Science is Awesome, Fish Science is XXAwesome
San Diego, Southern California, some time in the early ‘00s. My dad, who at the time was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, had come down for a visit. We are in the Steven Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Large fish, small fish, silvery fish and colorful fish populate the aquaria around us. “Every time we get together, we end up looking at fish” remarked my dad.
Good observation. Fish had captured my imagination from childhood on. It started with me feeding spaghetti to trout in an Austrian alpine lake, and it lead to me writing papers on fish evolution. I enjoyed that trip from a curious kid to a scientist. It seems, however, that these days not everyone is enjoying their science.
I just came across this selection of essays by scientists in Science from the ending year, none are of them about the joy and thrill of knowledge & discovery, rather, most are about sensibilities and psycho issues. This is quite indicative of a cultural shift which happened during the last 15 (?) years, one which I don’t particularly like. The one essay I greatly enjoyed describes how someone rose from an Indian slum to become a scientist, and that’s a huge achievement and a very positive thing. The career-change, back-to-postdoc essay was interesting. Most of the other essays were not what I would expect in a celebration of the year’s science in a top scientific journal: lots of conflicts, anxieties, insecurities and generally bad times.
Any person, in any field of work, can run into tough times. Nurses burn out. Construction workers hurt their backs. And, yes, I’ve had a funding setback a few years ago and temporarily got out of academia (not science!). But even then did I still write that I “feverishly love science”, and would continue engaging in it. The idea is not to bask in one’s misery, but to overcome these challenges and then move on to do productive, interesting things. At least to me that’s the idea.
So I wanted to write a counter-essay to this selection of what is, mostly, a whine-fest. Science is not a competition who is the most sympathy-worthy victim. It’s not supposed to be a competition at all, it’s the communal effort to understand reality better. And I think science, far from depressing and anxiety-inducing like it is portrayed in the Science essays, is awesome, especially if it involves fishes.
So, let me rave about the good times I had in science in 2020:
Freshwater gobies
I live in the central Philippines, on the island of Negros. I like the place for a number of reasons, but the reason why I moved there in first place were … fish. The scuba diving in the area south of Dumaguete, on the southern tip of the island, is absolutely amazing. The area has a mix of gorgeous coral reefs and “muck” diving sites featuring rare and unusual fishes, mollusks, crabs and other marine critters.
Now in the course of the covid-related restrictions, scuba diving was outlawed for several months. That certainly sucked. But, “Sweet are the uses of adversity” (Shakespeare, Macbeth), and I teamed up with my student and friend Likko to explore the fishes living in the mountain creeks of the island. We got to observe several species of freshwater gobies, some of them exceptionally pretty little fishes, colored in deep red or metallic blue scales.
These gobies are rightfully popular with aquarium hobbyists around the world, and it’s a thrill to see them in their natural environment, doing natural behaviors like mating or grazing. I am sure that this initial expeditions will lead to interesting science in the coming years.
Side-benefit of this snorkeling expedition: I cooled off. As a big dude in the tropics, I get hot a lot. The goby-creeks were probably only about 24, 25 C warm.
These goby expeditions was were wet science in the most literal sense. But you can get your intellectual rocks off even if you never leave your couch.
Large pelagic filter feeders
Across from Dumaguete, on the neighboring island of Cebu, is the little town of Oslob. There, whale sharks visit a shallow bay on a regular basis. They used to show up regularly, and now they show up very regularly, because they are fed by the locals, which attracts tourists who pay to see the whale sharks, which pays to feed the locals. The whole situation is a bit controversial, because feeding wildlife is never ideal, but in any case it’s mind boggling to see a seven meter long fish swim above you. Whale sharks are the largest living fishes, but they are harmless to humans since they feed by filter-feeding plankton.
Seeing these large, filter-feeding giants got me to start reading about whale shark biology, and then about other large pelagic filter feeders alive in the planet’s oceans today, such as whales or manta rays. This lead me to reading about extinct large pelagic filter-feeders: I encountered amazing extinct giants, from meter-long pseudo-shrimp to nine-meter long Ammonites, to plankton-filtering Mesozoic reptiles. Most of that reading I did last year as a visiting professor at the University of the Philippines’ Marine Science Institute, which was the best science gig I ever had, both in terms of the research I got done as well as in terms of the bright and friendly people I got to interact with, from undergrad interns to the institute’s leadership.
This paper reading binge resulted in a review paper which was published in Historical Biology in early 2020. I found several macro-evolutionary patterns shared by most large pelagic filter-feeders which ever lived. It’s hard to put into words how much I enjoyed the process, but I am good with words, so here you are: I had understood something which no one else had understood before, or possibly a few people had understood before, but none had written down in an organized manner. This creation of insight felt like a head-orgasm, but longer lasting than the original sexual orgasm, and shareable with a larger number of people. Awesome is a massively overused word, but that experience was truly, genuinely awesome.
Go out, enjoy science, and stop the whining.
