In Love With Slugs : Teenager Takes Prize-Winning Research in Stride

She is young, beautiful and--as of late--independently wealthy. Now if only Carrie Shilyansky would stop spending her evenings with total slime balls.

She can’t keep herself away from them, she explained. They’re just so cute, so sweet--so misunderstood.

“And,” the 15-year-old neuroscientist said, “sea slugs have contributed a lot to science.”

Aplysia californica, a mass of mollusk common along the coast of Los Angeles, has also contributed a lot to the San Marino High School senior’s future. Her impressive experiments on the neurosystem of the sea hares, as the invertebrates are sometimes called, recently garnered Shilyansky second prize in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a distinction that comes with a $30,000 college scholarship.

So, she says with unassuming joy, the two years of late-night shifts spent in a Westside laboratory--relentlessly poking, coaxing and examining her sea slugs as the youngest member of a UCLA neuroscience team--have actually paid off.

Vindication for her slime balls.

Now don’t get her wrong, this is no Timmy-Lassie love story. Shilyansky has yet to even name any of the hundreds of sea slugs she has met in the last two years.

“When you’re going to cut off its head and pull out its central nervous system, you don’t want to get too attached,” she says.

And no garden variety mollusk will do. With the look of a portobello mushroom and the feel of a viscous fluid, Aplysia californica is the only invertebrate that can set Shilyansky’s heart aflame--and her incredibly analytical synapses afire.

Boasting larger-than-normal neurons, sea slugs make great guinea pigs for neuroscientists, said Dr. David Glanzman, assistant professor of physiological science at UCLA and Shilyansky’s mentor.

Sea slugs have very simple neurological systems, the analysis of which scientists can use to represent the workings of more complex animals’ brains.

And as an added bonus, they’re hermaphrodites.

But all that information wasn’t enough. Shilyansky wanted to know how sea slugs think.

While setting up for a completely different experiment two years ago, Shilyansky’s graduate student lab partner took off--”He went to a Grateful Dead concert for two weeks”--and left her with the then-unfamiliar invertebrates.

Instead of panicking, the good-natured researcher decided to take the experiment even further and find out if a single cell receptor in the simple creature’s brain has the ability to habituate, or learn.

“The idea was entirely hers,” Glanzman said during a party that the lab gave Thursday in honor of Shilyansky’s victory. “Now that they’re cloning adult mammals, I’m hoping they can clone 30 of Carrie for my lab.”

Watching Shilyansky make kissy faces at one soon-to-be-sliced mollusk, Glanzman said he is less impressed with the teenager’s ease at handling slimy things than he is with her sincere passion for research.

“Research is intrinsically boring,” Glanzman said. “And researchers are really intellectual athletes. Everybody knows who Kerri Strug is . . . but nobody knows who Carrie Shilyansky is. She’s definitely not going to get a sneaker contract out of this.”

Overhearing this, Shilyansky shot him a don’t-be-so-sure look.

“At [the Westinghouse awards in Washington], everyone was asking me if I was a model,” she said, half mockingly. “Someone there said, ‘No, but she’s the Valley Girl.’ ”

That’s really all she is, promised the child prodigy whose research has impressed her graduate student and doctoral candidate lab partners--a San Gabriel Valley Girl.

“I like rap music and dance. I have a poster of Snoop [Doggy Dogg] in my room,” she said. “And I like marine mollusks.”

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Even Slugs Can Learn

Carrie Shilyansky, 15, of San Marino, won second prize in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search for her neuroscience project, which provides insights into the cellular processes behind memory and learning. Here is a summary of her experiment, which studied “habituation”--or learned behavior --in Aplysia californica, a type of sea slug:

1) She used a thin rubber tube to prod specific nerve cells in order to provoke a gill withdrawal reflex in the animal. She repeated this prodding at regular intervals, measuring the effects.

2) Over time, the slug’s cells developed a “memory” of the frequency of the stimulus.

3) When the prodding was repeated later --but at different intervals-- the gill reflex response was remarkably similar to what she had noted before, showing that the mollusk’s cells had “learned” a predictable behavior.

Sea slugs can grow to 15 3/4 inches