815: Fascinated by the Effects of Material Properties on the Form and Function of Fishes - Dr. Adam Summers
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Hi, listeners. I'm your People Behind the Science podcast host, Dr. Marie McNeely, and I'm excited to have you with us today for episode 815, where we'll be resharing our conversation with our guest, Dr. Adam Summers.

Listeners, Adam applies his background in engineering and mathematics to better understand living systems. He uses lessons from the natural world to develop solutions to real-world problems like how to filter things or stick to things, burrow in the sand, and move quickly and efficiently underwater. And in our interview, Adam shared some fantastic stories about his life in science.

So get ready to enjoy this episode of People Behind the Science. Every day, discoveries are made that will change our understanding of the world around us. Dr. Marie McNeely is here to bring you the brilliant minds who are making these discoveries so they can share their incredible stories and take you on an amazing journey. Welcome to People Behind the Science. ♪

Hello, everyone, and welcome to People Behind the Science. Our guest today is Dr. Adam Summers. So, Adam, welcome to our show. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. Wonderful. We are excited to have you with us today and to welcome you to our program. And listeners, I'm going to tell you just a little bit about Adam before we dive in. He is a professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, as well as the Department of Biology at the University of Washington.

and his research laboratory is within the Friday Harbor Laboratories there. He completed his bachelor's degree in mathematics and engineering at Swarthmore College, and afterwards he worked as a SCUBA instructor in Australia. Adam then decided to go to graduate school, and he received his master's degree in biology from New York University, and he was awarded his PhD in organismic and evolutionary biology from the University of Massachusetts. He received a Miller Research Postdoctoral Fellowship to conduct research at the University of California, Berkeley,

and he went on to serve as a faculty member at UC Irvine before joining the faculty at the University of Washington where he is today. Now, Adam has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in addition, he was awarded the Bartholomew Prize for Physiology Research from the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. He's also received the UC Irvine Academic Senate Prize for Undergraduate Teaching, as well as the Director's Award for Program Management Excellence from the National Science Foundation.

Now, in addition to all of this and his excellence in research and teaching, Adam writes a monthly biomechanics column in Natural History magazine, and he has also served as the scientific advisor for the Pixar films Finding Nemo and the recently released Finding Dory. And listeners, Adam is here with us today to talk about his life and science. So Adam, we want to get to know you as a person, as a scientist, we want to know it all. So can you start by telling us what you like to do with your time when you're not doing science?

I love to do a bunch of different things. I'm a dad, so I got a couple little kids and my wife and I spend an awful lot of time when I'm not working doing fun things with our kids. So a lot of hiking and playing by the seashore. We live on a little island and so there's a lot of water related activities.

But probably my most time-intensive non-scientific hobby is that I'm a pilot. And so I do an awful lot of flying of small planes. Very cool. So when did you start flying? 10 years ago now in Southern California. Well, it sounds like you have a lot in life to keep you occupied outside the laboratory, but I'm sure you've got quite a bit going on inside the lab as well. So can you tell us a little bit about what you do at work every day? Can you give us the high-level view of how you describe what you do to someone who's not familiar with your field?

I'm trained as an engineer and mathematician, and I came late to biology. So my route into biology is that I apply very simple engineering and physics principles in a mathematical context to living systems. So I take my childhood love of the natural world and sort of the natural environment. I always loved looking at organisms doing things, snakes eating things and catching fish and

for bugs in the sewers of New York.

And I take the inspiration from the natural world and then try to understand how it works in a physical sense. And I use the lessons that I learned from the natural world to try to inspire new solutions to technical problems, how to filter things, how to stick to things, how to burrow in sand, how to move more quickly or more efficiently underwater. Certainly. Well, I think we still have a lot to learn because a lot of these animals seem to make it look easy, right? Yeah.

Well, that's the fascinating thing is that animals perform amazingly well at tasks that we're mediocre at. And they do it with materials that we would consider inferior, soft materials, materials that are gooey, things that don't lend themselves to our concept of a technical solution to a problem. Suction cups are a good example. You have a very clear idea in your head of what a suction cup should be and a fairly stiff, smooth chunk of rubber.

In the aquatic realm, there is a bunch of different kinds of fish that stick really well. And many of these fish have a big sucker disc on their belly. And this disc is soft. It's got hairs all over it. But even so, it can lift 300 times the fish's weight while stuck to a substrate that's incredibly rough, just basically your average intertidal rock. So not only is it really weak,

rough, but it's also covered in various kinds of slime. So I look there and I see this completely different way of doing something that seems so low key and it's green to manufacture and it has this incredible high performance. And I want to understand why and see if we can learn some lessons that can teach us how to make new things.

