DATE: Saturday, September 20, 1997          TAG: 9709190093

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Larry Maddry 

                                            LENGTH:   95 lines

FOR 30 YEARS, EVMS RESEARCHER HAS HAD A SOFT SPOT FOR JELLYFISH

THEY CALL HER ``the jellyfish lady.''

She collects jellyfish art and artifacts.

And her car's license plate reads ``JFNSPC'' for jellyfish in space

Her name is Dr. Dorothy B. Spangenberg.

She's a nationally renowned research professor in the department of pathology and anatomy at Eastern Virginia Medical School. She's so well known that people send her jellyfish from the oceans and bays of America to use in her work.

And her experiments have gone far beyond her laboratory to 184 miles above Earth aboard the space shuttle Columbia - hence the license plate.

Today at 11 a.m. in the Virginia Marine Science Museum's IMAX Theater, she will discuss experiments conducted aboard the Columbia that helped

us understand how organisms develop and function in the weightlessness of Earth orbit.

Her talk and a video ``From Under the Sea to Outer Space'' - a NASA production about the Spangenberg-designed jellyfish experiments aboard the shuttle - are part of a weeklong ``Jelly Jubilee'' with special programs and events highlighting the life of the jellyfish and the myths that often surround them.

For the past 30 years, jellyfish have been an obsession with Dr. Spangenberg. She raises ``moon jellies'' mostly - in her Lewis Hall laboratory at EVMS. Thousands of them. Those jellies are common in Hampton Roads and are so named because of their round shape and luminous appearance in the adult stage.

``I became interested in jellyfish because they metamorphose (grow from eggs to adults) so rapidly,'' she explained. ``They only live for a year and then they die. We don't know what happens to them when they die in the ocean. And we don't know why they die.''

The jellyfish lady and her assistants grow thousands of the jellies, which survive in the lab in artificially created ``sea water.'' To the naked eye, the polyps (baby jellies) are smaller than gnats. More than 100 of them will fit on the head of a dime.

Dr. Spangenberg's fascination with the jellies is easily understandable if you take a look through a microscope eyepiece into a cluster of sea jelly ephyrae (formed when a polyp metamorphoses by splitting into several parts) in a dish of sea water.

``See for yourself,'' she said. Under magnification, the tiny jellies appear to be about the size of an ``o'' on a computer or typewriter keyboard. But they weren't floating in the dish of water. They floated for a few moments, then squirted through the water by contracting their body.

She showed that microscope view of pulsing baby jellies to a group of visiting Japanese journalists not long ago. ``They were so excited they applauded,'' she said.

To understand why NASA's shuttle has carried baby jellyfish aboard in 1991 and 1994, it helps to know a little about jellyfish.

``Jellyfish are 500 million years old, among the oldest creatures on Earth,'' Dr. Spangenberg said. ``They were our first multicellular animals. They have seven different kinds of cells, including muscle cells and neurons.''

The NASA experiments were concerned with the effects of low gravity on the balance of jellyfish.

``At the cellular level, there are structures in the jellyfish that are analogous to structures in the inner ear of humans.'' Dr. Spangenberg said. Jellies have tiny crystals on their armlike projections that help them determine which way is up.''

What would happen if jellyfish were taken into space, where there is minimal gravity and astronauts float through the cabin in a near-weightless state? Would the baby jellies go up and down as they do on Earth? Since the entire experiment could be done in a few days and the apparatus for it was not much larger than a microwave oven, NASA thought it seemed worth a try. (A control group of jellies was observed on the ground to give the experiment validity.)

During the first shuttle launch, 2,478 baby jellyfish were taken aloft. And on the second flight in 1994, 126 jellies were sent aloft to determine at what point between the Earth's gravitational force and the zero gravity of space behavioral changes take place.

The experiments aloft showed that jellyfish require only one-third of the gravitational force on Earth to behave normally.

But with less than one-third of Earth's gravity, the jellies did not go up and down as they normally do. Instead, they tended to swim in circles and were not as mobile. ``Often they would stop pulsing,'' Dr. Spangenberg said.

The experiments contributed to our understanding of the effects of space travel and how the absence of gravity contributes to motion sickness.

Incidentally, Dr. Spangenberg doesn't agree with the dictionary's colloquial definition of jellyfish: ``a weak-willed person.''

That does seem an odd term for a creature with a relentless will to live and multiply despite the most turbulent conditions of the ocean.

``They're pretty tough,'' she said. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Bill Tiernan/The Virginian-Pilot

[Jellyfish]

Photo

Dr. Dorothy B. Spangenberg

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