Joining me at the campfire today is Marianne Porter.
Marianne is associate professor at the Florida Atlantic University where she runs the Florida
Atlantic Biomechanics Laboratory, also known as the FAB Lab.
Much better name.
There, she works on biomechanics and functional morphology.
Now, by looking at the properties of biological materials such as cartilage and bone and what
organisms use those materials for, such as for swimming or feeding, she helps us to understand
how organisms like sharks and fish work.
And she uses that information to develop new bio-inspired materials and also robot fish.
Marianne, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for having me.
That was probably one of the best summaries of my research that anyone's ever done.
Yay, I hit it right there.
Well, if people know your research, they're going to want me to ask this question.
So I'm sorry, we have to get it out of the way.
People will want to know this one from you.
Right?
So how close are you to building robot sharks with friggin' laser beams on their heads?
I'm personally not very close at all.
We have been focusing a lot of our time recently more on like CT scans and actual swimming
fish.
So the attachment of laser beams to the robot sharks is far away in my lab, but I think
there are some other labs that are actually pretty close to that.
So watch out, world.
Well, I think there's some good Dr. Evil funding that way if you want it.
As long as I can have my cat with me to do all this research.
What is it?
Wigglesworth?
That'd be good.
Awesome.
Now, that was, of course, a silly question, but I know you make these awesome robot fish
and I really like the work you've done.
And congratulations with your new paper on how, well, cartilaginous fish, I shouldn't
call them fish, chondrichtious smell underwater.
That was a very nice one.
But you didn't start with fish.
I think you started with plants.
So can you tell us a little bit how you got started?
Yeah.
So I actually started out my life as a biologist, as a scientist, even as a plant ecologist.
And so one of my favorite stories to tell is about how I got started as a scientist
because it remains still something that I think about every day.
And it definitely got me started on my journey.
So this is a story for all the young scientists out there who are just beginning their careers
and just beginning sort of their paths forward as a scientist.
And so way back, nearly 30 years ago now, I think, if I have to do that head math real
quick, I was an undergraduate student at Northern Arizona University.
So that's something everybody always asked me too is like, oh, you must have grown up
near the ocean because you study sharks.
I'm actually from Arizona in the United States.
I assume your podcast viewership is variable around our lovely planet.
Very few sharks there.
Exactly.
So Arizona, it's a desert and there's actually a really big pine forest in Northern Arizona.
And so I was a student at Northern Arizona University and I was majoring in zoology.
So I was working towards my zoology degree and I had wanted to be a scientist, but I
didn't know how to do that.
I had read a lot of national geographics and watched all the nature shows and I knew I
love science and wanted to be a scientist, but I didn't know how.
How does one do that aside from picking a major or a degree in the sciences?
And so I was taking one of my classes.
It was actually my ecology class and I loved my professor.
It was Dr. Tom Widom, who was at Northern Arizona for a very long time.
He's a brilliant plant ecologist.
And I was loving my class so much that I went to talk to him in office hours, which I'd
never gone to office hours before because I didn't even know what they were.
So also for all the students watching, especially in the United States, professors have office
hours, which is a time where you can go ask them questions about their research, the class,
whatever.
It's time that professors have to give to students outside of the classroom time, FYI.
Anyway, so I went to office hours and Dr. Widom was like, hey, you're getting an A in
my class and you seem really interested in this, would you like to do research and do
research in my lab with one of my grad students?
And I was like, that sounds amazing.
I don't know anything about what this means.
And so he was describing a project where we would be working in the Pinion Pine Forest,
where he had a whole bunch of his research for literally decades.
And we would be looking at a moth, which is a keystone species in that system.
And so this moth is really important because it is a cone boring moth.
So it eats all the cones off of pine trees.
The cones hold seeds, right?
So if you are destroying all the cones and the seeds, you are basically taking away the
pine tree's ability to reproduce.
So these moths are like changing the whole ecosystem.
And is that a moth that belongs?