Definitely. So it sounds like you draw a lot of your inspiration from the natural world. And I know this love of nature and the natural world motivates a lot of scientists. Is there one particular element of it that really motivates you? Or do you have a favorite saying or quote that really motivates you to go in every day and do your science? I'm not a guy who puts quotes on my wall. I read incessantly, but I can't think of a single sort of defining quote that

Probably not helpful to your listeners, but I'm not a guy who's got a door full of cute phrases. My door is covered with pictures that my kids drew. So I'm afraid not. I like it. So is there something though, in general, that motivates you? Curiosity. I mean, I'm just absolutely insatiably curious about how things work. I absolutely delight in seeing something that I don't understand. I love to be

on the steep part of the learning curve where I'm trying to understand both the natural history and the physics of something that is completely unknown to me. For instance, how fishes burrow in sand. There's all sorts of great math behind these granular solids that make up the substrate of the sea. And yet we don't really understand how you might burrow into them. And I love...

being on that steep part of the learning curve. So when I wake up in the morning, I'm excited to dash into work and get started answering whatever question it is that's burning in my head that morning. And it does change. I've got a lot of different irons in the fire at any given moment, but I'm always motivated by getting answers to questions I do not know.

I love it. Well, I think this curiosity, this need to know drives a lot of scientists. So that's fantastic to hear. But I'm curious to hear about some of the people who might have inspired you along your journey. Do you have role models or were there ever people that you were looking up to as you went through your career? Oh, very much so. I mean, my PhD advisor, Beth Brainerd, who's at Brown University now, is sort of my model for the perfect scientist citizenship.

She is incredibly dedicated and has a incisive mind that looks to the core of questions really quickly and really effectively.

That makes her a wonderful scientist, but she's also an incredibly flexible mentor who is able to get the very best out of lots of different kinds of students. And I think that's a talent that I dearly wish were easily communicated because I struggle to implement the lessons that I've been trying to learn from her. And from my postdoc advisor, Marvelee Wake at Berkeley, who also is one of these people who's just

unbelievably good at the job of mentoring new scientists and is a role model in terms of doing service to science. So I come from a lineage of people who thought it was really worthwhile to invest your time and energy making the scientific endeavor a better place. And I'm

I've internalized that and I think it's pretty important to do. Definitely. I think these mentors are so key to inspiring people to continue pursuing science or keeping you moving along your journey. So can you take us back though to the beginning, Adam, and tell us where your interest in science began? You mentioned you maybe had this love of the natural world as a kid. Where did it all start? So I have a moderately unusual background in that I grew up in downtown Manhattan in New York City, Greenwich Village. And I

And I was an animal freak. Every summer, we would spend in a remote cabin in Canada, north of Toronto, by about four hours. So every summer, I would be at a lake in a cabin that had no running water or electricity, surrounded by the natural world and animals. And the rest of the year, I was in New York City, which many people view as a sort of an abiotic wasteland. But for me, it was very much a natural historian's playground.

I found a lot of animal life in the parks, but also I caught three different species of snakes in the subway. Oh, wow. That's scary. Undoubtedly, they were all escapees. None of them were native New York City snakes. But if you had the eye for it, there was all sorts of animal life to be found there. And I did not realize that there was any profession that involved being interested in animals. So I went off to college and studied the things that I thought were fun to study.

I worked in math and worked in engineering and never intended to be employed in either field because they didn't look like the kind of thing that I would be either very good at or enjoy very much.

And then I went off to Australia where I did a lot of scuba diving and realized that I love the natural world. And here I was in what seemed like the ideal job, but that I was missing just terribly the intellectual stimulation of college. It's an odd thing to think about it and realize that the happiest time in your life has been when you were on a college campus and your time was incredibly constrained and things. And I realized that I did like a lot of aspects of the college campus. And so I...

I started looking around for graduate schools in biology and found that I could get into the master's program at NYU. And so I went to New York University and did a master's using a scanning electron microscope to look at snake scales. And from there, I went to the University of Massachusetts where I got a PhD in organismic and evolutionary biology while spending about half my time working in a museum in Cambridge called the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.

That exposure to the world of museums was incredibly influential because it turns out I'm just a completely collections-oriented person. I absolutely love being in a catalog room where there's thousands and thousands of dead fishes.

You make it sound so romantic. Yeah. It's amazing to wander through there and pull things off the shelves that were put on the shelves 225, 250 years before and realize that they were stuck in the bottle by a human who was also interested in that fish but generations before was brilliant for me. I just absolutely adored it. And so I've made it my career to spend as much time as I can in the natural world and near collections.

Great to hear more about your journey. I'm really fascinated by this time you spent in Australia. Can you tell us, finishing your degree in this sort of engineering mathematics field, what then turned you to become a scuba instructor in Australia? Well, I had done a few jobs after college, teaching high school math and running a computer company and basically hit a point where I said,

I'm not finding something that looks like it's got long-term legs. Maybe I should just go do something that I've always thought was fun. And immediately after college graduation, I had spent some time in Australia with some friends and we'd learned to scuba dive. It had become my hobby. I mean, I just went every chance I could get.

