Speaker 1: Imagine the place where you can escape for a day,
Speaker 1: get immersed in a world of rooms, inspiration and expertise,
Speaker 1: where you can lay in luxury, accommodation and kids cam
Speaker 1: fees from ninety five sets. Tickets are free to everyone
Speaker 1: and include all the attractions you've just imagined. A day
Speaker 1: out at the Caia, the Kia, the Wonderful every Day.
Speaker 2: Oh hey, it's that second cousin who tries to talk
Speaker 2: to you about sports stats and can't read that you
Speaker 2: don't care. Ali Ward here with another episode of ologies.
Speaker 2: What a week, My friends, What a week. I'm recording
Speaker 2: this after a few days of being glued to live
Speaker 2: streams of government hearings, and I'm just I'm hoping everyone's
Speaker 2: taking care of themselves, maybe going out to take a breather,
Speaker 2: talking to a frog, letting yourself buy the fancy salad
Speaker 2: dressing at the store, because sometimes you just gotta unwind.
Speaker 2: So this episode hopefully will help. It's so amazing. I
Speaker 2: think you will find it equivalent to like a bag
Speaker 2: of jellybeans that you've selected out of the bulkbins, where
Speaker 2: there's not a single bean in a flavor you don't enjoy.
Speaker 2: It's just pure delight and some of the best long
Speaker 2: form storytelling I have ever heard. I just I set
Speaker 2: up the mics, I forced a world respected ologist to
Speaker 2: talk into them, and I interjected occasionally with some gasps.
Speaker 2: She's amazing. Before we get to that feast, let's do
Speaker 2: some formalities. Let's tuck our napkins into our collar if
Speaker 2: you will. Thank you to all the folks who have
Speaker 2: logged into patreon dot com slash ologies to donate a
Speaker 2: buck or more a month to support the show, and
Speaker 2: that helps me pay a wonderful editor, Hi Stephen, and
Speaker 2: lets me continue doing this, which it's my favorite thing
Speaker 2: to do. So thank you for that. Thank you to
Speaker 2: everyone who gets merch at ologismerch dot com. There's some
Speaker 2: really great ball college sweatshirts, backpacks are up, bird pas,
Speaker 2: earned mugs, just a whole mess of awesome. Thank you
Speaker 2: also to the amazing producers at Linton Entertainment who make
Speaker 2: not one, but two of the science shows I work on.
Speaker 2: And this Saturday, I'm just gonna plug it. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: plug it right now. October sixth my very own solo
Speaker 2: science show premieres on the CW. It's called did I Mention?
Speaker 2: Invention with Ali Ward, and I don't know how to
Speaker 2: celebrate other than just like squealing into a jar and
Speaker 2: then running atop a mountain to release it like Yosemite. Sam.
Speaker 2: If you're hearing this before noon on Tuesday, October second,
Speaker 2: I'm doing a Reddit Ama at noon Pacific time. So
Speaker 2: just putting those things out there to celebrate this new show,
Speaker 2: all right. Thank you to listeners who rate and subscribe.
Speaker 2: You guys keep ologies in the front of new eyeballs
Speaker 2: and ear holes, growing this kind of curious cult of ologites.
Speaker 2: And especially thank you to the ones who take a
Speaker 2: minute to review, because I am I'm nothing if not creepy,
Speaker 2: and you know I read them all and then I
Speaker 2: present you with a still moist one, such as this
Speaker 2: review from vsk Stark, who says this podcast is amazing
Speaker 2: in so many ways, and then they say some nice
Speaker 2: stuff about me that I'm too embarrassed to read aloud,
Speaker 2: and then also say the editing is genius and the
Speaker 2: content I would say is juicy, spicy learning. It brings
Speaker 2: a smile to my day when I commute. I highly
Speaker 2: recommend it juicy spicy learning. I think we might need
Speaker 2: a sweatshirt. This is juicy, spicy learning. Am I right?
Speaker 2: We'll work on it. Okay, Onto theology functional morphology. That's
Speaker 2: a lot of syllables. What in a sam hell does
Speaker 2: it mean? Well, pretty much means the study of form
Speaker 2: and function, So the anatomy of an organism, and then
Speaker 2: what the hell that anatomy does? So like, why do
Speaker 2: we have eyelashes? What's up with the little headstool things
Speaker 2: on top of a giraffe face? Why do some animals
Speaker 2: get to have so many stomachs and butts? Why? I
Speaker 2: originally heard of this ologist and I thought, okay, whale scientist.
Speaker 2: Her bio on Twitter says whale scientist. She is the
Speaker 2: foremost expert on carving up, sometimes explosively decomposing whales on
Speaker 2: beaches worldwide. But I learned thrillingly that she deals with
Speaker 2: so much more than whales. So this is not the
Speaker 2: satology or whale episode. We'll get to that in the
Speaker 2: future a differentologist. This one functional morphology. We cover way
Speaker 2: more than that. So she's an anatomist who compares all
Speaker 2: kinds of species to each other to see what's similar
Speaker 2: and what's different between them, why they work and how
Speaker 2: and how maybe it can help US. So she's a
Speaker 2: professor at the Center for Anatomy and Functional Morphology and
Speaker 2: Department of Medical Education at Mount Sinai in Manhattan, New York.
Speaker 2: She has appeared on Sex in the Wild on PBS,
Speaker 2: the British Channel four show Inside Nature's Giants, which also
Speaker 2: airs on PBS, where she I sected 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 worthy, 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 to her
Speaker 2: perfect job. So prepared to be enthralled and inspired by
Speaker 2: functional morphologists anatomist doctor Joy Rodenberg. I, oh, no, no word.
Speaker 2: I do so much editing, so you can pretty much
Speaker 2: confess to murder and I'll cut it out. And now
Speaker 2: in functionalphology, would you say that you're a functional morphologist
Speaker 2: or would you 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. I know, but I do study anatomy
Speaker 3: of lots of different animals, and whales are just one
Speaker 3: of my favorite animals to look at because they're so weird.
Speaker 2: They are crazy weird. Let's go back, tell me when
Speaker 2: you got so interested in animal anatomy and are you
Speaker 2: also interested in human anatomy or when did like when
Speaker 2: did the bug cutting stuff up and look at a stuff? Getcha?
Speaker 3: So that's a multiprong question, so I'll have to give
Speaker 3: 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: definitely one of our most interesting animals we can look
Speaker 3: at in the world are humans, because humans are so
Speaker 3: incredibly adapted for things that other animals can't do. Starting
Speaker 3: with what we're doing right now. Language speech, Hey, you know,
Speaker 3: the ability to produce the speech sounds is uniquely human.
