Dr. Albert Doucette Jr. - The LSU MNS's first Black ichthyology graduate student

This week we are celebrating 'Black In Natural History Museums' (check out their website https://www.blackinnhms.org/ and follow along on Twitter #BlackInNHMs). The work the LSU Museum of Natural Science postdoc, Dr. J.C. Buckner and others have put in is incredible, and I've learned a lot. 

 

One of the activities for this week was a scavenger hunt, and it inspired me to look up who was the first Black graduate student at the LSU MNS Ichthyology Section. 

 

I joined the LSU MNS in 2008, and I only met my predecessor J. Michael Fitzsimons once before he passed. He had retired before I started my position, but I knew he had an African American student from a discussion with some other curators who had worked with him and via my former graduate student Valerie Derouen Stampley (see her video for Black In Natural History Week here). It is through them that I learned of Albert John Doucette Jr.

Albert John Doucette Jr. was born in March 23, 1948 in Slidell, Louisiana and received his bachelor of science degree from Southern University. He would later become faculty (1985) and Associate Dean at Southeastern Louisiana University – he held that position until his death on September 4, 2004 at the age of 56. He also worked with Tennessee Tech University and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1973 he was the first black graduate student at LSU’s School of Renewable Natural Resources getting a Masters in Fisheries. He then worked on a PhD at the Museum of Natural Science with Dr. J. Michael Fitzsimmons who was Curator of Fishes; Doucette defended his PhD on April 30, 1985 with a dissertation titled ‘Karyology of Lower Teleost Fishes’ (Read it here.)

There are 67,119 (!) specimens that he collected deposited at the LSU MNS Fish Collections. If you have more information about Dr. Doucette please reach out to prosanta@lsu.edu – I would love to learn more.

 

Sources

1- Southeastern Louisiana University profile
https://www2.southeastern.edu/NewsEvents/PublicInfoOffice/Doucette.html

 

2- Obit https://obits.theadvocate.com/us/obituaries/theadvocate/name/albert-doucette-obituary?pid=2586004

 

3- Dr. Doucette's PhD Dissertation https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/4048/  

 

 

 

 

My Strange Sabbatical

 

As Hurricane Ida passes over my home, lab, and collections, I feel inclined to write about my past year, mostly spent in Ottawa, Canada. Like Baton Rouge, Ottawa is another capital city; Canada’s fourth largest city (but with only 800,000 people). It is perhaps more similar to Washington, D.C. than to any other city I can think of, and probably for obvious reasons – they both have lots of government buildings and lots of green space. My family and I spent part of 2016-2017 in D.C. when I was on leave from LSU working for the National Science Foundation. That was such a fun and illuminating year that I jumped at the chance to take my first real sabbatical when I was awarded a Fulbright in 2020 to go to Canada. It didn’t hurt that my wife has family near-by; she and I were both born in Montreal (about a two-hour drive from Ottawa). Despite my Canadian roots, Ottawa is a city I was largely unfamiliar with until last year.

            The Fulbright award was a Distinguished Chair position at Carleton University. Carleton is right on the Rideau Canal (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). Unfortunately, I never ended up working on that beautiful campus as Carleton was one of the first schools in North America to declare that they would close campus and go remote due to COVID-19. I only met my host, Steven J. Cooke (#16 on a recent ranking of the Top Living Biologists by the way) one time in person; his lab is bigger than that of the entire LSU Museum of Natural Science’s work force put together but he somehow manages to be an amazing father as well as being a friend and mentor to many (including me). I spent most of my year in a make shift home office in our rented apartment near campus, by “office” I mean a 10’  X 10’ basement space (yes they have real basements for you Louisiana folks) that had hanging sheets for two of the “walls”. It wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t all that horrible either. From that little space I did most of my Zoom meetings and writing. I did a lot of writing both for scientific papers and for pleasure including a couple of books I hope to tell you more about soon.

            I spent way more time with my family this past year than I did in anytime in my academic past, and I honestly enjoyed that time way more than I expected (I love my family obviously but I always hated working from home). My kids went to a French public school near-by (Quebec was only a few miles away but unlike in that province, the vast majority of folks spoke English in Ontario) and I would walk with them for pick-up and drop-off. Those walks propelled me to enter a walking/running competition with the Cooke lab where I would walk about 50km each week. Even in the snowiest months (Winter is half the year up there, just like Summer is half the year down here) Ottawa has a lot of walkable and bike-able paths that remain clear. The COVID-19 pandemic did mean that we had to quarantine at home upon arriving in Ottawa and by the time our two-week sentence was over it was already getting chilly (this past September was one of the coldest on record for the area), and by the time it started getting warm this past Spring the province went into another lock down to try to tamper down the spread of the disease that has plagued us (pun intended) for over a year. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to enjoy the ‘real’ Ottawa or travel as much as we had planned within Canada (although we did get to Toronto, Montreal and the Maritimes region before leaving). With the border being closed for the last year I also wasn’t able to make any return trips to Louisiana or to see my family a relatively short distance away in New York City.  

