Speaker 1: Oh hey, up top.
Speaker 2: So this is an encore version of one of my
Speaker 2: favorite recordings I've ever done. This was such an experience.
Speaker 2: I'm going to take you to a lab down many
Speaker 2: many corridors in New York.
Speaker 1: This guest, Oh the stories.
Speaker 2: I just want to sit in like an old mariner's
Speaker 2: bar and glug disgusting things out of glasses and hear
Speaker 2: all of her stories. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this.
Speaker 2: This is an encore because I'm having some medical stuff.
Speaker 2: I had to have surgery this week, so I am
Speaker 2: doctor's orders laying low. But there is a new secret
Speaker 2: at the end, So listen to it again because it's
Speaker 2: a great episode. And then I'm going to hit you
Speaker 2: with a secret at the end that's new. Okay, Oh hey,
Speaker 2: it's that second cousin who tries to talk to you
Speaker 2: about sports stats and can't read that you don't care.
Speaker 2: Ali Ward here with another episode of Ologies. So this
Speaker 2: episode it's so amazing. I think you will find it
Speaker 2: equivalent to like a bag of jellybeans that you've selected
Speaker 2: out of the bulk bins, where there's not a single
Speaker 2: bean in a flavor you don't enjoy. It's just pure
Speaker 2: delight and some of the best long form storytelling I
Speaker 2: have ever heard. I just I set up the mics,
Speaker 2: I forced a world respected ologist to talk into them,
Speaker 2: and I interjected occasionally with some gasps. She's amazing. Before
Speaker 2: we get to that feast, let's do some formalities. Let's
Speaker 2: tuck our napkins into our collar, if you will. Thank
Speaker 2: you to all the folks who have logged into patreon
Speaker 2: dot com slash ologies to donate a buck or more
Speaker 2: a month to support the show, and that helps me
Speaker 2: pay a wonderful editor, Hi Stephen, and lets me continue
Speaker 2: doing this, which it's my favorite thing to do. So
Speaker 2: thank you for that. Thank you to everyone who gets
Speaker 2: merch at ologiesmerch dot com. There's some really great ball
Speaker 2: college sweatshirts, backpacks, are up, bird patterned mugs, just a
Speaker 2: whole mess of awesome. Thank you also to listeners who
Speaker 2: rate and subscribe. You guys keep ologies in the front
Speaker 2: of new eyeballs and ear holes, growing this kind of
Speaker 2: curious cult of ologites, and especially think you're the ones
Speaker 2: who take a minute to review because I am I'm
Speaker 2: nothing if not creepy, and you know I read them
Speaker 2: all and then I present you with a still moist one,
Speaker 2: such as this review from vsk Stark, who says this
Speaker 2: podcast is amazing in so many ways, and then they
Speaker 2: say some nice stuff about me that I'm too embarrassed
Speaker 2: to read aloud, and then also say the editing is
Speaker 2: genius and the content I would say is juicy spicy learning.
Speaker 2: It brings a smile to my day when I commute.
Speaker 2: I highly recommend it juicy spicy learning. I think we
Speaker 2: might need a sweatshirt that says juicy spicy learning. Am
Speaker 2: I right, we'll work on it. Okay, Onto theology. Functional morphology.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of syllables. What in a sam hell
Speaker 2: does it mean? Well, pretty much means the study of
Speaker 2: form and function, So the anatomy of an organism, and
Speaker 2: then what the hell that anatomy does? So like, why
Speaker 2: do we have eyelashes? What's up with the little headstool
Speaker 2: things on top of a jura face? Why do some
Speaker 2: animals get to have so many stomachs and butts?
Speaker 3: Why?
Speaker 2: So? I originally heard of this ologist and I thought, okay,
Speaker 2: whale scientist her bio on Twitter says whale scientist she
Speaker 2: is the foremost expert on carving up Sometimes explosively decomposing
Speaker 2: whales on beaches worldwide. But I learned thrillingly that she
Speaker 2: deals with so much more than whales. So this is
Speaker 2: not the satology or whale episode. We'll get to that
Speaker 2: in the future a differentologist. This one functional morphology. We
Speaker 2: cover way more than that. So she's an anatomist who
Speaker 2: compares all kinds of species to each other to see
Speaker 2: what's similar and what's different between them, why they work
Speaker 2: and how and how maybe it can help us. So
Speaker 2: she's a professor at the Center for Anatomy and Functional
Speaker 2: Morphology and Department of Medical Education at Mount Sinai in Manhattan,
Speaker 2: New York. She has appeared on Sex in the Wild
Speaker 2: on the British Channel four show Inside Nature's Giants, which
Speaker 2: also airs on PBS, where she dissected a hippo, a giraffe,
Speaker 2: a fin whale, a crocodile, a giant squid, polar bear,
Speaker 2: so much more. And she's on Mythical Beasts, which is
Speaker 2: an eight episode series premiering October fourteenth on Science Channel.
Speaker 2: It's all about the fabled creatures like cyclops and vampires
Speaker 2: and sea monsters and dragons and where we got the
Speaker 2: idea for them. She's amazing. So I met up with
Speaker 2: her at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and we went
Speaker 2: through this labyrinth of halls. We headed through a door
Speaker 2: labeled functional morphology to her office and then set up
Speaker 2: shop in the breakroom next to a tray of muffins
Speaker 2: I wanted to eat. So you won't hear the muffins
Speaker 2: because muffins are silent, and I did not eat them.
Speaker 2: But you might hear the occasional din of a co
Speaker 2: worker chatting as they passed, which is kind of like
Speaker 2: you're right there in the breakroom with us, but without
Speaker 2: access to the muffins, this human person can spin a yarn.
Speaker 2: I loved it. Please sit back and enjoy tales that
Speaker 2: are porchworthy, like whiskey around a campfire, legend grade stories.
Speaker 2: As you also pick up the hows and whys of
Speaker 2: deconstructing animals that have passed into the great beyond. You'll
Speaker 2: hear about whale hands and pickled primates and run ins
Speaker 2: with danger and tarps and tools and art and fainting
Speaker 2: and the winding road that led this ologist.
Speaker 1: To her perfect job. So prepared to be.
Speaker 2: Enthralled and inspired by functional morphologists anatomist. Doctor Joy Rodenberg's
Speaker 2: Oh no, no worries. I do so much editing, so
Speaker 2: you can pretty much confess to murder and I'll cut
Speaker 2: it out. And now, in functional morphology, would you say
Speaker 2: that you're a functional morphologist or would you.
Speaker 1: Say that you're a setologist? She studies whales.
Speaker 3: I actually would call myself a comparative anatomist. Oh so
Speaker 3: I wouldn't use either word. Okay, you know that doesn't
Speaker 3: have the ology.
Speaker 2: I know, but.
Speaker 3: I do study anatomy of lots of different animals, and
Speaker 3: whales are just one of my favorite animals to look
Speaker 3: at because they're so weird.
Speaker 1: They are crazy weird. Let's go back.
Speaker 2: Tell me when you got so interested in animal anatomy,
Speaker 2: and are you also interested in human anatomy? Or when
Speaker 2: did like when did the bug cutting stuff up and
Speaker 2: look at stuff?
Speaker 1: Getcha?
Speaker 3: So that's a multi prong question, so I'll have to
Speaker 3: give you a multi pronged answer. Bring it on, all right, So,
Speaker 3: first of all, I am interested in human anatomy, or
Speaker 3: I wouldn't be at a medical center, right, So it's
Speaker 3: it's definitely one of our most interesting animals we can
Speaker 3: look at in the world. Are humans because humans are
Speaker 3: so incredible adapted for things that other animals can't do,
Speaker 3: starting with what we're doing right now, language speech, Hey,
Speaker 3: you know, the ability to produce the speech sounds is
Speaker 3: uniquely human. You get lots of animals that get close,
Speaker 3: but they're not the same. They can't make the full
Speaker 3: range of owwls that we can make. So our anatomy
Speaker 3: in the area of the throat is really spectacularly different
Speaker 3: from all other animals. And we can get into that
Speaker 3: if you want. But they are an interesting animal into themselves.
Speaker 3: And then of course there's a whole range of other animals.
Speaker 3: So how did I get into it? Well, I don't
Speaker 3: know how long is this interview?
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 3: I have to stay. It really probably started before I
Speaker 3: knew that anatomy was a discipline. I had no idea
Speaker 3: that you could cut up things, look inside and call
Speaker 3: that a career. That seemed to be the kind of
Speaker 3: thing that was relegated to horror films, right, you know,
Speaker 3: So it wasn't really thought of as a career for me,
Speaker 3: you know, And probably that started with when I was
Speaker 3: a kid. I just I loved getting close to animals. Really,
Speaker 3: they wanted to learn as much as I could about nature.
Speaker 3: The problem was that animals ran away from you. So yeah,
Speaker 3: you really couldn't look at them up gloves unless they
Speaker 3: were your pets. Now, of course, I'm not going to
Speaker 3: cut up with a pet. I love pets. You know
Speaker 3: that they have to have their their places a pet
Speaker 3: and belive and be with you, and you can cuddle
Speaker 3: them and all that fun stuff. But the animals in nature,
Speaker 3: they were also alive and fun and cuddly, but you
Speaker 3: wouldn't stay with you unless you tried to cuddle them,
Speaker 3: and they'd bite you. So that wasn't a great interaction.
Speaker 3: But everywhere, once in a while you got a chance
Speaker 3: to get really close to them if it was dead,
Speaker 3: because it wasn't going to run away. So you know,
Speaker 3: one of the biggest arguments used to have my parents
Speaker 3: was whether or not it was allowed to touch the roadkill.
Speaker 3: I love this woman, so there I would be, you know,
Speaker 3: fascinated with whatever it is that fell on the ground,
Speaker 3: you know, dropped out of a tree, or got you know,
Speaker 3: or got run over by a car. Whatever I could
Speaker 3: find that was in some capacity left where I could
Speaker 3: find it. I wanted to I wanted to see it.
Speaker 3: I wanted to learn more about it.
Speaker 1: Did you carry gloves with you?
Speaker 3: As I didn't know what gloves were you kidding? My
Speaker 3: cat would come home with a chipmunk and I would
Speaker 3: take the dead chipmunk that had left on the front
Speaker 3: doorstep and I would hide it from my parents so
Speaker 3: they wouldn't know I was looking at it. And I
Speaker 3: took the skin off the chipmunk and I saved it.
Speaker 3: I didn't have a tan skin I was. I was like,
Speaker 3: I want to learn all about it. And you know,
Speaker 3: back then, it wasn't the Internet to look it up
Speaker 3: and figure it out. I'd like get books out on
Speaker 3: things like that. And I tried tanning the skin of
Speaker 3: this chipmunk, and I thought this would be awesome. It's
Speaker 3: got this you know, racing stripes on it. You know,
Speaker 3: it's really cool looking.
