FEATURE
PHOTOS PROVIDED BY LINDSAY DARJANY
BY ANDRES LEON
LINDSAY DARJANY: CRITTERS, GLOBAL CATASTROPHE AND MARINE BIOLOGY EXPLORE WHAT INSPIRES A LECTURER FOR THE BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT
L
indsay Darjany is a marine biology lecturer for the biological sciences department at Long Beach State University. She is outwardly passionate about her study and she often teaches students who are fulfilling a general education requirement. I speak as a student who took one of her classes, BIOL 153, Introduction to Marine Biology. I was very engaged even as someone who is intimidated by anything STEM related. She is known to show off her collection of interesting animals during class while classes were solely online. Before digging into her background, I wanted to know about what other animals she currently has. “I have my stickbugs, my Madagascar Hissing cockroaches, a California Desert tortoise now, I also had a giant millipede that I gave away because I had too many things to take care of. And a dog. For now.” I then learned that the stick bug that died recently was most likely not the same one I saw in the fall of 2020. “They only live about six to seven months, towards the end of that they’ll lay their eggs and then die. Then that new generation takes a couple months or so to hatch. They’re asexual so they don’t neccesarily need a mate to lay eggs. They’ll lay hundreds of eggs. I only had three so I had a couple hundred eggs. I keep about 75, and of those, about 30 will hatch, then maybe ten will survive. I have some friends that I give some to.” What fuels her ongoing interest in the subject is her education path that led her here. “In my undergrad I went to the University of California, Santa Cruz in Northern California and that’s where I got my Bachelor of Science in marine biology. There, I worked for an intertidal invertebrate monitoring group. We went up and
down the coast looking for sea stars, urchins, worms, mussels and we used that as an indicator of how the overall ecosystem was changing. I did that all through college. I got to go to Tahiti to study for a little bit after that,” Darjany said. Following her undergrad education, she worked for a phytoplankton ecology lab where she studied diatoms, dinoflagellates and protists. Eventually, it led her to having a two month stint in Antarctica, studying microorganisms and sea ice while there. “That was at the University of Southern California for about two and a half years or so and then after that I went back to school to get my masters. I was actually a little bit older than a “Not to be a Debbie downer, but we’re going to have to make some changes.” lot of my peers because I had taken two to three years off,” Darjany said. Darjany then recollected her time going back to graduate school. “I went back to grad school and I’m a little overambitious so my thesis project was very complex, it took almost three and a half years. Normally they want you in and out at two years, and I’m a pleaser, so when people ask me if I can do something I say, ‘yes of course I can do that, do you think I’m capable? Like, of course I’m capable.’ So I had a multi-faceted project for my master’s thesis. I got hired at Cal State right after that. They hired me as a lecturer teaching classes, lab coordinating. I haven’t left.” However, employment at LBSU hasn’t stopped her from staying involved in other jobs relating to marine biology. For a while she worked for an organization called the Southern California Coastal Water Research project,
a group that focused on studying microbes in the local marine environment as well as water bodies in general, including rivers, outfalls and even sewers. Darjany recalls what she learned: “Now instead of testing people for covid, what they’re doing is they’re taking sewage water from the flush of your toilet, and they can sample that for coronavirus mRna, from that they can detect amounts and quantities. It’s called microbial source tracking. They can figure which areas of California are more heavily inundated with the virus which is really cool. They can figure out how much is in the area and where it’s coming from. There’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with poop water.” Darjany then added what other types of studies could be done with studying sewage water. “I’m not part of this work, but there’s a whole field called toxicology and one thing they can do is look at birth control remains like tetracycline in sewage water. It’s actually getting into our water system and it’s having an effect on the fish population. It’s making them become more female because of that added female hormone switching the endocrine system of fish. They can also look at which drugs are present in the water system. They can look at Los Angeles county for crack cocaine and Seattle for opioids. It’s really fascinating what they can do with water chemistry.” Of course, studying today’s water chemistry comes with an impossible subject to avoid, the exponential growth of microplastics in our ecosystem. “The world of microplastics and plastics is on the cusp of having it be a really big focus because it’s causing a lot of issues. Once it threatens sperm count it automatically becomes ‘more’ important of an issue to a lot of people.
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