of reasons why they have these silica cell walls.
Jason Wallace 13:33
So opaline? transparent?
Laura 13:34
Yep, they're opaline. They're not fully transparent. Of course, we don't really know, because it's really hard to see a diatom and what it actually looks like. But the common belief is that if you were to look and you know what an opal looks like, they're probably similar to that, where they kind of have this milky exterior that is radiant, and then it has these beautiful colors to it. But we don't really know they're so tiny we can only see what we can see through the microscope. And they are see through. So when you look at them alive, you see the chloroplast, you see all the organelles, you see this beautiful golden brown color when you look at them, because you're not seeing the actual cell wall, because it's mostly see through and transparent.
Brian 14:07
So I have two questions. One question is, what does the name mean? What's the origin of the name diatom?
Laura 14:13
The name diatom comes from it being two parts. So it has two halves, because diatoms are shaped like a box where they have the top half and a bottom half.
Jason Wallace 14:19
Okay, so probably Greek diatomos or something like that.
Laura 14:22
That sounds right.
Brian 14:23
The other question was, so they're photosynthetic, but they're not related to green plants, is that right?
Laura 14:28
Correct? The algal group that is most closely related to plants would be green algae, but diatoms are not green algae. They are in their different kingdom.
Brian 14:35
okay, different kingdom. So they're, they're brown algae, right?
Laura 14:38
No brown algae would be seaweeds. Oh, they're called golden brown algae. Is their common name.
Brian 14:43
Okay? There's too many flavors and colors of algae. I guess there's a reason they span, you know, so many different branches. Golden brown algae.
Laura 14:50
Algae literally fits in every kingdom of the tree of life.
Brian 14:54
So algae is a little bit like when you say tree, lots of different things make trees, right? An algae is just a way. Of being a living thing.
Laura 15:01
Yep, traditionally, they're photosynthetic. I think that's the only characteristic that really pulls them all together.
Jason Wallace 15:06
And then you said that you're the collections manager at a diatom herbarium. Now I'm familiar with plant herbariums, where people take plant samples and they'll press them in paper, and then they record like where they were recorded and when and such. And people use that to study the distributions of plants and such. I assume a diatom herbarium is similar. But can you explain to us, like, what exactly is a diatom herbarium and what's it used for?
Laura 15:30
The diatom herbarium operates very similar to the botany herbarium. We actually do have a botany herbarium in our institution as well, but we're not a part of it just because we are diatoms and just diatoms. That being said, we actually do have radiolarians and other things, but that's another topic for another day of just collections in general, but we have the largest collection of microscope slides in the entire world. So we have about 300,000 accessioned microscope slides. And we have accessioned means that it's officially cataloged into collection. We have a ton of other microscope slides that have not been formally added to our database, given a catalog number, and don't even know, probably another 100, 200,000 of those. And then we have the materials used to make the slides. So when we say materials, it's usually organic or digested material. And what we mean by that is when you go collect an algae sample. So algae is found everywhere, fresh water, salt water, there's even terrestrial diatoms. And you collect the sample, and then to actually see them, and to see the intricate structures of the cell wall, we have to soak them in acid to remove all the organic materials you find inside the cells, because they're see through, we can't see any of the structures about doing that. So then we preserve the materials, which is the digestive material, our sample. And so we have that as well in the collection, and we probably have about 100 to 200,000 samples, and all of our slides and samples are from all over the world, and how they're used is that researchers will contact us if they're trying to study diatoms in a specific region to look at what was there 150 years ago, to see how that compares to what's there. Though, also we have a lot of type slides. So if you get into taxonomy, in order to describe a species, you have to select a single specimen, which is a whole debate in the diatom world that I don't think we have time for today, to use as the type specimen. So we have about five to 6000 type slides. So if you're trying to describe a new species, you want to look back at the original type specimen to ensure that what you're describing is not already been described, and then also to look at comparisons of morphological features.
Jason Wallace 17:20
You have the diatom holotypes.
Laura 17:22
We have a lot of them.
Jason Wallace 17:23
We talked about the game holotype and dinosaur holotypes About a year ago. So, so what's your job as collections manager entail? Are you entering all these into the database, the ones that haven't been cataloged? Are you fulfilling order or is like, what do you do as your day job?
