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