Sea Slugs, Nudibranchs & Dendronotus frondosus Part II | Drift Off with Cozy, Meandering Talk

Looking for a sleep podcast to fall asleep fast, reduce anxiety, and quiet an overactive mind? This calming episode of The Insomnia Project is designed for insomnia relief, stress reduction, and gentle nighttime unwinding through slow, soothing conversation.
Marco Timpano welcomes back guest Becka Barker for Part 2 of a relaxed discussion about sea slugs, also known as nudibranchs, exploring their fascinating features and unique beauty. This low-stimulation, easygoing episode offers curious yet calming content that’s perfect for bedtime listening.
The conversation also drifts into light microscopy, touching on how tiny organisms are observed and studied, adding a gentle sense of wonder while maintaining a soft, meandering tone. With unhurried pacing and thoughtful storytelling, this relaxing podcast episode helps ease racing thoughts, reduce anxiety, and create a peaceful environment for sleep.
Whether you’re searching for a sleep podcast for insomnia, calming background noise while you work, or a gentle way to unwind at the end of the day, The Insomnia Project offers a comforting, reliable escape.

​Sea Slugs, Nudibranchs & Dendrontus Frondosus Part II

Speaker:   Welcome to the Insomnia Project. Sit back, relax and listen. As we have a conversation about the mundane. One thing that we can promise is that our conversation will be relaxing so that you can feel free to drift off or just listen and relax. Thank you for joining us. We hope you will listen and sleep. Follow us at Listen and sleep.


Marco Timpano welcomes back Becca Barker for a part two episode

I'm your host, Marco Timpano and I'm uh, very excited to welcome back Becca Barker for a part two. Actually our first part two episode. Becca, welcome.

Speaker:   Hi. Thanks for having me, Marco.

Speaker:   Now Becca, we also prior to recording, we're talking about our experience with 80s alternative bands and concerts we went to. And I have a little clip that we might play as a extra. So uh, invite our listeners to look out for that. It won't be as relaxing, but maybe

Speaker:   they'll get a laugh or two. Yeah, it's for when you want to wake up.

Speaker:   Right. There you go. So we were talking about sea slugs. M and we were really getting into the sort of meat of sea slugs. Not the actual meat of sea slugs, but we were getting into the nitty gritty and we got to the end of our episode so I said we'd have a part two.


Let's talk about sea slugs. They have an annual life cycle

Let's talk about sea slugs.

Speaker:   Mhm. Well, um, I'm happy to talk more about the Dendronotus frondosis, which is the

Speaker:   sea slug that you did your thesis on.

Speaker:   That's right. Um, which I did over 20 years ago right now. So. So who knows what is known in the world about these little guys?

Speaker:   Fair enough.

Speaker:   Well, I shouldn't actually even just say guys because as I mentioned before, they're actually hermaphroditic. Right, right. Um, this is part of the charm of them. And actually so many animals, um, they're simultaneously hermaphroditic, which means they have um, both male and female reproductive parts active at the same time. Right. And um, when we left off last time, I was talking about their life cycle. So, um, they only live for one year. They have an annual life cycle. And. And when we left off, we had sort of, I sort of talked about the beginnings of their lives and um, that wasn't really part of my study. Um, and so tonight we're going to actually start with the stuff that I studied.

Speaker:   Exactly. And if you want to listen to ah, what we were talking about before episode 25, you will hear everything you need to know about sea slugs up until this point right here. In particular, the dentinotus.

Speaker:   Dendronotus.

Speaker:   Dendronotus.

Speaker:   Yeah.

Speaker:   Front. I'm m gonna say it.

Speaker:   You got it.

Speaker:   Frontosis.

Speaker:   You got it. There you go. Just like you. You just said it like you've been saying it for years, you know? Yeah. Um, so when these little sea slugs hit their juvenile phase, um, it's kind of like their teenage years or their teenage times.

Speaker:   Would this be like three months into.

Speaker:   Because.

Speaker:   Because they only live a year.

Speaker:   That's right. Yeah. I'd say, um, yeah. Three or four months in, like, the first third of their lives is. Is over.

Speaker:   Right.