            Instead of doing the traveling I love, I gave a lot of virtual seminars; including at my alma mater, McGill University (I also hosted a virtual reunion for my graduating year, the Class of 2000) and the University of Winnipeg, among other spots that I would have loved to have gone to in person. I also frequently checked in on my lab at LSU, but they are all so self-sufficient that they didn’t need much of my help. Pam Hart (now Dr. Pam) successfully graduated this past Spring and I made it back to Baton Rouge in time to hood her at graduation this Summer; Diego Elias (currently doing fieldwork in Guatemala) is used to me being away (I was at NSF his first year) and Sheila Rodriguez Machado, my newest student, like me and many others, had to get used to virtual lab meetings – but she is a trooper, and a brilliant one at that. I also was involved in the hiring of our new collections manager, David Boyd who joined LSU from the University of Florida at the start of 2021. It was great knowing the lab was doing well in my absence, despite all the pandemic gloom. As for my learning experience, I got to watch the Cooke Lab work like a giant well-oiled machine cranking out publications at a nearly weekly basis. I was able to work with his lab and several collaborators on a large review of the conservation statuses of Canada’s freshwater organisms (Desforges et al. 2021 in press at the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences). I’m still in awe of how quickly the students put together a publishable document reviewing thousands of species in a few months. My only regret is that I wasn’t able to collaborate and connect with more folks in that lab, and it was only the pandemic that prevented more interactions from happening – not any lack of effort.

            That paper was an important part of my goal for my Fulbright – which was to learn how to study evolutionary biology “in action” as it is happening today and in terms of challenges created by humans e.g., climate change, damning, overfishing. Also as part of my Fulbright goals was making new fish collections in Canada to compare species and populations from that area with those in Louisiana and other parts of the U.S. With the pandemic I wasn’t sure how I would do any collecting, but I lucked out by having the Canadian Museum of Nature (which is like the Canadian Smithsonian) allow me to join their ranks as a Research Associate and by having friends who are experienced commercial fishers in the area. With their help I was able to get scientific permits to collect Lake Sturgeon (one of the few spots where you are allowed to do so in the world, as most sturgeon populations are critically endangered), and other freshwater fishes in Ontario and Quebec. I went ice fishing and seining and also collected fish with giant hoop nets. My fisher friends, Fabienne Côté, Roch Quesnel and Michel La Haye taught me more about fishing and the fish from the region than I could have learned from any course. These were wonderful trips and although I didn’t get to do my usual tropical fish collecting trips, I can at least say that I did a bit of international fieldwork this past year. These fishes (representing about 40 species from the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers) will be shipped to LSU soon to be part of our collections at the LSU MNS. Some material was also left behind for the CMN and I hope to have many future exchanges between our museums.

            Like Hurricane Ida, my sabbatical wasn’t exactly what I expected. I wanted to meet and chat with lots of new folks and travel and talk around Canada, and although I did have some great interactions the virtual space isn’t the same as seeing people in real life. In the end I think of my sabbatical as having been “frustratingly relaxing” – working on-line in a new country without being able to really interact with people was frustrating, but spending a lot of time with my wife and kids while working from home was also quite nice. I know a lot of people had a much tougher year than I did, and I’m grateful that I was even able to have a sabbatical and for the time that the people I did get to interact with gave to me. Cheers to them, and here’s to a brighter pandemic- and hurricane-free future for all of us.

Many thanks to LSU, the Fulbright Program and my new friends and colleagues in Canada, especially in the Cooke lab and Canadian Museum of Nature, for making my sabbatical a memorable one.

 

Thanks for teaching everyone about evolution SARS-CoV-2!

What a time to be alive! These days, just staying alive feels like an accomplishment. As of late January 2021, at least two million people have died worldwide from COVID-19 (the disease caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2). A little more than a year after it was first recognized in Wuhan, China, we have the first vaccines being distributed; a scientific feat brought to you by the study of evolution. Yes, evolution. If you learned anything during this pandemic, I hope it is a healthy dose of the ‘forbidden science’ (no one calls it that).

