— Alexander Borisovich, you are a zoologist specializing in invertebrates... In polychaetes, to be precise. How did that happen?
— Such things always happen by chance.

— That's exactly my point. I doubt you thought in fifth grade that you would grow up and study segmented worms.
— I certainly didn't think that way in fifth grade because I was attending the Moscow Physics and Mathematics School No.2, and the first six months there made it clear that a career in mathematics wasn't my cup of tea.

— We have a lot in common, but it took me much longer.
— For me, it happened very quickly. By the time I graduated high school, I had to develop some interests, and it turned out that I was most interested in history and the like. However, it was clear that pursuing it would be problematic and potentially unsafe, so I decided that biology was a good field of interest for me. I started exploring biology and joined some study groups, and then it so happened that I decided to pursue biology as a major.

— So it was a calculated and mature decision, wasn’t it? Or was there something before? Did you torture fish as a child?
— I didn't torture any fish, and I wasn't born a true naturalist.
Moreover, since I became interested in biology in high school, I had to catch up on all the youth stuff like walking in forests and learning how different birds sound like and what traces animals leave, later on, at university. And I still feel that I lack this culture a bit. Every time I find myself in the forest with, say, Nikolai Formozov, I realize that I lack this cultural layer, don't have it in me.

— I suspect anyone would lose in comparison with Nikolai Alexandrovich.
— Yes, he's an excellent zoologist... So, this year I was supposed to do field practice in Chashnikovo. At the time, students did field practice in Chashnikovo after their first year and in Zvenigorod after their second year. They offered us to go to the White Sea instead of Chashnikovo. I signed up. The condition seemed simple, I had to spend the entire August working in the student construction brigade. That was the year when the station received the Seine boat SChS-2032, the first research vessel of the White Sea station capable of performing certain scientific tasks. It had a winch, among other things, and they planned to study the distribution of biota in the White Sea. From the first voyage, they brought back numerous boxes with jars filled with various creatures preserved in formalin and began to sift through them. I worked in the construction brigade during the day, and in the evenings, I would go look at these creatures in jars and help the students sort them out. I don't even remember how it happened. Either I managed to identify polychaetes, or...

— Polychaetes specifically?
— The collected material was first sorted by phylum, and then we had to identify it down to species. By the end of the month, I was given polychaetes to try and identify them. Not that I was particularly good at it. It's just that you get drawn into the process. When a student gets their hands on some biological material, it piques their curiosity, if you ask me. I was no exception. What makes my case special is that the voyage program accumulated more and more of this material, but the department had no polychaete specialists. So I started to grow as a self-taught polychaete expert, quite a wild one.

— Did you have any identification guides with you?
— Of course, there were identification guides at the department. I also had people helping me. I went to seek advice from the Institute of Oceanology, among other places. But I gained real professional competence only when after a year or two I got into the Zoological Institute in St. Petersburg (Leningrad back then) where the wonderful expert Pavel Ushakov worked. He essentially became my supervisor because he was a great expert on polychaetes. His guidance was invaluable. He was also an exceptionally likable and interesting person. It felt amazing just to be in his company. He was much older than me, of course.

— For a student, "much older" probably means a person in their early thirties, right?
— No, he was already over seventy at the moment. After all, he was a student back in the 1920s. Next year (2022) we hope to repeat the benthic survey of the White Sea to study animals living on its bottom and not only there. The initial survey was conducted 100 years ago by the great Russian and Soviet hydrobiologist Konstantin Deryugin, while Pavel Vladimirovich identified polychaetes. This is all so very important to me because, to me, these are living people, the participants of that voyage.

— So if they didn't have a mollusk specialist...
— It's very possible that I would have studied mollusks, yes. Or copepods. Or something else. All the animals are fascinating. It's just that polychaetes turned out to be quite numerous as a group.

— How many species are there in this phylum?
— Not that many, really. Probably around 15,000–20,000. Estimates always differ. If you say fifteen thousand, someone will immediately tell you that it's exactly twice as much. But half of all the life that lives on the ocean floor by biomass are polychaetes. I think that polychaetes are awfully ancient. We don't know much about fossil polychaetes because they're soft, but some traces of them remain. I'm currently studying worms with jaws, and these jaws... Suffice it to say, paleontology is a complex science. The more I delve into it, the more fascinating it becomes... Real paleontologists’ brains are just wired differently. But it's clear that what we call biological orders, which are more or less compact groups, has clearly existed since the early Paleozoic.

— It would seem there should be more species given how much more time they've had...
— On the one hand, they've had more time indeed. On the other hand though, a lot of them have died out. And those that remain just don't hurry anywhere. Maybe the niches aren't very diverse either.

— There were already first and second divisions at the biology faculty back then. So when you decided to study classical biology, there already was the insanely trendy molecular biology in the picture, right?
— Of course, but the classical biology division somehow felt cozier.

