Ologies with Alie Ward - Ichthyology (FISHES) with Chris Thacker

Episode Date: January 30, 2018

ALL. ABOUT. FISH. Hilariously charming fish expert and LA County Natural History Museum Curator of Ichthyology, Dr. Christine Thacker, sits down with Alie in a basement full of several million jars of fish to chat about the worst fish husbands, the weirdest mating behaviors, the scariest fish, the nicest fish, the tiniest fish, how they breathe, how you can help reverse global warming, and whether you should pee in wetsuits. I love her so much and so will you.Follow Dr. Chris Thacker on InstagramMore episode sources and linksSupport Ologies on Patreon for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramEditing by Steven Ray MorrisMusic by Nick Thorburn

Hey, oligites. It's your old dad over here, Allie Ward. I'm not recording in my closet today. Can you believe it? I'm 16 floors up in a hotel in New York, and it's midnight on a Friday night, and I'm out here for work shooting this new show. If you listen to the very end of each episode, I usually tell a secret to the people who stick it out past the credits, so you may have heard it last week, and if not, more on that when they let me tell you, like, legally, or whatever. But I'm excited about this episode, wiggling its way into your consciousness. It's a good one. This oligist is, ugh, like, imagine when an Italian chef kisses his fingertips. She's so good. Also, if you hear any weird sirens or the people in the hotel room next to me coughing or doing other things, sorry. Okay, so fish. They're out there. They're underwater. They're deep in the sea or skimming the surface of lakes with fins, and they got fleshy lobe fins and sharp noses and sometimes blobby faces and big teeth and sucker mouths, and we really like them. Some people love them, and I like fish, but I love the people who love fish. I love them. I'm a creep for fish people. The way that their eyes light up when you talk about swim bladders and larval stages and biodiversity, so I was giddy as hell to talk face-to-face about fish. But while we're talking creeps, let's get to our intro segment, Creeping Your Reviews, in which I thank you all for leaving reviews on iTunes.

It really helps get oligies up in the charts since launching this kind of dream project in September. This podcast is pretty much covered in the top 30 or 20 science podcasts on iTunes, which is a very big deal for me and my heart. Thank you for putting it there with your ratings and reviews, and by subscribing and telling a friend, it really matters. So I'm going to read the reviews that really tickled me. I am going to say Rare Cactus said Infotainment. Intercation, whatever your favorite portmanteau is for the intersection of learning and laughing, Allie Ward lives in that space. I thought her use of portmanteaus really moved me. Also, portmanteau is a portmanteau. Whatever, we'll talk about it sometime. I also want to thank Shen Yan, who said, this is the holy grail of podcasts, like no pressure.

So much wisdom and knowledge to be gained with every episode, I've listened to over 400 different podcasts in a frantic, desperate search to find meaning and clarity in my daily life. This podcast delivered those goods and spades, and now I finally feel better about my nightmarish existence and have the inner fortitude to do normal things, like take out the trash. Thanks, Allie. Thank you for that review because it's relatable. Sometimes you're like, ugh, I have to take out the trash during this nightmarish existence of life on planet Earth right now, and you did it. And I relate and high fives. Okay, and thank you real quick to all the patrons who support via Patreon. You can kick in and keep the podcast going as a thank you.

Your questions get asked to theologists. Just you guys. Thank you for that. You can support for as little as 25 cents an episode, which is crazy cheap. But I like to be inclusive. And if every listener actually pitched in that much or a little more, man, whew, I would spend all the extra money probably on hot dogs and gold teeth. But as it is, I appreciate all of the support so much. You guys are funding the podcast.

So oligiesmerch.com has incredible t-shirts with pithy sayings from the show. There are hats, pins, totes, mugs, all kinds of stuff, and proceeds go to keep the show up and running. So get yourself something and feel like a good person because you are one. So says old Ward. Okay, on to the episode. First, the etymology of ichthyology. Pretty straightforward. ichthys means fish in Greek.

It also sounds like a cat sneezing. Like ichthys. Do it. Do it right now. ichthys. Right? Whatever. Okay, so this all just let me into the bowels of a natural history museum.

To the very basement where she walked me through the floor to ceiling, gray metal shelves filled with jars of fish suspended in these amber, chunky liquids past these articulated fish skeletons. Apparently the collection, the museum is over five million specimens of just fish, which weigh a lot of pounds. So they got to put them on the bottom floor because they're so heavy. That's the thing with museums. What you see on display is the tiniest fraction of what they really have.

So much is kept in the back in libraries and warehouses is like a catalog for research. So we pulled up some chairs in this little library and thisologist. Honestly, she has the regal presence of Robin Wright, but she has the timing of a comedian and she has the obsessive fish knowledge of a savant. I could not get over her. I couldn't get over her. It was a gear. Amazing.

So you'll learn about the touching relationship between a fish and a shrimp that I want to write a quiet indie movie about why you should never name a species after yourself, what seafood you should not eat, the worst fish husbands peeing in the ocean, embarrassing mating strategies, a fish, where they got five million goddamn jars and how you can save the planet, you and me. So we cover a lot of ground and by ground I mean ocean. So let's dive in with ichthyologist Dr. Chris Backer. So you are an ichthyologist.

That's right. I study fish. How often do people spell that wrong? Pretty much every time. And it's very awkward to say, oh, there's two H's in that because that kind of doesn't make sense of people. Two H's, what? It's ichthy...

What? What? But yeah, it's constantly misspelled. It's misspelled on my badge. Is it? Really? Yeah. It was on my old badge.

The one I have now is fixed, but... Man, how long did it take you to notice? Oh, I always noticed it right away. I noticed it right away, but it didn't bother me. It's so common. How long have you been an ichthyologist? Since birth. Since, yeah, since ever.

Chris has worked at the Natural History Museum of LA County for almost 20 years and she's been studying a specific group of little fishies for almost 25 years. That is a long term relationship with fish. How did you fall in with this gang of fish? The fish that I work on are called gobies and they are a group of reef fishies and stream fishies. They're found all around the world. I fell into them completely by accident.

I was fascinated with larval fish. I was fascinated with a tiny little larvae that are so complicated and yet tiny. I was living in Hawaii. I was working on a master's degree. I was studying a larval fish called shinlaria. Shinlaria definitely sounds like a disease. They pick up at a college party, but it's actually one of the smallest vertebrates in the world. How itty bitty is this fish?

Well, it only weighs about a tenth of a gram when it's fully grown. It's everywhere in the Pacific and in the Indian oceans. The common name for it is stout infant fish, which I feel like is a really good insult if you're feeling fancy. If they're so tiny, how do you even see them? It's just like a clear little shimmer in the water. When I went out to catch them, I asked a guy who knew about these fish, what they looked like, and he said, go down in the water and look for the shimmer like steam rising off

a boiling pan. That's how you find these things. You go out there, you pull a net through that shimmer and you come up with shinlaria. Or you can go out at night and just pull a plankton net. I did a lot of night plankton work. In Hawaii? In Hawaii. Did that not suck?

It was the best, except for the time that I almost hit a whale. What happened? It was nighttime, but there was just like a whale and her calf kind of parked in this channel and I was trying to go out. When it's dark, you don't really see the black shape of a whale in the water. It's difficult. I did not hit the whale. Let me be clear.