Speaker 3: You get lots of animals that get close, but they're
Speaker 3: not the same. They can't make the full range of
Speaker 3: owwls that we can make. So our anatomy in the
Speaker 3: area of the throat is really spectacularly different from all
Speaker 3: other animals. And we can get into that if you want,
Speaker 3: but they are an interesting animal into themselves, and then
Speaker 3: of course there's a whole range of other animals. So
Speaker 3: how did I get into it? Well, I don't know
Speaker 3: how long is this interviewed.
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 3: I'll 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.
Speaker 3: I really wanted to learn as much as I could
Speaker 3: about nature. The problem was that animals ran away from you,
Speaker 3: so you, yeah, you really couldn't look at them up
Speaker 3: gloves unless they were your pets. Now, of course, I'm
Speaker 3: not going to cut up with a pet. I love pets.
Speaker 3: You know that they have to have their their places
Speaker 3: a pet and be live and be with you and
Speaker 3: you can cuddle them and all that fun stuff. But
Speaker 3: the animals in nature, they were also alive and fun
Speaker 3: and cuddly. But you wouldn't stay with you unless you
Speaker 3: tried to cuddle them, and they'd bite you. So that
Speaker 3: wasn't a great interaction. But everywhere, once in a while
Speaker 3: you got a chance to get really close to them
Speaker 3: if it was dead, because it wasn't going to run away. So,
Speaker 3: you know, one of the biggest arguments used to have
Speaker 3: my parents was whether or not I was allowed to
Speaker 3: touch the roadkill. I love this woman, so there I
Speaker 3: would be, you know, fascinated with whatever it is that
Speaker 3: fell on the ground, you know, dropped out of a
Speaker 3: tree or got you know, or got run over by
Speaker 3: a car. Whatever I could find that was in some
Speaker 3: capacity left where I could find it. I want I
Speaker 3: wanted to see it. I wanted to learn more about it.
Speaker 2: Did you carry gloves with you?
Speaker 3: As I didn't know what gloves were? Were you getting
Speaker 3: My cat would come home with a chipmunk and I
Speaker 3: would take the dead chipmunk that had left on the
Speaker 3: front doorstep and I would hide it from my parents
Speaker 3: so they wouldn't know I was looking at it. And
Speaker 3: I 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 be like a Native American, and I
Speaker 3: want to learn all about it. And you know, back
Speaker 3: then it wasn't the Internet to look it up and
Speaker 3: figure it out. I'd like get books out on things
Speaker 3: like that. And I tried tanning the skin of this chipmunk,
Speaker 3: and I thought this would be awesome. It's got this
Speaker 3: you know, racing stripes on it. You know, it's really
Speaker 3: cool looking. It's already dead. It's yeah, I can't hurt it.
Speaker 3: It's already dead, right, And I had done a really
Speaker 3: great job, and I was like so excited because I
Speaker 3: was going to use this chipmunk for as a saddle
Speaker 3: blanket for one of my toy horses. That's pretty okay.
Speaker 3: So that was like, I thought this was really legit.
Speaker 3: And I had I'd hid it in a specific place,
Speaker 3: you know, a wooden box in our yard, and I
Speaker 3: came out later to check on it a couple days later,
Speaker 3: and a raccoon had taken it. And I only know
Speaker 3: that because I saw the footprints. So I was like,
Speaker 3: oh man, 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, good
Speaker 2: news and bad news, you just missed it. It was
Speaker 2: October first, So now you have a whole year to
Speaker 2: make felted bandit masks and learn how to scratch up
Speaker 2: palm trees using only your overgrown toenails. Okay, anyway, Joey's childhood.
Speaker 3: So that's how my adventures would often go. But then
Speaker 3: I discovered fishing. I really liked fish. I thought fish
Speaker 3: are really amazing looking animals. They're so hydrodynamically shaped, and
Speaker 3: then they have all these interesting colors. You know, mammals
Speaker 3: are pretty boring when it comes to colorss, birds, and fish.
Speaker 3: Well they've got.
Speaker 2: It, yeah they do. They do have it going on,
Speaker 2: and they've got crazy mouths and some of them have
Speaker 2: big lips.
Speaker 3: Some of them have no lips, like the giant eyes
Speaker 3: that never closed, and these fins that come out of
Speaker 3: nowhere that did just open up like a Chinese fan.
Speaker 3: And I love that. I just really really loved that.
Speaker 3: And so I would go fishing, and my dad would
Speaker 3: agree to take me fishing because it was on the
Speaker 3: way to taking my brother to race go carts, because
Speaker 3: it was at the same place at the beach. So
Speaker 3: I would hang out on the dock fishing well, they
Speaker 3: would race ghost carts, and I'd come home with all
Speaker 3: the stinky, smelly things, and he would tolerate it as
Speaker 3: long as I fillet all the fish, okay, And later
Speaker 3: he would even take me out. We got a small boat,
Speaker 3: and he'd go out in the boat and he would
Speaker 3: get madly seasick because he would sit there read the
Speaker 3: newspaper the whole time, which is not what you do
Speaker 3: in a rocking boat. But again, he would tolerate all
Speaker 3: this as long because I would deal with all the fish.
Speaker 3: And so I was happy to do that, because you know,
Speaker 3: we were going to cook them and we're gonna waste them.
Speaker 3: But I got very distracted flying fish. You know, I'd
Speaker 3: 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 filay the meat off,
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. No, I
Speaker 3: love it? Are you kidding? Bring it on so fast forward?
Speaker 3: I want to I want to go to college, but
Speaker 3: I don't really know what I want to do, and
Speaker 3: my dad just and are trying to advise me in
Speaker 3: and my dad and particular said, well, you should really
Speaker 3: know what career you want, so you can pick a
Speaker 3: college that's really tailored to what you want to do
Speaker 3: for your career. That was pretty sage advice coming from
Speaker 3: parents who hadn't gone to college, and it was again,
Speaker 3: it wasn't a thing where you can look up on
Speaker 3: the internet and find all this, So you had to
Speaker 3: wait for the brochures to come in the mail and
Speaker 3: read them and then right away for more material, or
Speaker 3: actually go and visit the places, which is really hard
Speaker 3: to do. Some of them were pretty far away. We
Speaker 3: didn't have the resources to go fly over to different places.
Speaker 3: So I remember reading about a lot of them and
Speaker 3: still being very confused, not knowing what I wanted to do.
Speaker 3: Because what kid in the eleventh grade or even early
Speaker 3: twelfth grade knows exactly what they want to do. I mean,
Speaker 3: some people might have a good idea that want to
Speaker 3: be a firefighter or a police officer or a ballerina.
Speaker 3: I just wanted to play with animals. My dad would say, no,
Speaker 3: one's going to pay you to play with the animals. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 3: I kept thinking, Okay, you know, maybe you know I'm
Speaker 3: a smart kid too. I'm doing really well school. I'm
Speaker 3: in the top five percent of my class, and I'm thinking, Okay,
Speaker 3: what am I gonna do all this information right now?
Speaker 3: I want to be a dog walker? I'm going to
Speaker 3: do something.
