S1 E7: Tides that Bind with Randie Bundy

Randie Bundy is a researcher with the University of Washington School of Oceanography. Her complex work looks into the cycling of trace metals in marine environments, how bioactive metals such as iron, copper, and cobalt are acquired by marine phytoplankton and bacteria, and how the organic forms of these metals affect their uptake and cycling in the ocean. 

Bundy recently co-led a team aboard the R/V Thomas G. Thompson for the recent Gradient 5 Survey with all female principal investigators,  LGBTQIA+ diversity represented, and participants from 14 countries of origin. 

On this episode, Bundy shares her path to science, how she approaches scientific inquiry, and what it's like to be an ocean scientist living and working at sea.

Since 2018, Randie Bundy has received 4 grants from the Simons Foundation: Mechanisms of trace metal regeneration in the upper ocean via organic ligands, The fundamental role of heterotrophic bacteria in the global iron cycle, The Impact of Trace Metals on Microbial Communities in the Pacific Ocean and In the Iron Continuum: Physicochemical Metal Speciation Dictates Bioavailability.

https://environment.uw.edu/podcast

Transcript

00;00;00;01 - 00;00;12;25
Randie Bundy
This line of work is really fun because since we still don't know so much about the ocean, there's a lot of just general curiosity and, you know, creativity and the types of questions that you can explore in this field.

00;00;17;21 - 00;01;05;19
Sarah Smith
From the University of Washington, College of the Environment. This is a FieldSound. Ocean chemistry is the stuff of life. Through observation, scientists seek to understand, “to sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea,” as Rachel Carson once described. To find connection. Randie Bundy is an assistant professor with the UW School of Oceanography, studying the cycling of trace metals in diverse marine environments.

00;01;06;16 - 00;01;25;21
Sarah Smith
Through a variety of analytical techniques to assess the distribution and reactivity of trace metals, she couples experimental work with at-sea field studies to better understand the role of trace metals in global biogeochemical cycles. To find the connections, make the unknown known.

00;01;27;03 - 00;01;52;22
Randie Bundy
My name is Randie and I've been a professor here in the School of Oceanography for about six years now, and our lab focuses on understanding different metals and overall just kind of the chemistry of the ocean. And we're interested in metals specifically because they are both nutrients that life in the ocean needs, but they can also be toxic or pollutants as well.

00;01;53;04 - 00;02;17;19
Randie Bundy
And so we're kind of interested in understanding where those metals are in the ocean if they're being kind of beneficial or harmful. And just kind of broadly better, better knowing how the ocean works. It's pretty much almost all salts, like the vast majority of it, is very similar to just normal tables, salt. But then there's all these other really, really important minor things like, like nutrients.

00;02;17;19 - 00;02;44;01
Randie Bundy
But the the nutrients are like several orders of magnitude lower in concentration than just the salts themselves. So if you're a living thing in the ocean, you're kind of in this like salty, salty environment. But then you also need to kind of extract really important things that you need in order to grow and live that are much lower in concentration than kind of all the other chemicals that you're exposed to in your environment.

00;02;44;10 - 00;03;08;29
Randie Bundy
But that's not you know, it's not too unlike what we're doing as humans, like breathing air. You know, most of our atmosphere is actually nitrogen, but oxygen is kind of our main currency. And so organisms in the ocean are doing something similar, you know, with a lot of the other nutrients that they need. The metals that our lab focuses on are some of the nutrients that all life needs, like iron, for example.

00;03;09;19 - 00;03;35;24
Randie Bundy
You know, us as humans, we also need iron and so does life in the ocean. But the thing with iron and with many of these other metals that are kind of like we call them micronutrients or like trace nutrients, they're not the major ones like nitrogen and phosphorus, but they're super important. They have kind of weird chemistry and they they don't behave very well in water, and it's not as easy for the life to take them up and get them in the quantities that they need.

00;03;35;25 - 00;04;04;16
Randie Bundy
So they view their adjusted kind of their their biochemistry. So they don't need as much iron in the first place. Or some of them have developed these other cool strategies to kind of try to gather as much iron from the ocean as possible. So one example is that some of these organisms produce different organic compounds that they kind of tether to the cell and then they like stick it out into the water and kind of fish for the iron and then pull it in to the cell like kind of a fishing rod.

00;04;04;29 - 00;04;37;02
Randie Bundy
So we're interested in understanding those different organic compounds and what things are making those. But they have lots of different strategies. And that's kind of one of the big open questions that we look into, like how do they deal with these low nutrients and how do they compete with other organisms for them? This line of work is really fun because since we still don't know so much about the ocean, there's a lot of just general curiosity and, you know, creativity and the types of questions that you can explore in this field.

00;04;40;19 - 00;04;46;11
Sarah Smith
The ocean is a place of unknowns. It's complex and fascinating.

00;04;50;18 - 00;04;52;20
Sarah Smith
How does Bundy approach the big unknowns?

00;04;54;16 - 00;05;14;05
Randie Bundy
I think in some cases there might be some mystery or question that's out there, and then we have an idea in our lab and then want to test that. Sometimes you might just observe something in nature about you then have an idea or a hypothesis about that you want to test and you can go out and approach that scientific question that way.

00;05;15;03 - 00;05;40;29
Randie Bundy
I think also sometimes we are out maybe testing some other scientific idea and then we get an observation that we can't explain or understand, and then we kind of continue to pursue that maybe on different, you know, a different line of inquiry. And so we follow that path as well. But in both cases, it just kind of stems from a natural curiosity and want to understand how something works better than we do now.

00;05;41;27 - 00;06;09;00
Randie Bundy
One thing that's been exciting me recently, which has been kind of a new area of research for me, is related to underwater volcanoes or hydrothermal vents. And my lab is interested in understanding how those underwater volcanoes input different metals into the ocean like iron, because when they're kind of erupting underwater, they put a lot of different chemicals into the ocean.

00;06;09;00 - 00;06;30;29
Randie Bundy
And then it affects in general the ocean chemistry. But they're so hard to study because they're on the bottom of the ocean. And so you don't know where all of them are. But if you get close to them and you can take pictures or video, you see that there's so much life around them that has been really fun because it's very exploratory, because we just by no means know where all of these volcanoes are.

00;06;30;29 - 00;06;53;24
Randie Bundy
So it's really hard to understand still how important they are. And it's really fun being at the University of Washington because there's so many researchers here that have studied hydrothermal vents before. So I'm able to learn so much from them. Like Kelly and Marvel lately. And some other folks know a pimple like Joe Rinsing and Dave Butterfield because they have been studying these systems for a long time.

00;06;53;24 - 00;06;59;28
Randie Bundy
So it's really nice for some of the newer scientists coming in and continuing that to get to learn from all of them.

00;07;02;29 - 00;07;18;15
Sarah Smith
How do we connect what's happening in the ocean to our day to day lives? If you live far inland in the desert or a midwest farming community, maybe you've never even seen the ocean, but that doesn't mean the ocean doesn't impact you.

00;07;20;07 - 00;07;44;25
Randie Bundy
I mean, I think there's always ways to kind of connect to what's going on in the open ocean with just other, you know, anyone who's living in, say, the middle of the country that might not go into the ocean a lot. I mean, for those of us who are lucky enough to live near the coast, we maybe have some bigger draw to the ocean because we can see it and you know, that that makes us naturally kind of curious and maybe drawn to it.

00;07;45;10 - 00;08;06;18
Randie Bundy
I love trying to understand the chemistry of our ocean because I think kind of a just basic fundamental level. You know, it's it's the foundation for life in the ocean. So we have to kind of we have to know its chemical makeup just so that we can understand better how life is existing in motion and how it might change in the future.

00;08;06;20 - 00;08;43;00
Randie Bundy
The chemistry of the ocean changes. And then I think on the kind of really large scale level, the chemistry of the ocean really, really impacts our climate. Basically, it can impact how much carbon the ocean is able to take up from the atmosphere right now. If the ocean had kind of a different chemical makeup, if it was essentially just freshwater, then we would have about, I think, about 25% more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which means it would be a lot warmer, a lot hotter everywhere, even just like our recent summers in Seattle sometimes have been super, super warm.

00;08;43;00 - 00;08;51;25
Randie Bundy
So so that's another kind of just like really big picture scale of why the chemistry of the ocean is so important. It really impacts our climate quite a lot.

00;08;54;11 - 00;09;08;09
Sarah Smith
What sparked the connection to Ocean science for Randy Bundy? Proximity to the water, to be sure, but also a love of adventure and the opportunity as a student to experience research at sea firsthand.

00;09;09;04 - 00;09;29;01
Randie Bundy
I I'm I've always been very much a beach and ocean person. But I think what really got me into studying oceanography was that I was lucky enough to have a summer internship where I got to go out on a research vessel for one month and that totally hooked me. I was an undergrad and I just I loved it.

00;09;29;01 - 00;09;49;05
Randie Bundy
It was so adventurous. It was very hard work, but it was wonderful waking up every day and just looking out on the ocean. And you also meet really interesting people when you're out there and you form really nice friendships and bonds over your shared love of studying the ocean. And so that's what really hooked me into this career.

00;09;51;03 - 00;10;23;21
Sarah Smith
Early in 2023, Randy Bundy led a diverse team alongside Dr. Ginger Armbrust for the Gradient Five survey aboard the RV. Thomas G. Thompson with female co-chief scientists, all female principal investigators and LGBTQIA plus diversity represented among participants from 14 countries of origin. On board the research Cruise serves as an example of a more inclusive setting for a diversity of opinions, insights and methods in science to take place.

00;10;24;13 - 00;10;52;02
Randie Bundy
The goal of that cruise is we have this mixture of chemists and biologists and also physical oceanographers which study how the ocean currents move. And we're basically trying to understand how this kind of really complex ecosystem exists in the North Pacific, given the sort of nutrient conditions that they're experiencing on kind of these seasonal time scales. And part of that is related to the amount of iron that they get.

00;10;52;02 - 00;11;18;15
Randie Bundy
And in the open ocean where we're going to go because we're going out by the equator and we're going from San Diego to Honolulu, there's not a there's essentially no land nearby. We won't see any land at all for the 28 days after we leave port in San Diego. We're trying to kind of understand where they're they get the iron, which organisms are best dealing with kind of these pulses of iron or low iron conditions.

00;11;18;28 - 00;11;52;19
Randie Bundy
And then we're comparing that to this big model that exists called the MIT Darwin model. And it's one of the most complicated ecosystem models of the ocean and it's very high resolution. And so we're comparing a lot of our data to that model and we're basically trying to kind of improve that model and make it better because it's a really nice one to use to understand how the living things in the ocean might change in the future with different changes and nutrient conditions or temperature and things like that.

00;11;54;25 - 00;11;57;05
Sarah Smith
And what's it like to be a scientist out at sea?

00;11;59;04 - 00;12;21;04
Randie Bundy
We we work 24 hours a day or there's 24 hour operations on the ship because it's very expensive to both pay the crew and fuel and things. So we try to be as efficient as possible. So sometimes your schedule is a little weird, like the work that you're doing might happen at two in the morning and you you wake up and do that and then you take a nap later in the day.

00;12;22;03 - 00;12;38;07
Randie Bundy
But it's also very fun because there's a lot of other scientists out there that you'll meet from different institutions and you you get to work with them, you get to become friends with them. We all help each other and work as a team because it is very hard work and we try to get as much done as possible.

00;12;38;07 - 00;13;00;11
Randie Bundy
So yeah, we like to play a lot of board games. The internet is not very good, so we don't really use the internet, so we do a lot of board games. Yeah, lots of movies, TV shows. I'm the one of the co chief scientist along with Ginger Armbrust for this expedition. And so this time I brought some, like, fun treats for everyone on board.

00;13;00;11 - 00;13;19;23
Randie Bundy
When we finish some of our bigger stations where we're doing a lot of work. So I brought some little like spa treatment, face masks. So I'm very tired too. So yeah, we do a lot of fun things and we have set meal times that we eat together. And then you have roommates on the ship that you bunk with.

00;13;20;09 - 00;13;39;09
Randie Bundy
You know, they're nice and have good space and their feels kind of like college dorms. Every morning you get to wake up and have your coffee and look out on the water, which is really great though. Lots of interesting things happen. You know, we'll see interesting wildlife last year on this similar regional we saw a lot of sharks.

00;13;39;25 - 00;14;04;11
Randie Bundy
When we're in the nutrient rich area, we see lots of flying fish, lots of dolphins and whales. We've seen some sunfish before, which are really cool. So for those hanging out, I think probably the coolest thing that I've seen when I've been at sea was in the Gulf of California one time and it was super, super calm, like not a breath of wind.

00;14;05;00 - 00;14;22;06
Randie Bundy
And we were kind of driving along and all of a sudden there was like hundreds of sea turtles right at the surface. And there was like even birds, like sitting on some of their shells because it was just so calm. And we had this slow down to like a really slow speed so that we could kind of navigate through them.

00;14;22;06 - 00;14;24;10
Randie Bundy
So you just, you never know what you'll see.

00;14;24;13 - 00;15;01;09
Sarah Smith
The discoveries are countless and the rewards are limitless, continually reminding researchers like Bundy why they do what they do. A thank you to our guest, Randie Bundy. To learn more about Randie's work and University of Washington College of the Environment, click the link in this episode description or visit environment.UW.edu. From all of us at FieldSound

00;15;02;07 - 00;15;10;03
Sarah Smith
Thanks for listening.