Brian 17:37
Is your collection digitized at all? Or is it all
Laura 17:40
Oh, boy. So that that word digitized. So yes, we are digitiz ed. We do have an online database, which is a bit of a it's been chaotic. So we had one database in a format that wasn't functional for many years, and then we moved to a different format in which we're having to rebuild it and get it back to where it's fully functional. A lot of our data is digitized in the sense of, we have the metadata. We have a lot of other stuff too, such as, like pictures of the specimens on the slides, which counts as digitized data. We actually have 3d microscope slides available online, so we have scans of our slides that you can operate, similar to looking at a microscope, where you can focus in and out at different, well, not different magnifications, but you can zoom in and out of that scan, which is at 400 times magnification. We also have a ton of other just stuff. We have a library, which we have digitized as well. We have records of that, and I have to manage all of that, organize it, maintain it. I have to care for the slides to make sure they're being properly stored and not getting damaged over time. Repair slide that they're broken. If I can repair them, I have to send loans out if other scientists request that they want to see slides or take images of type materials to send to them. It's a lot. The better question is, what don't I do as the Collection Manager? Because on top of all of that, I also am a researcher myself, and try to publish papers and work on research projects various different topics. With diatoms, I primarily focus on phylogenetics with them right now and taxonomy, but I also do ecological research as well. It's a lot.
Jason Wallace 19:06
And so if you remember from our talk about Holotype, I think we talked about phylogenetics and taxonomy there. Phylogenetics is the process of figuring out what is related to what, and then taxonomy is the process of like assigning names and species. And it sounds like trying to tell two species of diatoms apart is about as problematic as trying to tell two species of bacteria apart, which is to say that the natural world laughs at these artificial divisions that we humans have made upon them.
Brian 19:32
But they've got all the cool structures. So I unlike bacteria, you've got a lot of morphology to look at, right?
Laura 19:38
Yes, they have numerous structures that are so immense that you wouldn't even be able to comprehend how many there are, and we're discovering new ones each day. When we look at them in a scanning electron microscope, we can actually see the very detailed structures of the cell wall at a level that we wouldn't be able to see under a light microscope, we can see the internal features because they have features on the external part the internal part on. The sides, they're held together by silica bands. And even those can have features that can distinguish two species. Diatom taxonomy is really complicated. It's really hard to distinguish them. There's debates about what is a new species, what isn't and then when you start adding molecular data, which is the DNA, we finally have started doing DNA work on diatoms. We're very behind on that compared to other organisms, but we work on that too. You would think that would add more clarity, but sometimes it creates more confusion. There's a ton of cryptic species, which are species that you can't tell apart morphologically by how they look, but they have different DNA sequences, which would indicate they're different species. And there's the ecological species concept of maybe these two diatoms have identical morphological features and identical DNA, but however, they only exist in completely different ecological environments. So are they two different species, or are they the same? Diatoms just are the epitome of all of the issues with taxonomy and what is a species and what isn't.
Jason Wallace 20:55
So are they sexual, or are they just asexual?
Laura 20:58
They do both. So they reproduce by binary fission, which I think is the primary mode of reproduction. So how that works is they have a top half and a bottom half, those will split apart, and the top half becomes the bottom half for the daughter cell. However, if you think of a box or a petri dish, one half is slightly smaller than the other. So as they produce they go through this size shrinkage. So you'll have a great size variation, which also creates some difficulties when trying to identify them within the same species, and can actually affect the morphological structures as well and how they look. And in order to get back to the original size, they have to undergo sexual reproduction, where they produce an egg and a sperm, mate and then create an Auxospore that can pull silica from the environment to get back to the original size.
Brian 21:38
That's crazy. It actually vaguely reminds me of telomere degradation. Jason, explain what that is.
Jason Wallace 21:45
So telomeres are the tips of your chromosomes, which is what your DNA is bundled in. And because you can't copy all the way to the end of them, they tend to shrink over your lifespan. And there are complicated mechanisms to help take care of that when children are conceived and such. And that is not my area, so they don't know what those are, but this sounds amazing, that basically every time they divide, they technically get a little smaller, until they finally need to do sexual reproduction. So they could they start over, so they can so they can get back up to normal size. That's just fascinating.
Brian 22:14
That's so cool.
Jason Wallace 22:15
How long have diatoms been around? I mean, something this diverse and this widespread, I'm thinking hundreds of millions of years silica shells, those have got to be very well preserved in the fossil record. How long have they been around?
Brian 22:25
And I imagine from a species depiction, if you're using the silica shell, then you can be doing using the same species characteristics for our fossilized silica shells from a long time ago versus the ones that are out right now.