Is that in equilibrium with those trees?
It's been there forever or is that an introduced species?
Yeah, it's a native moth.
It just lives there.
And the system, he knows so much about it because he studied it for literal decades.
There's actually other things going on, several other insects that are really important in
that system.
But I was focused on the moths.
And what was really important for me is that gave me my very first field experience.
So I got to learn what it was to be a field biologist and go out in the field.
So I learned about waking up early to go out in the field, even if it was snowing, even
if it was hot.
We would go out, we would count the moths, we would measure the trees.
So I had a lot of sap in my hair and pull over my body because I had to get all up in
these pine trees to get the moths, measure the trees.
And what was really great about this experience is I learned some really overarching lessons
in science that, again, really do stick with me today.
And so one of the things Dr. Widom always used to ask us is, well, what is the question?
What is the actual question you're trying to answer?
Which is something I have to ask myself all the time because you start going down rabbit
holes in your data.
Yeah.
And you're like, oh, there's this and this and this, but it's really important to step
back and think about what am I trying to answer?
What are my data actually telling me?
And so that's a really great overarching theme that I ask myself all the time and I teach
my students and they come in and they're spinning out of control in space, as it were.
What is the question?
What are we trying to accomplish here?
And it was something that being out in the field, you really observe and have to think
about what your questions are.
So you're really working on that very first steps of the scientific method.
What are your observations?
And then developing those questions and hypotheses.
And so sometimes finding out that you're not asking the right question is huge.
Yeah.
Or you realize after you've done an experiment in the lab that you did an experiment that
doesn't answer your question and you realize you have to do it all again.
Right?
Oh dear.
Yeah.
You're like, oh, turns out that didn't quite work out the way I expected it to.
But that's like science and the scientific method, right?
You've got to keep moving forward and sometimes do it over.
And so the what is the question was a huge lesson I learned from this and being out and
about with the trees in the snow and the sun.
The other thing that I really learned from those experiences is if you're trying to observe
something and make those initial observations, sometimes it really helps to look at the extremes.
And so that's where going out in the snow turns out to be really important.
What does it look like in winter?
What does it look like in summer?
If you're looking at something in sort of different elevations, what happens at the
highest elevation, lowest elevation?
What happens at different points in the trees?
So really looking at extremes in your system and what you're trying to study in nature
is huge.
And you can do that anywhere, right?
Walking around your neighborhood, you see a bird you've never seen before.
That's like an extreme.
That's something that's different.
Like what's going on there?
Where was that bird?
Or you can do it anywhere.
Walking around our campus, we have raccoons that are very bold and are out during the
day, which is not what raccoons usually do.
So I'm like, that's an extreme behavior.
You are very habituated to humans.
So we kind of look for that.
And it's actually turned out to be, again, another important theme and lesson that I
carried throughout my career looking at extremes.
So a lot of my papers are on the weird sharks or the sharks doing weird things.
You mentioned the sharks that get out of the water and walk.
So how do they do that?
What do they do?
So that's like a pretty extreme behavior for a fish to leave the water and wander around.
And we just had a paper come out where we were looking at how the vertebral columns,
the spines of thresher sharks are mineralized.
Thinking about how does that sort of help us tell the story about why and how thresher
sharks use that giant tail to whip the tail over their heads.
And then I've also done a number of studies on hammerheads.
So got the hammerheads with the weird head that sticks out to the side.
Very different than basically any shark or any fish or any organism you will look at.
And so sort of looking at those extremes to kind of understand your system.
So those are sort of my big life lessons that I have gotten from the very beginning of my
career that actually still stick out.
And I like to remember my life as a plant ecologist and also use it as an opportunity
to remind students and early career scientists that your questions and the skills you're
learning are huge.
So I often have students who want to talk to me about, well, how do I study sharks?
I'm like, well, first you have to become a scientist.
Look for opportunities that are going to help you learn how to become a scientist.
And those were all very important things I learned from the trees and the mobs in northern
Arizona.