Speaker 1: It's already dead.
Speaker 3: It's yeah, I can't hurt it. It's already dead, right,
Speaker 3: And I had done a really great job, and I
Speaker 3: was like so excited because I was going to use
Speaker 3: this chipmunk for as a saddle blanket for one of
Speaker 3: my toy horses.
Speaker 1: That's pretty locate.
Speaker 3: So that was like I thought this was really legit
Speaker 3: and I had I'd hit in a specific place in
Speaker 3: a wooden blocks in our yard, and I came out
Speaker 3: later to check on it a couple days later, and
Speaker 3: a raccoon had taken it. And I only know that
Speaker 3: because I saw the footprints, so I was like, oh man,
Speaker 3: so frustrated.
Speaker 2: So side note, I just learned that raccoons are incredibly smart.
Speaker 2: They remember tasks years after learning them, which is more
Speaker 2: than I can say for myself. And also, their name
Speaker 2: in Spanish is derived from an Aztec phrase meaning the
Speaker 2: one who takes everything in its hands. So next time
Speaker 2: you're making a tiny saddle out of a fresh dead chipmunk,
Speaker 2: watch out for them because they are lurking in the
Speaker 2: trees at dusk waiting for your back to be turned.
Speaker 2: Don't freak out though. Also if you wish there was
Speaker 2: a holiday to celebrate raccoons internationally, well boy howdy, it
Speaker 2: was October first, So now you have a whole year
Speaker 2: to make felted bandit masks and learn how to scratch
Speaker 2: up palm trees using only your overgrown toenails. Okay, anyway,
Speaker 2: Joey's childhood, so that's how.
Speaker 3: My dventure would often go. But then I just covered fishing.
Speaker 3: I really liked fishing. I thought fish are really amazing
Speaker 3: looking animals. They're so hydrodynamically shaped, and then they have
Speaker 3: all these interesting colors. You know, mammals are pretty boring
Speaker 3: when it comes to colorless birds and fish. Well, they've
Speaker 3: got it, yeah, they do.
Speaker 2: They do have it going on, and they've got crazy mouths,
Speaker 2: and some of them have big lips, some of them
Speaker 2: have no lips.
Speaker 3: Like the giant eyes that never close, and these fins
Speaker 3: that come out of nowhere that did just open up
Speaker 3: like a Chinese fan.
Speaker 1: And I love that.
Speaker 3: I just really really loved that. And so I would
Speaker 3: go fishing and my dad would agree to take me
Speaker 3: fishing because it was on the way to taking my
Speaker 3: brother to race go carts because it was at the
Speaker 3: same place at the beach. So I would hang out
Speaker 3: on the dock fishing. Well, they would race ghost carts
Speaker 3: and I'd come home with all the stinky, smelly things,
Speaker 3: and he would tolerate it as long as I fillaid
Speaker 3: all the fish, okay, And later he would even take
Speaker 3: me out. We got a small boat, and he w'd
Speaker 3: go out in the boat and he would get madly
Speaker 3: seasick because he would sit there read the newspaper the
Speaker 3: whole time, which is not what you do on a
Speaker 3: rocking boat. But again, he would tolerate all this as
Speaker 3: long as I would deal with all the fish. And
Speaker 3: so I was happy to do that, because you know,
Speaker 3: we're going to cook them and we're going to waste them.
Speaker 3: But I got very distracted flying fish.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I'd open up the fish and then I would be, wow,
Speaker 3: look at these feathery red things. What are these things?
Speaker 3: Of course there were gills, but I didn't know what
Speaker 3: they were. And then the intestines, like wow, the spaghetti
Speaker 3: just keeps on going, and the muscles were like in
Speaker 3: dou W's. I thought that was the weirdest thing. Of
Speaker 3: the muscles zigzag back and forth. And I'd sit there
Speaker 3: forever playing with the skeleton. After i'd fully the meat up,
Speaker 3: like wow, you know, and my mother would be screaming
Speaker 3: from the from the kitchen, Get on with it. We
Speaker 3: want to eat. And that was my introduction to anatomy.
Speaker 3: But I didn't know that was a career r. So
Speaker 3: I'm sorry it's not the cliff notes version.
Speaker 1: No, I love it, Are you kidding?
Speaker 3: Bring it on so fast forward? I want to I
Speaker 3: want to go to college, but I don't really know
Speaker 3: what I want to do, and my dad is and
Speaker 3: are trying to advise me, and my dad in particular said, well,
Speaker 3: you should really know what career you want, so you
Speaker 3: can pick a college that's really tailored to what you
Speaker 3: want to do for your career. That was pretty stage
Speaker 3: advice coming from parents who hadn't gone to college. And
Speaker 3: it was again, it wasn't a thing where you can
Speaker 3: look up on the internet and find all this, so
Speaker 3: you have to wait for the brochures to come in
Speaker 3: the mail and read them and then right away for
Speaker 3: more material, or actually go and visit the places, which
Speaker 3: is really hard to do. Some of them were pretty
Speaker 3: far away. We didn't have the resources to go fly
Speaker 3: over to different places. So I remember reading about a
Speaker 3: lot of them and still being very confused, not knowing
Speaker 3: what I wanted to do. Because what kid in the
Speaker 3: eleventh grade or even early twelfth grade knows exactly what
Speaker 3: they want to do. I mean, some people might have
Speaker 3: a good idea that I want to be a firefighter
Speaker 3: or a police officer or a ballerina. I just wanted
Speaker 3: to play with animals. My dad would say no, one's
Speaker 3: going to pay you to play with the animals. So
Speaker 3: I kept thinking, Okay, you know, maybe you know. And
Speaker 3: I'm a smart kid too. I'm doing really well in school.
Speaker 3: I'm in the top five percent of my class, and
Speaker 3: I'm thinking, Okay, what am I going to do all
Speaker 3: this information? Right now? I want to be a dog walker.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to do something more beids.
Speaker 1: You can't see inside the dogs.
Speaker 3: Well that's true, but I remember I didn't know seeing
Speaker 3: inside was the ultimate goal. It just was a way
Speaker 3: to get close to the animals, to understand more about them.
Speaker 3: I was just as fascinated with the outside and like
Speaker 3: behaviors too. It's just they didn't do that when they
Speaker 3: were dead, so I only I can only do what
Speaker 3: I could do when I get that close. The rest
Speaker 3: of the time, I'd sped at the window, glued to
Speaker 3: the window, watching birds at the bird feeder or wherever.
Speaker 3: You know. I was always watching the animals and catching
Speaker 3: snakes and bringing them home, and catching pollywogs from the
Speaker 3: pond and putting it in a tank and raising frogs
Speaker 3: out of that. You know. It just I loved all
Speaker 3: of that nature stuff. My mother thought I was like crazy,
Speaker 3: I come home with a snake on each arm? Can
Speaker 3: I keep them? As long as it fits in the tank.
Speaker 3: You can keep whatever you want. So I had tank
Speaker 3: this all over the garage.
Speaker 1: That's so I would have been such good friends. You're
Speaker 1: kidding me.
Speaker 2: We once put a dead snake with a ken head
Speaker 2: on it in the freezer to surprise my grandma.
Speaker 1: I can not go over well, but we loved it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I get it now.
Speaker 3: It started to sound a little bit like that that
Speaker 3: kid next door and toy story.
Speaker 1: Oh no, you guys don't get it to you.
Speaker 2: Once we go into cit house, we won't be coming out.
Speaker 2: We didn't like my grandma very much, but we love
Speaker 2: dead snakes. My grandma was not a nice person anyway,
Speaker 2: back to her backstory, which I.
Speaker 3: Love so Harry. I'm talking with my dad about this
Speaker 3: and he says, well, you really need to figure out
Speaker 3: your career, and he hands me the yellow pages of
Speaker 3: the phone book. You know, back then it was actually
Speaker 3: a book. Yeah, thing online, and you know we up
Speaker 3: until then. I used it as a high chair for
Speaker 3: me to sit on so I could reach the table.
Speaker 3: It wasn't really something we looked in very often. But
Speaker 3: that's where you'd find things like plumbers and electricians and whatever,
Speaker 3: you know, pizza joints and whatever. And so I'm flipping
Speaker 3: through this Yellow Pages because to him, every career was
Speaker 3: in the Yellow Pages.
Speaker 1: That's a good I mean, that was a good resource
Speaker 1: back then.
Speaker 3: It was because there again, it wasn't the Internet. We
Speaker 3: couldn't look things up. This was the one place where
Speaker 3: everything was accumulated. As far as my dad knew, that
Speaker 3: was a career.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or the classifieds, which is I would look in the.
Speaker 3: More boring yeah.
Speaker 2: No. Quick question. When was the Internet invented? I didn't know,
Speaker 2: so I did look it up now in nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: three by a Connecticut chap named Vint Surf Vint Cerf.
Speaker 2: That sounds like what happens when you're playing a really
Speaker 2: shitty hand of scrabble and someone bursts in and says, hey,
Speaker 2: what should I name this king? Anyway, he is one
Speaker 2: of the main inventors of the infrastructure of the Internet,
Speaker 2: but it wasn't until nineteen ninety when Sir Timothy Berners
Speaker 2: Lee his friends call him tim bl no joke, invented
Speaker 2: the World Wide Web and decided to just give it
Speaker 2: away for free. Thus missing out of literally trillions of
Speaker 2: dollars of money, like he could have owned Earth. But
Speaker 2: he was like, hey, man, I just want people to
Speaker 2: pass around photos of moths who are randy for lamps
Speaker 2: during a time when justice seems out of reach. Thanks
Speaker 2: timbel Anyway, Joyett was leaping through physical paper and yellow pages,
Speaker 2: browsing for her future.
Speaker 3: And I'm looking through and what am I not saying.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying anatomist. I'm not sing comparative anatomist. I'm
Speaker 3: not sing biologists. I'm not seeing scientists, not saying researcher.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying professor. I did see doctor, but only
Speaker 3: medical doctors.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: I did think eventually I was going to get to
Speaker 3: z and I would be happy because I'd get to zoo.
Speaker 3: Maybe it'd be a zoo keeper. Right, So I got
Speaker 3: a lot of pages to flip through. I got pretty
Speaker 3: far along. When I got to veterinarian I thought, oh, okay,
Speaker 3: maybe that's a career for me because it's animals, you know,
Speaker 3: and they don't have to be dead animals. I did
Speaker 3: have this thing about it. Stuff didn't need to be
Speaker 3: dead for me to be interested in it. Although I
Speaker 3: did collect a lot of things, you know, shells, feathers, bones, rocks,
Speaker 3: you know whatever I could collect, you know, eat nature stuff. Yeah, sure, everything,
Speaker 3: So I thought veterinarians. I went to go intern for
Speaker 3: a vet and my first day on the job, there
Speaker 3: was a dog that had been hit by a car
Speaker 3: and they were going to do an operation. And he
Speaker 3: invited me to scrub in on this operation and showed
Speaker 3: me how to scrub in. But I was basically just observing.