I did not hit the whale or the whale calf, but it's a federal crime to touch a whale. Is it illegal to touch a whale? It appears to be an affirmative. It's illegal to feed or attempt to feed any species of marine mammal. In some states, it's illegal to even approach whales within a few hundred meters. Essentially, operate as though all whales have restraining orders against you. It's not illegal, however, to look at pictures of them and dream about them and wonder if they're thinking of you too.

But whales aren't fish. Back to fish. Were you always into fish? Well, I was. As I said, I was working on this fish called chenleria and it turned out at the time it was not known. It was so weird that it wasn't known what kind of fish it was. Really?

Yeah, no one knew. There were some theories, but it was like, what is this weird thing? I thought, oh, everything's fine as long as it's not a goby because gobies were so complicated. There's so many. There's thousands of species. It's a huge group. They're all tiny. When I finished my master's degree that same year, it was determined that it was a goby.

I went away to grad school for a PhD. I ended up working on gobies the whole time and I'm still doing it. You were like, please don't be a goby and then it was a goby. The universe was like, psych. You're going to work on the hardest group of fishes there is. Suck it up. Maybe the world needed you. Fish needed you.

It's one of those things that was absolutely terrifying and turned out to be the best possible answer because gobies are so fascinating and variable. They do anything. Any evolutionary thing you want to study, a goby is doing it pretty much. Did you have fish growing up as pets? I did. That's how I got into, I think that's what started this madness. I remember when I was just a little kid, maybe five years old, staring into a fish tank.

We had some little rasboras or sort of little darter fish in the tank. Just staring at it and being sort of frightened because I couldn't understand how this little tiny thing could be alive and breathing water. I remember just tripping balls on the idea that there were animals that were breathing water. From that sort of fear, it was the fear that turned into a fascination. That's how it happened. Did you study biology instead of in high school as well?

I studied biology in high school, yes. I went away to college and I thought, I've always been very analytical. I love math. I love physics, chemistry. I was going to study chemistry. I remember sort of that I had taken natural history classes in college and taken a theology and I was into it and I started learning about fish. Then when I decided to go to get a Master's in Hawaii, the deal was pretty sealed.

I sort of remember this as a college time conversion. I recently had found my high school yearbook. There were people who had signed my yearbook. Good luck with the fish. What? Yes. There was a signature. There were like three different people who said, I hope you have a good time learning

about fish. One said, oh, you know, enjoy it. I'm sure someday you'll be ectheologist to the stars. Here you are in Los Angeles. Ectheologist. I was like, goal achieved. I wanted to fact check and see if there were any celebrity ectheologists or like fish people to the stars.

The closest competition I found was these two guys who run an aquarium business in Las Vegas and have a reality show, which took me to a surreal clip of Tracy Morgan appreciating biodiversity. I love exotic animals and there's some people that don't even know that these animals live with us here on the planet. It keeps me from watching TV. I like to watch the animals sometimes. Let's back up and can you tell me what a fish is?

Okay. A fish is a vertebrate, which means it has a bony skeleton with a backbone. It's a vertebrate that lives in the water. That's about, well, that's about it, although it obviously doesn't include some water living vertebrates like whales. Okay. Fishes breathe water. They don't have lungs.

They're part of a clade called, the bony fishes are part of a clade called actinopterygii. Okay. What was that word? Actinopterygii, which means ray finned fishes. It kind of sounds like the first line of a camp song, like the sequel to John Jangle, Jim Brayheimer, Schmidt. Right? Okay, back to it.

Which describes some characters of like the way the fins are arranged, some kind of details of the bones, but basically they're a vertebrate animal in the water. That's not a whale. That's not a whale or a dolphin, right? Or a seal. Okay. Or a snake. Right.

Or a human being. Or a human being. Exactly. You know what I mean. Or your dog at the beach. Exactly. As soon as you have a backbone on her in the water, you become a fish. Well, I would like to think so.

So this is a very, I mean, going back to like when you were a kid and you were marveling at the tank, this is such a basic question, but how do fish breathe? It is, that's not a basic question. That's complicated. Okay. Gasses, so they need oxygen. They're like us. They need oxygen to run their cells.

They absorb oxygen from the water, but that's more difficult than absorbing oxygen from the air. Remember, our lungs are wet. We also absorb oxygen from water. It's just a thin scrim of water inside a lung. Hey, heads up, you got moist as hell lungs. Now you know. But fishes have a very frilly, complicated, blood-enriched gill sort of filament, looks

like feathers, like a filament. Well, you've seen them on an axolotl, right? Yeah. Just inside the head. And the purpose of that is to exchange, have a lot of surface area exchange with water and oxygen diffuses from the water into the blood. Okay. So then what is the deal with a fish bladder?

Okay. So you mean a swim bladder? Swim bladder. Swim bladder. Yeah. Fishes have swim bladders. Well, not all, but most of them. And those are for regulating buoyancy, because remember, fishes live in sort of 3D.

They move side to side. They move forward and back, but they also move up and down. Oh, yeah. You know, compared to the fishes, we're sort of just like in flat land. Like we move like just in a few directions, but fish are actually basically always flying. Water, water, never wearing pants, flying without ever falling. I'm like, oh, okay, I get it. Like fish have the best lives.

They have the best lives. They also have swim bladders, which fill with gas and floats them up and down. Kind of like a functional whoopee cushion. Most of the time. And there are also some types of fishes that can actually gulp air and put it into their swim bladders. But obviously that's not going to work for a fish that lives, you know, 100 feet below the surface.

So there's two different kinds. Do you have a favorite strata of fish, like in terms of pelagic or, and I will have to remember and look up again, like what the zones are, but like in terms of ocean zones. Yeah. Okay. Quick, quick rundown of ocean zones. Just in case you're ever at a bar trameonite and you need to impress your coworkers or your new significant other siblings.

Okay. The ocean zones are roughly epipelagic at the top. These parts get sunlight. So plants grow there. The majority of ocean life lives in this zone. Goes down about 200 meters or around 600 feet for us non-metric Americans. Okay. Below that are the mesopelagic, bath pelagic, abyssal pelagic, and finally the very, very

bottom, which are the hadal zones. That's like the deep dark. So there you go. If anyone ever wins jeopardy or a bet, you owe me exactly one American dollar. Cable and coins, if need be, for this information. You are welcome. Okay. So what is her favorite?

I'm super basic. I like the near shore stuff. I like the shallow water stuff. I like the coral reef stuff. I like the in shore. Up into the streams, I'm getting into river fishes more. And it's interesting because most of life on the planet is right around the earth, the air-water interface, right?

Like near coast, close to the ocean. And then right around there is most of the air terrestrial life and bird life. I mean, you start to get too high and there's nothing. Same thing when you start to get too deep, there's not as much. It's all kind of right around that band is where most things are. I had never really thought about that. I just thought about it yesterday. Isn't that cool?

Yeah. That's crazy. You know why I was thinking that? Because I was driving down PCH and I was looking at ... One thing I never tire of is the glint of the sunlight off the water. And it looks like a skin. And I was thinking about the skin of the water and how it looks like a solid thing and how everything lives, the closer to that, the better.