Speaker:   Um, and so now they look like the sea slug that they look like as an adult. They're just smaller. And so, um, in the early. At the end of the summer and in the early fall, they start to settle on the rocks and on the seaweed in the intertidal zone. So the part of the, um, beach where sometimes at high tide it's covered in water, but at low tide it's not.

Speaker:   This is the Bay of Fundy we're talking about.

Speaker:   Yes. The ones that I studied live specifically on the, um, New Brunswick side of the Bay of Fundy. There you go. And so, um, in October and November, when they were sort of late adolescent phase, I guess, uh, I.

Speaker:   The rebellious sage.

Speaker:   That's right. I collected, uh, samples of them, uh, and then after a couple more months, I went back out in February. Yeah, it was kind of cold. And, uh, I picked more samples of them. So I picked them, uh, when they were. And when I say pick them, I make it sound like fruit, I guess. But they were. It did feel like when you pick them off the rocks does feel like you're sort of harvesting fruit, I suppose. But, um, so I. I gathered some that were, uh, October, November, sort of sort of early adulthood, and then February, sort of much later on when they were fully mature.

Speaker:   I see.

Speaker:   Because I wanted to have some sense of the development that, uh, they underwent in that time.

Speaker:   And would you put them in a pail to bring them back to the lab?

Speaker:   Yeah, we would fill pails with seawater, and then we'd put the sea slugs in the seawater, um, and keep them alive and, uh, bring them back to the lab at, uh, Mount Allison, um, where I did my degree. And, um, kept them alive in aquaria for. Until the time that I needed to, unfortunately, kill them and then study them.

Speaker:   Fair enough.

Speaker:   Um, so a whole bunch of little sea slugs gave their lives for me to get my degree. I suppose I learned a lot.

Speaker:   That's Great. And now our listeners will benefit from that.

Speaker:   I hope so.


The ovotestes are the organ that produces both egg and sperm

Um, the part that I studied in the sea slug was, um, their ovotestes. And that's an organ that's found in, um, a lot of simultaneous hermaphrodites. Um, as the name suggests, ovo and testes. It is the organ that produces both egg and sperm for the animal. So, I mean, let that sink in for a second. There's one organ in these animals that produces both the male and female parts from. For reproduction. Right. Slattin itself is fairly interesting, I think. Sure. Um, and so my task and my thesis was to chart that development. So my questions that guided me were like, how. Well, how does this organ develop? Um, it was already known that they don't auto fertilize. Oh, they don't know they're not able to fertilize themselves. There are sort of, um, evolutionary mechanisms that prevent that from happening. Okay. Because, you know. Yeah. If that. If they could do that, then they would just sort of be, you know, it genetically. That would, um, lead to weaker offspring.

Speaker:   Right.

Speaker:   Right. It's too much the same, of course, which, I mean, it's for the same reasons why we don't interbreed.

Speaker:   Or, or.

Speaker:   Or, uh. Interbreed's not the right word. But we don't, um, you know, marry our siblings.

Speaker:   Unless you're in the royal family.

Speaker:   Unless you're in the royal family.

Speaker:   So.

Speaker:   And these were not royal sea slugs.

Speaker:   Fair.

Speaker:   So, um, yeah, so they. We know they don't auto fertilize, but we did know that the organ developed, uh, in such a way that it would produce eggs and sperm at the same time. So that's kind of fascinating. Sure. So I had to figure out, how does it do that? Um, and so what I did was I, um, created, um, microscope slides out of thin sections of the, uh, some of the animals from the October batch, some from the November batch, and then finally from the February batch. So I could get a sense through their adult life of what. What did this organ look like at different points in time? Sure. Um, and what I found was that, um, the organ started off just as, like a circular lobe. Like a balloon.

Speaker:   Okay.

Speaker:   Almost. And, um. And it's hard. It was hard to see any particular sperm cells or egg cells at that point. Now, how could I tell if a cell was a sperm cell or an egg cell?

Speaker:   I was actually just thinking that. I know it sounds predictable. I was like, how would you be able to tell? Especially with this. This particular animal. Right.

