RITTSCHDF EXAMINES AN ANTI FOULING EXPERIMENT WITH A STUDENT. 



"And then I caught things for my 

 dissertation," he says. "Frogs." Though his 

 favorite high-school subject was chemistry, 

 he found himself drawn to ecology at the 

 University of Michigan. His college studies 

 saw the beginning of his exploration of the 

 interrelationships between animals and 

 their environment, and for his doctoral 

 dissertation, he studied the chemical 

 ecology of hibernating freshwater frogs. 



Then came a turning point. Just after 

 receiving his Ph.D. in 1975, Rittschof saw 

 the ocean for the first time, on a trip to the 

 Florida Keys. A child of the Southwest and 

 Great Lakes regions — he was bom in 

 Arizona in 1946 — Rittschof had never 

 seen the marine environment face-to-face. 

 And now he was sure of one thing: he 

 wanted to study chemical ecology in 

 marine systems. 



After post-doctoral work in biochem- 

 istry at the University of California at 

 Riverside, Rittschof got his first chance to 

 tackle a real-life problem. One of his 



Michigan professors had questioned the 

 mechanisms by which hermit crabs in the 

 Gulf of Mexico locate new snail shells to 

 live in. Hermit crabs have no hard covering 

 of their own, and as they grow, must 

 constantly find larger snail shells to inhabit. 

 How do they find empty shells of the 

 correct size? 



Rittschof believed that the answer lay 

 in the crabs' ability to detect certain 

 chemicals that were released when the 

 snails died. "Chemical perception is a 

 sense that you don't think about much," 

 he says. "It's much more than the sense 

 of taste or the sense of smell. There are 

 additional capabilities, like pheromone 

 reception and the perception of environ- 

 mental odors, that are poorly understood." 



To support his theory, Rittschof had 

 to locate the specific molecule that the 

 crabs responded to, and figure out how it 

 was produced. Working on vacation and 

 during the afternoons at a Florida confer- 

 ence, he researched and wrote two papers 



that described his discovery: when one 

 snail eats another, an enzyme in its saliva 

 reacts with the other snail's muscle tissue 

 to produce the molecule that hermit crabs 

 respond to. 



And different snails — with different 

 shells — produce different mixtures of 

 peptides within the molecule. Hermit crabs 

 only respond to molecules signaling the 

 right-sized shells. 



With two published papers under his 

 belt, Rittschof was on his way. In 1980, the 

 University of Delaware hired him to figure 

 out what kinds of molecules tell oyster 

 drills that living oysters are nearby. Oyster 

 drills are predatory gastropods that drill 

 through the shells of living oysters and eat 

 them costing fishers and the seafood 

 industry millions of dollars. 



His Sea Grant-funded research with 

 the oyster drills received the prestigious 

 Dean's Prize from the College of Marine 

 Studies, used two million larval oyster 

 drills and netted enough material to fill 16 

 Continued 



COASTWATCH 21 