            'Herd immunity', ‘mRNA vaccines’, ‘mutations’, ‘phylogeny’, what a great resource for our evolution lectures! Evolutionary biologists will no longer be relegated to being the bantering wit at cocktail parties (remember those) yapping about birds being dinosaurs, or how extinct Neanderthals live on in our DNA; no, now is a time for us evolutionary biologists to roll up our sleeves and explain to others what the people actually saving humanity are doing. Sure, we weren’t those fabulous front-line workers actually risking their lives for the greater good, or the microbiologists, immuno-engineers, and Faucis heroically working to find an end to the scourge. Instead, we evolutionary biologists worked mostly behind the scenes, but you could say we’ve seen this play before and could help set the stage. Evolutionary biologists include those figuring out what this disease is and where it came from in the first place. We are used to thinking in geological time, so forgive our stumbling acceleration from our typical glacial pace; all this “evolution-in-action” data that came pouring out during this pandemic was hellishly exciting and horrifying at the same time.

            Starting in late February and March 2020 many of us were drooling over the data coming off the science website NextStrain (https://nextstrain.org/) which proudly exclaims on its homepage to show ‘real time tracking of pathogen evolution¹ (and it doesn’t disappoint). On that site you can actually play (and replay, over and over) a day-by-day phylogeny (an evolutionary diagram depicting relatedness) and a corresponding world map showing the spread and growth of SARS-CoV-2 as it moved and mutated into new forms. Recently we learned of new even more virulent variants of SARS-CoV-2 first appearing in the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa^2,3. These variants are a result of mutations; mutations are errors in the copying of the genetic code of the virus as it is replicated, and are the raw material of evolution. Coronaviruses, like SARS-CoV-2, use the host cells to replicate and copying errors arise from this process.⁴ They are called “coronaviruses” because they look spiky, like an evil monarch’s crown (“corona” means “crown” in Latin); fun fact: several viruses that cause the ‘common cold’ are coronaviruses. The virus uses the crown to latch on to host cells; the vaccines being produced help your immune system recognize the proteins that make the spiky crown (via a messenger(m)RNA, hence ‘mRNA vaccines’), thus priming you to fight off the real virus if you encounter it.⁵ As the virus mutates into new variants it becomes harder for your immune system to recognize the disease compared to what the vaccine originally primed it to fight. That is why there is evidence that some of the available vaccines may not be so effective against the new variants.⁶ That genetic variation caused by mutations is also why you need a different flu shot every year; the flu is evolving and changing so a different vaccine is needed each year to keep up. Expect getting updated shots each year for COVID too (especially if it evolves into new strains and not just new variants).

            The more people that get the virus the more opportunities it has to reproduce and mutate resulting in new strains and new complications for scientists trying to stop it (which is why avoiding other people is so important right now)⁷. Eventually, if enough people do receive protection from the vaccines we will achieve ‘herd immunity’. For the anti-vax crowd, herd immunity is when everyone gets the disease and those that survive will be part of a new immune population. While that is very Darwinian of them, survival of the fittest shouldn’t be used to “trim the herd” of our most vulnerable e.g., the elderly, the immunocompromised, and those exposed to the virus like front-line workers and fast-food employees and others forced to work. Natural selection is brutal, ‘applying’ natural selection to humans is really just eugenics (since you would really just be sparing the privileged who can afford to avoid the virus). It isn’t ‘survival of the richest’ you know.

            In the ‘age of COVID’ we also learned about human variation; not all populations are impacted by the virus in the same way, revealing the biased nature of our healthcare system.⁸ Worse still is that the vaccine may not be as effective on Black and Asian populations due to our different histories and genetic makeup.^9,10 We also see big geographic discrepancies in where COVID genetic samples come from,¹¹ which will also hurt our chances for finding new variants before they spread around the globe.

            When the virus first emerged we didn’t know what it was until it was included in an evolutionary tree and found to be a SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) coronavirus¹², then with further evolutionary detective work we learned it originated from pangolins or bats^13,14, and definitely was not man-made in a lab as some conspiracy theorist and past-presidents suggested.¹⁵ Learning the origin of this disease helped demonstrate another reason why natural history collections should be supported so they can help identify and detect these disease vectors as they emerge¹⁶ (natural history and taxonomy being an important part of the study of evolution). New zoonoses (diseases coming from wild animal populations) can be better tracked if we have a good understanding of what organisms exist out there and what disease they carry (and how they live with those diseases, i.e., after they get herd immunity the hard way) and how those organisms and diseases relate to each other in the evolutionary Tree of Life.^17,18

            So as we watch the virus evolve, and the vaccines do their work, let’s keep in mind the evolutionary biology that went into the study of both. And after we’ve thanked the real heroes of this pandemic, remember to keep learning a little bit of that evolutionary biology that can teach us the nature of these pandemics in the past, present and future.