Yeah.
You really learn to look at nature in a very different way.
So other people would just be annoyed by the raccoons during the daytime.
You think about, oh, wait a minute, there's something going on.
Yeah.
There is something going on.
They like to steal the lunches that the students throw into the trash and leave behind.
So it makes a lot of sense to be out during the day on a college campus, on a university
campus.
There are far more snacks available.
Yeah, that makes sense.
That makes sense.
But they do walk around campus kind of like you would see cats or dogs walking around
and normally they're just like, are around.
I like raccoons, they're they're badass.
They're pretty wild.
Amazing.
And you don't need to to drop yourself in the middle of the ocean and chase sharks to
be a scientist.
You can just look at moths or raccoons or anything in your backyard.
Anyplace you can make an observation about something weird.
Yeah, there are things to be discovered there.
Right.
Yeah.
But you did transition to to sharks at some point.
I did during my PhD.
I had an opportunity to start working in Adam Summer's lab where he was working on biomechanics.
That's how we met.
Yes.
Way back in the day in California.
And so this gave me a real opportunity to take some of those life lessons I learned
on how to be a scientist and start working in a system and the kind of science that was
dramatically different from anything I had been trained to do as a field ecologist.
Yeah.
And biomechanics and ecology are very far apart, pretty much, especially organismal
biomechanics and plant ecology.
Yeah, real different.
But again, like I had those big questions and sort of skills as a scientist that I was
able to take advantage of as I started my academic journey as a biomechanist and shark scientist.
And that has led me to some really exciting places.
And I wanted to share a couple of stories with you about a few of the sort of things
that had happened along the way.
These are a little bit less academic sort of things that happened to me underwater while
scuba diving.
Again, it's those observational skills that are going to be important here.
So the first story I want to tell you about was one of my wildest scuba dives ever.
Actually, this is my next two stories.
You've scuba dived in a lot of places in the world.
I have.
I have been lucky enough to be able to go a lot of places.
Again, those observational skills are huge, right?
Being what an animal does underwater gives me a ton of ideas of things that I want to
explore, look at in my lab and helping me think about what those next questions are.
It's that observation.
What is the question?
What's happening here that I can look at?
And again, the extremes.
You're out underwater and you see this extreme thing happen.
You're like, oh, what should I do with that?
So you need to get out there.
You need to observe your organism.
Yeah.
But I will add as sort of an accessibility thing, you don't have to be a scuba diver
to be a marine biologist or study sharks.
Most of my research does not require me to scuba dive.
It's what I do for fun.
Like I said, it's where I get my inspiration and ideas.
So it does definitely help me for my work, but is not a requirement.
The ocean is huge and it has a million different questions and organisms for people to look
at and explore.
So there's a lot of opportunities there.
But I want to tell you about one of the really interesting sort of field adventures I had
in Hawaii on the big island of Hawaii.
I was diving at a place called Huako, which is a pretty popular and well-known dive site.
Is that from a boat or from the shore?
From the shore.
Okay.
And so you drive to this little place, you get out and the dive shop had told us, you
know, this is where a sea turtle cleaning station is.
And that's always fun.
So what a sea turtle cleaning station is, is sea turtles can swim by a particular area
and a bunch of fish come up and start cleaning the algae off of them.
So this happens in a lot of animals and the people at the dive shop had said, oh, there
was a sea turtle cleaning station there yesterday.
Like you should go out there and check it out.
So we're like, okay, cool.
And this is Hawaii.
So a lot of volcanic activity historically, currently, and as a result, there are a bunch
of places you've got these little caves, like tunnels you can swim through, arches you can
swim through.
So it's a really great coral.
It's really great place to see a lot of structure when you scoop it up.
I imagine, yeah.
So I go out and I'm looking for the turtles and their cleaning station with my dive buddy.
And here's the reason I think this is an interesting story.
The cleaning station was really neat.