Laura 22:38
Yeah. So the current belief for how old diatoms are is from the Cretaceous Period. They're actually relatively new on the evolutionary scale. So dinosaurs came here first, and then diatoms showed up sometime afterwards, towards the Early Cretaceous period. And the reason we know this is because the silica cell wall preserve so well. They are heavy. So when diatoms die and they lose their buoyancy, they drop to the bottom of the water body that they are existing in. So whether that be a river, a stream, a bay, an ocean, and they they lay on top of each other and create a structure similar to like a sediment core. So when you take cores that which is like a giant cylinder that you can put into the core, pull it up, and then you have different layers, you can actually see how the diatom community has changed over time, especially in water bodies that are more stagnant, such as lakes or bays, we've been able to date the sediment, and that's how we can figure out how old diatoms are. And the current findings is that at the Early Cretaceous period, but diatoms have changed rapidly since then. So what we see from the older diatoms, they look remarkably different than what we see in today's modern times.
Jason Wallace 23:38
So quick aside, Early Cretaceous would be probably 100 to 100 and 50 million years ago. I had no idea we'd be referencing holotype so many times on this episode. But change drastically how? like so listeners, if you're not driving, find a place to do a quick pause. Do a search for diatom art or diatom diversity, and just spend a few minutes going down the Google rabbit hole of just how varied and beautiful these little things are. When they're mounted, they're glass shells. You hit them with a light, they turn all these beautiful rainbow colors. I look at those like we have long, skinny ones, we've got round ones. We've got ovals, stars, these weird triangle things, if you're saying they were very different than what they were, what were they?
Laura 24:15
I'm trying to think of how to describe it without showing a picture. And they have strange structures. They almost look alien. They have. Some of them have what looks like antenna, weird spines, the areolae or the pores in the cells, can look really strange compared to what we see today. And in my mind, when I think of a normal, diatom in modern time, I have the background to know what that is, but it's hard for me to describe that without using pictures of what the shapes and everything look like. But even the shapes of them back then are different than what we see to now, let me start by saying there's two main classes of diatom shapes, which is centric, and pinnate centric are more circular, and pinnate are more boxy. So centric diatoms are believed to have happened before pinnate. So that's why we'll see more centric diatoms when you look back in the cores,
Jason Wallace 24:56
I'm just thinking how every time life hits on something new, it tends to do it weird at first, which obviously is our own personal bias, but I'm thinking of, if any of you have ever seen pictures of animals recovered from the Cambrian explosion, which was when animal life first really diversified in the oceans, about 500 million years ago. I think there's some weird critters in that that we look at those days like that. That was evolution experimenting, because it hadn't figured things out yet,
Brian 25:21
so we had the diatom explosion of the Early Cretaceous, where they were experimenting with form and shape. We'll definitely try to find some pictures that we can put up with these, or point people to things on our show notes. So we can say like, this is a current diatom. This is an early diatom, so they can see for themselves how they have changed over 100 million years.
Laura 25:41
I definitely recommend doing that if you ever looking for a good rabbit hole to get stuck in diatoms. Is a great one for that.
Brian 25:43
Do you have any diatom channels you can recommend on social media?
Laura 25:47
I don't know if there's diatom channels, per se, there is the DoNA, which is the diatoms of North America, we have a webinar every other Tuesday at 12 Eastern Time, and they save all of those online and publish them on YouTube so you can watch all of the previous webinars, some of them a little bit more friendly to the novice, and some of them were geared and tailored towards researchers. There's a large variety of the different webinars, and those are fun to look over. There's also Jeffrey stone, I think he has an Instagram or some sort of social media account where he does SEM work, which is the scanning electron microscope. And I'll often show diatoms and talk about them. I think they actually have their own podcast. I'll have to do more research into that and give you the name of what they do.
Brian 26:25
Oh, that would be great. So I manage the social media for as it is for the podcast, and I know that there would be a hunger for diatoms on Instagram. There's a whole subdivision of Instagram people just taking pretty pictures of things in nature, and micrographs and close ups of plants and everything, and I think diatoms would hit big.
Jason Wallace 26:43
Unfortunately, I think our biggest contender for that, we lost a few years ago. So if you do any search for diatom art, you will eventually run across Klaus Kemp, who, until a few years ago, was, as I understand it, the at least the most famous living diatom artist, possibly the only professional living diatom artist, but he passed away in 2022 but he actually spent years perfecting a glue recipe that would take days to dry so that he could position his diatoms properly. Because there's hundreds of these things, and it takes a very long time. He built custom microscope rigs. People like, pick them up and move them around. There's a video you can look up called the diatomist. I'll link it in the show notes. It's actually well worth a watch. It's only about 10 or 15 minutes long, beautiful, highly recommended.