Do you go to the ocean a lot living in LA? Because I know we're near downtown and I get to the ocean once a year. How are you? Do you surf every morning? Are you always in there? No, no, no. I don't. Usually if I'm going into the ocean, I'm working.

Okay. What is a day like for you? Well, right now I'm just in the office. So it's a lot of lab work, some of it's lab work, some of it's spreadsheets, some of it's emails. Sometimes I have to photograph things. I've been writing a lot lately, which is really nice. If I'm traveling, a lot of times I will travel to visit museum collections or visit colleagues.

And in that case, I will go into someone else's collection and look at the jars of fish and take fish out and examine them and look at them in certain ways. And then if I'm in the field, it's work, work, work. It's dive, dive, dive, fish, fish, fish. I've never been diving. But what does it feel like down there? Does it feel like freedom? Does it feel like cozy?

It feels like you're flying. Yeah. It's cold. I'll say that. It's cold. And you have to wear a wetsuit, wear a dry suit, be careful. But it is the thing that people often don't realize is that when you're in the water completely submerged for a long time, the water really sucks the heat out of your body.

So you've got to be thermally insulated. That's why you often see divers wearing big suits. Is it true that divers and surfers do pee in them? I get asked this a lot. I'm sorry. And those are okay. It's like peeing in the shower. It's like you can't honestly say that it never happens.

I couldn't look you in the eye and swear to you that I've never done it, but I try to keep it to a minimum. I would do it. I mean, the fish are doing it. The fish are doing it. Yeah, but the fish, it doesn't get trapped in the fish's body. And when you're in the field and you're in Helengon, New Guinea, and you're going to be there for a month, and you've got one or two wetsuits, and you're wearing them every day.

Yeah. Try not to. You try not to. Okay. Good to know. I appreciate the candor. That is a question that would have plagued me. I would have been driving home being like, I wish I would have asked that.

Okay, good. That makes me feel better. Okay. Saltwater fish, freshwater fish. I think we don't think about it until it comes time to have perhaps one as a pet, and you're like, oh, if you have a saltwater aquarium, you are a millionaire. It's a whole different thing. Yeah.

If you have a bowl of the fish in it that costs a dollar, what is the difference in how they live and how they breathe and exist? The difference in how they ... It has a deal with what's called Osmo regulation, which is the regulation of salt basically in your body and outside your body. The kidney pumps salt one way or the other. Freshwater fishes live in a situation where they've got too much salt relative to the freshwater around them. Saltwater fishes have less salt than the water around them, so they just have to be careful

with their kidneys. Some of them go back and forth. What? Oh, yeah. Well, salmon, right? Salmon go down. They go up the river. They have their babies.

Salmon in the ocean. They switch back. Lots of gobes do this too. Really? Yes. How do they do that? They have badass kidneys. That's how.

Wow. I never knew. I always thought once they got to a brackish zone, they'd be like, I'm out of here. Some do. Okay. Yeah. I've seen salmon spawning in a stream, and I've always wondered, clearly, that makes them so vulnerable to predation.

If you wanted Sashimi, it was just like any of them, how screwed are they when they do that? Well, you've seen the bears, just scooping them up, just watching them go by, grabbing them one by one. There's a lot of them, and some of them make it and some of them don't, but a lot of them make it. Also, the ones that do make it, they'll have hundreds and thousands of eggs. That's kind of how fishes deal most of the time with the lottery of having children,

is that they have a whole bunch and just hope that some survive. Right. Good luck. See ya. Yeah. Have fun. Yeah. Okay.

Okay, bye. See, also, the enormous Catholic broods on either side of my family lineage. So many. It's like, some of them will probably be fine. When it comes to the little guys, you study a lot of little guys. You showed me some cool specimens. Is that also a numbers game? Are they kind of lower on the food chain, right?

It's kind of a, it's a valuelayton term. It's a valuelayton term. Sorry, sorry. Yes. They're food for a lot of other things. It's true. Yeah, and there's a lot of them. There's a lot of them.

So the larger group that they're a part of is maybe 20, say, 2,500 species. And the total number of bony fishes is like 25,000. So that's a little more. So that's 10% of fishes right there. How many fish species have been identified? Like I said, 25,000, 26,000 in that ballpark. Yeah. There's more all the time.

People are finding more all the time. And there's more out there we don't know about. There could be 50,000 out there that we just haven't, we haven't gotten them yet. And you just walked me through the collections. You have five million specimens here in jars. Yep. Where'd you get the jars? Well, you know, that's a good, that's a very good question.

You know, if you're talking about like a straight A to squat A, you want a gallon, you want a big hinge one with a lid, that's different, different places. But a general bottle in here in Los Angeles sells jars. Okay. Curiosity and procrastination got the better of me and I Googled general bottle supply. Why not? It's legit. Now, if you ever get lost in a catalog of jars, whew, short, tall, amber, cobalt blue,

lidded, narrow, boy howdy, whew, jar heaven. This will change at least one of your lives out there. I'm convinced. Do you ever have to take like donations like, hey, if anyone's got any big pickle jugs like drop them off? That's exactly what we don't like to do only because the, you know, let me tell you the problem's not the jar. It's the lid.

Oh. Glass jar is a glass jar. You got to, you got to think about your closures to some serious collection management. Got to get that lid nice and tight. You want it to have a nice liner. It's important. Oh, or else you've got all kinds of evaporation happening. Exactly.

Okay. Now, what happens when, say, an orefish washes up? Side note, an orefish is this long, long, long, like sometimes up to 11 meters or over 30 feet. It's like a three story building long, bony, snaky looking fish that lives in temperate or tropical waters. Now when they're sick or dying, they tend to come up to the surface just to be like, it's the end.

So they're at the surface and they fueled all these old piracy rumors of sea serpents. They also have these two long fins on their bellies, which look kind of like canoe ores. People image search them and then tell me if you omitted a scream like Homer Simpson. And it's a specimen that everyone is just crazy for. What do you do? What happens is usually we get a phone call and they'll say, this is great fish. Do you want to come get it? Do you want it?

We've had stuff wash up, orefish, sharks, various things. Sometimes fishermen will catch some weird thing and they'll call us and we'll go get it. We have, there's some pictures on my, I have an Instagram account at Saqfish, THAC Fish. That I post behind the scenes, fish's stuff. And one of the pictures on there is us prepping the orefish. So great big fish. We had to have a tank, especially built, and we fixed it and we put it up on display upstairs.

I love that fish. It's a great fish. I mean, I used to be, as a volunteer, I would get stationed there a lot. Did you really? Yeah. So you know how it has those long ores? Did you notice that one of them is broken and our collection manager had to like plastic surgery fix it with a drinking straw, with like a piece of a drinking straw?

No. I did not know that. It was, it was a little bit of like mortuary, you know, body, body preparation for display. I've heard that there's, I just heard that there's an ology for that of the, it's like cosmetology and Thanatology combined. Combined. There must be. Yeah.

I forget what it's called, but I didn't know anyone did that for orefish. By the by, that ology is desaerology. And I just want to give props to Megan Rosenbloom of Death's Salon for the heads up on that. Also I used to volunteer at the museum talking to kids about this orefish and I never ever noticed the drinking straw, but after this interview at the museum, I went upstairs and I looked for it and I saw it and I loved it. So a photo will be up on the ologies Instagram because you got to see this. You would never notice.