And I thought maybe I'd just go to Australia and learn how to become a dive instructor and do that for a bit and see how I like it. So that's what I did. I think that's something that we all dream about doing maybe at some point in our life, going abroad somewhere very far away and doing something completely different. So it's really awesome that you were able to have that experience. Do you think that then...

shaped the science that you were going to pursue. I think this is when you mentioned that you were able to get exposed to the natural world and some scientists who are doing research that you might be interested in. Yeah, that's where I met my first ichthyologists. And it's important to recognize that the only reason this happens is I've had an incredibly privileged life. You don't get to go take off for Australia to make a few bucks a week teaching scuba diving if you've got any worries about feeding yourself or putting a roof over your head. And

And so with the privilege of not having to worry about feeding myself or clothing myself, I could take time to go and do things. And honestly, it also really made a difference that at all stages, my parents were sort of tickled by whatever I was doing. They thought it was really, really neat that I was in Australia basically being a bum and

I think having parental support was pretty powerful. Absolutely. So can you tell us a little bit more now, Adam, about a project that you have ongoing that you are so excited to continue to be working on? Oh, this is a very difficult time for me to pick just one because right now I've got a pile of unbelievably talented graduate students in the lab for a fish course that we run every two years that combines all the gear we have with a big teaching staff and we just go at as many different projects as we can all at once.

So I'll give you a couple of thumbnails and then you can ask me to expand on one. A sampling perhaps. I like it. So we're looking at how fish stick to things. So how the little belly suckers work. We're looking at how manta rays filter out tiny, tiny particles from the water with filter holes that are larger than the particles. How do different kinds of fish bury themselves in the sand? So fluorophores

So flatfish and stingrays go one way and this thing called a sandfish goes a completely different way and a sand lance goes yet a different way under the substrate. A big initiative going on in the lab right now is that I'm engaged in trying to CT scan every species of fish. So there's 33,000 species of fish. I'm trying to CT scan every one of them and make all of those data available to everybody so that anyone can get at any of the skeletons of any fish.

We've got a woman working on a new mode of locomotion in flatfishes. We've got a discovery of extensive male-male combat in some tiny little intertidal fishes. And we're looking at the biomechanics of how they lock up these antlers and wrestle around. We've got a lot of projects looking at how armor works. So we've got a bunch of fish that have different kinds of armor. And we're interested in how the armor works, but then also some of the trade-offs.

Is the armor very expensive to maintain? Is it a huge percentage of the fish's body weight? Do they have to really deal with having to cart around a lot of heavy armor or is it not as heavy as it looks like it is? These

These are just a few of the things that we're messing around with right now in the lab. Well, they all sound phenomenally fascinating. But the one I think that really caught my eye is this initiative to CT scan these thousands upon thousands of fish species. And one thing that I really love about this initiative is the fact that you're making them all available. You know, it's open source science. So can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Last year, we raised $340,000 from private foundations to buy a very, very nice state-of-the-art CT scanner. One of the conditions of the gift was that the scanner be available free of charge for anyone to use. So we've had people flying in from all over the states, but all over the world as well,

to use this scanner to gather skeletal material. And as part of my outreach, I have a Twitter account and I had been tweeting out individual pictures as we CT scan things. And people would be suggesting what I scan next and also asking me what I'd scan next. And my reply was always, I'm going to scan them all. And it was kind of tongue in cheek with 3000 species of fish. That's a lot of fish. And pretty much no matter how long it takes or how much it costs,

It's too much time and too expensive to think about doing. I still said it though, because I didn't want to limit myself. I wanted to give myself the freedom to pursue whatever fish I wanted next. So we then had kind of an epiphany about how to scan things and what made a good scan. And that process suddenly made it possible to actually scan all of them.

And I'll give you a little flavor for the advance we made, which is incredibly intellectually trivial. But at the same time, it hadn't been noticed before. And it allows us to do this pretty ambitious thing. You may have had a CT scanner, seen one, and it basically consists of a bed and a donut. And either you pass into the donut on a moving bed or the donut passes over you on a moving track. But in any case, everything inside the donut gets imaged.

And of course, much more than you fits in the donut. And a good question is why not just scan lots of people at once, right? You could all pile in there, lie on top of one another and...

And then when they reconstruct it, they could digitally dissect one person from another. That seems like a huge increase in efficiency, but humans are probably a little too squeamish to lie on top of one another, especially with their bodies in various states of disrepair, which is generally how you end up on the CT scanner. So dead fish are less picky. And so we figured out we could scan maybe as many as 20 species at once. So a 30-year project becomes a two-year project.

And that's a really neat thing. That is awesome. And by being able to offer all of this free in terms of the scanning itself, we have a sort of a club that we can wield to ask people as they come to scan to immediately put the data up on the web on this thing we call Open Science Framework. And they make it available to everybody free of charge immediately. So whose idea was this to wait, hold on, let's just scan multiple fish at once.