Brian 26:43
So if you want to manipulate a diatom on a slide are you using, like a super pulling, like a fine glass rod into like a little micro point, or like a fine needle, how do you move one diatom?
Laura 27:36
So there's a lot of people who've tried various ways to do that. I know actually decent amount about the original diatom arrangers from the Victorian time period. We have a lot of slides by Möller, who was the original or most well known diatom arranger from that time period. And so I've done a lot of research, because there's some of the more precious items in our collection, and they're fun to show to the public, or if we have any events, I've done a little bit of research into his life. And one of the things I've noted most is that the original arrangers all kept their secrets with them and how they did it. So unfortunately, we don't know what they did to create these beautiful arrangements, especially Henry Dalton, who used butterfly scales, parts of bugs and created true artwork. He has chickens, flowers there's insanely gorgeous. I also recommend searching Henry Dalton arranged slides. They're gorgeous. And there are also some diatoms on there that he died to add color to them, but Klaus Kemp was the most modern one, and he has records of how he did it, but how you move diatoms, we have to still do that if we want to do SEM work and look at a certain position of a diatom, because they look a lot different when they're sitting on their side versus when you see them from what we call valve view, which is the forward view. We used glass pipettes that we stretch under a flame so they're super tiny. We tried using that to suck them up and move them around. It's really complicated, really hard, very tedious, exhausting, stressful work
Jason Wallace 28:52
that sounds like the voice of experience
Laura 28:55
trying to make monocultures for diatoms is one of the most frustrating things I've ever done in my life, because you have to isolate one cell and move it, because they do reproduce by binary fission, and there's not enough DNA in most cells to get quality DNA sequences, so you have to isolate one cell, move it into a Petri dish with medium, and then you just pray that it grows. It often doesn't and just dies. But that isolating one from a live slide culture is just frustrating. But we actually have a student. Her name is Sylvia Lepic, and she really found these arranged slides beautiful and lovely, so she started doing that herself. And she uses a eyelash glued to a wooden rod that she will look at the microscope under 100X magnification and manipulate diatoms that way. I forgot to ask her what kind of glue she uses. I know she used glycerin, plus some lab grade gelatin. Has she tried that as well? But she's actually been really good and has made some gorgeous arrangement just out of fun.
Brian 29:48
That's really cool. I'm thinking about these other times where you see the science and art kind of coming together, like I'm thinking about the glass flowers that are on display. I think it's at Harvard, because they're so important for identification. But they don't flower all the time. So if you really want to be able to teach people how to do the identifications, you have to have the flowers, and in this case, the sort of art made with the diatoms. I don't know. I mean, like, if you could make a diatom arrangement, that would be a combination of art and science. Would you try to arrange, like a phylogenetic tree? Like, what would you make as your arrangement of diatoms?
Laura 30:18
There's actually example of what I really enjoy about the arranged diatom. So as I mentioned earlier, that we have to see certain features with the different views that you see them in, versus girdle versus valve view is there was Schultz, who was a original member of the Academy of Natural sciences, who made arranged slides, and he would take valves and put them in these different orientations, so that way they could be used to research and to really learn the morphology of the diatom. So I would enjoy doing something like that. There's also Möller was quite famous for using microphotography, where they would take a picture with the names written of the diatoms and somehow shrink it down where they can glue it onto a microscope slide, and they would place individual valves into the circles above these names. So when you go to look at this microscope slide from the 1800s you see a diatom, and under it is the name written down. And I think that is amazing, because back then, he paired up with Rabenhorst , and they actually did do art compared with science. That was amazing learning tool. They were able to help young taxonomists start to learn the name, so they have access to the diatom right next to the name.
Jason Wallace 31:18
It's lovely collaboration between science and art. We don't get enough of those, but they're wonderful when they happen in all of this. Laura, do you have a favorite diatom? I mean, you have access to the world's largest collection. Surely, you must be able to pick a favorite out of all that.
Brian 31:31
And I actually wanted to ask a slightly different question that's on the same theme. I see that you have named many you've contributed several species. So is one of those your favorite?
Laura 31:39
So right now my favorite diatom. It does change fairly often depending on what I'm working on, is I recently published a paper where I described a few new species of Penularia, and one of them was able to name after my former research advisor, Dr Kalina Manoylov. So that's very special to me, because I was able to do something special for her and give her back a little bit of how much she's poured into my life and my professional career.
Brian 32:01
That's very sweet. What is the name of that species?
Laura 32:02
It's actually not on diatoms of North America, because I need to make a page for it still, because the paper was just published recently, so I couldn't have made a page without the name being officially published. But it's Penularia manoylovy (sp?).