Speaker:   Well, um, the um, egg cells, uh, typically, especially when you. When you use, uh, the. The staining, um, the stain that I was using, um, would be. First of all, they'd be colored very differently from sperm cells. Um, but they'd also be. The size is just completely different. Right. Egg cells are energetically. We say they're energetically expensive, meaning it takes a lot of resources in the animal's body to produce them because they have to contain pretty much everything that the developing fetus needs. Right. Except for half of the chromosomes, which is what the sperm provides. Right. So, um, they tend to be very large cells. Um, sperm, ah. Cells, by contrast, are very tiny. And of course, as we know, sperm have, uh, just a little. The little nucleus. They're part of the cell. They're part of, um, the DNA that they're contributing to the animal being created. And, um. And a flagellum, which is the tail.

>> Marco Timpano: Right.

Speaker:   And so.

Speaker:   So even the sea slug. Yeah, same. Okay.


Staining sea slugs is one of your favorite parts as an artist

Speaker:   Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And that's kind of fascinating. Like a lot of species, almost. I don't know if it's all species, but almost every species I can recall studying. That's the way it is. Egg cells are these big, bulky, energetically expensive things. Sperm are, uh, energetically inexpensive. They're very easy to produce in mass quantities. It doesn't tax the animal energetically.

Speaker:   Right.

Speaker:   Takes, um, nothing to make them. And so. Which is why they can be made in such abundance, I suppose. So what I found was at first the, um. I couldn't see any cells that were really distinguishable as egg or sperm.

Speaker:   Okay.

Speaker:   In, uh. This would have been in the first batch in October. Um.

Speaker:   And were you expecting to see that?

Speaker:   Well, the reading I had done had indicated that most of the time in the sea slugs, um, there was what is called a germinal layer of cells. Germinal cells. And, uh, so the sac. So if you can imagine a sort of balloon, um, being this, the organ, the ovotestes, as in that age of the animal, uh, the October animals. Um, so let's, let's put a. An age to them. Um, they would have been, let's say they were like, I don't know, 17.

Speaker:   So they're adolescent.

Speaker:   Adolescent late adolescence. Yeah. Um, yeah, just post puberty, I guess.

Speaker:   Okay.

Speaker:   I mean, it's really not equivalent. So I probably shouldn't be using those terms just for.

Speaker:   For sake of knowing the sort of your span of the animal, where they're at. Sure.

Speaker:   So imagine a balloon, but that balloon is lined on the inside with all of these tiny cells. That look the same. They're just little round blobs. And I remember them as being purple because I used Milligan's trichrome stain. Um, which colors? Uh, that material, a bright purple color.

Speaker:   Is that the preferred stain to use when working with sea slugs?

Speaker:   Well, the stain you choose has a lot to do with what it is you're looking for and what kind of biological material you want to investigate.

Speaker:   Wow.

Speaker:   And so, um. Yeah, so two popular stains which I used. One was a sort of. I can't remember the name of it actually, but it was a pink and purple stain.

Speaker:   Okay.

Speaker:   And the, um. But the one that was my favorite is Milligan's Trichrome. That's probably why I remember the name Cut. And Trichrome, as the name suggests, has three colors. It's a very colorful stain. And so it stains things, um, purple and turquoise and pink.

Speaker:   Oh, that's cool. Colors to be staining things.

Speaker:   Totally. Right. And so the, um. And there was a third one that I tried actually, just to try it, but I don't remember it working out very well. Um, but, um. Yeah. So, for example, if something that you really want to look for in your slides is, um, um. I don't know, like a. Like a collagen material or, um, if you're looking for a particular kind of cell that has a certain kind of, uh, material in it, maybe something that's got a lot of protein in it or something, um. Uh, different stains will sort of highlight or sort of make certain things, certain biological materials, pop. Um, and that's the cool thing about stains. Right? So that was probably my favorite part of the whole project, as you can probably tell, was one of my favorite

Speaker:   things as an artist. You know, I would. I would.

Speaker:   I would.

Speaker:   It stands to reason that would be one of your favorite parts.

Speaker:   Yeah.

Speaker:   Have you ever used that stain in your artwork?

Speaker:   Well, I'll tell you what I did do, okay. Uh, when I was completing my thesis and when I was staining all my slides, um, something I probably should not have done, but I did the rebellious. I took the. Some, uh, of the stain, the different colors with a. With a little pipette or a little stir stick. And I would sort of. On the back of my lab coat, because we all had lab coats. I actually sort of painted a little sea slug. But the stain, some of the staining materials is, um, not really good for you.