Man, I love that dead fish. This one time a little girl looked at it and then she looked at me and she asked, is it dead? And I told her, yes, and it died naturally. And then she asked me, is the fish in heaven with my grandpa? And I said, man, I hope so because that sounds like a real party little dude. I love the idea of her grandpa, like listening to disco, drink it as seagrams and sevens just with a dead ass sea serpent.

What's the craziest fish you've ever seen, IRL? Something called a hula fish. What is it? A hula fish is a small reef fish that lives in Australia and it is only found in Australia. And I'd never heard of it. I'd never seen it. And this is just like a couple of years ago. I'm sending fish all this time and I'm down in an aquarium in Sydney and I saw this fish

in a tank and I had no idea what it was, like no idea. And that's a weird feeling, given what I do. And I just stared and stared and stared and it was like I was five again looking at this tank going, how is this possible? What is this alien thing? Yeah, hula fish. Freaky looking. It looks like nothing.

It's got blue and white stripes, but it moves in a very sinuous way like a hula dancer, hence the name. And that's where they got it clearly. Exactly. I saw a video on the hula fish does have moose. Have you ever gotten to name a fish? Oh yeah, I've named several fish. How do you do?

Where do you come up with it? Let's see. One of them I named for the color, one of it I named for the locality. There's one that I'm naming right now that I just showed you that I'm naming for the guy who worked on it, Midgeley. Do you get to name anything after yourself? That's considered poor form. Okay.

Yeah, that's considered poor form. He's named after me by other people. Oh my God. So if you have a fish named after you, it's because someone else is like, ding, you deserve this. You deserve this. But if you do it yourself, oh that's it. If you do it yourself, you're a douche.

I never knew that. Oh my God. That's so great. You got it. If you really care, I mean, and if you really care about such things, you just make a deal with your buddy. Like, you know, I'll describe it. But people don't even really do that.

I mean, that's again, that's like, that's pretty, that's tacky. I had no idea. Are there any that have been named recently where, you know, they'll name one after like David Bowie or? I don't know. There's a genus that Gobi's called Zappa. Oh, really? Yeah, that's a while, that's from a while ago.

How, I wonder why did he get a, because the guy who studied him loved Frank Zappa. Boom. And the awesome thing is it's a mudskipper. Do you know what that is? No. These crazy amphibious fish, they have, they have these googly eyes on top of their head that they can like suck back down and these little water cups in their faces. They come out of the water, they live in the mud, they live on land most of the time.

They just kind of bloop, bloop, bloop around and they fight each other and they have these crazy little fin displays and they're like this big. Just little guys? They're tiny. Yeah. That's like half the size of a candy bar. They're ferocious. They're itty-bitty and they're ferocious, ferocious, ferocious.

Do you have a favorite fish? I have several favorite fish. Have you ever seen a wahoo? It's beautiful. It's beautiful. A wahoo is kind of like a tuna, it's a great big silvery pelagic fish and it's just spectacular. It looks like a torpedo. It looks like a silvery torpedo.

I really like Mutscape Birds. I like shrimp gobies. Some of the shrimp gobies that I work on are just beautiful, they're very delicate, colorful fishes and they do all kinds of weird things. Yeah. What's their relationship with a shrimp? Shrimp gobies live with shrimp in burrows. The shrimp builds the burrow and the gobie lives with the shrimp.

It's a symbiotic relationship, like a mutualistic relationship. They help each other. Oh my God. They're like burdened already. They are. Gobies actually do this a lot. They live in beaches and sea urchins and all kinds of different places. They're friendly.

They like to participate in mutualisms. A gobie and a shrimp, the gobie is actually the watchdog. The shrimp is blind. Oh, stop. Isn't this a great story? The shrimp is blind. This is nature. This is evolution.

This is our world. We live. This is a planet we live on with these things, which just blows my mind. This is fishes. I think about fishes every day with that sort of tone. This is on our planet with us are these creatures. Shrimps and gobies. The shrimp is blind.

The gobie watches, sits on the bottom and watches and is a guard dog. The little shrimp builds the burrow and takes care of the burrow. They are in touch with each other. They communicate via a tactile communication system, a touch system. The antennae of the shrimp are very long and the antennae of the shrimp as the shrimp scrumples around and works. It keeps in contact with the gobie's body. The gobie will flick its tail or move or dart back and forth to let the shrimp know what's

going on. If there's danger, if he can come out, no way, 100% true. Have you guys been able to figure out what different flicks mean? Well, not exactly, but you can see them. If you watch them, which I have so many, many hours doing, you'll see the gobie like one hard flick is basically there's danger. Oftentimes, the gobie and the shrimp, when they're sitting together, the gobie will move a little bit and the shrimp will keep in touch, but it's real gentle.

They'll almost sing, yeah, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. Little gentle movements. I just got goosebumps, like the full-body goosebumps. That's crazy. That's bananas. Now, is that language? Yeah. Yeah, that's language.

Oh, yeah. For sure, it's language. Of course, they're communicating. God, that's nuts. They're rare in collections because they're very, very difficult to catch. Are they just too quick? They're very quick. Do you have to just have certain nets, like you were saying, plankton nets or set up traps?

That doesn't work. Actually, you have to use a speargun. A speargun? You have to use a speargun. It's this crazy, complicated way. You have to go down there with a speargun. You fit the speargun out with a blade or a pented dent, like prongs, so it's almost like a shovel.

The sand is very loose and the gobie is very fast and very good at its job. What you do is you wait. You have to wait, let them calm down until the shrimp and the gobie are both out of the burrow and then you shoot the burrow. You shoot the burrow, the fish and the shrimp run, and then you chase them and you catch them one by one. Oh, my God. You might be doing that all day.

Oh, my gosh, yeah. It's very difficult. I have the dumbest question. Please. Dinosaurs. Right? We've got a meteor. Boom.

Dinosaurs. Goodbye. Fish. Under water the whole time, so they were just chill and fine? There were losses, but not to the extent that the terrestrial animals suffered in the cretaceous tertiary extinction. The meteor that killed the dinosaurs did affect fishes. In fact, it killed a lot of the bigger predatory fishes, larger top of the food chain fishes.

There was an event a lot earlier, the end permian extinction, that was much worse for oceans. It was just a different type of extinction, different causes. There were volcanoes and sulfur and climate change, and the ocean got acidic, and it was very bad. That's what we're watching out for now, because those things are very, very bad and that kills a lot of the ocean life. Okay, so there was the end permium, and then there was the KT.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. I didn't know the difference between them. Thank you very much for that. I'm sure people ask you this day in and day out. Do you eat fish? Yes, I do eat fish. For fish, I always recommend, and it's serious, again, one of those things we've got to watch

out for with the ocean. You can eat most kinds of wild-caught tuna, do not eat orange ruffy. For your convenience, you can go to seafoodwatch.org, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium has a list, and it's always changing. They're always updating it, but a lot of farmed fish is fine to eat. It's done responsibly, ecologically conscious, and you can also check and see if the seafood that you're buying is MSC-certified, Marine Stewardship Council certified. Oh, okay.

I didn't know about that. What about fish? Fish is getting it on. There's some weird behavior. Any that you tell people at cocktail parties? Well, a lot of the Gobi's that I study are sex changers. What? Yes.

They will start out, some of the ones that live right off our coast start their lives. They're all born as females, and then the biggest one turns into a male. Yeah. No way. It kind of runs the harem, and then if he dies, the next biggest female turns into a male. Everyone's to go the other way, too, that they're all male except for a big female. How do they do that?

It's just like the freshwater to saltwater. They have a really good kidney. Male to female, they have a really flexible gonad, and it just changes. Do they have an X and Y chromosome? They do. Yeah, they have a system that's similar to ours. The thing is, remember, a female is the ground state. Being male is like an extra little birth defect that gets hammered on there at the end.

A female turning into a male is what happens to all human males. Oh, hey, misogynists? Booyah. Right? Yeah. You can switch. The gonads come from the same tissues. You can switch them back and forth.

That's true. I forget that. The biggest one. I wonder if they do it by will. Are they like, boop, okay, here I go. Yeah. Yeah. They start to feel it.

They start to feel it. Boom. Unbelievable. Everyone always talks about the anglerfish. The male just grows into the female. Is that a good one for cocktail parties? Oh, yeah. People know that.

The only problem is people know that one now. That's kind of old news. Okay, to sum up the lore of the anglerfish in a few seconds, here we go. Very unsightly, but majestic, deep sea lady anglerfish has this glowing dinkled angle on her head and a vicious underbite with these jagged ass teeth. The male is tiny and he can barely feed himself with his little baby mouth. He finds a lady anglerfish and he gnaws into her side, thus dissolving his lips and her flesh and fuses them into one.

He just feeds off nutrients in her blood, gets absorbed into her body, and then supplies her with sperm when she needs it. He's kind of like that sad guy at last call, but it's dark and you feel ugly, so you go with it forever. I'm trying to think about what is a cool fish fact I'd say. I talk about mudskippers, which are crazy that they're fish. I read one story about how there's some, oh God, now I can't remember, there's some fish who holds her eggs in her mouth.

Oh, yeah. Cardinal fish. Cardinal fish do it. Jawfish do it. It's fantastic. Cichlids, cichlids, which you might know from Aquaria, will sometimes do it. It's just a way to keep the eggs safe. And then sometimes I've heard that a man will trick a man.

A male fish will trick a female fish into thinking there's food. She opens her mouth and then he just is like, surprise, just surprise, I've fertilized your mouth. Does that happen? What usually happens is that the eggs get fertilized right away, either because she'll lay the eggs, she'll fertilize them and she'll scoop them up, or she'll scoop them up and then she'll fertilize them in her mouth. You can picture that.

Right? Yeah. Sure can. It's biology. It's not bad. We don't judge. I mean, but the main thing with fish is you've got to make a lot of babies hope they survive. Exactly.

That's the main thing. Exactly. And the idea is that the lower the amount of care that you put into your babies, the more you've got to have. Right. So if you're just going to blow them out to the wind, like a seed or a fish egg into the water, you've got to have a bunch of them. If you're going to take care of them, you might have fewer.

And if a mouth breeder is just going to have a couple hundred, whereas a spawner, a broadcast spawner might have a couple thousand. A broadcast spawner? Broadcast spawner. What is that? Broadcasting to you. Yes. Is that just like holding eggs out of a moving car and just something?

You just see, it's like you salt the fields just everywhere. Although sharks have those cool sacks. Yeah. Sharks have some lay eggs like that and some actually have live young. And some fish have live young too. They have a few live young. But it's rare. And sharks are fish.

Sharks are fish. Does that ever trip people up? I always feel like sharks are in their own category because people are, they have such a different place in society than the rest of the fish. Yeah. Well, and they aren't different. I mean, they are a different evolutionary group than fishes. That's true.

But they are, you know, and like I said, most people, the general term fish, they just think, oh, it's a vertebrate animal that lives in the water. And they're not even thinking vertebrate, but like, you know, an animal like us with like heads and a back and limbs and eyes. So yeah, sharks fall into that category in that case. I have so many questions from listeners. Oh, absolutely. When I rapid fire.

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Your questions. All right. So I'll just rapid fire. Okay. As quick as you can answer. Great. Although sometimes I know these are complicated questions. Okay.

Okay. Greg wants to know, how has climate change affected fish species and fish populations across the world? And how are plastic and other pollution affecting fish biology and health? Number one, fishes are moving. Like we will see things off the coast of California we never used to see because they came from warmer waters to the south. So fishes that can move are moving in response to climate change.

What is plastic? Very, very bad. The number one thing that I would say to people when they say to me, what can I do sort of for the planet and for the oceans is watch it with your plastic, keep your plastic. Like if you are using plastic fine, but recycle it, don't, you know, don't let it get into the ocean. Be careful what you let into the waterways. I went to Hawaii.

I got to go for a job and I got to see, I know I was mostly in hotels and in donut shops. It was a weird job, but I, but I walked by the marina and it looked like a beautiful aquarium and like a Doritos bag just floated by and I was like, this is a picture of dystopia. What have we done? Plastic is very bad and it bugs me, it bugs me like emotionally, like it upsets me. So yes, please, please people be careful with your plastic. Just recycle it. Just recycle it.

It's not even that hard. Just recycle it. Just recycle it. That's all I ask. Once again, recycle it. If you're like, everything is bad, what do I do? I feel you. I feel you.

So I looked it up. According to Greenpeace, here are some other ways you can cut down on plastics. You can carry a reusable bottle. We use a bunch of bottles all the time. You can say no to plastic straws, say no to disposable cutlery. You can avoid things with microbeads and carry a shopping bag. Look at that. Boom.

You're already a better person. Better than you were 15 seconds ago. We did it. We saved the planet. Yay. I also asked Dr. Thacker in an email later, something I forgot to address. This regarding flesh colored rope looking slime balls, which feed on decaying matter, which I hear is spectacularly gross to witness.

So has she ever seen a hagfish eating in a whale? She said, I have never personally seen a hagfish eating a whale, but they do scavenge those carcasses down in the deep and it's busy mainly. They really go at it. Lots of hagfish flailing. She says, right now there's a bunch of hagfish having a whale picnic in the dark depths of the ocean. Is that crazy?

And you're just like making a sandwich and there's just a hagfish being like, this is my life. Anyway. Okay. Brian Edge wants to know, have the populations of any species changed for the better since Org's like Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch have come around? Absolutely yes. Absolutely.

And one of the beautiful things about the ocean and working with fish and thinking about fisheries and climate change and whatever and even horrible scary things like coral bleaching is that if we take action, the problem, it will help. The problem will get better. Fisheries are rebounding that have been protected. So it's definitely worth it. Is there a hope for coral reefs? Yes.

Okay. 100% yes. Oh, good. Yes. It is a failure of will. It is not a failure. It's not that we don't know what to do. What we need to do is watch it with the carbon emissions.

It's just that we don't have the will to do it. But if we were to take care and cut that down, we would see some recovery in the coral reefs. I have no doubt. You never hear about the ozone hole anymore. Remember that? Word, yes. CFCs. That's because CFCs got banned and it helped and boom, problem solved.

Good to know. That gives me a lot of hope. Michael Sadambaga asks, throwing some shade here, why does some tilapia taste like mud? Well, others don't. It depends on what it's eating and how it's farmed. But yeah, he's right. And some catfish you taste, it tastes terrible. You want to go eat an alligator.

You want to get yourself a farmed alligator. Don't eat a wild alligator because they just eat garbage and like pig carcasses. It's yucky. I didn't know that. Same problem with tilapia. Do the farmed ones just eat like cereal and stuff? They do. Yeah.

They're like, you know, and they have like, you know, alligator spa days and they eat good food. I'm sure. I couldn't seem to find out what farmed alligators eat. But I did manage to find some southern swamp boat captain hopping out in a mussel tank top into the bog water and feeding alligators marshmallows out of his mouth. And now I know that hell exists. Jenna, I say her name wrong.

Every time I read it. I'm sorry, Jenna. Okay. This is a, I once heard this when I was 12 thing, but can fish not feel pain or do they just have short memories? This is a common misconception. And the answer is, of course they feel pain. Of course they feel pain.

You have to feel pain. Otherwise, when a predator starts running at you, you wouldn't feel it and you just get eaten. So yes, they do feel pain. How are their memories? Well, probably not that great. Okay. But I mean, let's just, you know what?

Let's just not hurt fish. All right. Yeah. Don't make them feel pain. Don't make them feel pain. Why do they need to feel pain? What kind of brains do they have? They have brains like ours, but simpler.

But the same basic, the same basic, you know, roadmap, the same basic nerve, same basic vertebrate brain. So they can feel pain? Mm-hmm. Oh, I'm sorry, fish. Joe wants to know, there are some highly weird species in the deep ocean. Do you have a favorite one you like to bring up at parties, which I think I just asked you this.

Sorry, Joe. No, that's okay. The deep sea fishes, the thing about deep sea fishes that's hilarious is that most of them are small. Oh. Yeah. Really? There's a little, in fact, just yesterday I was looking at a fossil, a beautiful fossil

of something called a hatchet fish. There's one about the size of a silver dollar in our collection. It's got these beautiful little light organs and crazy teeth. Even your average angler fish is not going to be any bigger than your fist, for the most part. Oh. And your sort of toothy dragonfish-looking thing, you know, those might be, I don't know, those might be the size of a hot dog, maybe six, seven inches long.

Uh-huh. Not that big. Really not. A lot of them are smaller than that. Zoe Teplik wants to know, aquariums, good or bad? Do fish suffer the same impact of captivity as mammals, and is the benefit of studying fish and captivity worth the harm it can cause the fish? Well, you know, fish, it's true.

Fish can get bored. It's not as bad as like a polar bear. A polar bear in a studio apartment. You feel sad, right, for the polar bear or something like a wolf, or something that requires a big territory. It's not quite that bad, but they don't like being in captivity, it's true. And the bad thing about keeping fish in captivity, as far as I'm concerned, is the pet trade. I used to keep fishing, and then I stopped because I found out about the terrible practices

in the pet trade. What happens? And then guys will go out and dynamite fish, they'll cyanide fish, they'll just kill tons of fish, they get a few, just to get a few, and then they'll get shipped across the ocean and they'll be sick. And it's just awful. It's horrible. I know.

So you dynamite, you kill a bunch, and then whatever's alive you take? Yeah. That seems like a terrible idea. It is, but it's cheap and it's quick. And the idea is that the percussion of the explosion, you know, can stun the fish, and then the fish will float up and they just swoop them up. That's nice. And that doesn't happen every or all the time, but it does happen, especially for species

that are in the pet trade. What about aquariums like sanctioned Monterey Bay Aquarium? How do you feel about those? You know what? I like them. And the reason is that fishes are so alien and the undersea world is so bizarre, I want people to be able to see it. I want people to look at those rockfish, look them in the eye, and think about the planet

that we share in common. Also for being ambassadors to the public. Exactly. But just like a fish tank in your dentist's office. A fish tank in your dentist's office. And it's kind of like fish that you eat. There's fish that are farmed, that are bred for captivity for pets. Goldfish is all those fancy goldfish things like that.

There's plenty of saltwater fishes that are bred in captivity. And that's fine. Again, keep a fish, keep a pet, look at it, appreciate it, understand it, learn about it. Don't eat a wild caught tuna and don't care for a dynamite-raised, dynamite-hunted fish. I never knew that was a thing. That's so mean. Casey Hanmer wants to know, why do fish have so many bones, all caps, also why are salmon

so amazing? Fish do have a lot of bones. I mean, I suppose that's just what works for them. It's not, again, it's not sort of a value judgment one or the other. They gotta be flexible. They gotta be flexible. In some directions, they have a lot of muscle motion going on. Like I said, they live in 3D, up, down, side to side, back forward.

And why are salmon so awesome? You know, salmon are very old. Salmon forms, it's an old group, a lot of cool things all around the world. And again, it's kind of amazing that something can go back and forth between fresh and saltwater. He wants to know also, why do some fish have two codominant mating strategies, the alpha and the sneak? That is a complicated question. What he's talking about is, a male and a female fish will mate and have babies.

And the male oftentimes has to expend energy to do that. He's got to show off. Maybe he makes a little territory, he makes a little nest, and he does a little fancy dance. And the lady says, oh, that's beautiful. And then lays her eggs. If you are a sneaker male, you can get away with circumventing that. And what a sneaker male does is just jumps in, sprays the semen, fertilizes the eggs,

and whips out of there. What a fuck boy. Right? Okay, this is the fuck boy of the animal kingdom. No effort, just like, you up, you know, it's 2 a.m., bam, in and out. And it's a strategy usually used by smaller males that can't sort of do a territory or do the behavior, they don't want to spend the energy, but they'll sneak in and have a mate.

They'll sneak in and have a mating. No good, no good, no good. Sharks. Happens in a lot of species. Mike Melchior wants to know, do fish sleep? They do. They do? They do.

Yeah, you sometimes parrot fish, you'll see them on the bottom at night, they wrap themselves in this bubble of mucus. Just tucking in. It's nice and cozy and just lovely. And yeah, they'll, you know, they doze off. I wonder if they dream. They must, right? They must.

You know, big plagic fishes, they'll just, you know, obviously they don't go down to the bottom to sleep, but they'll just, you know, they'll doze off a little bit at a time. They'll sleep in little bursts. Yeah. I bet they have so many shark nightmares. Oh man, I wonder, right? I wonder what that must be like. I know.

Do you ever have to talk people down from shark phobias? Sometimes, yeah. But most people are pretty reasonable about it. I feel like the statistics are like so slim. Yeah, exactly. And at this point, everyone knows that, you know, you're more likely, you know, to fall off a curb and break your neck than get beaten by a shark. Right.

Stay out of the water, I suppose, but, nah, nah. Elspeth, hey, wants to know, what kinds of fish are the most ethical, oh, to keep his pets? I love my beta fish, but whenever I'm in a pet store and see all the betas and their tiny cups, I feel sad. I want to take them all home. Should I contribute to that market or should I get a different kind of fish next time? Are beta raising captivity?

Excellent question. And thank you for being so, you know, so responsible. Yeah, beta fish are raising captivity. Go ahead and have as many as you like. Okay. Yeah. She also said, why are octopi so freaking scary and do you think they'll take over the world?

That's a question for a teethologist, right? Get this. Okay. Okay. That is a very good question. Here is the reason that we are not living in servitude to our cephalopod overlords. Even the biggest giant squid only lives for five years. What?

Yes. I just found this out. Squids, octopuses, they have very, very short lifespans. They got to go. They got to grow up. They got to mate. They got to get it done because they're not hanging around it. And the minute I heard that, I thought, holy shit, if one of those things ever figures

out and lives to be a hundred, we're aft. We're out of here. It's over for us. I feel like they'd be better at computer programming than us. Oh, it wouldn't even be computer programming. It would be like telepathic control of everything. I know. Yeah.

Do you think they're aliens? I feel like I'm not qualified to make that assessment. It could be. It could be. Okay. Craig wants to know how his, oh, he wants to know how his farmed salmon tilapia and catfish affect their species. But I feel like we kind of address that, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Farmfisher are fine. The species is fine. It's good. Okay. Yeah. Craig Minami wants to know, has the discovery that Southern California is a nursery for

great white sharks increased your research into their habits? Not me personally, but plenty of people, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. This is a great place to be if you want to work on sharks. Like I said, we're getting fish up in Southern California that used to be found much farther to the south, including hammerhead sharks. We, the sharks will follow the seals.

I mean, the big fishes follow the little fishes. They follow the prey items. So if the seals move around, the sharks will go after them, the white sharks. Dang. John Worcester wants to know, when a fisherman catches a fish, the hook usually goes in the lip of the fish. Do the fish feel pain when that happens? That's a yes.

Yeah. He says, I don't go fish anymore, so the answer will not affect me at all. Thank you for, again, thank you for these comments I love because they're responsible. These people are trying to do the right thing. They're caring. And I encourage this. I do feel like fish are, people are sensitive to fish because people know that they are getting boned with climate change.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, good. Yeah. I mean, that's great that I encourage that. Well done, people. Jessica Chamberlain has a personal question. She asked, do fish ever bite people?

Specifically bass or other lake dwelling fish. I'm trying to settle a little bet. I'm positive a fish bit me while we were swimming in Whitewater Lake in Wisconsin last summer, but my husband disagrees. It's definitely possible that a fish bit you. Oh, so good. It's definitely possible. Oh, Jessica's husband, you have been proven wrong.

They'd have to be a little confused, but maybe the water's muddy, fish bumps into you bite you. Yeah, it could happen. I mean, they don't usually, obviously, attack things bigger than themselves. They usually eat little insects. But yeah, it's possible a fish could bite you, sure. Officially, you know, see your finger some, take a little bite. No nibble.

Just a little nibble. No big deal. No big deal. No thing. Yeah. She got a fish kiss. That's exactly. So, Christa Trexler asked, do seahorses actually mate for life, and why do the males carry

the babies? I'm basically wondering why are seahorses so cool? Oh, my gosh, there's so many reasons. What a great group of fish those are. They do not mate for life. They'll mate with many different females throughout their life. Why does the male carry the babies? You know, I'm actually not sure.

They've got a pouch. They do carry them around. Usually something like that can be explained by the idea that the female can make more young because of it somehow. You know, maybe she has many clutches going at a time. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah, that one you'll have to Google.

That's a great one. Yeah, that's a good question. That's a good question. I love that she's maybe outsourcing. Yeah. You know what I mean? Side note, I have long thought that fashionable, stay-at-home dads wearing baby beorns, walking kiddos down the block to the cold press juicery while their mom is out kicking ass should

be called colloquially seahorses. What do you think? Like, Melanie's husband is a total seahorse. He's the best. Well, yeah, I quit my job at the tech firm and I'm just seahorsing for now. Well, Julie's at the oncology practice. Like, can we start that, please? Billy Merino asked, do fish develop emotional attachments to other fish, such as those they're

related to or even those that they're in a school with? If so, how do those emotions manifest for us to study? Like, do the goby in the shrimp? Like, do they? I feel like they would have to. Right? I think there's no evidence of that. In fact, even fish is like, fish will protect their young if they know they're their young,

but some fish is actually the young have to exhibit a different coloration pattern or show different behavior just so that the adult doesn't think they're an enemy or a prey item. Oh, wow. So, yeah, you know, I don't know. I don't think so. I mean, fish do parabon. They'll parabon, for sure. Like, two anemone fish is in an anemone.

Those guys will parabon. They must feel something. Yeah, they must. They can't just be dead inside. Exactly. I mean, they're cold-blooded, but they're not cold-hearted. That's it. Exactly, Ali.

Perfectly put. I feel like if you parabond, you can feel love. You must be able to. Otherwise, why would you? Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Well, we've settled that for science.

That's it. That's solidly scientifically settled. I'm a doctor now. Alicia, our sheevil asks, what's your favorite scary or weird fish? She loves, personally, the wolf eel. Just for the visual, wolf eels are kind of this like granite-colored gray long eel normal, but when it comes to that face, they have this angry countenance of Stadler and Waldorf, those two muppets who sit in the balcony and judge everyone.

They're great. Please look them up and then tattoo one on your back. Okay. First of all, great choice. Okay. My scariest fish is related to childhood imaginary trauma. I am terrified of stonefish. Stonefish are tropical.

They live in the sand. They're camouflaged. They have big spines and they're deadly venomous. What? Yes. I have, for some reason, was terrified of stepping on a stonefish, which is kind of like being terrified of being eaten by a great white shark. They'll never.

It's not going to happen. What am I ever going to get? Probably never. So, yeah. Have you gotten over it? Not really. Oh, no. What are their habitats?

In the Indo-Pacific reefs, mostly. Okay. Yeah. So, I just be real careful when I'm walking around. Do you wear little footsie booties? Yeah. I wear little footsie booties if I'm walking, but usually I'm swimming so I'm wearing fins. Okay.

Well, they probably can't stab you through a fin. No. I'm fine. Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. It's an irrational fear. Stonefishes. Stone-cold fishes.

That's it. Erin Kelly. Last questions. It says, I have a billion questions because I'm training at an aquarium. Oh, whoa. Great. Thank you. Yes.

But she needs to know. Needs to know about lumpfish. Why are they that color? I had never seen one until recently. She's fascinated. She said specifically the teal color. And why are they jelly-like? And why do they make good caviar?

What is a lumpfish? Oh, she's talking about. Okay. All right. So, Erin's talking about a fish called Cyclopteris lumpus, which come on. That name? That name wins. They're also called lump suckers, which is another A plus insult in a pinch when you

can't swear. So, they must have healthy self-esteem to deal with the name, but can you imagine if their species was called like a lump ape? How savage is that? Lumpfish are like whatever. Anyway, they are lumpy, and they suck things, and the caviar is expensive, and not much is known about them, so I hereby implore, Erin Kelly, if you're listening, please become a nyctheologist and study them.

No pressure. She's talking about a deep sea fish. I don't know that much about those. So, yeah. There's a lumpfish that lives off the coast here that's really cute and bright orange, and in our kelp forest, that's kind of a camouflage color, but yeah, this one, lumpfish caviar, I'm not sure. Ooh, I got to look it up.