Brian 32:15
Okay, well, let us know. We'll point people to it when it's out. Okay, we can at least put it on our Discord.
Jason Wallace 32:20
Going back a little bit, you talked about how diatoms stick around. And when I was researching, I came across something that I've run into previously, which is diatomaceous earth, which is apparently dirt made from diatoms. Can you explain to me what this stuff is?
Laura 32:35
Yes, so it deposits the diatoms that there was a body of water that had an abundance of diatoms. As it dried up over time, all of the silica would sink to the bottom, and then you just have this massive deposit of pure silica dust, and it appears white and chalky, and it's just crushed up frustules, which is what we call diatom cells. And it has a lot of applications. It's used a lot for commercial use. It's a very valuable resource, and it's also beautiful to look at because it's just a whole bunch of diatoms. And I know of a few things they use it for. Is like a dynamite stabilizer. It's used for filtration to make beer and wine and fish tanks. They use it as an abrasive, so for fine sanding, because it is slightly abrasive, it found in some toothpaste, because it is a gentle abrasive,
Brian 33:15
we use it for pest control in organic farming. It's the insects don't want to walk over it or something. I don't know.
Laura 33:22
What it does is it gets into the skeleton of the bugs and breaks it apart. So it kind of is like a whole bunch of tiny glasses attacking the bug.
Jason Wallace 33:30
Tiny glass knives being shoved into the bugs exoskeleton got it,
Laura 33:33
but it's organic and won't harm us as humans.
Brian 33:36
Like eating glass. Is it bad for humans, or it's just it's too small to hurt us?
Laura 33:40
You can buy food grade diatomaceous earth, and there is a difference between food grade and non food grade, where it's fine to ingest in small quantities, it's not fine to breathe in, and actually can cause lung damage if you do breathe in too much of it, because it is just tiny shards of glass.
Jason Wallace 33:55
Okay, so okay to eat, not okay to breathe. Got it also, part of me just chafed at the idea of a silicon based substance being called Organic.
Brian 34:03
That's a different episode
Laura 34:05
that depends on the definition of organic.
Brian 34:08
Yes, it does.
Jason Wallace 34:09
Yes, I know. So one of the facts I ran across when researching for this episode is that, apparently the Amazon rainforest gets fertilized by diatom dust from Africa that gets blown across from the Sahara, from where there used to be a bunch of lakes, and they've all dried up. Now, can you confirm that?
Laura 34:26
I do know about that. I don't know a ton about it. I know very little bit. But if you do go and you collect some of the sediment off of the top of the Sahara Desert, you'll find diatoms in it. And diatoms are remarkable organisms and can withstand years of desiccation. So there are believed, confirmed instances where they've been able to rehydrate diatoms from the Sahara Desert, which would have allowed for that repopulation if it gets blown in the wind or gets carried up in the clouds and then dropped on the Amazon rainforest. The whole idea of diatom dispersal and how it travels around is a very complicated topic.
Jason Wallace 34:57
Okay, Brian, diatoms have just surpassed tardigrades in terms of my favorite cute, microscopic organism,
Brian 35:02
okay,
Laura 35:03
they don't look like bears. The Tardigrades are adorable.
Brian 35:06
Yeah? So, like, what are the Okay, so I was gonna ask about the DNA thing, but then I figured it might be like a touchy subject. I'm also thinking about how everybody's taxonomy got rewritten by DNA. For bacteria, it's mostly settled down the fungi people are going through it now, but for the diatoms, it seems like it's even worse, because the problem now is that you've got a morphological species concept that you've been able to apply back through time, but you can't do that with the extinct ones. So what you're going to have is two parallel species definitions for the same groups of organisms. That's going to make things complicated.
Laura 35:37
I would say that is a touchy topic, and there is two different sides or parties that believe certain things. So diatoms are used as bio-indicators, which is the biggest applications for them in environmental research. So a bio-indicator is an organism that you can based on its presence or absence in the environment. Can give you ideas about how healthy or clean or unhealthy the environment is. So diatoms are used as bio indicators, and that's all been based on morphology for the past, however long we've been working with them, but now there's this meta barcoding and e-DNA that's coming up, and you can use that to make water quality research using diatoms. However, you lose that very important connection between how they look and the DNA sequence, because eDNA doesn't allow that connection to morphology, unless you have a reference library that was done through monocultures to be able to compare the sequences,
Jason Wallace 36:27
all right? And so eDNA just means environmental DNA. It's DNA you get from, like taking a water sample or a soil sample, instead of taking it from a specific organism.