— Is it reasonable to divide biologists into lab and field experts from the very start of their studies?
— If you ask me, a person who is already rather old, I would say no. Overall, I think that it's not quite right to push students towards specialization early on and immediate engagement in science from year one, as they do nowadays. I remember my fellow students wondering why I spent my evenings sorting out worms when there were far more interesting things to do, like going to the conservatory, for instance. Although, I enjoyed those worms then as much as I do now. That's what classical zoology is all about, it's about physical sensations even, when you actually touch things. I'm not sure lab biologists have that kind of pleasure in their life, but maybe they do too.

— Even computer biologists do.
— Well, yes. When you unexpectedly come across an animal you've extensively read about but never actually seen, the joy is immense... I've quit smoking now, but in those days, I could just stand up, have a smoke, and take a stroll.

— You've aligned proteins and observed their conservative positions... There was a time in my life when we identified a certain protein in bacteria and predicted its function. Later, we discovered the same protein in archaea through a completely different method, and it turned out that the function was identical. I remember startling my neighbor in the US, at the NCBI, by excitedly jumping on my chair and shouting.
— That's wonderful. It shows that any field of science can bring joy.

— I believe that's an indicator of good science.
— Maybe. I'm not sure. In zoology, there is also the pleasure of creating good drawings and images... Speaking of early specialization, here's the downside. Students, and probably anyone who focuses on a specific field, begin to narrow their interests and concentrate on what they deem important at the moment. However, with students, it's not always clear if what they're studying is all they need to know for their major. We can clearly see this in our student cohorts now. After the COVID-19 era, they feel much more liberated and constantly ask, "Why are you teaching us this? We don't need this."

— Honestly, that calls for expulsion...
— In our department, and probably in many others, student research seminars don't last. That's because a seminar where everyone just comes to listen passively to another presentation is not the kind of seminar where people are prepared to collectively discuss a problem they've read up on in advance. And it doesn't work any other way. So such seminars don't last.

— Name an ever-present issue in classical biology that should be discussed in seminars.
— That's a good question. I think the issues that need to be discussed in seminars and that could be important are methods. For instance, how do you determine what animals eat if you can't observe them?

— You catch them, extract everything you can from their guts, and perform ribosomal DNA sequencing.
— Partly, yes. We can do that now. But this method will only tell you what the animals ate, not where they got it or how they did it.
Not only are methods changing, but zoology is also at a very interesting point right now. For the past 100 years, zoologists in the broad sense of the word, i.e. embryologists and others felt they were at the forefront of evolutionary science, revealing the nature of phylogenetic trees and evolutionary paths... Now it turns out all this is being done without them, and what they were doing was endless speculation for which they criticized themselves.
That's a whole other story I'm very fond of is the issue of various comparative anatomies. The introduction of new methods over time provided science with a vast number of facts that needed interpretation. First came microscopes. Then, at the end of the 19th century, what we call histological technique emerged, that is, the ability to make serial sections and reconstruct the structure of animals, both small and large. A vast amount of information about the animal structure, previously unseen, came to light. The analysis of these data initially led to new comparative anatomical theories, but then a few critics began to question the logic of comparative anatomical constructions, pointing out that they were full of unproven assumptions and logical gaps.
In Russia, such a person was Vladimir Beklemishev, who wrote an outstanding book Methodology of Systematics. In Germany, there were Zieving, Remane, and then Hennig, who invented cladistics. All of them essentially practiced natural philosophy. The argument was that zoologists, embryologists, and evolutionists should not deviate too far from formal logic.
All of that was wonderful. Beklemishev decided not to publish his book because he was much smarter than most people around him and concluded that the book was good, but criticizing the "proletarian evolutionary theory" wasn't worth the risk. During World War II, the university was divided. Some evacuated, while others stayed here. Vladimir Beklemishev, who at that time was the chief epidemiologist of Moscow — his main scientific works were actually on malaria control — published his comparative anatomy in 1946 or 1947, which in terms of deviation from formal logic was no better than all the others. The story behind it is simple. He had to teach a course in comparative anatomy to students, and it turned out that it wouldn’t have worked without storytelling.

— Is it boring?
— It is. So, coming back to where we started, since phylogenetic trees and evolutionary paths are now determined by molecular geneticists rather than zoologists, the question was what the morphology should focus on and where to apply all the accumulated methods.
Right now, I see comparative morphology, which our department is still successfully practicing and which I personally enjoy, moving towards functional morphology.

— And towards embryology, presumably.
— And embryology, yes. Even pure morphology, which used to solve problems like "who has similar legs, and what other legs evolved from them", has started to focus on how everything works and what these legs do, and it's incredibly interesting.
I'm currently working on the structure of worm jaws that are very similar to the worms that lived in the early Cambrian. Absolutely nothing is known about them. They are incredibly elusive creatures. We collect them near Marseilles because they don't live in our northern seas. We're studying underwater caves there, and it turns out they're full of these unknown worms. To write a paper, it would be good to identify what these worms are, and that task has turned out to be quite untypical. We are now delving into descriptions from the late 18th century and trying to do something.