Speaker:   Okay.

Speaker:   So it's probably not something I should have done, but it looked really cool. I had this sort of pink and orange profile of a sea slug on my back. On my lab coat.

Speaker:   That's awesome.

Speaker:   So. And I think that's cuz I spent so many hours in the lab.


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Speaker:   Sure.

Speaker:   Um, with various slightly hazardous materials. And there was a vent, but maybe I could have used it more. Anyway, um.

Speaker:   Back to the slugs.

Speaker:   Yes. I don't want to get my thesis advisor in trouble or anything.

Speaker:   Well, they wouldn't have known that you were doing.

Speaker:   It was the 90s things.

Speaker:   Sure.

Speaker:   Well, he did come in at one point over the Christmas break and he was like, you really need to turn the fan on in here because, uh, after a while you just can't smell anything. Just like la la la.

Speaker:   Having fun.

Speaker:   Yep. Carefree in the lab over Christmas holidays. As you do. Um, so, um. Yeah, so. But the Milligan's trichrome was my favorite stain. And it, and I remember it staining the uh, germinal layer of cells, which is that sort of the only kind of cell that's in the ovatesestes in the late, um, adolescent phase of the animal, um, dyed it a bright purple. Um, and so these germinal cells, um, I mean, germinal cells is a general term for any layer of cells that can become something else that can become more specialized. I see. Right. So they're sort of like, um, yeah, like the basic cell, I guess. And um, and as the animal grows, um, the germinal cells sort of become separate into two different layers.

Speaker:   So would it be like a stem cell? We're talking here?

Speaker:   Um, I. Now see, this is where I'm very rusty, but it's, it's. I think those are slightly different concepts, but that is something that we can all look up after this podcast.

Speaker:   And I don't mean to, to sort of paint you in a corner with that.

Speaker:   No, that's fine. I'm comfortable with not knowing things now that I'm over 40.

Speaker:   What's funny is I'm, I'm coming to know so much by just doing these podcasts.

Speaker:   So I could probably look it up on my phone.

Speaker:   No, let's, let's keep going.

Speaker:   But it's, it's, it's not a, it's not a completely dissimilar concept. I'll say that it is sort of like a basic, uh, cell that can turn into something else.

Speaker:   Perfect.

Speaker:   You know, it may wind up being the same thing, but I just remember we were calling them germinal and for some reason I remember germinal epithelium. And I guess that makes sense because the lining of the organ would be a sort of epithelium.

Speaker:   I see.

Speaker:   Yeah.

Speaker:   I have no idea what an epithelium is.

Speaker:   Well, epithelium is your skin, basically. So it's any layer of cells that is the same sort of covering layer.

Speaker:   Oh, so epidermis is what we call our. Our skin.

Speaker:   Oh, epidermis, yeah. Right. So it's. Yeah. And, um, yeah, so I. That's, that's the same.

Speaker:   It's the same concept. Okay. But this is the sea slug skin.

Speaker:   The. The inside skin of their ova testes.

Speaker:   Oh, my goodness. Okay.

Speaker:   So specific.

Speaker:   No, we've got to be specific. This is part two. You know, we're not specific on this episode.

Speaker:   Then what are we doing?

>> Marco Timpano: Exactly.

Speaker:   So, um, yeah, so a very undifferentiated, just sort of sack of these little cells. So if you just imagine these sort of purple, I don't know, pearls that sort of line the inside of a balloon, that's basically what the ovatestes looks like when the animal is a little better than halfway into its life.

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Speaker:   um, and then what was interesting was the next month's batch of sea slugs all had this peculiar, um, I'm going to say pigmentation. Yeah. On parts of their ovatestes.

Speaker:   Okay.

Speaker:   Now what I just described to you with the balloon and that sort of, um, purple layer of cells from the stain is what I saw on the inside when I made thin, thin sections of the animal. Um, because we had to, we were responsible for making all our own slides from scratch. Right, Right. Which was one. That was the other part that I loved the most. So the two things I loved the most about my thesis were basically the things that were closest to doing studio work.