Laura 36:36
So there is this debate on, do we need to connect the data? Do we not need to connect the data? And it can get a bit dicey between people on this debate. And generally, the diatom community is very friendly and cohesive. However, debates do happen in any scientific community, so this is definitely one of them that happens fairly frequently, and there are people who just do diatom DNA and don't really know anything about morphology. So it's a strange and complicated topic.
Brian 37:03
I feel like if the diatomologist and the artist can get together, then the molecular and the morphologist should be able to find common ground as well, right?
Laura 37:10
I would hope so. And I definitely am on the party of we need to figure out how to connect the morphology with the molecular data. And there are a lot of people that are working towards that and stand in that middle ground. So there is progress moving forward.
Brian 37:23
Diatoms united.
Jason Wallace 37:24
So you mentioned that they're indicator species, and you mentioned previously that they fix a lot of oxygen for the world. So what else do they do in ecosystems? What other roles are they playing?
Laura 37:35
So diatoms are the primary producers. In almost all aquatic ecosystems, if you think back to fifth grade science, when you learned about primary producer, and then the grazers, and then you have the predators. So everything eats everything, and the energy flow through an ecosystem all starts with plants, well diatoms and other photosynthetic organisms play that role in aquatic ecosystems. So they're very important, because without them, you wouldn't have the energy flow through the ecosystem.
Jason Wallace 37:59
So they're the basis. They capture the sunlight and it flows through. And because they're largely microscopic and just kind of like the brownish slime that we see on rocks and tree stumps and stuff, we just ignore them, but it's actually a really important component for how energy flows through the environment.
Laura 38:15
Yes, and diatoms in particular are interesting because they have lipid droplets, which is oil in them. There's this whole idea to use them to milk for oil. But again, that's another topic that requires a lot of conversation.
Brian 38:26
Did you say milk? Are we milking diatoms?
Laura 38:28
I did say milk. So when they get stressed, they produce lipid droplets and oil. And so the idea was to get a whole bunch of diatoms in a pool, stress them out, and then milk the oil out of it.
Brian 38:37
Oh, wow. Is there society for like, protection of diatoms. This sounds cruel.
Laura 38:42
No, the problem is, is, it takes so much energy to get to that point where you actually get a usable amount of oil. Is, it's not really any benefit. It's actually worse than the regular oil that we use now. But they've been referred to as the hamburger of the ocean because they have those oil droplets. Is, they're very nutrient dense, though they're beneficial for organisms to eat them, especially the macro invertebrates or the small fish they eat them.
Brian 39:04
Do the lipids contribute to buoyancy and keep them up in the photic zone? Or is that just just, am I just making a connection to something that isn't actually there?
Laura 39:14
I have to go back to my plant cell anatomy, but I think it's primarily to use for storage, because they do it when they're stressed, when the environment. So I think it the storage or way to keep them alive under stress.
Jason Wallace 39:24
Okay, so what is the weirdest environment that you have a sample from?
Laura 39:30
So I don't personally have any, I mean the collection. I think we have some from some hot springs in Japan. My boss here, the curator, Dr. Marina Potapova, has a lot of Arctic diatoms in her collection in some highly harsh environments, that they also look a lot different than what you see, such as like temperate areas I Philadelphia region, but I would say the hot springs probably is one of the most interesting samples we have, because you would think it's quite strange that diatoms can survive really intense temperatures, but they can.
Brian 39:57
There's something really lovely about the thin, Brown. Lime layer. And then when you look at it under a microscope, it's this incredibly gorgeous complex.
Jason Wallace 40:05
Yeah, I wanted to try to do our own diatom isolations in preparation for this episode, but it's a very busy time with grant proposals and such, and so we were not able to do that, although we have plenty of ponds around campus where we could go get some and I'm sure Brian has some hydrochloric acid or something that we could boil them in to clear them out. There are videos on YouTube that will show you how to do this. Just be very careful doing it at home, because you do have to, like, boil hydrochloric acid or stuff like that in order to clear them out.
Laura 40:30
Hydrogen Peroxide also works really well. Oh, that actually you don't have a ton of organic material in it. It's a softer treatment. So any diatom that's widely silicified, we have to use that for but it works pretty well, like 70% hydrogen peroxide, even like 40% hydrogen peroxide, I don't think it's the kind you can just buy from a drug store. I haven't tried that before, but it works, and you do really need a fume hood to do this. I do recommend not doing this without a fume hood.
Brian 40:53
Well, then Jason, actually, yes, I have both of those things, so bring me some pond slime, and we can do it later.Okay?