Speaker 2: More beids 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. Yeah, so I can only I can only
Speaker 3: do what I could do when I get that close.
Speaker 3: The rest of the time, I'd sped at the window,
Speaker 3: glued to the window, watching birds at the bird feeder
Speaker 3: or wherever.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: I was always watching the animals and catching snakes and
Speaker 3: bringing them home, and catching pollywogs from the pond and
Speaker 3: putting it in a tank and raising frogs out of that.
Speaker 3: You know. It just I loved all of that nature stuff.
Speaker 3: My mother thought it was like crazy, come home with
Speaker 3: a snake on each arm. Yeah, can I keep them?
Speaker 3: As long as it fits in the tank. You can
Speaker 3: keep whatever you want. So I had tanks all over
Speaker 3: the garage.
Speaker 2: That's so, I know that it would have been such
Speaker 2: good friends. So you're kidding me. We once put it
Speaker 2: a dead snake with a ken head on it in
Speaker 2: the freezer to surprise my Grandma.
Speaker 3: I can not go over well.
Speaker 2: But we loved it.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I get it now. It started to sound
Speaker 3: a little bit like that that kid next door and
Speaker 3: toy story. Oh no, sid, you guys don't get it
Speaker 3: to you.
Speaker 2: Once we go into sit 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 rivers in
Speaker 3: the yellow Pages. That's a good I mean, that was
Speaker 3: a good resource back then. It was because there again,
Speaker 3: it wasn't the Internet. We couldn't look things up this
Speaker 3: was the one place where everything was accumulated as far
Speaker 3: as my dad knew. That was a career.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or the classifieds, which is I would look in the.
Speaker 3: More boring Yeah, I know.
Speaker 2: 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 burst 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 monies like he could have owned Earth. But
Speaker 2: he was like, hey, I just want people to pass
Speaker 2: around photos of moths who are randy for lamps during
Speaker 2: a time when justice seems out of reach. Thanks timbel Anyway,
Speaker 2: Joyett was leaping through physical paper and yellow pages, browsing
Speaker 2: for her future and.
Speaker 3: I'm looking through. And what am I not saying. I'm
Speaker 3: not saying anatomist, I'm not saying comparative anatomist. I'm not
Speaker 3: saying biologists. I'm not saying scientists. I'm not saying researcher.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying professor. I did see doctor, but only
Speaker 3: medical doctors.
Speaker 4: 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
Speaker 3: zoo because maybe it'd be zoo keeper. Right. So I
Speaker 3: got a lot of pages to flip through. I got
Speaker 3: pretty 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. And I
Speaker 3: didn't have this thing about it. Stuff didn't need to
Speaker 3: be dead for me to be interested in it. Although
Speaker 3: I did collect a lot of things, you know, shells, feathers, bones, rocks,
Speaker 3: you know, whatever I could collect you eat nature stuff? Yeah, sure, everything,
Speaker 3: So I thought veterinarian. So I went to go intern
Speaker 3: for a vet and my first day on the job,
Speaker 3: there was a dog that had been hit by a
Speaker 3: car and they were going to do an operation and
Speaker 3: he invited me to scrub in on this operation and
Speaker 3: showed me how to scrub in. But I was basically
Speaker 3: just observing, and I was really excited because I was
Speaker 3: going to get to see this dog fixed. I was
Speaker 3: going to get to see I don't mean newter, I
Speaker 3: mean yeah fixed up. And the dog was, you know,
Speaker 3: definitely had a terrible injury. And I thought, well, I'm
Speaker 3: going to get to see the inside on this animal.
Speaker 3: That's pretty cool because it's a living insight. It's and
Speaker 3: all the dead stuff that I'd seen before. And I
Speaker 3: was so fascinated. I was riveted. I was watching this,
Speaker 3: you know, wide eyed and you know, totally full of wonder.
Speaker 3: And I started to get light headed, and I was like,
Speaker 3: what is happening. I'm really interested in this. I'm not
Speaker 3: nausea as, I'm not squeamish. What is going on? And
Speaker 3: I started getting more and more lightheaded, and I was
Speaker 3: so embarrassed. But I didn't I want to fall into
Speaker 3: the sterile surgical field, so I told the veterinari and
Speaker 3: I was getting a little light headed. I thought, well,
Speaker 3: maybe the room is too warm, or maybe I didn't
Speaker 3: need enough breakfast or something. What I was having was
Speaker 3: called a vasovagel reaction, which is something you absolutely can't control.
Speaker 3: It's essentially an autonomic discharge of your nervous system that
Speaker 3: no one can predict. This is gonna happen, and no
Speaker 3: one really knows why it happens, and then it goes
Speaker 3: away almost as fast as it 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 in 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 3: It's going down, I'm yelling, but whatever, it's pretty incapacitating.
Speaker 3: So that was happening to me, and I thought, I'm
Speaker 3: never going to be able to be a veterinarian if
Speaker 3: I pass out when I'm trying to do an operation.
Speaker 3: So the veterinarian sent me out of the room, which
Speaker 3: I was very embarrassed about. And later came to talk
Speaker 3: to me and said, you know, don't let this go
Speaker 3: to your head, don't let this deter you, because it
Speaker 3: might just be a one time thing, and explained what
Speaker 3: it was, what I was going through, And I'm glad
Speaker 3: he gave me that second chance and asked me to
Speaker 3: come back, because I didn't ever have 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. Yeah, which is
Speaker 3: the stepping stone you need to go to VET school.
Speaker 3: So I got accepted at Cornell. I was very happy
Speaker 3: about that.
Speaker 2: 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 2: Yeah you're like Ivy League. Hello. But Joyce says, since
Speaker 2: it cost the same tuition, she enrolled in the Arts
Speaker 2: and sciences department because frankly, she didn't know if she
Speaker 2: 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 2: It sounds like both sides of your brain are very good.
Speaker 3: That's why I could walk straight enf 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. Apparently,
Speaker 2: it involves a lot of spey and neuter surgeries and euthanasias,
Speaker 2: but more complex medical procedures are usually declined by pet
Speaker 2: owners just because of cost. So this bummed her out.
Speaker 2: She thought maybe a wild animal vet. There's not a
Speaker 2: lot of job openings in that field, so she kept brainstorming.
Speaker 3: And then I thought about what about form vet work,
Speaker 3: you know, right, And they said, well, most of that
Speaker 3: is vaccinating herds of cattle. Oh. I was like totally
Speaker 3: not into that. Yeah, all right. So then there's this
Speaker 3: pro called aqua vet. I thought, oh, that's where I
Speaker 3: belong because I really love marine biology because I still
Speaker 3: still never left that fascination on fish. Right. Of course,
Speaker 3: I had actually, in the interim, had worked for the
Speaker 3: Nationally Fishery Service, I'd worked for the National Uceianic Society.
Speaker 3: I'd spent summer working at the Bermuda Biological Station for research.