Speaker 3: And I was really excited because I was going to
Speaker 3: get to see this dog fixed. I was going to
Speaker 3: get to see I don't mean newter, I mean yeah
Speaker 3: fixed up. And the dog was, you know, definitely had
Speaker 3: a terrible injury. And I thought, well, I'm going to
Speaker 3: get city inside on this animal. That's pretty cool because
Speaker 3: it's a living inside it and all the dead stuff
Speaker 3: that I'd seen before. And I was so fascinated. I
Speaker 3: was riveted. I was watching this, you know, wide eyed
Speaker 3: and you know, totally full of wonder. And I started
Speaker 3: to get lightheaded and I was like, what is happening.
Speaker 3: I'm really interested in this. I'm not nausea's I'm not squeamish.
Speaker 3: What is going on? And I started getting more and
Speaker 3: more lightheaded, and I was so embarrassed, but I didn't
Speaker 3: want to fall into the sterile surgical field, so I
Speaker 3: told the veterinari and I was getting little light headed.
Speaker 3: I thought, well, maybe the room is too warm, or
Speaker 3: maybe I didn't need enough breakfast or something. What I
Speaker 3: was having was called a vasovagel reaction, which is something
Speaker 3: you absolutely can't control. It's essentially an autonomic discharge of
Speaker 3: your nervous system that no one can predict. This is
Speaker 3: going to happen, and no one really knows why it happens,
Speaker 3: and then it goes away almost as fast as it
Speaker 3: comes on.
Speaker 2: I was so curious, why does this happen. It happens
Speaker 2: technically when the vagus nerve is stimulated and it causes
Speaker 2: this sudden drop and heart rate, and also maybe the
Speaker 2: dilation of blood vessels and your legs, which causes blood
Speaker 2: to pool there and away from your brain, causing you
Speaker 2: to pass out. It can happen from standing too long,
Speaker 2: or from heat exposure, stress, or the sight of blood.
Speaker 2: I like to think that watching a veterinary operation inspired
Speaker 2: this pitbull Kesha duet.
Speaker 1: It's going down ye.
Speaker 3: Anyway, but whatever, it's pretty incapacitating. So that was happening
Speaker 3: to me, and I thought, I'm never going to be
Speaker 3: able to be a veterinarian if I pass out when
Speaker 3: I'm trying to do an operation. So the veterinarian sent
Speaker 3: me out of the room, which I was very embarrassed about,
Speaker 3: and later came to talk to me and said, you know,
Speaker 3: don't let this go to your head, don't let this
Speaker 3: deter you because it might just be a one time thing,
Speaker 3: and explained what it was, what I was going through,
Speaker 3: and I'm glad he gave me that second chance and
Speaker 3: asked me to come back because I didn't ever have
Speaker 3: that again.
Speaker 2: Really, oh man, this is like the blissful happy ending
Speaker 2: to a kid's movie. This is just the story America needed.
Speaker 3: I never had it again. It was only once, and
Speaker 3: I still don't exactly know why it happened, but I
Speaker 3: think it has something to do with my brain trying
Speaker 3: to process the idea that this dog was not feeling
Speaker 3: pain because it was nesthetized but clearly had enough injuries
Speaker 3: to feel a lot of pain. Yeah, and I kept thinking,
Speaker 3: but that's got to be painful, but no, it's not
Speaker 3: feeling it, but it's got to be painful, but it's
Speaker 3: not feeling it. And that conflict kept going around around
Speaker 3: in my head. Maybe that had something to do with
Speaker 3: why I couldn't process what was happening. But maybe I
Speaker 3: was just hyper excited about it all because I got
Speaker 3: to see everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's like a big day. That's like
Speaker 2: a lead up of so many animal bones and skeletons,
Speaker 2: and you've already done field work pretty much like you know,
Speaker 2: like amateur field work, and yeah, like that's a big day.
Speaker 3: It was a very big experience and here I was
Speaker 3: going to get to see it was going to be
Speaker 3: controlled in at the setting where it was alive. There
Speaker 3: was just so much happening. But I thought maybe I
Speaker 3: couldn't be a veterinarian. But he convinced me otherwise that
Speaker 3: I could. So I applied to Cornell University because they
Speaker 3: had a VET school. I wasn't applying to VET school.
Speaker 3: I just wanted the undergraduate part first, which is the
Speaker 3: stepping stone you need to go to VET school. So
Speaker 3: I got accepted at Cornell. I was very happy about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a big deal.
Speaker 3: It was a big deal, especially for my family where
Speaker 3: I was the first one to go to college.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're like Ivy League.
Speaker 2: Hello, But Joyce says, since it cost the same tuition,
Speaker 2: she enrolled in the Arts and Sciences department because frankly,
Speaker 2: she didn't know if she wanted to stay with science.
Speaker 3: Because I'm also an artist. So there was another part
Speaker 3: of me that I hadn't talked about, which is that
Speaker 3: I am an artist, and I didn't really know which
Speaker 3: career I wanted because if I wasn't going to be
Speaker 3: a veterinarian, I was definitely going to go into art,
Speaker 3: and not only an artist, but also a musicians. So
Speaker 3: I'm definitely heavy on that side of the brain as well.
Speaker 1: It sounds like both sides of your brain are very good.
Speaker 3: That's why I could walk straight enough fall over right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, heads up, that was an anatomy joke, Thank you.
Speaker 3: Joy I majored in a science field, but I minored
Speaker 3: in an art field, and so I was kind of
Speaker 3: pursuing both in this college. And as I got closer
Speaker 3: to graduation, I was trying to think, what kind of
Speaker 3: job do I really want? Do I really want to
Speaker 3: go to VET school? I thought that's what I was
Speaker 3: set on.
Speaker 2: So Joya was on track to be a vet. She
Speaker 2: took four years of classes to prepare her for it,
Speaker 2: but she started interviewing vets to ask about their lives
Speaker 2: and found nope, nope, was not what she wanted to do.
Speaker 2: Apparently it involves a lot of spay and neuter surgeries
Speaker 2: and euthanasias, but more complex medical procedures are usually declined
Speaker 2: by pet owners just because of cost. So this bummed
Speaker 2: her out. She thought, maybe a wild animal vet. There's
Speaker 2: not a lot of job openings in that field, so
Speaker 2: she kept brainstorming, and.
Speaker 3: Then I thought about what about farm vet work, you know, right?
Speaker 3: And they said, well, most of that is vaccinating herds
Speaker 3: of cattle. Oh it's like totally not into that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: all right. So then there's this pro called aqua vet.
Speaker 3: I thought, oh, that's where I belong because I really
Speaker 3: love marine biology, because I still still never left that
Speaker 3: fascination on fish. Right. Of course, I had actually, in
Speaker 3: the interim, had worked for the Nationally Fishery Service, I'd
Speaker 3: worked for the National Uceianic Society. I'd spent summer working
Speaker 3: at the Bermuda Biological Station for research. I had done
Speaker 3: a lot of marine oriented so it was very interested
Speaker 3: in that. I wanted to be an aquivat. Now this
Speaker 3: would be the veterinarian for all the aquariums or the oceanariums.
Speaker 3: So cool, and you take care of their fish, you
Speaker 3: take care of their dolphins. I was like, dolphins, totally, yeah,
Speaker 3: I want to do that. But there was one aquivt
Speaker 3: and one one for the whole northeast coast. What that
Speaker 3: was it?
Speaker 2: That's ridiculous. Even Pepsi has coke. I mean, come on,
Speaker 2: you gotta have a little competition.
Speaker 3: So I thought, I'm gonna have to wait for this
Speaker 3: guy to retire before I'm going to have a career, right,
Speaker 3: and he was still young at the time, so I
Speaker 3: was like, Okay, that's probably not going to happen in
Speaker 3: my lifetime.
Speaker 2: She started exploring the art side and thought maybe medical illustrator.
Speaker 2: So she talked to a medical illustrator who warned her
Speaker 2: that it was frustrating as an artist because you're for hire.
Speaker 2: You have to follow exactly what the client wants. Megabomber
Speaker 2: for her and she didn't want to end up at say,
Speaker 2: an ad agency, drawing nature for wine labels or car ads.
Speaker 2: Wasn't her bag. Moved from science, so.
Speaker 1: What was she to do?
Speaker 3: But I still liked working with the anatomy. I started
Speaker 3: really loving my anatomy courses, and I'd taken a comparative
Speaker 3: anatomy course and then an advanced one at the VET school,
Speaker 3: and so I thought, let me ask the instructor of
Speaker 3: that course about his job. And I thought he was
Speaker 3: a veterinarian, but it turned out he wasn't. I was
Speaker 3: totally surprised by that. How could the chairman of anatomy
Speaker 3: at the Veterinarian college not be a veterinarian, right, He's like, surprise, surprise,
Speaker 3: I'm a PhD. Now. I was really confused, and I
Speaker 3: did not grow up in an academic family, so I
Speaker 3: really didn't understand what a PhD was. To me, it
Speaker 3: was a doctor of philosophy, so it means you have
Speaker 3: to philosophize, So was somebody in science. Philosophizing didn't make
Speaker 3: any sense to me. So I really didn't get it in
Speaker 3: the science world that it didn't seem to make a
Speaker 3: lot of sense unless you were just going to talk
Speaker 3: about the science. So like my biology professor, okay, I
Speaker 3: get it. I didn't understand that until I spoke to
Speaker 3: him and realized that, yeah, there are opportunities and exactly
Speaker 3: what I love, which is anatomy. Because I didn't know
Speaker 3: that you could do more. I figured it's all known,
Speaker 3: it's all there, right right, Well I've seen it.
Speaker 2: Oh god no, and then you realize, oh, they're still
Speaker 2: cracking things open and being like, what is this little.
Speaker 1: Foing you doing?
Speaker 3: Do there? You go? So, so he said, you know,
Speaker 3: you really belong in a research career. But I didn't
Speaker 3: understand what that was. And he said, well, why don't
Speaker 3: you do a summer work study with me? Because I
Speaker 3: did do work study pay for college anyway, And so
Speaker 3: he he had me working on this big jar of toadfish. No,
Speaker 3: I like fish, but these these are ugly fish. But
Speaker 3: I thought they were interesting because they kind of look
Speaker 3: like a frog that didn't quite become a fish, quite
Speaker 3: become a frog. And these have these giant biggie froggy
Speaker 3: eyes and giant big froggy mouths and skin tags hanging
Speaker 3: off with them that make them look like seaweed. You know,
Speaker 3: they are ugly looking things.
Speaker 2: Okay, quick aside. I just looked these creatures up and
Speaker 2: they are gloriously unsightly. They have a wide, wordy looking
Speaker 2: and a just massive downturned mouth with the expression of
Speaker 2: like if jab of the hut lost a lot of
Speaker 2: money playing the slots. Also, they are horny. So a
Speaker 2: few years ago Monterey residents were just puzzled by this
Speaker 2: low thrumming sound in the summer. It sounded kind of
Speaker 2: like someone farting into a vinyl diner booth. But to
Speaker 2: the toadfish that translates to just a sonnet of lust.
Speaker 2: And I applaud them anyway, Joy dug them too.
Speaker 3: But they had their own appeal to me.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: They had these beautiful pectoral fins that they'd splay open
Speaker 3: that looked like it had rainbows on them. It was
Speaker 3: just gorgeous, you know, really pretty. And so these fish
Speaker 3: were fascinating. And I spent forever drawing these fish, and
Speaker 3: he said, I want you to cut them open and
Speaker 3: draw what you see on the inside.
Speaker 4: Oh.
Speaker 3: I was in pig heaven. I loved it. I was
Speaker 3: cutting up in these fish and I was making these drawings,
Speaker 3: and he was going to use them in a dissection manual.
Speaker 3: I thought, wow, it's like even useful, you know, I'm
Speaker 3: not just having fun. And so I did that all
Speaker 3: summer long, and then I asked him, you know, is
Speaker 3: there like a career in doing stuff like this? And
Speaker 3: he said, yeah, you could be an anatomist. He says,
Speaker 3: that's what I am. I said, that's what you are.
Speaker 3: I thought you were a veterinarian this whole time. Now
Speaker 3: it's an anatomist. And then I discovered research and that's
Speaker 3: what I really got into anatomy as a career, because
Speaker 3: he said, you should go to graduate school, you should
Speaker 3: become a researcher, because as a research scientist you have
Speaker 3: the ultimate and creative freedom, which is what every artist
Speaker 3: really wants, right, and you could focus it on the
Speaker 3: animal stuff, which is what you really like. But the
Speaker 3: best part about being a researcher is that you have
Speaker 3: the ultimate creativity and that you can ask any question
Speaker 3: in the world, any question, and you get to design
Speaker 3: the experiment to answer it.
Speaker 2: So this is what a functional more apologist slash anatomist does.
Speaker 2: Joy had finally found her joy and she was getting
Speaker 2: paid to poke at roadkill for the good of humanity.
Speaker 3: And I have that Now, I have that creative freedom.
Speaker 3: I can study anything anything, any animal, any part of
Speaker 3: any animal, anything that's interesting to me about that. I
Speaker 3: can delve into that and just get really down into
Speaker 3: the nitty gritty and figure out how does it work,
Speaker 3: why does it work? What's useful about knowing how it works?
Speaker 3: So that's when I'd said, Okay, I'm in this is
Speaker 3: the career for me. Yeah, that's when I realized that
Speaker 3: I was going to be an anatomist. Before that, it
Speaker 3: was just science, you know, terarian animal. But anatomist really
Speaker 3: came in my senior year. That's when I realized that
Speaker 3: And what.
Speaker 1: Is it involved.
Speaker 2: I mean, Nika, we're at a medical center, but as
Speaker 2: an anatomist to people say hey, I need to figure
Speaker 2: out what is going on with this antelope or this
Speaker 2: whale or this person.
Speaker 1: Let's ask Joy what's happening here?
Speaker 3: So that does happen, but not so much at a
Speaker 3: medical center for humans, of course, you know, because I'm
Speaker 3: not in the area or people are company was saying,
Speaker 3: how does this analoge work? Yeah, that might happen more
Speaker 3: at a veterinary college, I think, and maybe that is
Speaker 3: a bitter fit for what I know. But in a
Speaker 3: medical center, I feel like I've edited another layer of
Speaker 3: importance to my work because I can take information from
Speaker 3: the animal world and bring it to people, and that's
Speaker 3: essentially what I do so our lab. I kind of
Speaker 3: joyfully call it the animal recycling Center because we get
Speaker 3: everybody's leftover, so I don't have to go out and
Speaker 3: kill the animals together and they're already dead. People give
Speaker 3: it to us if they're you know, that's something dies
Speaker 3: at a wildlife center, we get it. It dies in
Speaker 3: the road, we could get it, dies on the beach,
Speaker 3: we get it. It dies in a lab, someone's using
Speaker 3: it for an experiment. We can also get that, too, cool,
Speaker 3: So we get all kinds of leftovers from from wherever,
Speaker 3: and the more exotic and more interesting the animal is
Speaker 3: to me because the exotic animals are adapted to unique environments,
Speaker 3: and these really weird environments. Some of them mimic human diseases.
Speaker 3: So if we can understand how these animals can survive
Speaker 3: in conditions that for us are harmful, we can copy
Speaker 3: that adaptation and we can bring it back to people
Speaker 3: as a treatment for their disease.
Speaker 1: Like what kind of diseases?
Speaker 3: Well, for example, emphasem is something I'm now getting very
Speaker 3: interested in. We now call it chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
Speaker 3: or COPD.
Speaker 2: And CPOD can also mean chronic bronchitis, sometimes asthma. Either way,
Speaker 2: if you enjoy breathing, it's not something you want. My
Speaker 2: uncle Ron has it, and so of course I was
Speaker 2: all oracles. That's how anatomus say, ears, Are you impressed?
Speaker 1: I looked it up.
Speaker 3: So this is a disease that takes away the stretchability
Speaker 3: of the lungs. So the lungs become too floppy. It's
Speaker 3: hard to get air back out of them. So this
Speaker 3: elastic tissue is totally shot from exposure to whatever, smoking
Speaker 3: or or whatever else. And so people who have that
Speaker 3: problem they have trouble breathing out. So it was to
Speaker 3: breathing in. They breathe in, but they can't get it
Speaker 3: back out again because the way you exhale is your
Speaker 3: lungs recoil because of their stretchy they're elastic like rubber bands.
Speaker 3: So the only time you actually force your lungs is
Speaker 3: when you blow out birthday cannals or blow up balloon.
Speaker 3: The rest of the time you breathe out passively, and
Speaker 3: not so for someone with COPD. They can't breathe out passively.
Speaker 1: Oh I didn't know that.
Speaker 3: Now there are animals whose lungs have various abilities to
Speaker 3: change their compliance, which is their stretch ability. We don't
Speaker 3: we have fixed stretch ability, and if you lose it
Speaker 3: with a disease like this, you can't get it back.
Speaker 3: So they are animals that can change their flexibility, particularly
Speaker 3: diving animals like whales. Oh that makes sense, okay. So
Speaker 3: as they encounter different pressures, they need different amounts of
Speaker 3: stretchability and their lung tissue and their lungs have to
Speaker 3: respond to recoiling because of the high pressures around them
Speaker 3: without tearing or distorting and so on, and so there's
Speaker 3: a lot of interesting biology going on when you deal
Speaker 3: with pressure changes on the lungs or any gas containing space.
Speaker 3: But if we can understand how these animals tissues respond
Speaker 3: to the pressure changes and they can change their compliance
Speaker 3: as they dive, maybe that ability to change the compliance
Speaker 3: is what we need to take from that adaptation and
Speaker 3: bring that into someone with mphyzema.
Speaker 2: So an anatomist or functional morphologist looks at structures and
Speaker 2: says that's tight. How can humans do that too? Like
Speaker 2: the animal kingdoms and influencer and we're like, I love
Speaker 2: your shorts, And then we figure out how to diy
Speaker 2: them with biotech. So Joy cites another example gastro esophageal reflux,
Speaker 2: which is also a great a bummer for those afflicted people.
Speaker 3: Who are burping and regurgitating their food and the acid
Speaker 3: is getting into their throat and it's irritating their larynx.
Speaker 3: Can even get down into the lungs and cause asthma,
Speaker 3: get into the back of the mouth and rode the
Speaker 3: back of teeth. You know, your molars can be rolled
Speaker 3: away from the acid. All lots of bad things happen
Speaker 3: if you can't control that acid reflux. But there are
Speaker 3: animals that regurgitate all the time and don't have these problems. Now,
Speaker 3: maybe the luminance, yes, ruminance do it. Now, Maybe they've
Speaker 3: already got rid of the acid opponent because they're dealing
Speaker 3: with a multi chambered stomach and the acid digestions and
Speaker 3: another part of the stomach. Okay, so they've decidified what
Speaker 3: it is they're going to be bringing up. But they
Speaker 3: also don't insult their larynx.
Speaker 2: Colonel larynx, you have nothing but a nonsense spewing throat accordion.
Speaker 3: Oh, every time the food comes up, it doesn't go
Speaker 3: down the voice box and down the wrong pipe and
Speaker 3: end up in their lungs, have them gagging and coughing
Speaker 3: and having a you know, a sore throat kind of
Speaker 3: you know voice. But they divert it around that opening
Speaker 3: and they don't choke on it. How do they do that?
Speaker 3: They essentially have a splash guard in the back of
Speaker 3: their throat.
Speaker 1: They have a splash guard.
Speaker 3: Yes, we don't have that, so we regurgitate. It goes
Speaker 3: right into the opening of the larynx. It causes all
Speaker 3: kinds of problems.
Speaker 2: I just love the idea of you looking starre eyed
Speaker 2: at a cow being like, how do you not get
Speaker 2: acid down your throat?
Speaker 1: How do you do it? Like, tell me your secrets.
Speaker 1: The cows like, well, I've got a splash Gud're so excited.
Speaker 3: So these are the secrets that we try to find.
Speaker 3: We look at animals that are diverse. They don't even
Speaker 3: have to be all that exotic. Cattle are not that exotic.
Speaker 3: But if you're looking at something that's different from a human,
Speaker 3: it's got something that makes it different. We want to
Speaker 3: know what that thing is and is this something useful
Speaker 3: about that? So sometimes if we look at very weird
Speaker 3: animals the weirder they are, the better because the more
Speaker 3: likely they have some unusual adaptation that hasn't really been
Speaker 3: fully explored. And being in a medical center, I'm prepared
Speaker 3: by understanding this sort of you know, the whole human
Speaker 3: condition and the various diseases that can happen or there's
Speaker 3: injuries that can happen. So having that awareness, and most
Speaker 3: of that's through my medical colleagues, Okay, teaching me about
Speaker 3: it makes me a better prepared so that when I
Speaker 3: see an animal with a weird adaptation, I already know
Speaker 3: what that application is going to be.
Speaker 1: Oh that's smart.
Speaker 3: So I'm I'm prepared to find the fun things in
Speaker 3: these animals that I then think can be developed into
Speaker 3: a protective or a treatment, you know, device for people.
Speaker 2: In your knowledge, you have a range of problems. So
Speaker 2: it's kind of like a puzzle piece. Like when you
Speaker 2: see the negative of that, you can go, ah, I
Speaker 2: know where that.
Speaker 3: Can go when I see it's one of those things, yeah.
Speaker 2: Those like pornography, and when I see it, as they say, now,
Speaker 2: how many different animals are you dissecting and studying like
Speaker 2: on the daily or the weekly? Are you like I'm
Speaker 2: on a real whale kick or is it like you
Speaker 2: might get a raccoon in later today?
Speaker 3: Later today, I'm expecting an ai.
Speaker 1: It's been I.
Speaker 3: It's a lemur from Madagascar?
Speaker 1: Are you serious? Where is it coming from? From madagas?
Speaker 3: Actually from well, this particular one is on loan from
Speaker 3: Cornell University from a colleague of mine who was the
Speaker 3: very same guy who gave me the toefish to di sect,
Speaker 3: Doctor Howie Evans is his nineties. He's loaned me this
Speaker 3: eye to look at and we've just finished getting it
Speaker 3: MRI scanned, so it's supposed to come back up here
Speaker 3: to later today after the scanning. And this II is
Speaker 3: a really really rare lemur. And it was actually collected
Speaker 3: in eighteen seventy five, and it was at the time
Speaker 3: packaged in rum because they didn't have preserving fluids like
Speaker 3: we have today.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that sounds.
Speaker 3: Like that's so old and precious. This particular specimen.
Speaker 1: Is damn and so it's pickled.
Speaker 3: It's pickled like golden booze.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a golden booze.
Speaker 3: Well, now it's in alcohol, but it was, you know,
Speaker 3: in normal preserving alcohols as opposed to know, some rum
Speaker 3: that was on.
Speaker 2: The ship, just like Bacardi, like spring Break that lemur
Speaker 2: so hard, You're like, we put him in a Pina Colada,
Speaker 2: but he's holding up five. And so you're gonna look
Speaker 2: at an II later today or later this week.
Speaker 3: Well, we're gonna look at the scans from it because
Speaker 3: we can't open and we have to return at home.
Speaker 3: But we are going to look at the scans from
Speaker 3: this II.
Speaker 1: And is there a.
Speaker 2: Particular problem that you're looking for to solve with that?
Speaker 2: Like does it have a crazy.
Speaker 3: Crazy I actually don't even know what we're gonna find yet.
Speaker 3: You know, when you look at a really exotic animal,
Speaker 3: to me, it's like getting a present.
Speaker 1: I love her? How much do you love her?
Speaker 3: I can't wait to open the wrapper and see what's
Speaker 3: inside the present. I don't know what I'm gonna find,
Speaker 3: but I'm going to find something because otherwise it would
Speaker 3: look like everything else. If it doesn't look like everything else,
Speaker 3: that's what I want to know. I want to know
Speaker 3: why it doesn't look like everything else, and what can
Speaker 3: we learn from that? And maybe there's something in there
Speaker 3: that we can use for people?
Speaker 2: And how did you get because I mean, I've seen
Speaker 2: these videos of you scaling whales. I mean, the most
Speaker 2: badass you've ever seen. There's a whale on a beach,
Speaker 2: there are like a hundred spectators, and there's you in
Speaker 2: full yellow slickers with like a machete, scaling it like
Speaker 2: a tiny mountain and just it open and like blubbers everywhere.
Speaker 2: I would like to play you a clip from Inside
Speaker 2: Nature's Giants, wherein doctor Ridenberg has arrived on a beach
Speaker 2: in the pre dawn dead of night to lead a
Speaker 2: whale dissection, and as she carves into the abdomen with
Speaker 2: something that appears to be a chef's knife.
Speaker 4: It's really really fresh. I don't smell anything. It's like
Speaker 4: it's like walking down the butcher's aisle in the supermarket.
Speaker 4: All the meats, really fresh hair. This animal, I think,
Speaker 4: is only around twenty four hours dead. Ah, So we
Speaker 4: gotta wipe get my face, wipe down around my lips.
Speaker 4: It's a funny, that's fun The most dangerous thing is
Speaker 4: if you get in your eyes are in your mouth,
Speaker 4: and so I know enough to keep my mouth shut,
Speaker 4: but probably poked one of the intestines and that was
Speaker 4: just all the gas in the intestines, spraying in the face.
Speaker 4: Oh that was probably.
Speaker 2: Better than that. The whale intestine has released a death
Speaker 2: fart into her face and not only does she remain
Speaker 2: composed and professional but jovial. How does she do it?
Speaker 2: And can she run for president? You're like, oh my god, Like,
Speaker 2: this is an art forum that you how do you
Speaker 2: get good at that?
Speaker 1: Because it's amazing? What does it smell?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: How do you know where you're cutting? Like?
Speaker 1: What do you do with the piece?
Speaker 3: What happens?
Speaker 2: Side note, that was a lot of questions, But before
Speaker 2: we get to that, we're going to take a quick
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Speaker 1: Okay, questions, Wow, that's a lot of questions.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: We'll start with a pros. So I don't remember which
Speaker 3: was the first?
Speaker 1: Now, how do you?
Speaker 2: How do you? What was the first time you dissected
Speaker 2: a whale on a beach? Like, because I imagine you
Speaker 2: got to do it on site.
Speaker 3: Yes, the first The first time I disrected. It wasn't
Speaker 3: a really big whale. It was actually a fairly small whale.
Speaker 2: Buckle up, folks, who this woman tells good stories.
Speaker 3: It was a Pigmies form whale. Oh and it was
Speaker 3: about I don't know, fifteen feet long. Oh and it
Speaker 3: actually it was on a beach, but not when I
Speaker 3: saw it. So it was my very very first whale
Speaker 3: dis section. I was a very excited graduate student at
Speaker 3: the time. I didn't have a car, so I got
Speaker 3: the call and I thought, if I don't go down
Speaker 3: there right away and get the specimen, I'm never going
Speaker 3: to get another one, because when are they gonna call
Speaker 3: me again if I don't show up right Yeah, and
Speaker 3: they said you got to be here by nine o'clock
Speaker 3: because the Smithsonian is coming to take it away. Wow.
Speaker 3: So if you want to just get a piece out
Speaker 3: of this, they just want the skeleton. You can come
Speaker 3: get your soft tissues that you need for your research.
Speaker 3: WHOA then at the time, it was very interested in, well,
Speaker 3: how whales are making sound underwater? So I needed to
Speaker 3: get the voice box. So I rented a car. Oh no,
Speaker 3: car rental places in New York Donald until eight and Brigantine,
Speaker 3: which is where this was near. Atlantic City is about
Speaker 3: two and a half maybe three hours away. Oh no.
Speaker 3: So I was doing a very swift fifty five out
Speaker 3: of New York and I got pulled over by a
Speaker 3: police officer on the Garden State Parkway, and I remember
Speaker 3: so vividly. I didn't know you're supposed to stay in
Speaker 3: the car. I got out of the car because I
Speaker 3: thought I would like expedite this and get this over with.
Speaker 3: So it was a little surprised that was already waiting
Speaker 3: for my mother's shoulder.
Speaker 1: Feel like I got a sperm whale to cut up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I gotta move here, I gotta move. And so
Speaker 3: so he asked me, well, why are you Why are
Speaker 3: you going so fast? Yeah, they always asked that question
Speaker 3: because maybe maybe you're gonna have a baby or something
Speaker 3: I don't know, right, right, I wasn't gonna have a baby.
Speaker 3: So I told him I was on my way to
Speaker 3: wave stranded whale, which I'm sure is an excuse you'd
Speaker 3: never heard before.
Speaker 2: Uh, officer, I'm about to give birth to a baby
Speaker 2: whale that's also on fire. There's a there's a fire
Speaker 2: too in me. Please let me go.
Speaker 3: And and I thought I was being all official. I
Speaker 3: put on my white coat, I had my d tag
Speaker 3: graduate student in anatomy, you know. I was ready. I
Speaker 3: was ready for this, right. And and then he looked
Speaker 3: in the back of my car. Oh boy, And I
Speaker 3: had put everything I thought I was going to need
Speaker 3: in the back of the car because it was my
Speaker 3: first whale stranding. So I had gloves, and I had
Speaker 3: plastic bags, you know, big black trash bags. And I
Speaker 3: had scalpels, and I had knives, and I had bigger knives.
Speaker 3: And I had bigger knives, and I had machetes. And
Speaker 3: then I had all these things that like gardeners use
Speaker 3: because I thought I might need to clip ribs. So
Speaker 3: I had like these loppers and pruners and big wood saws,
Speaker 3: and I had all kinds of things back there in
Speaker 3: a redful car, in a rental car. But the thing was,
Speaker 3: he was looking at this, and all of a sudden
Speaker 3: his face turned white. Now he was white to begin with,
Speaker 3: but he got whiter. He's looking at this stuff. And
Speaker 3: now I know why the cops. You know, they wear
Speaker 3: the sunglasses. You can't read what's going on with their eyes. Right,
Speaker 3: He's looking at this, and he gets really quiet, and
Speaker 3: he says to me, what's all that for? Oh no,
Speaker 3: And I realized why he turned white. I had heard
Speaker 3: on the radio the day before that the police had
Speaker 3: found a body that had been chopped into pieces in
Speaker 3: black plastic bags floating down the Passaic River. And I
Speaker 3: think he suddenly realized that I might be the murderer.
Speaker 3: Oh my, I had all the nohow and I had
Speaker 3: all the equipment, and there it was in the car,
Speaker 3: and I was running away as fast as I could.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, you fit the profile a million percent.
Speaker 3: I know. And I was terrified that I was going
Speaker 3: to be taken in from murder. So so I was.
Speaker 3: I got really nervous. And that's not a good sign either,
Speaker 3: because now you get nervous in front of a cop,
Speaker 3: and they think for sure you're guilty, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got.
Speaker 3: I hope you didn't get so lightheaded, so I didn't
Speaker 3: get like, I didn't have a vasophical reaction. I didn't
Speaker 3: pass out because that would have been really bad. So
Speaker 3: I so I said to him, well, that's if I
Speaker 3: don't get there in time. I didn't tell him that
Speaker 3: the whale was already dead. I just said it was
Speaker 3: a stranded whale. So in his mind, there was a
Speaker 3: flopping around whale on the beach, and if I do
Speaker 3: would get there before it dies, I'm going to have
Speaker 3: to cut it up, right. So he went back to
Speaker 3: his car, and I thought, for sure, he's he's trying
Speaker 3: to figure out if I'm the murderer, right right. And
Speaker 3: you know, we didn't have cell phones either, so I
Speaker 3: couldn't call them and tell them what was happening this
Speaker 3: whole time. So he he radioed back to headquarters I'm
Speaker 3: sure to say what kind of crazy person he had found,
Speaker 3: and they gave him permission to escort me. He came
Speaker 3: back and I never got a ticket. He escorted me.
Speaker 3: He said, I'm going to escort you to the whale stranding.
Speaker 3: He must have called ahead to the cop at the
Speaker 3: whale stranding down in Brigantine, who said, yeah, yeah, we
Speaker 3: got a whale on the beach here. You know.
Speaker 2: Can you even with the story right now?
Speaker 3: Though? So the cop down there held up the Smithsonia
Speaker 3: so they wouldn't leave. Oh, because I was well past
Speaker 3: nine by the time I arrived. Yes, And I'm following
Speaker 3: him and he says, you have to pay all the tolls, Like, okay,
Speaker 3: we didn't have easy pass back then.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: He had to actually pay each hopper, you know, you
Speaker 3: know the little coins.
Speaker 1: Did you have to pay the cops tolls too?
Speaker 3: No, he went right through them, but I had to
Speaker 3: page toll. He would he would go through, and he'd
Speaker 3: wait and I'd have to pay, and then then we'd
Speaker 3: go on and and you know, sirens and everything. We
Speaker 3: were going really fast. And I arrived to my very
Speaker 3: first whale stranding with a police escort with sirens and
Speaker 3: lights and everything. I had a big deal entry. It
Speaker 3: was very memorable on many accounts.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that is the way to arrive, dude.
Speaker 3: That's that was. That was my first whale stranding.
Speaker 1: Did he stay to watch?
Speaker 3: He did not. Once I climbed on top of the whale,
Speaker 3: he was done. I was like, Okay, I'm out of here.
Speaker 3: Which is gonna make blood? It's gonna use those things
Speaker 3: in the back of the car that made him turn white.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, what pressure, though.
Speaker 2: I feel like in all of the fishermen's saloons and
Speaker 2: all of the seaside towns all over the globe of
Speaker 2: all time, that's gotta be one of the best whale
Speaker 2: stories ever.
Speaker 1: Right, how do you so it's a fifteen foot whale?
Speaker 1: How do you know to scale it and where to
Speaker 1: start zipping into it?
Speaker 3: Well, most vertebrates are built on the same body plant. Well, so,
Speaker 3: whether it's a fifteen foot whale or it's a sixty
Speaker 3: five foot whale like the one you know that maybe
Speaker 3: people have seen on TV where I'm dissecting for inside
Speaker 3: Nature's giants. The whale has this similar body plan to
Speaker 3: you and I. It's got a head, right, it's got
Speaker 3: a spine, it's got a heart, it's got two lungs,
Speaker 3: it's got one liver, it's got intestines, it's got two kidneys.
Speaker 3: It's got all the same things we have as mammals.
Speaker 3: The only thing it doesn't have is hind legs. But
Speaker 3: there are remnants of that too, So if you're looking
Speaker 3: for a particular organ, it's going to be in a
Speaker 3: predictable place because the body plan is pretty similar. So
Speaker 3: I know I'm looking for a voice box. I know
Speaker 3: the voicebox is going to be in the neck. We
Speaker 3: whales don't have much of a neck. It kind of
Speaker 3: go from head to body.
Speaker 1: Right, They're kind of like us at the gym that
Speaker 1: are there a little too much?
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, very built up, right, and particularly considering those
Speaker 3: muscles are being used for movement, you know, they are
Speaker 3: built up. So the whale's neck doesn't really exist as
Speaker 3: a neck like it does in us. But that's where
Speaker 3: I'm going to find a voice box, and that's what
Speaker 3: I was looking for. So it meant you go to
Speaker 3: the back of the jaw and cut it open. It's
Speaker 3: going to be somewhere near the back of the jaw
Speaker 3: and in front of the front of the chest, which
Speaker 3: is a very small area in the whale. So you know,
Speaker 3: you have one little area to look in and that's
Speaker 3: what it's gonna be.
Speaker 1: So what does a voice box look like in a whale?
Speaker 3: Well, it's huge, it's really huge. So imagine if your
Speaker 3: voice box was as big as a whales in proportion
Speaker 3: to your body. Okay, not absolutely big, Okay, absolutely big.
Speaker 3: I've seen voice box as the whales are like twelve
Speaker 3: feet long. Okay, they're huge, you know. And they have
Speaker 3: a big sack under them that they use for recycling
Speaker 3: air that I could just climb into like a sleeping bag.
Speaker 3: That's a really big voice box. But how big is that?
Speaker 3: Considering the whale is really big? It's just big as
Speaker 3: the whales big, right, No, it's big even considering that.
Speaker 3: Because the voice box of a big whale like and
Speaker 3: I would say big whale, I mean a whale like
Speaker 3: a fin whale or a blue whale or a humpback whale,
Speaker 3: that voice box is as big as a lung. You know.
Speaker 3: You imagine your larynx voice box went from the top
Speaker 3: of your shoulder down to the bomb of you rib cage.
Speaker 2: It's like having a saxophone in your body. You just
Speaker 2: talk it too, a saxellone.
Speaker 3: And then you've got these animals that can make incredibly
Speaker 3: loud noises, you know, some of these The power behind
Speaker 3: some of these noises have been equated to a jet engine.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, so quick question, how loud is that well.
Speaker 2: A whisper between humans is about twenty decibels. Normal speaking
Speaker 2: volume about fifty. Shouting is seventy. Jackhammers about one hundred decibels. Now,
Speaker 2: music starts to hurt at around one twenty, and a
Speaker 2: jet engine is about one point forty. Ear drums can
Speaker 2: rupture around one hundred and sixty five decibels, and at
Speaker 2: one eighty five the noise can literally kill you. Whales
Speaker 2: louder than that. The lovelorn call of a lonely blue
Speaker 2: whale reaches up to one hundred and eighty eight decibels,
Speaker 2: and sperm whales like Holma beer the clicks they use
Speaker 2: for echolocation. You ready for this two hundred and thirty
Speaker 2: six decibels, which can be heard by other whales for
Speaker 2: thousands of miles. So anytime you see a heavy metal
Speaker 2: band just thrashing, crushing, no that there is a big
Speaker 2: wet leather pickle in the ocean munch and squid that
Speaker 2: is louder. And therefore everything in this life is just ridiculous.
Speaker 2: And now when you are climbing inside let's say a
Speaker 2: whale or another big animal, like, what is that?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: How are you finding a way around what is it
Speaker 1: smell like?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, first of all, it's really good thing that smell.
Speaker 3: A vision hasn't been invented yet because I think most
Speaker 3: people would turn the show off. Yeah, because the smell
Speaker 3: is really bad. I mean, just imagine you've got sixty
Speaker 3: five feet of rotting flesh. You know, you know a
Speaker 3: bad milk smell is when it goes bad. Yeah, Now
Speaker 3: imagine you've got sixty five feet of quarts of milk
Speaker 3: hanging out there, right, So it's a pretty bad smell
Speaker 3: when it's run. But like most things, you get in
Speaker 3: your two after a while, like you put on perfume,
Speaker 3: maybe an hour later, you don't even smell it anymore.
Speaker 3: But yeah, someone else walks into the room for the
Speaker 3: first time, they smell it. Right.
Speaker 2: I just look this up and it's called old factory
Speaker 2: fatigue or old factory adaptation. And our scent receptors essentially
Speaker 2: are just over it. They're like, I'm looking for danger
Speaker 2: or food, and if I haven't eaten this or been
Speaker 2: killed by it, forget about it. I don't care. This
Speaker 2: bench is like so five minutes ago.
Speaker 3: Well that's what's like at a oil stranding. After the
Speaker 3: first hour, you don't smell anymore. But everybody comes to
Speaker 3: visit smells it. And when you leave that stranding, everybody
Speaker 3: that you see smells it on you, no matter how
Speaker 3: many showers you take. Really, because the oil gets under
Speaker 3: your skin. Even when you're wearing l text gloves, it
Speaker 3: still gets under all that, and there's an aura about it.
Speaker 3: It's you know, like when you're around some smoke cigarettes
Speaker 3: and your hair smells. Okay, it's the same thing. Your
Speaker 3: hair is gonna smell, your skin is gonna smell. Your
Speaker 3: clothing even it was just in the vicinity, is gonna smell.
Speaker 3: What do you do?
Speaker 2: Is there like a special soap that you're like this,
Speaker 2: like this time seed.
Speaker 3: You just have to wait for it to volatilize out,
Speaker 3: because I mean you can wash off the snotty stuff
Speaker 3: that's stuck on your skin, yes, that you can do.
Speaker 3: You can get rid of the oil that's on the outside,
Speaker 3: but you can't get rid of the oil that's moved
Speaker 3: into your skin.
Speaker 1: That's a good point.
Speaker 3: You know, it's now part of you. You just have to
Speaker 3: wait for it to evaporate off.
Speaker 1: How many whales do you think you've dissected?
Speaker 3: Oh gosh, I think I stopped counting a long time ago.
Speaker 3: It's a tough number to come up with because whales
Speaker 3: to me includes all whales, which means dolphins and porpoises too.
Speaker 3: So if you start counting all of these cetaceans, whales, dolphins,
Speaker 3: and porpoises, oh, that number is going to be whale
Speaker 3: over three hundred Wow maybe more.
Speaker 2: So quick aside, quick, quick on whale evolution. Okay, this
Speaker 2: is not the setology episode, so I don't want to
Speaker 2: go into too much depth and spoil how bananas it is.
Speaker 2: But essentially, whales are very much mammals who started off
Speaker 2: is deer like creatures who just hung out by water
Speaker 2: and sort of gradually slipped into the abyss forever and expanded.
Speaker 2: Just like you know what, I'm going to dip out land.
Speaker 2: Good luck with all your walking around. I'm going to
Speaker 2: go sail through water like I'm flying and never have
Speaker 2: to brush my hair. Also, I'm louder than your quiet
Speaker 2: ass metal music and we all know it. Beace baye bye.
Speaker 2: And when you're dissecting any kind of animal, or when
Speaker 2: you're when you're mapping out the anatomy or of any
Speaker 2: kind of animal.
Speaker 1: Are you? Are you ever?
Speaker 2: Struck by similarities with humans, Like, do you do you
Speaker 2: notice certain things about the brain that you're like, Oh,
Speaker 2: that's a pretty human brain.
Speaker 1: That's surprising for this.
Speaker 2: Kind of animal, or anything that makes you reflect on
Speaker 2: kind of your your own morphology. Oh.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, because humans are tetrapods, which is a type of
Speaker 3: vertebrate that has four legs. That's so weird, you know,
Speaker 3: that's most of the vertebrates that we know, right it
Speaker 3: even whales of tetrapods, I used to have four legs,
Speaker 3: you know, they still have hind quarters, They still have
Speaker 3: a pelvis, and they still sometimes even have a remnant
Speaker 3: of a femur or thigh bone on that pelvis.
Speaker 2: How weird is that?
Speaker 1: Nubbins?
Speaker 2: But nubbins that are huge and pointless.
Speaker 3: Again, you're looking at a body plant's very similar. So
Speaker 3: if I look at a whale's flipper, I am reminded
Speaker 3: of a human because inside that flipper are all the
Speaker 3: same bones that are in our upper extremity. There's a humorus,
Speaker 3: the orang bone, there's the radius and lna, the two
Speaker 3: forearm bones, there's the carpal bones, all the little wrist bones,
Speaker 3: and there are in fact five fingers it's crazy. And
Speaker 3: all little bones of our hands are in a whales flipper,
Speaker 3: except they've added a few extra little bones to the
Speaker 3: ends of the fingers to make them elongated. But that's
Speaker 3: about the only difference.
Speaker 1: It's just like having acrylic nails under there, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean.
Speaker 3: Longer exactly, it's just very very long fingers. But they're webbed,
Speaker 3: and that webbing has become very stiff. So instead of
Speaker 3: like web feel like a duck has, you've got really
Speaker 3: stiff webbing in between those fingers. So when you look
Speaker 3: at the flipper, it's a paddle, but it is supported
Speaker 3: by essentially a hand inside there and the whole arm
Speaker 3: at the beginning of it. And so yes, you start
Speaker 3: to see things that look like humans, but they look
Speaker 3: like other terrestrial mammals as well. They might look like
Speaker 3: a horse because a horse in its ancestry used to
Speaker 3: have five digits too. Oh, but a horse has reduced
Speaker 3: that down to walking on its middle toe. In fact,
Speaker 3: just the nail of its middle toe. That's what the
Speaker 3: hoof is.
Speaker 1: That's so weird.
Speaker 3: And if you look at cattle they're working, they're walking
Speaker 3: on two of those toes. And if you if you
Speaker 3: look at a bird, you'll see Look next time you chicken.
Speaker 3: Go get a chicken wing and look at it really carefully.
Speaker 3: You'll see all the same bones that we have in
Speaker 3: our oper extremity. The said you won't find all five
Speaker 3: fingers anywhere, they've gotten rid of most of them, but
Speaker 3: you will see at least two, maybe three fingers there.
Speaker 3: Because nature is pretty conservative. You take a body plant
Speaker 3: and you just tweak it, you modify it. You don't
Speaker 3: add something completely new. You take something that's there and
Speaker 3: you more fit so it looks new. It's just really
Speaker 3: twisted and different. That's all. It's not really new. Very
Speaker 3: very rarely do you see something that's actually new, because
Speaker 3: that's really hard to accomplish, right, That's what we have
Speaker 3: a lot of fun doing. Looking at a new animal
Speaker 3: for the first time. You don't know necessarily what everything does.
Speaker 3: So one of the questions is, well, what is this
Speaker 3: most like in a human? What is this most like
Speaker 3: in the next animal that is closely related to it?
Speaker 3: Where are the homologies the things that have the same
Speaker 3: tissue origin but maybe have become different structures, like the
Speaker 3: wing of a bird and the flipper of a sea turtle.
Speaker 1: Okay, So what else does Joy's job entail?
Speaker 2: And are you still getting to do a lot of
Speaker 2: drawing and sketching when you're doing this.
Speaker 3: Or oh yeah, oh really. That's one of the best
Speaker 3: things about this career for me is it's a perfect
Speaker 3: combination of my interest in art and science.
Speaker 2: So what kind of.
Speaker 1: Drive do you use like a wake um tablet? Do
Speaker 1: you have your watercolors out?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 1: How are you capturing a.
Speaker 3: Very old school pencil and paper most of the time?
Speaker 1: Is there any place people can see your drugs?
Speaker 3: Usually the finished products can be seen in publications, because well,
Speaker 3: then I'll take that pencil drawing and I'll flesh it
Speaker 3: out as a digital image.
Speaker 2: But would it kill you to start an instagram of sketches?
Speaker 2: Will I convince her?
Speaker 3: Yes? It would kill me. You know why? For two reasons,
Speaker 3: oh man. The one is I don't have the time
Speaker 3: to think about putting stuff like that up. And secondly,
Speaker 3: I don't want to let out information before it's really
Speaker 3: solid information. The good point, you know, that's what publications
Speaker 3: are for, dang it. So we got to make sure
Speaker 3: that the information we're putting out is accurate because people
Speaker 3: will take you know how people take stuff off the
Speaker 3: internet all the time, is like, oh, it's the truth.
Speaker 3: I found it on the internet. Is I'll have to
Speaker 3: follow my publications. Then that's my version of Instagram, right.
Speaker 3: But it's so important to make sure the public gets
Speaker 3: accurate science information. In fact, that's one of the reasons
Speaker 3: I do those TV documentaries because as a scientist, I
Speaker 3: feel that we have an obligation to give information to
Speaker 3: the public. After all, they're the ones that funded our
Speaker 3: work in the first place. Most work is done through
Speaker 3: grant funding, which is your tax dollars at work, or
Speaker 3: your donations if it's from a private foundation. But most
Speaker 3: people don't get any return on their investment. How is
Speaker 3: the public learning about the science that we do? What
Speaker 3: a scientist do? We don't have a normal job. Okay,
Speaker 3: we don't make a widget that you sell. We don't
Speaker 3: provide a service that you can purchase and have us
Speaker 3: come and do it for you. Although there are some
Speaker 3: scientists for hire of course that do work for companies,
Speaker 3: but most scientists, academic scientists, are not for hire that way.
Speaker 3: So what is it that we do with our job?
Speaker 3: People really have no idea what we do because we
Speaker 3: don't sell anything, and we don't provide a service. What
Speaker 3: we do is we make knowledge, and we're supposed to
Speaker 3: give that knowledge back to the public. But what does
Speaker 3: scientists do. They publish that knowledge in highly technical journals
Speaker 3: that only other scientists are reading. So that's our ivory
Speaker 3: tower that we're stuck in, and we need to come
Speaker 3: out of that and get that knowledge back down to
Speaker 3: the public who paid for it in the first place.
Speaker 3: So I feel an obligation to return that information to
Speaker 3: the public, and one of the best ways to do
Speaker 3: that is through various types of public outreach. Public lectures, demonstrations,
Speaker 3: go to the schools, interact with the children, pats, podcasts exactly, interviews,
Speaker 3: ted talks, and television, because all of these media are
Speaker 3: ways to engage the public in the science that we're
Speaker 3: doing so that they can learn. Why is it that
Speaker 3: I study whales in the first place? They're awesome animals.
Speaker 3: These animals are adapted to deep sea diving the encounter
Speaker 3: huge pressure changes. If we can understand how they survive
Speaker 3: those pressure changes, maybe we can build better flack jackets
Speaker 3: for our soldiers who are essentially exposed to a pressure
Speaker 3: wave every time an explosion goes off next to them.
Speaker 3: They don't do so well in those pressure waves. Whales
Speaker 3: do great in those pressures, as they change pressures voluntarily
Speaker 3: every time they sum up and down the water column.
Speaker 3: But they're doing something in their bodies and we don't
Speaker 3: know exactly what it is. How come they don't get
Speaker 3: decompression sickness? How do they avoid the bends? All of
Speaker 3: these are very interesting questions for us. There's so many
Speaker 3: things that they do that we don't understand. How did
Speaker 3: they communicate underwater? How did they get those sounds out
Speaker 3: of their body when they're making them using an air
Speaker 3: driven system, which is evolutionary baggage from having been a
Speaker 3: land animal. They're still using air. That's a liability for
Speaker 3: an aquatic animal because now you got to keep coming
Speaker 3: back to the service to get more of it, and
Speaker 3: every time you dive down it shrinks to the tiniest
Speaker 3: little volume that you can barely work with. And if
Speaker 3: you have air in anything solid like a sinus, that's
Speaker 3: going to crack. So you've got to make adaptations that
Speaker 3: deal with the pressure changes. When we crack that code,
Speaker 3: Hopefully we can make better transmitters for sound underwater, for
Speaker 3: communication devices or whatever. But there are all kinds of
Speaker 3: things that we want to learn. We will learn how
Speaker 3: dolphins make their son aar. We know a lot about
Speaker 3: how they do it, you don't understand how they process
Speaker 3: it though, ocky talk, ma'am right, and if we could,
Speaker 3: maybe we could make better sonar for ourselves. Dolphins can
Speaker 3: actually detect a mine buried under the sand.
Speaker 2: Okay, so wait, whoa what?
Speaker 4: What?
Speaker 3: What?
Speaker 2: Okay? This is a thing I just found myself on
Speaker 2: a wiki page entitled military dolphins what and it says
Speaker 2: the dolphins and sea lions are trained by the Navy's
Speaker 2: Marine Mammal Fleet. Dolphins are trained as much as police
Speaker 2: and hunting dogs, and are given rewards such as fish
Speaker 2: on correct completion of a task. So dolphins are trained
Speaker 2: to detect underwater mines and enemy swimmers and then report
Speaker 2: back to their handlers. How weird is it that there
Speaker 2: are dolphins who are like, yes, yes, I mean, I
Speaker 2: appreciate the fish salary, but I also find my work
Speaker 2: very fulfilling. I'm good at my job and helping people.
Speaker 3: Not only can they detect it through multiple materials, we
Speaker 3: can't art zonar reflex it the first density interface change,
Speaker 3: but they can tell you if that's that mine is
Speaker 3: flooded with water or air, if it's made of plastic
Speaker 3: or metal, you know, if it's ticking, you know, all
Speaker 3: kinds of things that they can tell us. We can't
Speaker 3: see that. Our sonar is way too coarse. We can
Speaker 3: barely tell a school of fish from a whale going by.
Speaker 3: It's just a blob on the sonar screen, you know.
Speaker 3: And the dolphin is looking at a fish and goes, hmm,
Speaker 3: I know exactly what kind of fish that is. It's
Speaker 3: a butterfish, and I know how big it is, and
Speaker 3: when it's going to turn, and how many scales are
Speaker 3: missing on the right side, and where it's swim bladder is.
Speaker 3: You know, they can see all of that. What's the
Speaker 3: closest we've come ultrasound We can look inside and see
Speaker 3: someone was pregnant. I remember when I was swimming once
Speaker 3: off the coast of Florida and two dolphins came over
Speaker 3: to check me out. I was pregnant at the time,
Speaker 3: and I'm pretty sure that's why they came to check
Speaker 3: me out, because they could see what's going on inside
Speaker 3: with their sonar.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's so.
Speaker 3: It was amazing. They stay just out of reach. I
Speaker 3: can reach my hand out and almost touched them, and
Speaker 3: it's you know, they they just be on the edge
Speaker 3: of my fingertips. Oh and as soon as I would
Speaker 3: reach them, they would they would dive under and come
Speaker 3: up surface behind me. I hear the blow behind my head.
Speaker 3: I turn around and they play the same game. It
Speaker 3: was always this game of keep away. But they were
Speaker 3: just close enough you could almost touch them.
Speaker 1: They're like, why she got another little baby?
Speaker 3: And that's right. I think they knew. I think they
Speaker 3: totally knew. And they were totally fascinated by why this
Speaker 3: extra little creature was on board.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that's so cool.
Speaker 3: But they were probably able to see so much more
Speaker 3: than we could see with our simple ultrasound. Because our
Speaker 3: ultrasound you see it in one dimension, it looks like static.
Speaker 3: If you don't see it as a movie, you really
Speaker 3: get lost in the dots. I'm sure they're seeing things
Speaker 3: in three D. And you know, they probably got all
Speaker 3: kinds of you know, accommodations for the motion as well
Speaker 3: as the three dimensionality of it, and they process it
Speaker 3: interestingly in their visual cortex, so they may be seeing
Speaker 3: it as an image even though it's sound. Coming back
Speaker 3: to them.
Speaker 1: They're like, oh, it's a girl, and you're like, whoa, hey,
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 2: Now I just want to evolve myself back into the
Speaker 2: sea in a land where dolphins are my doctors and
Speaker 2: sea lions have my back.
Speaker 1: What is life?
Speaker 2: But since I'm land bound for now, I have a
Speaker 2: question that I feel Joy won't judge me about.
Speaker 1: I have this theory that I always try to talk.
Speaker 2: To Tomiold just about and you're the one person I
Speaker 2: feel like, well, definitely give me a heads or tails
Speaker 2: on this, but no pun intended. But how do you
Speaker 2: feel about the automotive design and how much it's modeled
Speaker 2: on quadrupeds? I'm so fascinated by, like we have the
Speaker 2: engine in the front, four tires, four legs, two headlights,
Speaker 2: and also genus and species, like a make and model.
Speaker 2: Do you ever think about that, like when you're driving
Speaker 2: around how we model things in our lives with like
Speaker 2: bilateral symmetry airplanes like birds?
Speaker 1: Does that ever? Is that just like such a duh
Speaker 1: for you?
Speaker 3: I would say it's such a dumb But I think
Speaker 3: biomimetics is a really important thing, you know, modeling things
Speaker 3: on nature. I mean, the first airplanes were really modeled
Speaker 3: on birds. You know, they even tried to flap the
Speaker 3: wings on Oregon.
Speaker 4: Hank Cretis took a running start to fame and fortune
Speaker 4: with his version of what believe this bird man should wear?
Speaker 4: But it's fire and went in the wrong direction.
Speaker 2: Nah, harsh bale, old timey bird dude.
Speaker 3: If you look at submarines and they're rudders, it's really
Speaker 3: not all that different than a fishtail, you know. And
Speaker 3: I think biomemicry is important. Why do we have four
Speaker 3: wheels on a car? You know, You're right, it does
Speaker 3: kind of remind you of four legs? Why not two? Well,
Speaker 3: it's not a stable into look alone, it takes us
Speaker 3: to learn how to walk on two legs. Start out crawling.
Speaker 3: It's anny more stable, you know. So it's just efficiency
Speaker 3: and design is based on nature. There are very few
Speaker 3: animals to walk around two legs. It's not the most
Speaker 3: efficient design for stability. There are advantages, which is why
Speaker 3: we do walk on two legs, but again it is unstable.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I think about it, but I think more
Speaker 3: about things When I think about car, I think more
Speaker 3: about what are we going to have those driverless cars?
Speaker 3: That's what I'm thinking about.
Speaker 2: I know, every time I drive a car, I'm like,
Speaker 2: We're gonna look back and be like, wait, you put
Speaker 2: just a human being who could just sneeze and kill
Speaker 2: people in this machine. This is ridiculous. So two last questions.
Speaker 2: One is what is the thing about your.
Speaker 1: Job that sucks the most?
Speaker 2: What it's the hardest part of your job, the most tedious,
Speaker 2: the most like, oh god.
Speaker 3: Reading, really believe it? Or not reading? I hate reading, really.
Speaker 3: I think that's why I went to anatomy, because all
Speaker 3: the books have pictures in them. I think I'm mildly
Speaker 3: dyslexic in some way. I think I think decoding is
Speaker 3: more laborious for me than it probably is for the
Speaker 3: average person. I read very slowly. I can't read faster
Speaker 3: than I can hear the voice in my head saying
Speaker 3: the sounds as I read. Some people can read a
Speaker 3: lot faster. I just don't decode that fast. But I
Speaker 3: find reading really really tedious, and so yeah's.
Speaker 1: A lot of infro.
Speaker 3: I would say that's that's the worst part, because as
Speaker 3: an academic you have to keep up with it. You know.
Speaker 3: I'm on editorial boards of journals, I have to read.
Speaker 3: I do really really careful reviews of articles there again me,
Speaker 3: I bet yeah, And I read every single word with intention,
Speaker 3: and I write the same way. So I'm very slow
Speaker 3: at writing. So reading and writing, I would say, which
Speaker 3: is kind of my nemesis.
Speaker 2: And that's so impressive that you have the job you have,
Speaker 2: knowing that that is a string, that that's a little
Speaker 2: bit of a struggle or that's like a little bit
Speaker 2: of a labor for you.
Speaker 1: And on top of that.
Speaker 2: You've achieved everything you've achieved. It's like that that's even more,
Speaker 2: that's even more inspiring.
Speaker 1: You know, well, thank you.
Speaker 3: And I don't know if I would have qualified for
Speaker 3: extra time back in the day. It didn't have a
Speaker 3: label for what I had.
Speaker 2: What is the thing that you love about your job
Speaker 2: so much? I know there must be like twelve things.
Speaker 3: Oh there's so many things, But I think just the
Speaker 3: freedom to explore is the most amazing part of it.
Speaker 3: It just I can, like I said before, I ask
Speaker 3: any question and answer it my way by doing the work.
Speaker 3: I love working with my hands. I love the exploration
Speaker 3: of something new, something society. Every time I get a
Speaker 3: new animal to look at, it's like having a present
Speaker 3: show up in the lab. I'm like, wow, this is great.
Speaker 3: And I love doing field work. So you know, the whales,
Speaker 3: they have to be done as fieldwork. They're just too big.
Speaker 3: It can't bring them into the lab.
Speaker 1: That's not happening.
Speaker 3: And so I love being outdoors and so field work
Speaker 3: is great. Traveling is great. I love doing two exotic
Speaker 3: places to see exotic animals.
Speaker 2: It's so great that after going through yellow Pages, going
Speaker 2: through all these different disciplines, you one million percent found
Speaker 2: the career that like is You've nailed it. Like you
Speaker 2: found the career.
Speaker 1: We get to draw, you get to learn, you.
Speaker 2: Get to help people like like you, you figured it out.
Speaker 2: That must be you must want to go back in
Speaker 2: time and be like yo, little joy.
Speaker 3: Fine, Absolutely well. I think that the best way to
Speaker 3: sum that up is I don't really feel like I
Speaker 3: go to work every day. I go to play. You know,
Speaker 3: if you're going to do your job the whole rest
Speaker 3: of your life, that's you only get one life to live.
Speaker 3: You don't want to spend it doing something you don't like. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you want to go to work knowing it's not really
Speaker 3: work works the wrong word for it. I'm excited about
Speaker 3: it when I come here, I'm here to play that's.
Speaker 2: Rad and I love that. Later you're just like Lemur.
Speaker 2: I got a Limur coming up, no bail. Thank you
Speaker 2: so much for doing this. I'm just so excited to
Speaker 2: get to talk to you and thank you so much
Speaker 2: for doing this.
Speaker 3: You're welcome. It's been fun. Thank you.
Speaker 2: I loved it so As always, ask smart people juicy,
Speaker 2: spicy questions because you never know. You never know what
Speaker 2: kind of glorious stories may unfold. Now, to follow up
Speaker 2: on your new obsession with doctor Joy Ridenberg, catch her
Speaker 2: on Science Channel's Mythical Beasts. You can find her on
Speaker 2: Twitter at Joy Ridenberg. You cannot find her drawings on
Speaker 2: Instagram as discussed, but that's okay. She's also on Facebook
Speaker 2: as Ridenberg TV and ologies is at ologies on Twitter
Speaker 2: and Instagram. Do give us a follow. I'm Ali Ward
Speaker 2: with one L on both and there are links in
Speaker 2: the show notes to all of this. There are also
Speaker 2: links to support even a dollar a month on patreon
Speaker 2: dot com slash ologies. You can get amazing merch at
Speaker 2: ologiesmerch dot com. Feel free to tag or DM me
Speaker 2: photos of you in it with the hashtag ologies merch mondays.
Speaker 2: I repost them on Instagram. Thanks Aaron Talbert for admining
Speaker 2: the Internet haven that is Theologies Facebook group, and I
Speaker 2: owe a hoil of thanks every week to editor Stephen
Speaker 2: Ray Morris, who also hosts the kiddie podcast The per
Speaker 2: Cast and ce Jurassic Right, which is all about dinos.
Speaker 2: Nick Thorburn made the music and is in a band
Speaker 2: called Islands. Now at the end of the episode, you
Speaker 2: know that I tell a secret.
Speaker 1: Look at you.
Speaker 2: You listen to the whole thing, and here we are
Speaker 2: with a brand new secret. So this is the night
Speaker 2: before I'm going in for surgery, and I will tell
Speaker 2: you guys all about it once I'm on the other
Speaker 2: side of it, and I'm hoping to get some good
Speaker 2: life lessons out of it via a field trip episode.
Speaker 2: But yeah, okay, so it's the night before. I've got
Speaker 2: to go in at five in the morning. It's like
Speaker 2: nine thirty at night, the night before. I am recording
Speaker 2: this with haired eye on my roots because for some reason,
Speaker 2: going in with roof and some just kind of ragged
Speaker 2: looking hair, I'm like, you know what, I'm going to
Speaker 2: go in there at least with my hair freshly done.
Speaker 2: But I do have to tell the anthesiologists that I'm
Speaker 2: not a real redhead because I don't want to mess
Speaker 2: up the dosaches. And if you want to hear more
Speaker 2: about that, oh, I can't remember what episode we talked
Speaker 2: about it.
Speaker 1: So just listen to all of them.
Speaker 2: Okay, wish me luck. Next week your secret will be
Speaker 2: how I'm doing. Okay, byebye, pacadermatology, homeology, ydo zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, paratology, nathology, zeiology, stellatology.
Speaker 3: Hi King snorky hereby banish all humans to the sea. Wow,
Speaker 3: it's like even useful. You know, I'm not just having fun.