Jason Wallace 40:59
okay, so we've talked a lot about the morphology, and these things are beautiful. Now there's a bunch of shapes in the game. It's conveniently they tie the shape to the number of color patches you've gotten. So if you get one patch, it's a circle. Two it's a little oval. It has two sides. Three is a triangle. Four is a square, five is a star. Looking online, I saw a bunch of much weirder ones, where they're like, bulbous, or they're what is the weirdest diatom shape out there that you've seen? Like, are any of these things like weird fractal shapes or anything like that?
Laura 41:29
The weirdest one I always think of is campylodiscus, which looks just like a Pringles chip.
Jason Wallace 41:34
Okay, microscopic glass potato chip. Got it.
Brian 41:38
It's probably very crunchy too.
Jason Wallace 41:40
I'm sure it's very crunchy. I'm sure teeth would not like it.
Laura 41:43
There's also some too, like Entomoneis, which look like a figure eight, but they're also kind of twisted,
Laura 41:45
Like a mobius strip?
Brian 41:47
I don't know what a mobius strip is. It's like you could take a piece of paper and twist it on itself, so it technically only has one edge.
Laura 41:56
I think it's similar. So they look twisted, and they have pictures of them on DoNA which is the diatoms of North America.
Jason Wallace 42:01
There will be many, many photos linked in our show notes people, so you should check them out. Okay, so we should start wrapping this up, which comes to our nitpick corner. Brian's favorite part of the show.
Brian 42:10
Oh, I don't know, man, I don't know what to talk about. I mean, they Yes, you get diatoms out of water. Like, that's the thing. Yes, people used to arrange them on slides to make pretty murals. That's a thing.
Brian 42:16
I don't think there's much we can science nitpick in this. Like, there's not enough science in it. It's a very science-lite game. I think we can nitpick The one issue, the game pieces are beautiful and they're all foiled. But the problem is the foil actually makes it hard to see the color, sometimes a little bit. So when it comes scoring time, I was lifting up my my scoreboard, I was kind of tilting it to try to get the light right. Like, is that red? Is that purple?
Brian 42:42
The patterns of the pores, you said those are the areola.
Laura 42:44
Areolae? Yeah,
Brian 42:45
Areolae. Those are different on each shape. So you can use they're colorblind friendly in that regard. So they always have a pattern there too. It's not just the color, but you're right. Like the yellow and the green really hard to tell apart if you're in the wrong kind of light,
Jason Wallace 42:58
but that's about it. Like I said, it's a very elegant game, very well put together, very high quality, and I find it very fun. I don't know, I've toyed with the idea of going through the single player mode. So single player mode involves a bunch of cards where there's challenges and there's rules so that you can't just, like, play it forever until you get it. You only have so many spare diatoms you can pick up that don't fit the patterns you're trying to do. And they're actually really quite fun. And you start actually on the front of the board, which has all the set little pieces I mentioned, where you can only put a circle or a star or whatever. But the second half, you flip the board over where it doesn't have that, and it's free form arrangement. And so they have some of these where you're making arrangements that look like a tiny Solar System, or ones that look like a face or a tree or other things like that. Where you're putting these together
Brian 43:17
Jason is holding up cards of the different shapes. So for those of you who Jason's forgotten that this is an audio podcast,
Jason Wallace 43:51
no, no, I'm trying to get your reactions. Like I know our audience can't see, but you can at least react.
Brian 43:58
Audience, I apologize for Jason.
Jason Wallace 44:01
All right. I mean, that's really it. There's again, elegant game, very well done. So on to grades, and I'm gonna say this is, I think Turing machine was the one where I gave an undefined science grade.
Brian 44:10
I think what we need is an art historian to really grade this. I think that this is the wrong class.
Jason Wallace 44:15
Okay, I will say the science grade is undefined, but I'm definitely want to give it points for bringing attention to these beautiful creatures. And okay, it does actually do some things right. It gets the shininess of them, right. Well, it gets the shapes right. It gets the variability there. I don't want to give it a grade, because that implies a wrong standard, but I want to say that they managed to make the game and the science mesh beautifully. And I really appreciate that
Brian 44:38
we wouldn't have had a chance to talk about diatoms otherwise. So like I said, I'm not going to grade it either, but I'm glad it's out there. I'm glad it exists, not for science. We can give it a fun grade. Well, actually, Laura, what do you what do you think you haven't had a chance to play? But it sounds like you'd be more informed on this than we would be. What do you think
Laura 44:55
I'm just happy there is a board game out there about diatoms? Because I'm just happy that diatoms are getting promoted in any way possible. So I'm very thankful for that, and I have seen it before. It does look like a beautiful board game, and honestly, I think it kind of gets the heart of whole diatom arranging, and the really complicated nature is the rules, almost is a perfect analogy for how complicated and complex diatoms are. So I really like the game. I'm going to buy a copy eventually,
Brian 45:18
Awesome. Let's see, Jason, I want to hear your fun grade first because you really like this game. In fact, I bought the coffee. But you have the game because you like it so much more than I do.
