By Howard Goldstein
Photographs of the vast arid vistas of the Negev Desert in Israel and the red Simpson Desert of Australia are hung above a powerful telescope with which Matt scans the skies in his leisure time. On the family coffee table, the molt of a strange creature adorns the table top.
The exoskeleton of a Caribbean spiny lobster, said Fox, carefully holding up the shell.
It's amazing. They shed their outer shells and leave this perfect replica of the living animal. When I first saw the lobster tank in the Hofstra laboratory, I thought there were twice as many animals as there really were. It's a beautiful creature, he said.
A scientist and nature lover, Matt was chosen last summer to enroll in the Summer Science Research Program at Hofstra University, which directly led to his entry into Siemens.
The study, "Identification of Chemosensory Sensilla Activating Antennular Flick Behavior in the Caribbean Spiny Lobster, Panulirus argus," was under Dr. Peter Daniel, a world authority on lobsters, and involved Fox and his partner Sagar Mehta, of Roslyn Heights.
The Caribbean spiny lobster, Panulirus argus, is widespread across the Caribbean Sea as far north as southern Florida. An agile and nocturnal carnivore in coral reefss, Panulirus is heavily defended by a spiny shell and armed with wicked tail spikes that the crustacean lashes at its predators.
Unlike the American lobster ( Homarus americanus) of the north Atlantic, the Caribbean spiny lobster lacks claws, its first set of five pairs of legs modified into very long tapering sense organs. They also have a set of antennae through which the crustacean senses both chemicals and vibrations.
The lobsters filter chemical agents from the water by what's called flicking behavior', Fox explained. Flicking is essentially pulsating the antennae together. It's something akin to smelling. When they sense something of interest, like food or a threat, the lobsters flick much more intensely.
Each antenna tapers into two filaments called flagella or antennules. These flagella are heavily laden with sensory receptors called sensilla. The outer filament is called the lateral flagellum, and the inner is the medial flagellum.
It was long believed that only the lateral flagellum, which ends in a tuft of sensilla, could sense chemicals, and that the medial flagellum was exclusively for [mechanical reception]. Our experiments proved this was not correct. Though the medial flagellum is not required for chemosensory reception, it does enhance it. We now know that some of the medial sensilla are in fact chemical receptors, said Fox.
The experiments, which involved surgically removing the lobster's tufts and destroying sensilla with distilled water, encompassed months of numerous experiments. As expected, lobsters with their tufts removed showed little flicking behavior when squid extract, a food agent that greatly excited normal lobsters, was added to the tank.
But what was not expected was significantly reduced flicking when the tufts were left, but the medial sensilla were deadened. Further experiments demonstrated chemosensory sensilla on the medial flagellum.
There are easily over 10 different types of sensilla, and we discovered that both flagella are pretty much the same, save for the mass of olfactory receptors on the tufts of the lateral, said Fox.
The destroyed sensilla regenerate when the lobsters molt. However, the lobsters themselves face a different future...covered with a rich buttery sauce and digesting deep inside Dr. Daniel.
Most of them get taken home and eaten by the Daniel family, said Fox.
It's one of the reasons we don't name them, he smiled.
Fox won't be joining in that feast, but not necessarily out of sentimentality. He's extremely allergic, to the point of anaphylaxis, said Lisa Fox, his mother.
In fact, it was severe allergies and asthma that may have set Matt on the road to biology. When he was little, he suffered terribly from asthma, so we took extended trips out West into non-polluted, mountain regions. We were a very outdoorsy family, and I think it helped spur his nature interests, she said.
Fox entered Siemens through a science mentorship program at Kennedy. His mentor, biology teacher Barbie Frank, entered Fox and Mehta's project, in the form of a 20-page paper complete with numerous statistics and graphs, under the partnership division.
Siemens, launched four years ago by the German technology conglomerate, competes with the old Westinghouse competition, now taken over by computer chip giant Intel Corporation, for recognition.
Though newer and not yet as well known, Siemens, also science, math and technology based, is widely earning accolades for the rigor of its judging and the quality of projects presented.
It also opens up new doors for students to enter by having a partnership project division, and thereby allowing more students from any given region to make semifinals.
The top prize is $100,000. The Regional Final was Friday, Nov. 1. Fox is eagerly awaiting his placement.
It was great working with Dr. Daniel. This year he will probably be presenting our research at a lobster convention in New Zealand. I would love to go to that, said Fox.
This research will probably lead to many more discoveries about the spiny lobster. I think the main reason people are interested is that it is further data about how crustacean olfaction works and what neural path it takes to the brain.
Fox has applied early admission to Tufts University in Massachusetts, where he hopes to continue studying the natural world in some form or another.