Speaker 3: I had done a lot of marine oriented things. It
Speaker 3: was very interested in that. I wanted to be an aquavet.
Speaker 3: Now this, this would be the veterinarian for all the
Speaker 3: aquariums or the oceanariums. So cool, and you take care
Speaker 3: of their fish, you take care of their dolphins. It
Speaker 3: was like dolphins, totally, yeah, I want to do that.
Speaker 3: But there was one equivit and one one for the
Speaker 3: whole northeast coast. What so 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,
Speaker 3: right And he was still young at the time, so
Speaker 3: I was like, Okay, that's probably not gonna 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. Two removed from science, so what was
Speaker 2: 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
Speaker 3: in the science world that it didn't seem to make
Speaker 3: a lot of sense unless you were just going to
Speaker 3: talk about the science. So like my biology professor, okay,
Speaker 3: I get it. I didn't understand that until I spoke
Speaker 3: to him and realized that, yeah, there are opportunities in
Speaker 3: exactly what I love, which is anatomy. Because I didn't
Speaker 3: know 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 2: foying 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. It's these have these giant biggie froggy
Speaker 3: eyes and giant, big froggy mouths and skin tags hanging
Speaker 3: off of them that make them look like seaweed. You know,
Speaker 3: 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: face and a just massive downturned mouth with the expression
Speaker 2: of like if Joba 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. You know.
Speaker 3: They had these beautiful pectoral fins that they'd display open
Speaker 3: that looked like it had rainbows on them. They were
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. Oh. I was
Speaker 3: in pig heaven. I loved it. I was cutting up
Speaker 3: in these fish and I was making these drawings, and
Speaker 3: he was going to use them in a dissection manual.
Speaker 3: I thought, wow, oh, it's like even useful, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm not just having fun. And so I did that
Speaker 3: all summer long. And then I asked him, you know,
Speaker 3: is there like a career in doing stuff like this?
Speaker 3: And 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 morphologist slash anatomist does.
Speaker 2: I'd finally found her joy and she was getting paid
Speaker 2: to poke it roadkill for the good.
Speaker 3: Of humanity, and I have that. Now, I have that
Speaker 3: creative freedom. I can study anything anything, any animal, any
Speaker 3: part of any animal, anything that's interesting to me about that.
Speaker 3: I can delve into that and just get really down
Speaker 3: into 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 anatomis really
Speaker 3: came in my senior year. That's when I realized that.
Speaker 2: And what is it involved? I mean, Nika, we're at
Speaker 2: a medical center, but as an anatomist to people, say hey,
Speaker 2: I need to figure out what is going on with
Speaker 2: this antelope or this whale or this person. Let's ask
Speaker 2: joy what's happening here?
Speaker 3: So that does happen, but not so much at a
Speaker 3: metal center for humans, of course, you know, because I'm
Speaker 3: not in the area or people are company. But saying
Speaker 3: how does this antaloge work? That might happen more at
Speaker 3: veterinary college, I think, and maybe that is a bitter
Speaker 3: fit for what I know. But in a medical center,
Speaker 3: I feel like I've edited another layer of importance to
Speaker 3: my work because I can take information from the animal
Speaker 3: world and bring it to people, and that's essentially what
Speaker 3: I do. So our lab I kind of joyfully call
Speaker 3: it the animal recycling Center because we get everybody's leftovers,
Speaker 3: so I don't have to go out and kill the
Speaker 3: animals together and they're already dead. People give it to
Speaker 3: us if they're you know, that's something dies at a
Speaker 3: wildlife center. We get it. It dies in the road,
Speaker 3: we could get it, dies on the beach, we get it.
Speaker 3: It dies in a lab, someone's using it for an experiment.
Speaker 3: We can also get that, too. Cool, So we get
Speaker 3: all kinds of leftovers from wherever, and the more exotic
Speaker 3: and more interesting the animals to me, because the exotic
Speaker 3: animals are adapted to unique environments, and these really weird andvironments,
Speaker 3: some of them mimic human diseases. So if we can
Speaker 3: understand how these animals can survive in conditions that for
Speaker 3: us are harmful, we can copy that adaptation and we
Speaker 3: can bring it back to people as a treatment for
Speaker 3: their disease.
Speaker 2: Like what kind of diseases?
Speaker 3: Well, for example, emphasm 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 3: I looked it up So this is a disease that
Speaker 3: takes away the stretchability of the lungs, so the lungs
Speaker 3: become too floppy. It's hard to get air back out
Speaker 3: of them. So this elastic tissue is totally shot from
Speaker 3: exposure to whatever, smoking or whatever else. And so people
Speaker 3: who have that problem, they have trouble breathing out. It
Speaker 3: was to breathing in. They breathe in, but they can't
Speaker 3: get it back out again because the way you exhale
Speaker 3: is your lungs recoil because of their stretchy they're elastic
Speaker 3: like rubber bands. So the only time you actually force
Speaker 3: your lungs is when you'll blow out birthday cannals or
Speaker 3: blow up balloon. The rest of the time you breathe
Speaker 3: out passively and not so for someone with COPD. They
Speaker 3: can't breathe out passively.
Speaker 2: 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 them phazema.
Speaker 2: So an anatomist or functional morphologist looks at structures and says,
Speaker 2: that's tight. How can humans do that too? Like the
Speaker 2: animal kingdoms and influencer and we're like, I love your shorts,
Speaker 2: and then we figure out how to diy them with biotech.
Speaker 2: So Joy cites another example gastro esophageal reflux, which is
Speaker 2: 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 erode the
Speaker 3: back of teeth. You know, your molars can be rowed
Speaker 3: away from that said, 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 in
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 sore throat kind of you know, voice.
Speaker 3: But they divert it around that opening and they don't
Speaker 3: choke on it. How do they do that? They essentially
Speaker 3: have a splash guard in the back of their throat.
Speaker 2: They have a splash guard.
Speaker 3: Yes, we don't have that, so if we regurgitate, it
Speaker 3: goes right into the opening of the larynx because there's
Speaker 3: all kinds of problems.
Speaker 2: I just love the idea of you looking star eyed
Speaker 2: at a cow being like, how do you not get
Speaker 2: acid down your throat?
Speaker 3: How do you do it? Like, tell me your secrets.
Speaker 2: The cows like, well, I've got a splash guard. So excited.
Speaker 3: So these are the secrets that we try to find.
Speaker 3: When we look at animals that are diverse. They don't
Speaker 3: even have to be all that exotic. Cattle are not
Speaker 3: that exotic. But if you're looking at something that's different
Speaker 3: from a human, it's got something that makes it different.