I was mine. Congratulations. That is an awesome idea. I don't know. I mean, I have to tell you, it doesn't feel like an awesome idea. It feels like sort of an obvious idea. Once we had the scanner here and you start making 3D printing devices to hold fishes, you pretty quickly realize that any device that isn't cylindrical...

is wasting space. And if they're cylindrical, you really should fill up all of the space with fish. So it seemed incredibly obvious to me. So now do you have an estimate based on this fact that you can scan multiple fish at once? How long do you think it'll take you to do these 33,000 or so species of fish?

It really depends on funding that we get. If I do it all by myself, I mean, I don't have any funding to support the project, so I'm doing it sort of catch as catch can. And by the end of next week, we'll be over a thousand species in. And it will probably take us five years, but realistically, it's a two-year, two-and-a-half-year project if we're doing it.

We've got some administrative help and some support for people to fly them in and out with their fishes and things like that. Well, that is so exciting, Adam. I think that is an awesome initiative. The big bottleneck is getting stuff up online. Yep. That's the big bottleneck. Just watching the slow uploads. Yeah. I mean, I live on a little island and...

It's a very small pipe getting off those islands. So each one takes an overnight. And so we're, I think we've got 60 or so up online and we've got over 600 in the can now. So they'll all get up there eventually. And we have a link on there to show you everything we've scanned so that if you hit the link and say, oh man, they don't have the such and sup up. We could throw that one up right away. It just changes the priority. But it's basically me doing the work. So yeah.

Up at all hours of the night, slowly moving things through. Well, Adam, I think this is truly phenomenal. I think it's such an exciting initiative and so awesome they're able to share the data with people who then can use it in their own research. I think that's amazing. It's really fun.

So then we've talked about a lot of great things about your career journey and the things that you're working on now. Lots of great projects going on in the lab, but we haven't yet touched on a lot of the challenges that you face. We've kind of hinted at some of them with this project, some of the limitations that you're facing. But can you think next, Adam, of a major failure or a major challenge that just really left you scratching your head and tell us what happened and how you worked through it?

I suppose at some level, this is sort of an opportunity for me to show how hard I've persevered through difficulty. But the truth is I'm a rich white guy. And so for me, difficulty has been experiments that don't work, funding for particular projects that didn't come through exactly when I'd hoped it would come through. But I've been incredibly blessed. I've had good funding. I've had unbelievably good students who've been through my lab.

great postdoctoral fellows, and I've had fabulous opportunities. I don't think there's been any systemic work-related issue that I feel like I've overcome. There are manuscripts that did not get accepted by the journal I had hoped they would get accepted by. And to this day, I feel those manuscripts should have been, and the people who rejected them were pigheaded. But I have a hard time putting that in the context of it being a terrible setback.

scientifically, I don't really think in terms of setbacks. So for me, when I start working on projects, I see the positive bits. There are some parts that don't work, but you learn something from all of it. And so every time you try to do something difficult, your first dozen attempts simply don't work. And that's all right. You learn a lot. And sometimes you learn

the key important thing. They don't brand themselves in my memory as negative things because they're just part of the learning process. Frankly, they're what I enjoy about science. We have a fabulous project going on right this second, and it's not going to go anywhere. It's dead in the water because we had an unfortunate death of a piece of equipment. We were looking to find out exactly how much force it takes for a particular fish to knock a particular kind of gastropod off a rock. And we had a beautiful force transducer

three-axis thing, gives us X, Y, and Z, and it just died. So now that student is punting and we're going to work on a different project entirely and someday the force transducer may get repaired. And when that happens, that may be the most important thing to investigate with it, but it may well not be. Right.

Well, I think that's one of the benefits of having multiple irons in the fire, as you say, multiple projects going on. So if one kind of tanks, a piece of equipment breaks, it's not a student just hanging out for the rest of the summer with nothing to do. You can put them on something else. Yes. And things tank all the time. I mean, that's how science moves.

That's actually the quality that I notice most quickly in students who work in my lab is the reaction they have to things not going as I suggested they might. Because when I ask someone to take on something, I'll give them an idea of how I think it should go. And perhaps by virtue of my persuasive nature, they become convinced that that's exactly how reality should happen. Or perhaps they read and they realize that I've got the wrong end of the stick and it really should happen some other way.

But invariably, if it's an interesting question, it doesn't come out the way you think it should. That's kind of how you find interesting questions. Crappy questions are ones where you look at them and you go, the answer to two plus two is four. Well, yeah, I mean... It's not exciting to prove that. It's not really exciting at the end of the day to say, wow, fish to feed, they open their mouth and then they close their mouth.

So it's fun when things don't go as you expect, but not every student finds it fun. And so that I think has been an interesting litmus test that I apply to students in the lab is I can very quickly see how much fun they're going to have at this game by how they react to the first time they try to gather data because it just is not going to go the way they want it to go.

And that's kind of fun to watch and interesting to watch. But I think having a attitude that obstacles are actually good things, not bad things. If you have no obstacles, you've got boring research. And if you have obstacles, you very likely have some neat research. Definitely. I think for me, it's you start to look at these things as opportunities instead of challenges and roadblocks.