Speaker:   Right.

Speaker:   Yeah.

Speaker:   So this was prior to you doing studio.

Speaker:   Oh, yes. Yeah.

Speaker:   So the C slug kind of introduced you to studio work and made you the artist you are today.

Speaker:   Kind of. I couldn't stop making slides. At one point my thesis advisor was like, you have like 1100 slides, you're fine. I'm like, but I just want to keep making them. Right. Because the whole process was so interesting. Um, because the, uh. I'm gonna sort of go on a bit of a tangent. Well, the animal like you and I, um, we would say they're hydrophilic. Right. They're full of water. Right, Right. Water, um, is sort of within their systems and their bodies. Well, when you create microscope slides of an animal for light microscopy, which is done less and less nowadays. And that's another thing. I tend to like obsolete technologies or technologies on the cusp of being obsolete. And this was definitely on the cusp of being obsolete at the time.

Speaker:   Amazing.

Speaker:   Um, yeah, when you're preparing cells for light microscopy, um, you have to embed them in wax. And that's how you can make thin slivers of the animal without losing the shape or the form of the stuff.

Speaker:   Cells.

Speaker:   And so you can't just take a watery animal and throw it in a chunk of molten wax.

Speaker:   Sure.

Speaker:   Because the cell, um, the cell membranes would rupture. Uh, and so you just have a mess. Right, right. You would. There'd be no animal to look at. It would just be a pile of

Speaker:   weird goo sort of like in the Remake of the Fly, when the baboon goes into the chamber and it comes out on the other side.

Speaker:   I'm trying to remember, like I saw David Cronenberg.

Speaker:   It was with.

Speaker:   I didn't see that. I saw the closed one. But wait, did he. Wait, the remake of the Fly was that one with Jeff Goldblum?

Speaker:   That's the one.

Speaker:   Oh, yeah, I've seen that. There you go. Yeah.


You take watery animals and you put them through a series of baths

Speaker:   Anyways, back to sea slugs.

Speaker:   Um, yeah. So what you have to do is you have to take these watery animals and you put them through a series of baths. Solutions. And the solutions go from being very generally they go from being all water based to. Through alcohol. And alcohol is the key. So you start with like, uh, you start with like, you know, 100%, you know, watery type stuff. Um, and then the next bath, you put it in for the next, you know, 10 minutes or whatever, it'll be 70% water, 30%, um, ethanol. Oh, and then the next one will be like 50, 50. And then the next one will be like more ethanol than water. And so you kind of do it in these slow phases. Right. Because the ethanol, alcohol, um, chemically is something that goes fine with water. It'll combine with water just fine, but it will also kind of start. It will kind of combine with something that's hydrophobic. So that was sort of the link. So you have a, um, you have a. You start with water or something that's. I actually don't remember what the first bath was, but it was something that was like water.

Speaker:   Sure.

Speaker:   And then you run it through a series of maybe five phases that, where the proportions of water to alcohol change, sort of like a spectrum or a continuum, I guess. Um, where at the end of it you're at like 95% or 100% ethanol, which, by the way, if you ever dared drink, it would kill you immediately.

Speaker:   Well, I'm glad you didn't drink.

Speaker:   That was the first thing they warned us when they let us loose in the lab in fourth year. So don't drink the ethanol. You will die.

Speaker:   That's a great tip.

Speaker:   Yeah, pro tip from my thesis advisor. Um, and, um, so after it's ah, 100% ethanol. So you can imagine you have this very thin, like just a couple of micrometers thick section of an animal, um, embedded in wax. Uh, it goes from the alcohol to, uh, you know, there was another,

Speaker:   um,

Speaker:   chemical, uh, in the step between the alcohol and the wax. And to be honest, I don't remember what that was. Um, but, uh, but there was, um, it was Something that helped, um, infiltrate the wax into the animal.

Speaker:   Oh, I see.

Speaker:   Without breaking the cell membranes.

Speaker:   Wow.

Speaker:   Right. Like, you have to be super careful. So there was infiltrating the wax so that it would get into the animal and basically almost plasticify it. Um, and then once that's done, the whole thing would go into hot molten. A, uh, hot molten cup of wax, a little cube, like an ice cube tray almost. And then after that hardened and dried, then you take out that block of wax, attach it to the end of a machine called the rotary microtome. And what the microtome does is. Well, you know those, um, those machines they use when they're slicing salami or whatever? Right. It's sort of like that.