Speaker 3: We want to know what that thing is and is
Speaker 3: this something useful about that. So sometimes if we look
Speaker 3: at very weird animals, the weirder they are, the better
Speaker 3: because the more likely they have some unusual adaptation that
Speaker 3: hasn't really been fully explored. And being in a medical center,
Speaker 3: I'm prepared by understanding the sort of you know, the
Speaker 3: whole human condition and the various diseases that can happen
Speaker 3: or various injuries that can happen. So having that awareness,
Speaker 3: and mostly that's through my medical colleagues, Okay, teaching me
Speaker 3: about it makes me better prepared so that when I
Speaker 3: see an animal weird adaptation, I already know what that
Speaker 3: application is going to be.
Speaker 2: 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. That's one of those things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of those like pornography and when I see it,
Speaker 2: as they say, now, how many different animals are you
Speaker 2: dissecting and studying like on the daily or the weekly?
Speaker 2: Are you like I'm on a real whale kick or
Speaker 2: is it like you might get a raccoon in later today?
Speaker 3: Later today, I'm expecting an ai. It's ben It's a
Speaker 3: lemur from Madagascar?
Speaker 2: 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 toadfish to a
Speaker 3: sect doctor Howie Evans. Oh my god, is his nineties.
Speaker 3: He's loaned me this eye to look at. We've just
Speaker 3: finished getting it MRI scan so it's supposed to come
Speaker 3: back up here to later today after the scanning. And
Speaker 3: this II is a really really rare lemur. And it
Speaker 3: was actually collected in eighteen seventy five, and it was
Speaker 3: at the time packaged in rum because they didn't have
Speaker 3: preserving fluids like we have today.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, that sounds like.
Speaker 3: That's so old and precious. This particular specimen.
Speaker 2: Is damn and so it's pickled.
Speaker 3: It's pickled golden booze. It sounds like golden booze. Well,
Speaker 3: now it's in alcohol, but it was, you know, in
Speaker 3: normal preserving alcohols as opposed to know, some rum that
Speaker 3: was on the ship.
Speaker 2: Just like Bacardi like spring break, that lemur so hard,
Speaker 2: you're like, we put him in a Pina colada, but
Speaker 2: he's holding up five. And so you're gonna look at
Speaker 2: an EI later today or later this week.
Speaker 3: Well, we're gonna look at the scans from it. Cool
Speaker 3: because we can't open it. We have to return at home.
Speaker 3: But we are going to look at the scan from
Speaker 3: this II.
Speaker 2: And is there a particular problem that you're looking for
Speaker 2: to solve with that? 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 2: 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 come
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: bad ass 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 slinkers with like a machete scaling it like
Speaker 2: a tiny mountain and just cutting it open and like
Speaker 2: blubbers everywhere. I'd like to play you a clip from
Speaker 2: Inside Nature's Giants, wherein doctor Riidenberg has arrived on a
Speaker 2: beach in the pre dawn dead of night to lead
Speaker 2: a whale dissection, and as she carves into the abdomen
Speaker 2: with something that appears to be a chef's knife.
Speaker 5: It's really really fresh. I don't smell anything. It's like
Speaker 5: it's like walking down the butcher's ale in the supermarket.
Speaker 5: All the meats, really fresh hair. This animal, I think
Speaker 5: is only around twenty four hours dead. So we gotta
Speaker 5: wipe get my face, wipe down around my lips.
Speaker 3: It's funny. That's probably the most.
Speaker 5: Dangerous thing is if you get in your eyes are
Speaker 5: in your mouth, and so I know enough to keep
Speaker 5: my mouth shut, but probably poked one of the intestines
Speaker 5: and that was just all the gas in the intestines
Speaker 5: sprayed me in the face. Oh that was probably better
Speaker 5: than that.
Speaker 2: The whale intestine has released a death fart into her face.
Speaker 2: And not only does she remain composed and professional but jovial.
Speaker 2: How does she do it? And can she run for president?
Speaker 2: You're like, oh my god, Like this is an art
Speaker 2: forum that you how do you get good at that?
Speaker 2: Because it's amazing. What does it smell like?
Speaker 3: How do you know where you're cutting?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 3: What do you do with the pieces?
Speaker 2: Side note, that was a lot of questions.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's a lot of questions.
Speaker 5: I know.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry. We'll start with the pros. So I don't
Speaker 3: remember which was the first? Get how? 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 for 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 whales section.
Speaker 3: I was a very excited graduate student at the time.
Speaker 3: I didn't have a car, so I got the call
Speaker 3: and I thought, if I don't go down there right
Speaker 3: away and get the specimen, I'm never going to get
Speaker 3: another one, because when are they gonna call me again?
Speaker 3: If I don't show up right, yeah, And they said
Speaker 3: you got to be here by nine o'clock because the
Speaker 3: Smithsonian is coming to take it away. Wow. So if
Speaker 3: you want to just get a piece out of this,
Speaker 3: they just want the skeleton, you can come get your
Speaker 3: soft tissues that you need for your research. WHOA. Then
Speaker 3: at the time, I was very interested in well how
Speaker 3: whales were making sound underwater, So I needed to get
Speaker 3: the voice box. So I rented a car. Oh no,
Speaker 3: car rental places in New York don'tald 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 he was a little surprised. I was already waiting
Speaker 3: for mother's shoulder.
Speaker 2: You're 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 wove
Speaker 3: stranded whale, which I'm sure is an excuse he'd never
Speaker 3: 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 a well official.
Speaker 3: I put on my white coat, I had my d
Speaker 3: tag graduate student in anatomy. You know. I was ready.
Speaker 3: I was ready for this, right. 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 so you can't read what's going on with
Speaker 3: their eyes. Right, he's looking at this, and he gets
Speaker 3: really quiet, and he says to me, what's all that for?
Speaker 3: Oh no, And I realized why he turned white. I
Speaker 3: had heard on the radio the day before that the
Speaker 3: police had found a body that had been chopped into
Speaker 3: pieces in black plastic bags floating down the Passaic River.
Speaker 3: And I think he suddenly realized that I might be
Speaker 3: the murderer because I had all the nohow and I
Speaker 3: had all the equipment, and there it was in the car,
Speaker 3: and I was running away as fast as I could.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, you've 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, yeah.
Speaker 2: I got.
Speaker 3: I hope you didn't get so light, 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 said to him, well, that's if I don't get
Speaker 3: there in time. I didn't tell him that the whale
Speaker 3: was already dead. I just said it was a stranded whale.
Speaker 3: So in his I mean, there was this flopping around
Speaker 3: whale on the beach, and if I do would get
Speaker 3: there before it dies, I'm going to have to cut
Speaker 3: it up, right. So he went back to his car,
Speaker 3: and I thought, for sure, he's he's trying to figure
Speaker 3: out if I'm the murderer, right right. And you know,
Speaker 3: we didn't have cell phones either, so I couldn't call
Speaker 3: them and tell them what was happening this whole time.