Absolutely. So Adam, we talked about some of the challenges that you faced, but next I do want to talk about some of your successes. So can you tell us a story of success, whether it's a big win or just a small victory that meant a lot to you? I'm not very good at this. Let's see. Your opportunity to brag. Go for it.

Yeah, I'm not much on that. I'll tell you an early experience with how poorly we understand the most basic bits of biology. So many years ago, 20 something years ago,

I came up to these laboratories as a student, and one of the people up here is a fabulous biologist named Elliot Drucker. He was working on clingfishes, which are little intertidal fishes that stick to rocks. And he was interested in how hard they stick to rock.

And he was measuring this. But he wasn't measuring it on rocks. He was measuring it on a plexiglass because that's an easier way to get a good suction is you can drill a hole in plexiglass really easily and stick a pressure transducer under it. And it's not as easy to stick a pressure transducer under a chunk of rock because you got to drill a hole in a rock. So I watched Elliot work with these guys and I collected a bunch of them. And over the next 10 or 15 years...

I looked hard at how clingfish acted in the wild and they were often stuck to the undersides of rocks. And I watched them feed and they eat limpets, which are sort of the prototypical attached gastropod. And they'd stalk these limpets. And there's nothing more darling than a tadpole shaped fish thinking it's being stealthy as it sneaks up on a snail that doesn't actually have eyes to look at it. I was delighted by it. And eventually I came up with a protocol for testing how well they stick to things.

And we started to deploy it. There was this moment when we were testing them on different roughnesses, when I suggested to Dylan Wainwright, who's now a graduate student at Harvard and who was working on this project, that he had somehow missed the boat in collecting his data because as far as I could tell, regardless of how rough the surface was, the fish was sticking equally well.

And that makes no sense. Man-made suction cups, first of all, don't stick to anything rough.

But even if they did, they don't stick as well to rough as they do to smooth. And so the very idea that these guys might stick as well to the rough as to smooth was an indication that the data were being badly collected. And we went through it a lot of times. And really, the answer turned out to be that indeed, these fish are sticking to rough surfaces, all rough surfaces equally well. And

Moreover, the only thing they don't stick to as well as they stick to rough surfaces is smooth surfaces. So a dead smooth surface, they don't stick to as well as one that has some roughness. And this was just bizarre. And then I had a long conversation with a friend of mine at Harvard, Maha Mahadevan, and he was explaining to me how man-made suction cups fail by the edges pulling in, causing a buckling in the edges of the cup.

And it suddenly dawned on me that what we had was a different method of failure, that these fish had suction cups that weren't failing the way normal suction cups fail. They were failing in a mode we call peel, where you can imagine sticking down a piece of scotch tape and

And trying to peel it off the surface, not by lifting straight up, but instead by pulling parallel to the surface. That'd be hard. Yeah. You could do it, but it would be hard. And the tape might break before it came off.

So when we realized we had a whole new mode of sticking, that was one of those just transcendent great feelings. You just as a flash realize that's why this is working, because it's a different way of attaching to surfaces and failing.

That is awesome. That's sort of that prototypical aha moment in science. It was an aha moment. So then how did you celebrate, Adam? I think I said, yay, and kept doing experiments. Pat yourself on the head gently and keep going.

Yeah. There's no real celebrations of that sort. It's sort of, yay, and now let's write the paper up. I fly a lot, right? So my great joys in life include being able to go on celebratory flights. And so I'm sure I took the kids off island for an ice cream or something. Fantastic. Take to the skies to celebrate. I like it. Well, wonderful to hear about one of these stories of success. And I think those are the exciting moments that scientists live for.

So thanks for sharing your story with us today. And speaking of stories, I know scientists spend so much time reading, getting into the literature and working on their research. But I have been working so hard to incorporate more fun reading time in my life. And I love getting book recommendations from everyone I talk to. So Adam, I want you to tell us today about a book that you've read that you've really enjoyed and you think me and our listeners should check out. Oh, a non-work related thing. It can be work related if you'd like.

The cranial muscles and cranial and first spinal nerves of amia calva is one of my recent ones that's been off my shelf. It's by Edward Phelps Alice. Okay.

Amazing, Anonymous. But I don't recommend it to anybody. This is one of those great book reviews. Good bedtime reading, maybe. At the end of the review, it says, and I recommend this to all my friends. I have an eclectic and peculiarly skilled set of friends, and I recommend it to none of my friends. This is really some very dry stuff for people with oddball interests.

But I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy type stuff. All right. City of Blades is one that I just recently read. It's a sequel to City of Stairs, I think was the first of them. And they're very interesting, vaguely magical. Robert Jackson Bennett is the author.

But I also read a lot of what I would, I guess, politely call crap mysteries. But I hate to say that and then have the authors of these things realize that I call them crap mysteries. It is terribly denigrating to them. But they're not Edward Phelps, Alice, and the Cranial Nerves of EMEA. Basically anything by Robert Crace. I've really enjoyed The Hostage recently. Oh, Mark Van Hoenacker's Skyfaring was quite good. Definitely.