We were able to watch the turtles and all the fish carefully picking all the algae off.
Then I heard the weirdest thing I've heard in my entire life.
This is why the story I think is interesting.
You're underwater.
So sound travels really far and really well.
Yeah.
If you're underwater, you can hear people rattling change.
So that's a way divers get other people's attention.
You can hear boats going by.
You can hear a lot of stuff underwater because sound is going to travel so well.
I heard this noise that was the weirdest thing I have ever heard about water and underwater.
And it was all encompassing.
And I was like...
Oh, scary.
It was scary.
And there were big boats around.
And so I was looking at my dive buddy, I was like, what is that?
And they're like, ah.
And my dive buddy was completely unconcerned about this super weird and it lasted a couple
of seconds sound that we heard.
And he was like, I don't know, boat?
I don't think that was a boat.
There is no way that was a boat.
And so I had lived in California for a long time.
We were in Hawaii.
These are both places where earthquakes are a common thing.
I'm thinking about what is this?
This noise was all around me.
I could feel it.
It was weird.
And so I was like, I think that there was just an earthquake.
So then my thought is, oh, that's when tsunamis happen.
We should go.
And my dive buddy looks at their air supply and they're like, no, no, we're good.
Let's keep going.
Are you okay?
I'm like, yeah, I'm okay.
But I think we should go up.
And they're like, oh no, let's go.
So then I'm like, okay, fine.
Hopefully there's no tsunami coming.
Wow.
Okay.
It's fine.
Yeah.
It's hard to communicate underwater, right?
I mean, you can't just say it.
And so I was looking at the time.
I'm like, okay, we've got maybe five more minutes of this dive anyway, whatever.
So we're going around.
My dive buddy is swimming under the arches.
I'm thinking if that was an earthquake, this stuff might all move.
That's a bad idea.
So I'm pulling them backwards and they're going in because they want to take a picture
and I'm pulling them out.
I'm still thinking and gesturing like we should go up.
So finally they're like, okay, let's go.
But they're pointing at their air gauge, really annoyed.
I've still got tons of air.
You've still got tons of air.
What is your deal?
And I'm like, no, no, let's go.
There's no hand gesture for earthquake, right?
It is more like you listen to me going up.
So when you start getting more dramatic with your gestures, your dive buddy is going to
listen to you.
I was like, stop it.
Let's go.
And so we get out of the water and there's no one on the beach.
There were people on the beach when we got into the water.
So it was like, yeah, I was like, well, okay.
But you know, I have not been in a tsunami, but I assume there are sirens or some sort
of communication happening.
It was totally silent.
So I'm kind of like, okay.
And then we're driving back up the hill to the dive store anyway.
So we get in the car and I'm like, did you hear that?
I think it was an earthquake.
And they're like, no, it was a big boat.
I'm like, that was not a boat.
Like I said, the absolute weirdest noise I've ever heard in my entire life.
So then we were able to drive up to the dive store and they were like, oh, did you guys
feel the earthquake?
And I was like, see?
I'm like, we were underwater during the earthquake.
Wow.
That is one of the rarest experiences a person can have.
I mean, being underwater with an earthquake.
Right.
And so it was wild.
They were like, oh no, there was an earthquake.
And I was like, see, I told you, we should have gotten out.
And I'm like, do we need to worry about tsunamis?
Like living in California, I'm like, but I, earthquakes happen.
It's something a little scary in the moment, but you know, it happens in most of the time.
It's like fine.
And so they're like, oh no, there's no tsunami warning warning.
You're fine.
I'm like, okay.
But then to my dive buddy, I was like, see, I told you so.
Like you've got to listen to me.
But then our next stop was to go hiking in Volcanoes National Park.
And by the volcano, they have all the earthquake activity, like in one of their visitor centers.
So we were actually able to go back and look at the seismic activity at the time of our
dive and like see the earthquake on all the instruments.
But that was, I think probably one of the wildest field adventures I ever had.
That's a super rare, weird experience.
