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For the non-scientific onlooker, the Woods Hole July 4 parade is both hilarious and mystifying. What exactly are these zanily costumed, dancing MBL students and scientists representing?

"The participants are elated to show on parade while the observers are a tad mystified" - my dad

— Julie Silver (@JulieAnnSilver)

Here is a key for some of the 2016 parade, with videos by Daniel Colón-Ramos of Yale University, an MBL Whitman Center scientist and lecturer in the Neural Systems and Behavior (NS&B) course.

Visually pleasing and accurate ion exchange in float at parade today — Daniel Colón-Ramos (@dacolon)

The NS&B students and faculty are depicting a giant neuron. "Sodium (Na+) enters the cell, the neuron fires, potassium (K+) leaks out, and the cell returns to its resting potential," one student explains. Course co-director André Fenton of New York University (in black t-shirt at right) is opening and closing the cell membrane. The other course director, Hans Hofmann of University of Texas-Austin (leading the group in a white lab coat) is "a grounded electron. Totally harmless," he says.

Physiology course putting on a strong showing in 4th if July parade with a colorful Stentor. Of course.

— Daniel Colón-Ramos (@dacolon)

Stentor is a microscopic, ciliated inhabitant of freshwater lakes and streams, and one of many kinds of cells the Physiology course studies. (Not a bad likeness in the parade!)

Fluid flow around Stentor as it feeds. Credit: Physiology course co-director Wallace Marshall, UCalifornia-San Francisco, and 2015 course students

The Embryology course is enacting the life cycle of a worm (polychaete). "First we show fertilization, then larva formation, then termination, when the adult dies," says course co-director and MBL Fellow Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado of Stowers Institute. (It's not a sad ending; they repeat the cycle multiple times!) 

The Biology of Parasitism course's float is a parasite that infects humans and is usually harmless, but can cause intestinal discomfort.

Every good 4th of July parade should have a float of Entomoeba histolytica, IMO — Daniel Colón-Ramos (@dacolon)

The Neurobiology course, led by co-directors Graeme Davis of University of California-San Francisco and Tim Ryan of Cornell University, makes good use of a squirt-gun: they are also enacting a neuron firing! 

The Grass Lab Fellows dressed as a plurity of organisms, including zebrafish, fruit flies, and hydra (below is their "Hydragon").

The Grass Lab's "Hydragon".

And last but certainly not least, the undergrads at MBL being undergrads (and tending the fires of their hydrothermal vent)!