David Liss has written a couple of books that I've been rereading recently. The Coffee Trader is a good one. Awesome. I love it. Well, I know I am a sucker for a good page turner mystery myself, so I'm guilty of it too. We will add these to our reading list on our website for our listeners to check out. But I want to talk about travel next. So can you tell us what is your favorite travel destination that science has taken you to?

I would say the Ravilla-Gigedo Islands. It's a small volcanic archipelago about 270 or so miles off of Cabo San Lucas. And it's just recently been designated a World Heritage Site because it is one of the very few places where you can go and have interactions with giant manta rays.

So there are two species of manta rays. There's a smaller reef mantas and then there's the very large pelagic ocean-going mantas. That is awesome. So I assume you had this experience. Can you tell us what it was like?

It was probably the most challenging diving I've ever done that was sort of in a recreational setting. That is, that wasn't technical diving. So it was very, very deep water. There was no bottom for a lot of the diving. And you were distracted by giant animals. So in addition to...

Very often having a giant ocean manta sitting somewhere around very nearby, there were hundreds and hundreds of white-tipped sharks, dozens of silky sharks, a few hammerheads, a few tiger sharks, and dolphins, a whale shark, all just...

around you. I mean, the dolphins were coming right up and practically bumping into you. Wow, that sounds amazing. It was outstanding. So what was the occasion for going there? I was there trying to understand how it is that manta rays filter particles that are smaller than the filter holes that they have. So they've got a mesh filter in their gill rakers that filters out food and

and their prey is actually smaller than the holes in that filter. And so understanding how that filter works

tells you something about how you might design a filter with this really neat property of not being able to clog because it's catching particles that are smaller than the holes in the filter. Interesting. Well, now on the subject of fantastic dive experiences, I know you spent some time as a scuba instructor, as we said, in Australia. Now, did some of your experiences and the things you saw there come in handy in your role as science advisor for Finding Nemo and the sequel Finding Dory? Oh, yeah.

I'm sure that all of that time I spent underwater really drove my interest in fish, fish behavior. All that I do is informed by the natural history of the organisms. And so that sort of deep look, I mean, I spent days and days and days every week on the reef. One day I dived 17 times. Oh my gosh, that's incredible. I was in the water a lot.

And when we weren't working, we were generally bumming rides to other reefs with other dive companies. So we were underwater as dive instructors just an outrageous amount of time. And I think, yes, that that constant exposure over a period of a couple of years to lots and lots and lots of fish up close was a huge deal that really informed how I do work.

Well, can you tell us a little bit more about your experience in this role as scientific advisor? Are there certain things that were just so memorable about this experience you had? Well, it was a chance to work with a group of people who have very, very different outlooks than the ones that I usually work with. I mean, I'm an academic. I work in the ivory tower of a university and always have. But here I got a chance to work with people who were just as enthusiastic about what they do as I am and as my colleagues are about what we do.

Only they were doing this in an artistic setting. And so for me, that was just fabulous. I greatly enjoyed it. I found them to be just absolutely wonderful colleagues.

Can you tell us how this opportunity originally came about for the first movie Finding Nemo? My landlady was the director of Pixar University. Oh, wow. And so she put together all of the learning materials for Pixar when they had new projects or if someone just had a need to know a particular thing, she was the one who sort of tracked down how that would happen.

And she came down to our apartment and said, is there any chance you know someone who does biomechanics of fishes? And I said, that's what I do. Almost too perfect, right? It's like she knew. And she said, would you like to come and give us a talk? And I said, about what? She said, oh, anything to do with fishes. All right, I can do that.

And I went and gave a talk and then that sort of turned into let's have you back to do a lot of work. I mean, I worked on that for three years. Very, very cool. Great to hear about these experiences that you've had and how some of these opportunities to dive in different places maybe are feeding into your scientific interest as well. I think that's awesome.

So now we've talked about some of the different groups of people that you've worked with over the course of your career. And I think scientists tend to have certain stereotypes. People think about them a certain way. We love to try and break those stereotypes on our show by just sharing some of the funny, fantastic things that happen in the world of science. So Adam, do you have a story of your own of maybe a quirky tradition that you experienced or just a hilarious memory that you shared with your colleagues?

I'm not sure. I can't really think of any quirky traditions. I mean, sadly, I think that I probably fulfill all of the crazy stereotypes of scientists. I mean, I'm a wealthy white male who's been expected to be a success all my life. And I don't know that I ever did any sort of fraternity style hazing or anything like that. And also, I'm genuinely a complete geek.

When I was in grad school, one of my offices was the office of a former curator named Sam Garman. And I would work late at night in this office, which was in the fish collection in this basement with tens of thousands of fishes in ethanol. And I used to delight in wandering through the collection in the middle of the night with a tiny little flashlight, just looking in the jars of fishes for interesting shapes and interesting sizes.