Speaker 3: So he he radioed back to headquarters I'm sure to
Speaker 3: say what kind of crazy person he had found, and
Speaker 3: they gave him permission to escort me. He came back
Speaker 3: and I never got a ticket, he escorted me. He said,
Speaker 3: I'm going to escort you to the whale stranding. He
Speaker 3: must have called ahead to the cop at the whale
Speaker 3: stranding down in Brigantine, who said, yeah, yeah, we got
Speaker 3: a whale on the beach here.
Speaker 2: You know, 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. Sure, yes, And I'm
Speaker 3: following him and he says, you have to pay all
Speaker 3: the tolls, like, okay, we didn't have easy pass back then,
Speaker 3: you know. He had to actually pay each hopper, you know,
Speaker 3: you know the little coins.
Speaker 2: Did you have to pay the cops tolls too?
Speaker 3: And he went right through the but I had to
Speaker 3: page till 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 really fast. And I arrived to my
Speaker 3: very first whale stretting with a police as court, with
Speaker 3: sirens and lights and everything. I made a big deal entry.
Speaker 3: It was very memorable on many accounts. God, that is
Speaker 3: the way to arrive, dude, that's that was. That was
Speaker 3: my first whale stretting. Did he stay to watch? He
Speaker 3: did not. Once I climbed on top of the whale,
Speaker 3: he was done. It was like, Okay, I'm out of here.
Speaker 3: Which is gonna make blood? I'm gonna use those things
Speaker 3: in the back of the car that made him turn white.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, what pressure, though. I feel like in
Speaker 2: all of the fishermen's saloons and all of the seaside
Speaker 2: towns all over the globe of all time, that's gotta
Speaker 2: be one of the best whale stories ever. Right, how
Speaker 2: do you so it's a fifteen foot whale? How do
Speaker 2: you know to scale it and where to start zipping
Speaker 2: into it?
Speaker 3: Well, most vertebrates are built on the same body plan. 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 or I'm dissecting for inside
Speaker 3: Nature's giants, the whale has a 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 voice box is going to be in the neck.
Speaker 3: We whales don't have much of a neck. It kind
Speaker 3: of go from head to body, right.
Speaker 2: They're kind of like dudes at the gym that are
Speaker 2: 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 whales neck doesn't really exist us
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: gonna be somewhere near the back of the jaw and
Speaker 3: in front of the front of the chest, which is
Speaker 3: 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 2: So what does a voicebox 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 voiceboxes. The whales are like twelve feet long. Okay,
Speaker 3: they're huge, you know. And they have a big sack
Speaker 3: under them that they use for recycling air that I
Speaker 3: could just climb into like a sleeping bag. That's a
Speaker 3: really big voicebox. But how big is that? Considering the
Speaker 3: whale is really big. It's just big as the whales big, right, No,
Speaker 3: it's big even considering that. Because the voice box of
Speaker 3: a big whale, like and I would say big whale,
Speaker 3: I mean a whale like a a fin whale or
Speaker 3: a blue whale or a humpback whale, that voice box
Speaker 3: is as big as a lung, you know. You imagine
Speaker 3: your larynx voice box went from the top of your
Speaker 3: shoulder down to the bomby rib cage.
Speaker 2: It's like having a saxophone in your body.
Speaker 3: You just talk it through a saxophone, and then you've
Speaker 3: got these animals that can make incredibly loud noises. You
Speaker 3: know some of these power behind some of these noises
Speaker 3: 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 forty. Ear drums can rupture
Speaker 2: around one hundred and sixty five decibels, and at one
Speaker 2: eight five the noise can literally kill you. Whales louder
Speaker 2: than that. The lovelorn call of a lonely blue whale
Speaker 2: reaches up to one hundred and eighty eight decibels, and
Speaker 2: sperm whales like home of Beer the clicks they use
Speaker 2: for echo location You ready for this two hundred and
Speaker 2: thirty six decibels, which can be heard by other whales
Speaker 2: for thousands of miles. So anytime you see a heavy
Speaker 2: metal band just thrashing, crushing, no that there is a
Speaker 2: big wet leather pickle in the ocean munchin squid. That
Speaker 2: is louder and therefore everything in this life is just ridiculous.
Speaker 1: Imagine the place where you can escape for a day,
Speaker 1: get immersed in a world of rooms, inspiration, and expertise
Speaker 1: where you can lay in luxury accommodation than kids. Cam
Speaker 1: Fees from ninety five sets Take yourself free to everyone
Speaker 1: and include all the attractions you've just imagined a day
Speaker 1: out at the Kia, The Kia the wonderful every day.
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 2: How are you finding your way around? What does it
Speaker 2: smell like?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Well, first of all, it's a really good thing
Speaker 3: that smell. A vision hasn't been invented yet because I
Speaker 3: think most people would turn the show off. Yeah, because
Speaker 3: the smell is really bad. I mean, just imagine you've
Speaker 3: got sixty five feet of rotting flesh. You know, you
Speaker 3: know a bad milk smell is when it goes bad. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Now imagine you've got sixty five feet of quartz of
Speaker 3: milk hanging out there, right. So it's a pretty bad
Speaker 3: smell when it's run. But like most things you get in,
Speaker 3: you're to it 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 all 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. The
Speaker 2: stench is like so five minutes ago.
Speaker 3: Well, that's what's like at oil stranding. After the first hour,
Speaker 3: you don't smell anymore, but everybody who comes to visit
Speaker 3: smells it. And when you leave that stranding, everybody that
Speaker 3: you see smells it on you, no matter how many
Speaker 3: showers you take. Really, because the oil gets under your skin.
Speaker 3: Even when you're wearing like text gloves, it still gets
Speaker 3: under all that, and there's an aura about it. It's
Speaker 3: you know, like when you're around some smoked cigarettes and
Speaker 3: your hair smells. Okay, it's the same thing. Your hair
Speaker 3: is gonna smell, your skin is gonna smell. Your clothing
Speaker 3: if 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.
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. That's a good point. You know it's
Speaker 3: now part of you. You just have to wait for
Speaker 3: it to evaporate off.
Speaker 2: 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 porposes, 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: as deer like creatures who just hung out by water
Speaker 2: and sort of gradually slipped into the abyss forever and
Speaker 2: expanded just like you know what, I'm gonna 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 Bay 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, are you are you ever struck by
Speaker 2: similarities with humans? Like do you do you notice certain
Speaker 2: things about the brain that you're like, Oh, that's a
Speaker 2: pretty human brain. That's surprising for this kind of animal,
Speaker 2: or anything that makes you reflect on kind of your
Speaker 2: your own morphology.
Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely, Because humans are tetrapods, which is a type
Speaker 3: of vertebrate that has four legs. That's so weird, you know,
Speaker 3: that's most of the vertebrates that we know, right, Even
Speaker 3: whales are tetrapods that used to have four legs. You know,
Speaker 3: they still have hind quarters, they still have a pelvis,
Speaker 3: and they still sometimes even have a remnant of a
Speaker 3: femur or thiebone on that pelvis.