— Okay, but early specialization and early involvement in science are not the same thing.
— If a person becomes part of a group, not because some leader ensnares them, but simply because it takes time to manage a group. In that case even five years isn't a lot of time. Sometimes all of this creates a conflict. Modern students come in, needing quick results, aka publications. This is what modern life demands of them. Everything is getting blurred very quickly. Even in St. Petersburg, the citadel of classical zoology due to the vast resource that is the Zoological Institute, there are fewer and fewer “real” zoologists among the students of the Department of Invertebrate Zoology.
I'm pleased not with the complicated tasks per se, but when this work actually solves something. Here's a puzzle. Some animals (some mollusks, for example) can eat another mollusk by making a hole in its shell. And some animals don't make holes but can persuade a mussel to open up. Some worms can do that, even though they have no teeth, their entire bodies are soft, including bristles... But all worms secrete mucus, and these worms have a proboscis they can evert and invert — it's their throat. As it turns out, this throat is entirely covered with single-celled glands that secrete an assortment of potent toxins. The worm wraps the mussel in its mucus and waits until some of the poison accidentally gets inside, and after a while, the mussel opens up. I remember being told in my first year that an unarmed nemertine ejects its proboscis, wraps it around its prey, and strangles it, although the latter wasn't said out loud.

— What's there to strangle if it doesn't have lungs?
— It’s a figure of speech. In reality, it smears the prey with poison. It's quite common for the proboscis to get ripped off, but that's not an issue, a new one will sprout. And even if the head gets devoured, it's still not a problem.

— That's why all these people enamored with the endless perpetuation of life hold them in such high regard.
— Absolutely.

— Let's talk about students some more. Numerous students, whole departments even, come to the White Sea Biological Station. Schedule aside, could you identify a department just by observing a group of students in, let's say, in the cafeteria?
— Not really. If they were sitting around a campfire, on the other hand...

— Would it be their conversation style?
— You might be able to guess based on the conversation style... Or you can listen to what they're discussing. People tend to discuss things they're involved in.

— That makes sense. Do you feel that field researchers have a different personality compared to lab researchers? In a broader sense, I mean. Biologists, archaeologists...
— I believe that distinction has significantly blurred now. Field life has become alarmingly scarce. It has become less field-oriented, which is a major issue because... Say, the Bioengineering and Bioinformatics Department brings its students to the White Sea to show them fieldwork that precedes the work of bioinformaticians. That is, everything from collecting worms on the shore to sequencing.
But geomorphologists and cartographers also visit the biological station to introduce their students to field life. For many decades, that wasn't an issue as these students would go on expeditions from August to September. I still remember the era of the comprehensive geological survey of the Soviet Union, in which millions of people participated annually. Remember all those songs about geologists? Do you know why there were so many? Because there were a lot of geologists. And now that's a significant problem…

— There is a difference though. Bioinformaticians capture and sequence something new, while geomorphologists describe the same peninsula for the forty-seventh time. Don't they feel like all of this is some sort of a game? Or are there new tasks?
— We discuss different things with them. They're always tackling new problems, sometimes very successfully. Cartographers are always mapping new areas for us and such... No, it's always something new. But the issue is, and it's a significant one, that the aspect of field life is gradually disappearing from all sciences.

— It's not disappearing from archaeology.
— It's not disappearing from archaeology or zoology. It's just transforming. For instance, students who graduate from the Department of Cartography will eventually be working on computers.
But the biological station is undeniably needed by many. I'm even preparing an entire speech on this topic because in exactly one month we'll be hosting a global congress of marine stations. I was hoping it would be in person, but it will be held online. Nevertheless, it's a major issue because each station operates individually. There are no two identical marine stations and no standard funding schemes. Everything varies.
Of course, if we consider the most prestigious publications and so on, the majority of articles about the sea in the last 20 years have been produced with the help of large, well-equipped research vessels. But that's incredibly expensive, and the number of participants on these voyages is minuscule.

— I guess you can't send students there.
— No, you can't. It's very costly to do so. Students do well at the biological station. I still have this impression from my student days that a biological station is a great place for setting tasks and solving them yourself, which is arguably the greatest pleasure imaginable. That's precisely why we need such field stations to begin with.

— But then it doesn't necessarily have to be a marine biological station. It could be located in a swamp...
— Any place where a student can encounter nature and set a task will do. The thing is, they can set some tasks in a lab too. But given how lab science is structured, for it's not cheap either, a student entering a lab becomes part of what they're working on there already.

— Usually, yes. I know very few labs, including my own, where they let students do what they want... But mine is relatively cheap, as we only have computers.
— I believe it's not about the type of problems being solved but the sheer joy of setting up your own experiment and getting results. I remember going around and asking the seniors about worms, pestering them with questions. At some point, someone told me. "Leave me alone! Get an aquarium and see for yourself." So I immediately got an aquarium and saw for myself. Then, after doing some reading, I realized that it had been done fifteen years before me. Nonetheless, I did the work and got the result. And that's the really cool part.

— My last question is about the lion's mane jellyfish. Were you truly oblivious to what was happening until the very end?
— Not really. I was simply occupied with something else. [Laughs]

This interview was initially published in the Troitsky Variant—Science newspaper*, issue 345 of January 11, 2022.

*This media organization has been registered as a foreign agent under Russian law