Can you describe what it sounded like or what it felt like?
I mean, did the water also shake or did you not feel it in the water?
I didn't feel it in the water, but it was like an all encompassing sound.
Like it felt like it was vibrating my body.
But also like, you know, when you hear a boat go by underwater, it's got a direction.
Like there's a directionality to it.
Like if someone shakes a chain underwater as a diver to get attention of other divers,
you can tell which direction it is.
So you know which direction to look and you can see like the person and be like, oh, okay.
You know where the boat is.
This was like literally surrounding in all directions.
And I was like, okay, like where did that come from?
And I was looking like, is there a giant boat here?
Like we're pretty close to shore.
I don't, but yeah, it was wild.
And then I was looking, I'm like the sea turtles at this cleaning station had long since gone
away.
I'm like, are the animals doing anything weird?
Do I need to like, yeah, they usually know, right?
They usually know what's going on.
They had already like moved on just kind of naturally, I think, but I don't know.
Yeah.
It was super weird.
Well, talk about an extreme observation.
Right.
One that I will never forget.
And like, I like to be safe in the field.
Like I hope that I'd never time that quite right like that again.
No, but it's an awesome experience.
Come on.
It would be very interesting to know if sea turtles actually move away from the shore
to avoid tsunami like, you know, damage.
Yeah.
I don't know.
We have some evidence that like in South Florida here where I live now, the sharks from the
tagging data, it seems like they move deeper into deeper water when there's a hurricane
coming.
So I'm sure other animals have their own ways of doing their thing to make sure they're
not stuck in a bad situation.
Yeah.
But yeah, I was looking for that turtle.
Like, is anyone else still around or is just us idiots in the water?
Only fools and horses.
Yeah.
Wow.
Exactly.
But that was, I think, one of my most memorable days kind of outside in the field.
I'm going to share my next story with you, which is actually something that is probably
something way more people have experienced, but it was an amazing opportunity for me.
Okay.
So this next story happens in the Bahamas, which is really close to where I live again
here.
Nobody's feeling sorry for you with these stories, by the way.
You understand that, right?
I know.
Like I said, I have been very lucky to be able to look at animals and dive a bunch of
places and I got to live and hike in Northern Arizona where we have the Grand Canyon.
So I've gotten to work in a lot of really beautiful places and take advantage of being
outside and making those observations.
But yeah, so this next story happens in the Bahamas and the Bahamas is a really amazing
place.
Again, it's close to where I live in South Florida.
So it's someplace that's not super difficult for me to get to.
And as a government and as a people, the Bahamas have been really proactive about conservation.
So they have a lot of policies and rules in place.
So it is an amazing place to visit and look at wildlife, especially for scuba diving.
And they have places like Tiger Beach and near Tiger Beach where there are really great,
relatively shallow reefs that you can dive on and see some of these amazing big sharks
swim through.
And so that's what happens in my next story.
Again, I'm scuba diving and they were telling us on the boat, like, okay, you might see
some big sharks.
I'm like, cool.
That's why I'm here.
Love to see them.
This is why the beach is called Tiger Beach.
Yeah.
It's actually pretty far out, but it's a shallow area and they call it Tiger Beach because
it's really sandy and there are a lot of tiger sharks there.
Wow.
Okay.
I think that's why I call it that.
Probably not because there are tigers there because there aren't any.
Yeah, it's not tigers swimming around.
They're the sharks.
Although, if there was a tiger swimming around, that'd be truly amazing.
That would be pretty cool.
Yeah.
But we were on the dive boat getting ready to go in the water.
And they say, basically, try to descend as safely as you can so you're not just out there
floating in the water column as some of these big creatures could swim by because you want
to be a stable scuba diver near the bottom because it's pretty shallow.
You don't want to just be floating up there looking weird and interesting to them.
And so I'm like, okay, we're hopping in.
We're descending as quickly as we can safely do.
So I'm being a good scuba diver and clearing my ears and descending as safely as I can.
Sure.
So I'm descending and in the distance, I see this very large, even in the distance, shark
swimming towards us.
And I'm like, I need to descend as fast as I can.
And so the shark is getting closer and closer and I'm descending.
And apparently, my eyes were incredibly large as the swimmer was swimming towards me and
I was going down.
And I'm going down.
The sharks like swimming by.
And it just like swims by.
It was totally fine.
Yeah.
But it was very close.
And apparently, my eyes were so big.
So the dive master always wanting to make sure everybody's okay is like, you're okay.
And I'm like, I'm okay.
You just described a nightmare for a lot of people, I think.
I'm sure.
Well, everything was fine.
It's a beautiful close encounter.
It's went by.
I kept descending.
Everything happened the way it was supposed to.
My dive buddy was like, you okay?
Do you still have air?
And I'm like, I'm so scared.
Didn't suck it all down when I was seeing the shark so close.
And then we were just kind of swimming around the reef, diving around the reef, exploring.
But what was really incredible about this is this, I assume it was the same shark, sort
of hung around for much of the dive.
And so we got to see it a whole bunch of times.
And it definitely swam pretty close to us several times.
We got some amazing pictures of this shark.
And it was, when I say it swam by very close, it was like, I probably could have touched
it if I wanted to.
But keep your hands to yourselves.
The shark keeps its fins to itself.
We'll like, it'll swim by.
I'll watch.
And from what we know about shark behavior, these sort of things should be fine.
Just curiosity probably, or in your experience.
There's a lot of tourism.
Like, I don't know if the shark was habituated or if it was just, I happened to be on the
same reef it wanted to visit.
It could be any number of things.
I can attribute whatever to the shark.
But I was there to dive, so I was diving, being shark safe as I could.
But we were able to have this dive with this incredibly large tiger shark.
And what is incredibly large?
I mean, just to augment our imaginations here.
This thing was probably close to three or four meters.
It was much bigger.
I am, what, 64 inches tall?
Whatever.
A meter and a half, a meter and three quarters.
It was a lot bigger.
Yeah.
And underwater things are so fast, much faster and agile than us.
I mean, everything becomes impressive.
Right.
It was this really amazing opportunity to see it swim by.
They have beautiful coloring.
So we got to look at it up close as it went by.
And they are so graceful.
You see them swim and like you said, they move so fast.
They make zero effort to...
And we were scuba diving, so we had neutral buoyancy.
So we were closer to the bottom, but up in the water.
So we were pretty floaty and graceful as a human can be underwater at that point.
But yeah, so the shark was able to just swim by.
We spent our whole dive underwater.
And what was really incredible is I think that is probably 100% the largest shark I
have ever been diving with that I saw.
I may not have seen other creatures I've been in the water with, but it was probably the
closest and the biggest shark I've ever been in the water with.
And it was just really big.
It was really graceful.
It was beautifully colored and kind of just swimming around doing its thing.
Like, this is my ocean.
Yeah.
That really must be burning your memory to have a big shark like that.
Yeah.
Who were you diving with at the time?
Was it also experienced shark people or people who might be a little bit more intimidated
by the experience?
Well, my dive buddy was a pretty experienced diver.
And then we had the dive master from the boat.
So the people who wrote the boat charters are always really well experienced in those
areas.
And so, I mean, that's a nice thing, right?
A lot of times when you go out and have these experiences, especially if you're diving from
a boat, you're with people who have a lot of experience in the area.
They know where the dive sites are.
They know a lot about the environment just because they spend every day, like all day
out there.
So, if you've ever been almost anywhere in the world and you have a guide to take you
on a hike or to a site, these are people who have just such incredible knowledge of the
natural history of the areas they work in.
They know exactly where to go and what they're doing.
So it's really nice, obviously, as a scientist to be able to work with people who have such
immense natural history knowledge in general.
But yeah, I feel like all the dive boats, they know where they're going.