Speaker 2: How weird is that nubbans, but nubbins that are huge
Speaker 2: and pointless.
Speaker 3: Again, you're looking at a body. Plants 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 arm bone, there's the radius and onna 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 whale's 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 2: It's just like having acrylic nails under there, you know
Speaker 2: what I mean, just longlanche exactly.
Speaker 3: It's just very very long fingers, but they're webbed, and
Speaker 3: that webbing has become very stiff. So instead of like
Speaker 3: web feel like a duck has, you've got really stiff
Speaker 3: webbing in between those fingers. So when you look at
Speaker 3: the flipper, it's a paddle, but it is supported by
Speaker 3: essentially a hand inside there, and all arm at the
Speaker 3: beginning of it and so yes, you start to see
Speaker 3: things that look like humans, but they look like other
Speaker 3: terrestrial mammals as well. They might look like a horse
Speaker 3: because a horse in its ancestry used to have five
Speaker 3: digits too. Oh, but a horse has reduced that down
Speaker 3: to walking on its middle toe. In fact, just the
Speaker 3: nail of its middle toe. That's what the hoof is.
Speaker 2: That's so weird.
Speaker 3: And if you look at cattle, they're they're walking on
Speaker 3: two of those toes. And if you look at a bird,
Speaker 3: you'll see Look, next time you chicken, go get a
Speaker 3: chicken wing and look at it really carefully. You'll see
Speaker 3: all the same bones that we have in our opper extremity,
Speaker 3: except you won't find all five fingers anywhere. They've gotten
Speaker 3: rid of most of them. But you will see at
Speaker 3: least two, maybe three fingers there. Because nature is pretty conservative.
Speaker 3: You take a body plan and you just tweak it,
Speaker 3: you modify it. You don't add something completely new. You
Speaker 3: take something that's there and you morph it so it
Speaker 3: looks new. It's just really twisted and different, that's all.
Speaker 3: It's not really new. Very very rarely do you see
Speaker 3: something that's actually new, because that's really hard to accomplish, right,
Speaker 3: That's what we have a lot of fun doing looking
Speaker 3: at a new animal for the first time. You don't
Speaker 3: know necessarily what everything does. Yeah, So one of the
Speaker 3: questions is, well, what is this most like in a human?
Speaker 3: What is this most like in the next animal that
Speaker 3: is closely related to it? Where are the homologies the
Speaker 3: things that have the same tissue origin but maybe have
Speaker 3: become different structures, like the wing of a bird and
Speaker 3: the flipper of a sea turtle.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what else does Joy's job entail? And are
Speaker 2: you still getting to do a lot of drawing and
Speaker 2: sketching when you're doing this or.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, oh really? That's one of the best things
Speaker 3: about this career for me is it's a perfect combination
Speaker 3: of my interest in art and science.
Speaker 2: So what kind of drawing do do you use? Like
Speaker 2: a wakeum tablet? Do you have your watercolors out?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 3: How are you capturing a very old school pencil and
Speaker 3: paper most of the time?
Speaker 2: Is there any place people can see your drawings?
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 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, a good point, you know. That's that's what
Speaker 3: publications are for, dang it. So we got to make
Speaker 3: sure that the information we're putting out is accurate because
Speaker 3: people will take You know how people take stuff off
Speaker 3: the internet all the time is like, oh, it's the truth.
Speaker 3: I found it on the internet. Is will have to
Speaker 3: follow my publications? Then that's my version of instagram, right.
Speaker 3: But it's it's so important to make sure the public
Speaker 3: gets accurate science information. In fact, that's one of the
Speaker 3: reasons I do those TV documentaries because as a scientist,
Speaker 3: I feel that we have an obligation to give information
Speaker 3: to the public. After all, they're the ones that funded
Speaker 3: our work in the first place. Most work is done
Speaker 3: through grant funding, which is your tax dollars at work,
Speaker 3: or your donations if it's from a private financial foundation.
Speaker 3: But most people don't get any turn on their investment.
Speaker 3: How is the public learning about the science that we do.
Speaker 3: What 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, poets, podcasts
Speaker 3: exactly Ted talks, and television because all of these media
Speaker 3: are ways to engage the public in the science that
Speaker 3: we're doing so that they can learn. Why is it
Speaker 3: that 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 unders 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: gonna crack. So you got to make adaptations that deal
Speaker 3: with the pressure changes. When we crack that code, hopefully
Speaker 3: we can make better transmitters for sound underwater, for communication
Speaker 3: devices or whatever. But there are all kinds of things
Speaker 3: that we want to learn. We will learn how dolphins
Speaker 3: make their sonar. We know a lot about how they
Speaker 3: do it. You don't understand how they process it though.
Speaker 3: May talk man right, and if we could, maybe we
Speaker 3: could make better sonar for ourselves. Dolphins can actually detect
Speaker 3: a mine buried under the sand.
Speaker 2: Okay, so wait, whooa what? Okay, this is a thing
Speaker 2: I just found myself on a wiki page entitled military
Speaker 2: dolphins What, and it says the dolphins and sea lions
Speaker 2: are trained by the Navy's Marine Mammal Fleet. Dolphins are
Speaker 2: trained as much as police and hunting dogs, and are
Speaker 2: given rewards such as fish on correct completion of a task.
Speaker 2: So dolphins are trained to detect underwater mines and enemy
Speaker 2: swimmers and then report back to their handlers. How weird
Speaker 2: is it that there are dolphins who are like, yes, yes,
Speaker 2: I mean, I appreciate the fish salary, but I also
Speaker 2: find my work very fulfilling. I'm good at my job
Speaker 2: and helping people.
Speaker 3: Not only can they detect it through multiple materials. We
Speaker 3: can't art z own or reflex it the first density
Speaker 3: interface change, but they can tell you if that mine
Speaker 3: is flooded with water or air, if it's made of
Speaker 3: plastic or metal, you know, if it's ticking. You know,
Speaker 3: those all kinds of things that they can tell us.
Speaker 3: We can't see that. Our sonar is way too coarse.
Speaker 3: We can barely tell a school of fish from a
Speaker 3: whale going by. It's just a blob on the sonar screen,
Speaker 3: you know. And the dolphin is looking at a fish
Speaker 3: and goes, hmm, I know exactly what kind of fish
Speaker 3: that is. It's a butterfish, and I know how big
Speaker 3: it is, and when it's going to turn, and how
Speaker 3: many scales are missing on the right side, and where
Speaker 3: its swim bladder is. You know, they can see all
Speaker 3: of that. What's the closest we've come ultrasound, we can
Speaker 3: look inside and see someone was pregnant. I remember when
Speaker 3: I was swimming once off the coast of Florida and
Speaker 3: two dolphins came over to check me out. I was
Speaker 3: pregnant at the time, and I'm pretty sure that's why
Speaker 3: they came to check me out, because they could see
Speaker 3: what's going on inside with their sonar. Oh that's so.