Jason Wallace 45:26
I'm going to give it an A I keep using the word elegant. I love things that are elegant, that have relatively simple rules and yet have a lot of strategic depth to it, which I think this game satisfies. And like I said, it's one of the few games that we've played that has a solo mode where I've actually played the solo mode and enjoyed it, and I'm considering doing more. There may be, there may be, like, 30 days of diatoms on our Instagram feed at some point.
Brian 45:48
Jason may not want this shared, but one of his hobbies is stained glass. So I think this is merging his love of highly analytical, optimizing games with his desire to create beautifully arranged mosaics.
Jason Wallace 45:58
Oh yes, yes, the fact that these are actually made of glass. Is part of that, taking something from silica, making beautiful arrangements. And so, yes, there is a little bit synergy. Is like, Oh, this is that same thing, but on a microscopic scale, I don't think we've mentioned it. So we talk about all these diatom arrangements on microscope slides. So like a full beautiful mosaic of like 100 or 200 little diatoms in these beautiful patterns is about the size of a period. So they really can only be appreciated under the microscope, or as prints.
Laura 46:24
I Think it's even smaller than that, depending on the size of the diatom, because the largest diatom is only two millimeters wide. And then they get much smaller than that.
Brian 46:32
Wait they get up to two millimeters.?That's like naked eye visible. Where is this diatom?
Brian 46:38
It's over there. Jason, look behind you,
Laura 46:40
trying to remember what it's called, starts with an E. Think it ethmodiscus but I don't know.
Jason Wallace 46:41
exactly where it's found, Entomodiscus. Insect circle?
Brian 46:45
Is that an insect associated? Is that a thing?
Laura 46:49
I know it's a thick, circular diatom. Says it's found in the temperate zones of the world's ocean.
Brian 46:54
Oh, okay, for my fun grade, I guess I have never gotten out diatoms to play, except for you. And then you took the game so and then
Jason Wallace 47:02
I you gave me the game.
Brian 47:02
I did. I have actually officially given you the game. I have been like, Jason, you should keep this game. You really like this game. I don't know we could play it a couple more times. I don't really want to ding it. I'll just say B, it's fun. I enjoyed it. You know, it's a little complicated. It's kind of two games in one, there's the selection, and then arranging the mosaics is very complicated. And you know how I feel about over optimizing I enjoyed
Jason Wallace 47:20
it, and I actually got to play it with my nine year old, and she was also enjoying helping me make the arrangement and stuff. So I consider that a win.
Brian 47:27
Absolutely. Laura, I just wanted to ask, Do you have a favorite game?
Laura 47:30
I actually love classic monopoly, just because I get to wreak havoc or chaos when I play it.
Brian 47:35
Oh, really, do you play with house rules? Or do you play by rules, rules?
Laura 47:38
Well, when I do play with my brother, primarily it's rules, rules, and we get very competitive with each other. And we actually have a long history of using my cousins as pawns to beat each other.
Brian 47:49
Monopoly, bringing families together for however long Monopoly has been around.
Jason Wallace 47:53
Does that mean you're using your cousins as like shell corporations in the game?
Laura 47:57
Yep, I have no shame over it either.
Brian 48:01
That's fantastic.
Jason Wallace 48:02
All right, we'll wrap up there. Thank you, Laura, very much for coming on and telling us about these beautiful microscopic organisms. Is there any place you want people to check you out? Do you have, like, a social media or something else to follow?
Laura 48:12
There you can check out Diatoms of North America, which is a wonderful resource for them to use for diatoms. I am a part of that. And then if they want to ever come see diatoms. We do have a very small exhibit at the Academy natural sciences in Philadelphia, which is the oldest natural history museum in the entire country.
Brian 48:32
Well, next time I'm in Philadelphia, I'll put it on the to do list for sure.
Jason Wallace 48:34
Well, now you have something for your travel plans listeners. So with that, we will sign off. Thank you very much. Have a great month and good games,
Brian 48:37
and have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.
Jason Wallace 48:39
This has been the gaming with science podcast copyright 2026 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to game with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai