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Professor Roger Short was interviewed in 2010 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge and view science as a human endeavour. These interviews specifically tie into the Australian Curriculum sub-strand 'Nature and development of science'. The following summary of Short's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers' notes. The extract discusses the aquatic nature of elephants and how Short discovered the use of an elephants trunk as a snorkel. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Roger Valentine Short was born in Surrey, England in 1930. Short was educated at Sherborne School in Dorset before starting a bachelor of veterinary science at Bristol University. He completed his bachelor’s degree in 1954 and then travelled to the University of Wisconsin in the USA on a Fulbright Scholarship to complete his masters in genetics (MSc 1955). Short then returned to the UK and began a PhD at the University of Cambridge. His thesis focused progesterone in blood, and was awarded in 1958.
Short remained at the Agricultural Research Council’s unit in the Department of Veterinary Clinical Studies, University of Cambridge until 1972. During this time he was appointed as lecturer (1962-71) and reader (1971-72). Short then accepted the positions of director of the Medical Research Council Unit of Reproductive Biology and honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh (1972-82). Whilst in Scotland, Short co-authored contributions to a series of textbooks entitled Reproduction in Mammals.
Short came to Australia in 1982 to take up a personal chair as professor of reproductive biology in the department of physiology at Monash University. While at Monash, amongst many themes of reproductive science, Short studied breastfeeding as a contraceptive and marsupial sex differentiation and determination. In 1996 Short became a professorial fellow in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Short continues in his research into reproductive biology, while following other interests in science, such as population growth, HIV transmission prevention and melatonin use to prevent jet-lag.
Professor Short has been awarded many honours throughout his career, including; scientific medals from the Zoological Society of London (1969) and the Society for Endocrinology (1970), fellowship from the Royal Society (1974), Royal Society of Edinburgh (1974) and Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (1976), honorary fellowship of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (1991), foreign membership of the Royal Society of Sciences Uppsala (1993), centenary medal (2001) and member of the Order of Australia (2004). Short was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1984. He served the Academy as council member (1988-91) and vice president (1990-91).
Snorkelling elephants
I want to stick with elephants for a second. What made you think that they had been aquatic for a huge amount of their history? What aspects of their biology? At what point did that occur to you?
When you go back to that beautiful drawing in Rudyard Kipling’s book of the elephant in the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with Fever Trees, and his trunk being pulled by the crocodile, you can see that Kipling was aware of the aquatic nature of elephants. Through the cropping scheme in Zambia and a subsequent cropping scheme in South Africa in the Kruger National Park, we were able to acquire a collection of elephant embryos, the smallest being half a gram, which is about that big [indicates]. It was actually 450 milligrams and is the smallest elephant embryo that has ever been seen.
Here in Melbourne, in the department of zoology, I had a very good PhD student, Ann Gaeth. I said, ‘Ann, I’ve got these amazing early elephant embryos. Your PhD project is to serially section them. Noone’s ever serially sectioned an elephant embryo and goodness knows what you’ll find.’ Ann went away, sectioned them and came up to my office and said, ‘Roger, can you come and have a look? The kidneys look most peculiar.’ I said, ‘I don’t know anything about the embryology of the kidney. I’ll get my wife Marilyn to come and have a look.’
We looked down the microscope and there we saw these amazing structures in the kidney, which are called nephrostomes, which are little tubules penetrating the whole surface of the kidney and ending up in little glomeruli. It is a way of bailing out the peritoneal cavity and siphoning that fluid directly into the kidney. Elephants have them – but no other mammal has nephrostomes in its kidney. Marilyn said, ‘Those structures are nephrostomes. They are a way of bailing out fluid from the peritoneal cavity and they’re found only in aquatic animals. The elephant must be aquatic.’ I thought, ‘God! The trunk is a snorkel. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?’
We then thought, ‘No. Let’s have a look at the trunk.’ I had dissected one or two young elephant foetuses and had noticed something strange: the lungs were stuck to the chest wall – but I hadn’t paid too much attention to it. Then I looked up an American veterinary review, which said that every single elephant that has died in captivity has had pleurisy because its lungs are stuck to its chest wall. So I thought, ‘Oh, probably that’s normal.’ We looked at these early embryos and foetuses and, yes, very early on the lungs stick to the chest wall and there is no pleural cavity at all. We did some work with a very good respiratory physiologist in San Diego who had spent his life looking at respiration and he said, ‘If you’re a snorkeler, you know that you’re not allowed to have a snorkel tube that’s much longer than that [indicates] because, if you do, you will actually rupture the blood vessels in your chest cavity. It’s illegal to have a longer snorkel tube’. And here is an elephant with a snorkel tube that is about eight foot long so they couldn’t possibly snorkel, were it not for the fact that they have managed to glue their lungs to the chest wall so that they can’t get a haemothorax, which is what you or I would get.
Presumably the elephants would have been living in rivers or lakes rather than out to sea.
I don’t think they were in the deep ocean, although they crossed large expanses of sea to get to remote islands off the coast of California. Santa Catalina Island has elephant remains on it and it had never been part of mainland California, so how had elephants got there? They had swum. David Attenborough has lovely shots of elephants swimming under water in the Indian Ocean.
Now that most fish have disappeared from the North Sea, the trawlers are trawling up the sand banks across the North Sea and coming up with all these amazing elephant remains, of which I have quite a selection here, from tusks to vertebrae to teeth. Mammoths, as they were then, were swimming across the North Sea between England and Scotland and Europe and they have really been great aquatic animals – and of course they are herbivores. We have been able to do their mitochondrial DNA just recently and guess what their closest relative is? The dugong. Elephants and dugongs arose from a common ancestor, called Anthrobacune, which I saw the first complete skeleton of in northern Hokkaido.
An edited transcript of the full interview can be found at
http://www.science.org.au/node/327196
Focus questions
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. These activities align with the Australian Curriculum strand ‘Science Inquiry Skills’ and the New South Wales syllabus Stage 4 Science outcome 4.8.2 and 4.8.4, Stage 5 Science outcome 5.8.3 and Stage 6 Biology outcome 8.4.4, 9.2.3 and 9.3.1. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
dugong
elephant
embryo
glomeruli
kidney
mitochondrial DNA
nephrostome
peritoneal cavity
pleural
trunk
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