I fit the stereotypes that they write about. I'm a geeky looking guy, balding, and I'm afraid I'm the stereotype. Well, I think some of this element of the stereotype that you're referring to is kind of a more fun, quirky side of it. You're not that serious person that's X hour to X hour...

in the lab every day yelling at your graduate students very serious, very alone. I think that's a huge part of science is the people that you work with and how much fun you have in the job. I definitely have fun. This is not a job that pays well enough that anyone would do it, I think, if they weren't having fun unless they were a particularly unusual person.

I do it because it's an absolute delight. I enjoy everything about it. It's a privilege to get to wake up in the morning and ask a question that no one's ever asked before. I like it. So in your lab, do you have any regular traditions that you do, even if it's maybe not so quirky? I

I don't know. I think my lab is kind of a quiet lab. We 3D print things. I mean, we've got a 3D printer and ever since we've had it, people have been encouraged to print stuff. So we have a fine collection of Yoda heads and Tyrannosaurus Rex heads because those are good things to play with when you're learning to 3D print. Of course. Well, on the subject of this 3D printer, I know you've done some 3D printing of fishes. Yes. And I must ask, what do you do with them all? Where do all these 3D printed fish go?

Actually, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure. I print probably 40 or 50 specimens a year that are not for a specific purpose. They're just meant to sort of be sitting around and I never have more than one or two sitting around. So I suspect that visitors to the lab who are just...

hanging around looking at things, snatch them. I suspect them of stealing all of them. Well, this is a mystery then, the disappearing 3D printed fish. It is. At different times, we've had probably as many as 45 or 50 Yoda heads. And I think we have two right now. Really? And T-Rex heads are the same way. There's a very high vapor pressure or something. They just seem to disappear. Right.

which is a little bit mysterious. It is. It is. You're going to have to start keeping those under lock and key. Well, I kind of like that they're flowing out there into the world. I sort of favor having things that are anatomically correct being printed. And so the Yoda's a pretty good Yoda. The T-Rex is an excellent T-Rex. People print various chondrocrania of sharks. And one of the things I like to do is I have a chondrocrania of a shark on a block that gets printed out

And it forms the coat racks and hat racks around the lab. So I noticed that those seem to go missing. And so I sort of hope that in people's houses, they've got these chondrocrania of salmon sharks glued to their wall holding up coats and hats. That would make me happy if it were really true. Yeah.

It's a good conversation piece too, I think. Yeah. I think it's much better than your average metal coat rack. Absolutely. Well, I love hearing about this fabulous tradition of 3D printing and this almost mystery in your lab of where on earth these things disappear to. It is very unusual. I think that's awesome. And I know we've chatted a little bit about some of the work that you've done on the research side of things. And I always love to ask scientists about the big questions that they haven't been able to answer.

in their research yet or with some of the grants that they're applying for. So I want to ask you today if we had no restrictions, if things like funding, staff, technology, feasibility, the things that normally impair your ability to do science, if we took those away, Adam, is there one question that you are dying to know the answer to? One? Just one. I think I'd like to know why it is that with 33,000 species of fish, we've evolved burrowing maybe more than 100 times, I'll bet.

And there's only three as far as we can figure out methods of burrowing. I would really like to know what it is that makes one of these three methods better than another. So you can either burrow with a pin method where you just sort of slam into the bottom and push your way through the sediment, or as a plate like a flatfish or a stingray that madly undulates and fluidizes a whole bunch of sand up over the top and then it settles down on top of them.

or you can pump, you can basically sit on the bottom and blow the sediment hard enough that it turns liquid and sink into it. And those three methods are, as far as we can tell, the only ways to burrow. Why do some pick one method and some another? Is there some advantage to one method over another that we're not seeing? 'Cause they definitely are common, all three of them are common. It's not like one of them is much, much, much better than the other and you only see it once or twice.

All three methods are perfectly common, and I have no idea why one would be picked over another, and I'd love to know that. This is a great question. So are you partial to one of these methods, the pin, plate, or pump? For me, myself, to do? I'm not well-suited to any of them, really. I'm fairly weak in the pinning department. I'm not flat enough to really do a good undulation. I suppose that leaves pumping, but I'd need some sort of mechanical assistance there.