They do it all the time.
So they've got a really good idea of what all the sites look like.
Well, you're no slouch either.
And it's nice to hear that somebody who has seen as many sharks as you have and sharks
and rays and all those amazing animals you work on, that seeing a shark like this can
still absolutely make your day, month, year.
It was so memorable.
But yeah, literally every time I go diving, I get excited by the smallest seahorse, the
biggest stingray, like anything.
Like I said, the ocean is full of a million things to study and observe and just enjoy.
And of those million things, are there things that you still want to see?
Oh, well, so we just did this thresher shark paper.
Yeah, I love thresher sharks.
They're just the most elegant looking things ever.
Yeah, I mean, they're a little goofy looking.
They've got these little bodies relative to their tail and these giant eyes sometimes.
They're like, yeah, they are elegant.
They're graceful.
And they have that big tail whip, which is a pretty graceful movement.
But I've seen videos.
YouTube is an amazing resource for natural history.
I know.
You get so much great information.
I've seen thresher sharks swim.
I've seen them whip their tails.
That's in the literature, scientific literature.
But I personally have never seen one.
So after spending some time studying their skeletons and thinking about the functional
morphology, like how does their anatomy enable them to do any sort of activity or motion,
I would really love to see one of those in the wild.
Yeah, that would be nice.
I have a real love of the mako shark.
They have very pointy noses.
I've been able to dissect specimens that have washed up and stuff.
So they are shaped like torpedoes.
They have noses that come to a perfect point.
They're like a perfect fast swimming torpedo.
And I would love to maybe not be in the water with one because it might be harder to watch
it swim as it zooms past you.
But I would love to be on a boat being able to see one swim past.
Or some of these big sharks breach and some big rays, like manta rays do.
And so seeing a breaching event would be really exciting.
We have seen some smaller sharks jump out of the water.
And at the time here in Florida, my son saw a manta ray jump out of the water.
We heard it, but he saw it.
He was like, now that manta just jumped.
Like, what?
And I missed it.
Well, and these are the things you see on natural history documentaries.
And just to show that somebody who's worked on it all her life has not seen that.
So just the value of observations like that.
Yeah.
Like I said, YouTube is amazing.
Those natural history documentaries, like the photographers and videographers who get
to go out and collect that information is just so valuable to share scientifically,
like what we know some of these animals can do, but also just to get the general public
excited and interesting.
How does a manta ray launch its giant sloppy body out of the water like that?
That was like a pretty amazing sort of biomechanical event, right?
Like how does that happen?
And they seem to have so much drag, right, on their big, big flat body.
There's just sloppy too.
And then we've got things like the mako sharks that are the fastest swimming sharks that
we know of.
And I've been able to study them since the very beginning of my dissertation.
And I've always wanted to be able to do something with my data where I can say, this is why
mako sharks swim so fast.
Yeah.
Well, they're partially warm-blooded, right?
Or at least they have a warm body core.
Yeah.
So that helps them swim so fast.
But in terms of their skeleton and muscle anatomy, how do you...
Because like I've said, I've gotten to dissect some of these guys who have washed up or been
incidental mortalities.
Their entire body is really stiff.
It's not just very pointed and torpedo-like.
It is solid and stiff.
It doesn't bend.
And so you think if you go to the grocery store and get a fish that you're going to
eat for dinner, if you pick up the head, most of them, their body's going to flop over.
Like their fish are just floppy, right?
And the same is true of most sharks, but makos are just so rigid that I am always trying
to use my research on their vertebral columns and their materials to say, this is why they're
so rigid and that's why they can swim so fast.
Yeah.
But most of the angles I've taken to show that, they've actually been less stiff or
less impressive than the skeletons of other sharks.
So I'm still trying to figure out what about their skeleton is the thing that makes it
so stiff.
It drives you nuts to have a question like that.
I have something similar with my scorpions.
I've been at it for 15 years.
I've got a new working hypothesis and a brand new PhD student who started this fall.
