![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/79\/2019\/06\/spontaneous_gen-e1519425152452-1024x631.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
A childhood friend told me that when she was a little girl, she heard her mother say \u201cdon\u2019t drop crumbs, we\u2019ll get ants!\u201d After hearing that, she thought that crumbs turned into ants. My friend and I laughed about this, but later we learned in our grade-school science class that people have shared similar beliefs over the ages. From Aristotle to the ancient Egyptians to Westerners at the start of the 19th century, it was commonly believed that frogs were born from mud, mice grew from smelly old clothes, and rotten meat turned into maggots (ick!). This so-called spontaneous generation of living organisms from non-living substances is also referred to as abiogenesis. Definitive evidence against abiogenesis was finally provided in the 1860\u2019s when\u00a0Pasteur\u2019s famous swan neck flask experiments<\/a>\u00a0showed that microbes did not spontaneously develop within sterilized broth. While this is certainly a landmark scientific discovery, I\u2019ve been surprised to find direct relevance to my own research program.<\/p>\n It started with a \u201csimple\u201d project for an undergraduate student. Much of the research in my lab focuses on aspects of cnidarian biology using the sea anemone\u00a0Nematostella<\/em>\u00a0as a primary study species. In the laboratory,\u00a0Nematostella<\/em>\u00a0is typically cultured in glass dishes, but in the real world, it actually burrows into salt marsh sediments. I\u2019ve become interested in how\u00a0Nematostella<\/em>\u00a0interacts with its natural environment<\/a>. I had heard from other scientists that\u00a0Nematostella<\/em>\u00a0exhibits a faster rate of asexual reproduction when cultured in more realistic conditions where it can burrow into mud. This sounded interesting! I thought a student could quantify the rate of asexual reproduction under a variety of experimental conditions. I wondered, for example, whether the asexual reproduction helped the animals to achieve an optimal size and shape so that they could more effectively move through the sediments.<\/p>\n We collected some mud from a local salt marsh, and passed it through a mesh filter to remove any large roots, rocks, or even sea anemones already in the sample. We initially put the mud into different sections of a fishing tackle box. We added one sea anemone to each section. After a few days, we saw \u201cnew\u201d anemones poking their tentacles out of the mud. It was working! But then I started worrying. Because the different sections of the box were connected to one another, maybe they were somehow climbing from one section to another. We needed a control to prove that wasn\u2019t happening. So we repeated the experiment, this time using some sections as negative controls where no anemone was added. I was shocked to find anemones growing in the control sections! I thought maybe the student had made a mistake, so I repeated the experiment myself\u2026same results!<\/p>\n![\"anemones](\"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/79\/2019\/06\/Kayla_expt_cropped-300x239-1-300x239.jpg\")
<\/p>\n