Speaker 3: It was amazing. They stayed just out of reach. I
Speaker 3: can reach my hand out and almost touched them. And
Speaker 3: you know, they would stay just be on the edge
Speaker 3: of my fingertips, and as soon as they would reach them,
Speaker 3: the would they would dive under and come up surface
Speaker 3: behind me. I hear the blow behind my head. I
Speaker 3: turn around and they play the same game. It was
Speaker 3: always this game of keep away. But they were just
Speaker 3: close enough you could almost touch them. They're like, why
Speaker 3: she got another little baby, And that's right. I think
Speaker 3: they knew. I think they totally knew, and they were
Speaker 3: totally fascinated by why this extra little creature was on board.
Speaker 2: 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 ultrasound.
Speaker 3: 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've 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 2: They're like, Oh, it's a girl, And You're like, whoa, hey,
Speaker 2: I know now. I just want to evolve myself back
Speaker 2: into the sea in a land where dolphins are my
Speaker 2: doctors and sea lions have my back. 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. I
Speaker 2: have this theory that I always try to talk to
Speaker 2: Tomiold just about and you're the one person I feel like, well,
Speaker 2: definitely give me a head or tails on this. But
Speaker 2: no pun intended. But how do you feel about the
Speaker 2: automotive design and how much it's modeled on quadrupeds. I'm
Speaker 2: so fascinated by, Like we have the engine in the front,
Speaker 2: four tires, four legs, two headlights, and also genus and
Speaker 2: species like a make and model. Do you ever think
Speaker 2: about that, like when you're driving around, how we model
Speaker 2: things in our lives with like bilateral symmetry airplanes like birds?
Speaker 2: Does that ever? Is that just like such a duh
Speaker 2: 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 wings.
Speaker 4: Ont An Oregon Hank Fetis took a running start to
Speaker 4: fame and fortune with his version of what the latest
Speaker 4: bird man should wear.
Speaker 3: But it's fire in the wrong direction.
Speaker 2: Duh hi, 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 onto look alone. It takes us
Speaker 3: to learn how to walk on two legs right start
Speaker 3: out crawling. It's any more stable, you know. So it's
Speaker 3: just efficiency and design is based on nature. There are
Speaker 3: very few animals to walk around on two legs. It's
Speaker 3: not the most efficient design for stability. There are advantages,
Speaker 3: which is why we do walk on two legs, but
Speaker 3: again it is unstable. So yeah, I think about it,
Speaker 3: but I think more about things. When I think about car,
Speaker 3: I think more about when are we going to have
Speaker 3: those driverless cars? That's what I'm thinking about.
Speaker 2: I know every time I drive a car, like, We're
Speaker 2: gonna look back and be like, wait, you put just
Speaker 2: a human being who could just sneeze and kill people
Speaker 2: in this machine. This is ridiculous. So two last questions.
Speaker 2: One is what is the thing about your job.
Speaker 3: That sucks the most?
Speaker 2: What it's the hardest part of your job, the most tedious,
Speaker 2: the most like.
Speaker 3: Oh god, reading, really believe it? Or not reading? I
Speaker 3: hate reading?
Speaker 2: 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 silence 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, a lot,
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 they're given
Speaker 3: to me. I bet, yeah, And I read every single
Speaker 3: word with intention, and I write the same way. So
Speaker 3: I'm very slow at writing. So reading and writing, I
Speaker 3: would say, which 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 strength, 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. 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 3: You know, well, thank you. And I don't know if
Speaker 3: I would have qualified for extra time back in the day,
Speaker 3: didn't have a 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 anxiety. 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 2: That's not happening.
Speaker 3: And so I'd love being outdoor. And so field work
Speaker 3: is great. Traveling is great. I love doing two exotic
Speaker 3: places to see exoic 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. We get to draw, you get to learn,
Speaker 2: you get to help people like like you you figured
Speaker 2: it out. That must be you must want to go
Speaker 2: back in time and be like yo, little joy.
Speaker 3: Fine, Absolutely well, I think the best way to sum
Speaker 3: that up is I don't really feel like I go
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: That's rad and I loved it. Later you're just like Lemur.
Speaker 2: I got a Lemur coming up. Thank you so much
Speaker 2: for doing this. I'm just so excited to get to
Speaker 2: talk to you and thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 3: You're welcome. It's been fun. Thank you. I loved it.
Speaker 2: So As always, ask smart people stupid questions because you
Speaker 2: never know. You never know what kind of glorious stories
Speaker 2: may unfold. Now. To follow up on your new obsession
Speaker 2: with doctor Joy Ridenberg, catch her on Science Channels Mythical
Speaker 2: Beasts that premiere's October fourteenth. You can find her on
Speaker 2: Twitter at Joy Ridenberg. You cannot find her drawings on Instagram,
Speaker 2: as discussed, but that's okay. She's also on Facebook as
Speaker 2: Ridenberg TV and ologies is at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker 2: Do give us a follow. I'm Ali Ward with one
Speaker 2: L on both and there are links in the show
Speaker 2: notes to all of this. There are also links to
Speaker 2: support even a dollar a month on patreon dot com
Speaker 2: slash ologies. You can get amazing merch at ologiesmerch dot com.
Speaker 2: Feel free to tag or DM me photos of you
Speaker 2: in it with the hashtag ologies merch mondays. I repost
Speaker 2: them on Instagram. Thanks Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis for
Speaker 2: all of the merch help you're amazing. Be sure to
Speaker 2: find them tag give them a follow. They're great. Thanks
Speaker 2: Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lippo for adminting the internet haven
Speaker 2: that is Theologies Facebook group, and I owe a hoil
Speaker 2: of thanks every week to editor Stephen Ray Morris, who
Speaker 2: also hosts the kiddie podcast The per Cast and ce
Speaker 2: Jurassic Right, which is all about dinos. Nick Thorburn made
Speaker 2: the music and is in a band called Islands. Side note,
Speaker 2: if you enjoyed the Melotology episode on bees, Mandy Shad
Speaker 2: now has her own b podcast called bee Keeper Confidential.
Speaker 2: Now at the end of the episode, you know that
Speaker 2: I tell a secret. And my secret this week is
Speaker 2: that I had a dream I was dating Oprah and
Speaker 2: then the dream I was like this rules she's great.
Speaker 2: And I think about that now every time I see Oprah,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, she's pretty great. Anyway, keep asking smart
Speaker 2: people stupid questions. That's the only way anyone learns anything.
Speaker 2: All Right, We're bye, Pacaderman College, hommeiology, rip doo, zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, matternology, anthology, seriology.
Speaker 4: Selenology, Hi king snorky hereby Spanish, all humans to the sea.
Speaker 3: Wow, it's like even useful. You know, I'm not just
Speaker 3: having fun.