Yeah, look it up. Do you have any advice for someone who is trying to be a nyctheologist? Learn how to spell it. Yeah, learn how to spell it, number one. Take a lot of biology classes, take as much organism biology as you can, and get out in the ocean as much as you can, and swim and dive, learn to dive. If you want to be a professional marine biologist, learn how to dive, get good at it. I have never been diving, but I have someone who's a listener who offered to take me diving.

It's amazing. Okay, should I go? Yeah, you should totally go. Yeah, oh yeah, it's amazing. But if you need to work, you know, doing it for work, you've got to really take it. You've got to study it. You've got to mean it. Yeah, yeah, you've got to study it.

But it's wonderful. Definitely go diving. What do you hate about your job? What are you like, this part sucks? Like what sucks? I have an easy, easiest answer. Okay. Malaria.

In a word, malaria. Malaria. I got malaria in the field one time. It sucked. And in fact, I didn't, I had the kind of, I called it tropical malaria, and it was the kind of malaria where it can go, you get infected, it can go in your liver and hide. And so I didn't actually know I had malaria until like 10 months later. What?

I'm like in my house reading a book, and all of a sudden I was like spiking a 104 degree fever and like shaking like I was having a seizure, horrible, no idea what was going on. My husband spotted it right away. He did? Is he a scientist? Yeah, he travels. He's a marine biologist also.

He studies snail. So he travels with me. He was in the field with me. Oh my God. We do all our field work together. And I went to the doctor and I tried to explain to them that I have malaria, but you really are in Los Angeles. They thought it was crazy.

What did they think it was? They thought I was nuts. They thought I had the flu. They thought I had, maybe I had meningitis. And then you can, to diagnose malaria, they have to take a blood sample while the parasite's active, while you're having the fever, while you're having the shaking, and that happened at night. I had to go to the emergency room.

They didn't believe me. They were like, you're insane. I said, please, please, please just take a blood sample. Finally got them to take the blood sample, and then I just bounced because I was pissed. And the next day, early in the morning, phone rings, it's county health. So do they have to put you into registry and stuff? They wanted to know what the what. They wanted to know what I was doing turning up in Los Angeles with malaria.

I said I was in New Guinea, but it was 10 months ago, 11 months ago. Did you get just the shit bitten out of you when you were there? Yeah, it's horrible. There's so much malaria in New Guinea. And we had taken, I was taking antimalarials, but I wasn't taking strong enough ones. There are some really strong ones that also tend to cause psychosis. And yeah, you can't be being psychotic when you're diving. You'll get killed.

You'll get killed or you'll kill someone else. Oh my God. Oh, that's not a good pair. So how long was... So I took a chance, rolled the dice, lost. Ended up with malaria. There it is. Worst thing about my job, malaria.

Did you... how long are you out with malaria? Once you take the meds, it goes away right away. Okay. Yeah. So you don't... It's easy to treat. You don't get to binge on a season of anything? Oh my God, no.

God, all for the love of fish? Worth it. What do you love about your job? What's the best, best, best, best? The best, best, best, best part. And there are so many. It is a great job. It's just figuring these things out.

I love learning about the fish. I love figuring out their evolution. I love figuring out how the evolution of fishes corresponds to the evolution of the planet and through geologic time. I love the work I do popularizing science. I love doing the Curiosity show on our YouTube channel. I love posting all the behind the scenes stuff on Instagram.

I love the people I work with. It's a blast. Where are you off to next? Well, next I'm going to... Actually, I'm going to London, which is just for collections work. And then in the fall, I'll be going back to Australia to work on some of the Australian stream fishes that are there. Oh my God.

Do you... How long are you in Australia when you're working there? Usually like a month or two. Do you come back with an accent? No, no. It's curious. No, let's see. What did I come back with?

I came back with an appreciation for freons and meat pies and totally blasé by Kangaroos. Blasé about them. Whatever. They're just everywhere. They're just everywhere. Yeah. What's freon?

A freon is a kind of muffin. It's a little baked muffin. It's made out of almonds. It's really good. Why don't we have them here? Get on with it. Search me. Yeah.

I don't know. Cookies show people pick this up. Freons. They're so good. You guys. You guys. Come on. Why aren't we all eating freons?

They're derived from French financier cookies and their almond meal and egg whites, but they're also kind of like a muffin and they come in raspberry and lemon. And oftentimes they're gluten free in case you live on the West Coast, where gluten is illegal. And bonus, I highly suggest you look up recipes on YouTube

because everyone making them has Australian accents and they say things like, this recipe is super easy to make. So give it a go. And if you haven't tried making freons before, we should give it a go because it's so simple to do. All right.

That's my new mission. If I find myself in a donut shop somewhere, I'll... Working. Yeah. I'll ask for a freon, which happens. And how can people find you? You can.

Well, I'm on our website, nhm.org. We... I do a little behind-the-scenes show called The Curiosity Show, which is at nhm.org slash curiosity show. I am on Instagram and Twitter as Thackfish, T-H-A-C-K Fish, Thackfish. And yeah, come visit the museum, you know?

Come look at our exhibits. Come look around. Take a behind-the-scenes tour. Maybe I'll show you our collection. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Seriously, if anyone has like a love of fish, I took a tour at the NHM

and ended up volunteering here. And like, I can't tell you it was a life changer. So if you... If there's a museum nearby, sign up to volunteer. It's one of the best things I've ever done. Oh, that's wonderful. Yes. I agree completely.

Absolutely. Come on down. Totally changed my life. Thank you so much for doing this. Oh, you're so welcome. My pleasure. My pleasure. Enjoy.

Yay, Gobi's. Ugh. How obsessed with her are you? Right? I'm like, fully. So follow her on the platforms. Catch The Curiosity Show on YouTube. And to follow ologies,

we're at ologies on Instagram and Twitter. I'm at alleyboard1l on Twitter, Instagram. You can join the ologies Facebook group where we all talk about the episode. We share weird links and gross pictures. It's a wonderful group of folks. No one in there is a clotwad, which I love. To support ologies,

you can head to ologiesmerch.com. Get yourself an item or two. Or you can make a donation if you want at patreon.com slash ologies. Also, honestly, just tweeting Instagraming, telling friends about the show, helps it grow so much. It's crazy to me to see the numbers go up every month.

Do spread the word. Thank you, as always, to Stephen Ray Morris for editing. Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lipo for running the ologies Facebook group, Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch for running ologiesmerch.com. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed

the ologies theme song. He's in a band called Islands. It's a very good band. You stuck it out through the credits. Thank you, congratulations. So here's my secret of the week. Right now, I have a blanket over my head because this room is really echoey.

So I've been recording this entire thing with just a full blanket over my head. And I can hear the people in the room next to me. And I think one of them has a flu because she's been coughing a lot and she stopped coughing. And I don't know if she just straight up died. And I also don't know if they can hear me, but I'm really nervous that they can.

I'm also not wearing pants because I just forgot to pack pajamas. So it was like, I'm just no pants. So what? Also, I turn the heat up in hotels to like 80 degrees. I don't really know why I do it. It's just, it's so cozy. But I am sweating.

Okay. Thanks so much for listening. Remember, go out, ask smart people all the dumb questions you want. They love it. And do join us next week. Where I will maybe be wearing pants. I'm not going to make any guarantees.

Bye bye.