 

Stay safe and wear a mask or two, your friendly neighborhood evolutionary biologist,

Prosanta Chakrabarty

   

¹ Hadfield, J., Megill, C., Bell, S.M., Huddleston, J., Potter, B., Callender, C., Sagulenko, P., Bedford, T. and Neher, R.A., 2018. Nextstrain: real-time tracking of pathogen evolution. Bioinformatics, 34(23), pp.4121-4123. https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/34/23/4121/5001388

 

² Baric, R.S., 2020. Emergence of a Highly Fit SARS-CoV-2 Variant. New England Journal of Medicine https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcibr2032888

³ CDC. Emerging SARS-CoV-2 Variants. January 28 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-research/scientific-brief-emerging-variants.html

⁴ V’kovski, P., Kratzel, A., Steiner, S., Stalder, H. and Thiel, V., 2020. Coronavirus biology and replication: implications for SARS-CoV-2. Nature Reviews Microbiology, pp.1-16. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-00468-6

 

⁵ Zhang, N.N., Li, X.F., Deng, Y.Q., Zhao, H., Huang, Y.J., Yang, G., Huang, W.J., Gao, P., Zhou, C., Zhang, R.R. and Guo, Y., 2020. A thermostable mRNA vaccine against COVID-19. Cell, 182(5), pp.1271-1283. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32795413/

⁶ Zimmer, C., Weiland, N., LaFraniere, S. 2021. Johnson & Johnson’s Vaccine Offers Strong Protection but Fuels Concern About Variants. New York Times. January 29, 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/health/covid-vaccine-johnson-and-johnson-variants.html

⁷Evolution goes viral. Nat Ecol Evol (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01395-2

 

⁸ Manning, K.D., 2020. The Art of Medicine: More than Medical Mistrusts. The Lancet, 396: 1481-1482. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32286-8/fulltext

 

⁹ Ray, T. 2020. MIT machine learning models find gaps in coverage by Moderna, Pfizer, other Warp Speed COVID-19 vaccines https://www.zdnet.com/article/mit-machine-learning-models-find-gaps-in-coverage-by-moderna-pfizer-other-warp-speed-covid-19-vaccines/

 

¹⁰ Liu, G., Carter, B. and Gifford, D.K., 2020. Predicted Cellular Immunity Population Coverage Gaps for SARS-CoV-2 Subunit Vaccines and their Augmentation by Compact Peptide Sets. Cell systems. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405471220304610

 

¹¹ Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance https://beta.microreact.org/project/pa7U6YScBKgFkEmk1sp1SX-cog-uk-2021-01-25-global-sars-cov-2

 

¹² Eickmann, M., Becker, S., Klenk, H.D., Doerr, H.W., Stadler, K., Censini, S., Guidotti, S., Masignani, V., Scarselli, M., Mora, M. and Donati, C., 2003. Phylogeny of the SARS coronavirus. Science, 302(5650), pp.1504-1506. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/302/5650/1504.2

 

¹³ Zhang, T., Wu, Q. and Zhang, Z., 2020. Probable pangolin origin of SARS-CoV-2 associated with the COVID-19 outbreak. Current Biology (30) 1346-1351.e2

  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982220303602

 

¹⁴ Flores-Alanis, A., Sandner-Miranda, L., Delgado, G., Cravioto, A. and Morales-Espinosa, R., 2020. The receptor binding domain of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is the result of an ancestral recombination between the bat-CoV RaTG13 and the pangolin-CoV MP789. BMC research notes, 13(1), pp.1-6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7450963/

¹⁵ Andersen, K.G., Rambaut, A., Lipkin, W.I. et al. 2020. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nat Med 26, 450–452. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9

 

¹⁶ DiEuliis, D., Johnson, K. R., Morse, S. S., and Schindel, D. E. 2016. Opinion: Specimen collections should have a much bigger role in infectious disease research and response. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(1), 4–7. https://www.pnas.org/content/113/1/4

 

¹⁷ Quammen, D., 2012. Spillover: animal infections and the next human pandemic. WW Norton & Company.

 

¹⁸ Thompson, C.W., Phelps, K.L., Allard, M.W., Cook, J.A., Dunnum, J.L., Ferguson, A.W., Gelang, M., Khan, F.A.A., Paul, D.L., Reeder, D.M. and Simmons, N.B., 2021. Preserve a Voucher Specimen! The Critical Need for Integrating Natural History Collections in Infectious Disease Studies. Mbio, 12(1). https://mbio.asm.org/content/12/1/e02698-20

 

Thanks to Dr. Vicky Forster (@vickyyyf) for help and discussion on an earlier version of this post.