And I told him what his first project is going to be.
And I'm like, here are some of these makos and this is what I want you to do with them.
And so I was just telling someone that the nice thing about my research is I can be out
in the field and using drones and videos to get videos of animals doing what they do in
the ocean.
We're in South Florida.
So we're ideally located to do that with some really amazing species.
My research also lends itself to bringing animals into the lab, not giant animals like
a big mako or a full-sized manta ray, but smaller species into the lab to study how
they swim.
And then anytime I have a dead fish that someone sends me, they can say, hey, do you want the
vertebrae from whatever that just washed up?
I can say, yes, please send it to here's my address.
And so I get coolers full of dead fish that nobody else wants.
And then it's a lot of research for me.
And it's fantastic research.
I'm a very big fan of your lab and your work.
Come on.
It's awesome.
Even if you're not putting laser beams on their heads, I love the material properties
of the skin and the bone and the cartilage.
Squishing and stretching stuff is so fun and informative.
That's a good summary.
So if people want to know more about your lab or they want to follow you online, are
you on some social media platforms that we can announce here?
That's a great question.
I am on Blue Sky.
I do not remember.
I used to be very active on Twitter when it was Twitter.
My use has sort of fallen off.
You can find me on bluesky at Marianne Porter.
And Twitter, I think is the same thing.
I don't check that very often.
I'll put something on the screen.
Don't worry.
We'll find it and I'll put it on the screen.
I also have my lab's website, which is just meportorbiomechanics.com.
So really pretty easy.
I think it's pretty Googleable to find me.
You can always find me through the university websites at Florida Atlantic University.
But yeah, we've got a great group of students working in my lab right now.
We just had our Thresher Shark paper come out earlier this year, which was really exciting.
My PhD student Jamie is one of her first big dissertation chapters to get published.
And then yeah, we've got a good group of students doing everything from sort of how fast sharks
work, how do the skeletons of cetaceans work.
So those are our marine mammals.
And what is interesting about them that I really love is as humans, we always hear that
we want to keep our skeletons strong, especially as we get older, right?
We want to make sure you're lifting weights and doing weight bearing exercises and taking
your calcium supplements.
And so my question with the marine mammals is what do you do if you're a dolphin and
you don't do weight bearing exercises?
Then that in Florida, we have a critter called a manatee.
A manatee, also sometimes called sea cows, they literally just like float around and
eat seagrass.
Yeah.
Definitely not what anyone would consider active.
And so how do they keep their skeletons strong?
Because they're floating around in water all the time.
They're not loading their skeletons under gravity like probably not lifting weights.
I don't know for sure, but I assume not.
They don't look like they do.
No.
And so we've got some questions about what does the bone anatomy look like in some of
those organisms, especially related to their terrestrial counterparts or close relatives?
That would be very interesting.
Yeah.
Do manatees get osteoporosis?
What happens if you just float in water and that's your life?
That's relevant also for astronauts and things like that, right?
That is one of my big goals is I hope someday that NASA or some space agency is going to
be like, your research is fascinating.
Would you like to come see our space shuttles?
So I can say yes, I would love to.
Not from the inside.
That might be too scary for me.
I accidentally dive during an earthquake.
I will dive with the tiger shark, but going into actual space might be a little bit too
scary for me personally.
You can just send your robots up there.
That's fine.
Yeah.
I definitely look at all the cool technology they have.
Yeah, awesome.
Look, but not touch.
Important.
Exactly.
Well, you're doing awesome stuff and I'll definitely keep following it.
And I hope everybody who listens to this have a look at her lab because Marianne and her
students do fantastic work, really interesting papers.
So with that, thank you very much, Marianne, for your great stories.
Thank you for having me.
It was amazing to catch up with you.
We'll have to talk more about you in the next one.
Oh dear.
Well, all right, we'll try that.
Thanks a lot, Marianne.
Bye bye.
All right.
Thank you.
This has been session call 2.