I don't know that I'm partial to one. I do think the most interesting from a sort of visual perspective is the pump because it looks like magic. When you see a fish burrow by fluidizing the sand underneath it and sinking in, you don't really see anything move. What you see is a fish sink.

sitting there on the bottom and slowly sinking in. And that's kind of disconcerting. And I really like to watch that. I think that's probably the most interesting and exciting method. I can't tell you whether it's better or worse than any of the others, but it took us the longest to figure out what exactly was going on. And I suspect...

that it's going to take us the longest to figure out why that one's advantageous sometimes. Definitely. Well, I am intrigued. I'm gonna have to pull up some videos after we end this call here. Yeah, look for sandfish burrowing. Okay, awesome. Listeners, you too, pull up the sandfish videos. It sounds like they're gonna be awesome. Well, Adam, fantastic question for us to think about. And I know we've talked about some of the people that you've encountered over the course of your career and some of the great experiences that you've had. And I think having a good source of advice as you go through your life, as you go through your scientific career,

can really be beneficial. So is there one piece of advice that you can point to that someone gave you that was just the best advice? I think I've been getting good advice for most of my career. That's one of the things that makes a career work well is having excellent mentors. But I think a sort of tossed off piece of advice that made a big impression and ended up being pretty central to how I've decided to live my life and my career is

I was a postdoc and I was chatting with a very prominent scientist named Bob Full at the University of California at Berkeley. And Bob said, "You've got a job at the University of California at Irvine and it's a job where they're gonna tell you that teaching matters and you need to understand that teaching doesn't matter.

They're going to tenure you if you do good research, as long as you don't actually kill any students. And so you aren't going to be judged on your ability to teach, but you're a perfectionist. And so you're really going to insist on spending a lot of time getting the teaching right.

And that means that it's going to take a lot of time out of your life. And so what I think you have to do is you have to figure out some way to make your teaching serve your research. You have to figure out ways that you can go in front of a class of 450 students and come out of there feeling like you've pushed your own intellectual boundaries, not just theirs.

That turned out to be a fabulous piece of advice. I have been teaching for 20 years or so in a program every other summer where we do projects. We teach a graduate level course in fish biomechanics.

And these projects have turned into people's dissertations. They've turned into patents. They've turned into papers. They've been a huge driver of my research. And using that as a model, I've been able to teach really big classes like human physiology and comparative physiology and make them drive my research forward. And that thought was really important.

Well, Adam, this is amazing advice. And I think it's timely for me, for sure, as I'm agonizing over preparing some of my neuroscience fundamentals lectures that I'm teaching next week. But I think this is great advice to really think about incorporating your passions, your research, the things that you want to learn more about into the lectures that you're teaching your students just to economize your time.

Yeah. And it's not just a one-way street, right? So I really did try it first. I thought, well, what I'm doing is I'm using this time that I'm preparing lectures as a way to push my intellectual boundaries. And this is me, me, me in preparation for spewing out to them.

And then I started looking at the research on sort of interactive learning and realizing that if I can get these students, even in a 500 person lecture, to push a clicker button and start thinking about things and filling in blanks on exams instead of multiple choices on exams.

that I could actually get them to teach me stuff. Sometimes it was stuff that I could have taught myself quicker, but I couldn't have taught it to myself easier because I wasn't doing any of the work. And that's an important thing, right? So when I teach comparative physiology, the students are required to make up the physiology of an extinct animal.

They have to find an extinct animal and generate all of its physiology from various equations. And in that, I've learned how mammoths must have worked and how giant sea turtles and pteranodon must have worked.

I didn't know that and I couldn't have known that. And it's – as I've taught this class for a number of years now, I'm starting to feel some interesting general points coming out about things that are aquatic and things that are aerial from particular lineages. And I don't think I would have gotten that just reading.

Making those students teach me every year has given me insights that I just couldn't have gotten otherwise. Definitely. Well, I think this is awesome advice. Like I said, I'm going to have to work on applying this to my own teaching. So is there any message or is there anything you wish you would have known maybe when you were starting your scientific journey that you know now?

I think it took me a while to work out how important it was to go out of my way to be kind. That the sort of pedestrian politeness that passes for human interaction most of the time is in an academic setting, in someone who's intimidating, is counterproductive. It somehow makes people more intimidated and less willing to

open up. And I think if I had internalized some of my role models earlier and realized that it was important to go out of your way to make sure that you were hearing your colleagues and your students, that that actually yields huge benefits and makes your life more fun to live.

I like it. Well, I think that's a fantastic lesson for anyone out there to learn and apply in their life. Just go out of your way to be kind, to listen to people. And I think everyone benefits in that situation. So fantastic message, Adam. Now, can you tell our listeners how they can reach out if they want to learn more about you or your work? The Google is your friend. I think I'm the first hit when you start playing around with Google. You can look at Google Scholar.

We've got a web presence and research gate for papers. And then at Open Science Framework, there is a lot of links to pretty pictures of fishes. Absolutely. Well, listeners, definitely get to the Google, check out what Adam's working on. So many cool projects in the lab. And I have checked out some of these cool fish pictures. They're pretty amazing. So Adam, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your experiences.

No worries. It was my pleasure. It was a pleasure to chat with you and listeners. Thank you for joining us as well. We'll see you next time on another episode of People Behind the Science.

Your voyage to explore the lives of today's exceptional scientists has just begun. You can find everything we talked about today, including our guest's favorite books, biographies, photos, and more, when you visit us at www.peoplebehindthescience.com. I look forward to chatting with you next time on People Behind the Science. ♪