Speaker:   Okay.

Speaker:   Um, only instead of sort of pushing the, um, the item, you're slicing back and forth side to side, um, it is held stationary. And, um, the blade is actually what moves. It moves up from the bottom and slices a thin rectangular section, um, just a few micrometers thick, upward in an upward motion. Um, and so you can slice through the animal, uh, longitudinally from the left side of the animal to the right side, or you can slice through the animal cross sectionally from the head to the tail. Um, and it all depends on which way you orient it when you put it in the mouth. Microtome. Um, and so I would get these sections of animals where I'd be like, oh, here's the very tip of the left side. Oh, now we're going inside the animal a little bit. Oh, now we're at the halfway point. And so that was how I could locate the ovates.

Speaker:   Wow, that's fascinating.

Speaker:   Yeah, well, um, I certainly think it is. And um, it's kind of an interesting way to see something through space and time when you see it in sections.

Speaker:   Sure.

Speaker:   Um, anyhow, uh, so I did this with, um, with my samples from all three, uh, times that I collected them. Right. The October, the November and the February, uh, groups. And um, so I, I, Yeah, so I personally took them through this process of, um, turning them into little wax cubes, basically, and then thinly slicing those wax cubes. Um, and here's if you can imagine. Ah, because I know this is a podcast and I have to use my words to be visual. Um, the, uh, these sections, these are. Sorry, these cubes of wax were maybe about a centimeter by a centimeter by a centimeter.

Speaker:   Wow.

Speaker:   Very small.

Speaker:   Sure.

Speaker:   Um, and then as you slice, you get these sort of centimeter by centimeter square squares. Right. Now the neat thing is the um, the blade of the rotary microtome, um, goes up, slices upward, and then comes down and then goes in and slices upward. The thing that it just sliced, that square that it just sliced, actually stays on the tip of the microtome in such a way that the next slice you make kind of attaches itself to the past one. And do you know what it looks like after you do five or six slices? It looks like, like the most adorable strip of toilet paper really, but it's actually wax with little thin sections of animal on it. And then very carefully and without breathing on it, you pluck that strip with tweezers because if you use your hands, it'll melt the wax.

Speaker:   Oh my goodness.

Speaker:   And you, um, float it very gently on the top on the surface of a, a warm water bath that. That's not moving at all. Right. And then you take a microscope slide that's been treated with gelatin so it's got the sticky sort of, um, surface on it, and you carefully slide it underneath the water under where your, um, floating bits that looks like toilet paper is floating. The piece of animal.

Speaker:   Sure.

Speaker:   And then you very carefully raise the slide up to the surface from underneath the sections you've created in such a way that the sections don't fall off the slide.

Speaker:   Right.

Speaker:   But the water does. And then you have to, um, let it dry. And then once you've let it dry, then you can run it through your series of stains. And the stains have to remove the surrounding wax to leave just the animal and then infuse the color which attaches to different biological materials within the animal.

Speaker:   And then you put it in the microscope.

Speaker:   Yes. And then, and then you.


Becca Barker: Look out for episode three on sea slugs

Well, and then you, um, you, you use a very, um, cancer causing, um, um, goo. Ah, to um, adhere the top of the microscope slide onto the main slide like the COVID the glass slip cover. Um, and so that's the final step in creating slides.

Speaker:   Well, there you go. Well, we'll have to find out more about sea slugs because we just got to the sort of adolescent stage.

Speaker:   That's right.

Speaker:   We've come to the end of this

Speaker:   podcast, so I assure you the conclusion is not so exciting that you won't be able to sleep. Fair. But it's. I found some pretty neat stuff.

Speaker:   Well then, listeners, look out for episode three on sea slugs. Becca Barker, I want to thank, thank you for bringing us episode two. And when you're back in town, or when I'm in your town, we'll do episode three.

Speaker:   I cannot wait.

Speaker:   Thank you. You've been listening to the Insomnia Project as always. We are produced by Drumcast Productions and this episode was recorded in Toronto, Canada.