Functional Morphology (ANATOMY) Encore with Joy Reidenberg
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I know I usually save my secrets for the end of the episode, but I'm going to tell you my secret favorite candy. It's Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

It's really Reese's anything. But Reese's peanut butter cups are the thing that I'm like, have I had a bad day? I get these. Have I had a good day? I get these. Chocolate, salty peanut butter, the textures. I love everything about them. Also that there's two. So I'm like, oh, I get this one for later, which is one second later. Anyway, Reese's peanut butter cups. I love you. That's all. If you're me, you can shop Reese's peanut butter cups now at a store near you. Found wherever candy is sold. And I am.

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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'm

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

It's that second cousin who tries to talk to you about sports stats and can't read that you don't care. Allie 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 jelly beans 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.com slash ologies to donate a buck or more a month to support the show, and that helps me pay a wonderful editor, hi Steven, and lets me continue doing this, which is

It's my favorite thing to do. So thank you for that. Thank you to everyone who gets merch at ologiesmerch.com. There's some really great fall 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

of Ologites. And especially thank you to 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

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, on to theology. Functional morphology. That's a lot of syllables. What in the Sam hell does it mean? Well, it 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 giraffe 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 cytology 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 PBS, the British Channel 4 show Inside Nature's Giants, which also airs on PBS, Wildcats,

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 14th 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 break room 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 coworker chatting as they passed, which is kind of like you're right there in the break room 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 porch worthy, 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 prepare to be enthralled and inspired by functional morphologist, anatomist, Dr. Joy Ridenberg. ♪

Oh, 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 who studies whales? I actually would call myself a comparative anatomist. So I wouldn't use either word. Okay. You know, it doesn't have the ology in the name. I know. But...

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. Yeah.

And are you also interested in human anatomy or when did like when did the bug of cutting stuff up and looking at stuff get you? So so that's a that's a multi-pronged 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 definitely one of our most interesting animals we can look at in the world are humans because humans are so incredibly adapted for things that other animals can't do. Starting with what we're doing right now. Language, speech, language.

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 owls 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. Give me the cliffhangers. I'll 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. So it wasn't really thought of as a career for me. And probably that started with...

When I was a kid, I just loved getting close to animals. I really wanted to learn as much as I could about nature. The problem was that animals ran away from you.

So you really couldn't look at them up close unless they were your pets. Now, of course, I'm not going to cut open a pet. I love pets, you know, that they have to have their place as a pet and be alive 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 they wouldn't stay with you unless you tried to cuddle them and they'd bite you. So that wasn't a great interaction. Right.

But every once in a while, you got a chance to get really close to one if it was dead because it wasn't going to run away. Right. So, you know, one of the biggest arguments I used to have with my parents was whether or not I was allowed to touch the roadkill. Yeah.

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 or whatever I could find that was in some, 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 a kid? Oh, I didn't know what gloves were. Are you kidding? My cat would come home with a chipmunk and I would take the dead chipmunk that it 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

I saved it. I didn't know how to tan skin. I was like, I want to learn all about it. Back then, it wasn't the internet to look it up and figure it out. So I'd 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 these racing stripes on it. It's really cool looking. It's already dead. Yeah, I can't hurt it. It's already dead, right? And I had done a really great job. And I was so excited because I was going to use this chipmunk for...

as a saddle blanket for one of my toy horses. That's pretty legit. So that was like, I thought this was really legit. I had, I had hid it in a specific place, you know, wooden box and in our yard. And I came out later to check on it a couple of 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 1st. 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, Joy's Childhood.

So that's how my adventures would often go. But then I discovered fishing. I really liked fishing. I thought fish were 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 colors. 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 like no lips. And the giant eyes that never close. Yes. And these fins that come out of nowhere that they just...

open up like a Chinese fan. And I loved 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-karts because it was at the same place at the beach. So I would hang out on the dock fishing while they would race go-karts and I'd come home with all these stinky, smelly things. And he would tolerate it as long as I filleted all the fish. Yeah.

And later he would even take me out. We got a small boat and we'd go out on the boat. 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 were 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, they were gills, but I didn't know what they were. And then the intestines like, wow, this spaghetti just keeps on going. You know?

And the muscles were like in W's. I thought that was the weirdest thing, how the muscles zigzag back and forth. And I'd sit there forever playing with the skeleton after I'd filleted the meat off. Like, wow. You know, and my mother would be screaming 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 at all. 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 go to college, but I don't really know what I want to do. And my dad and I 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 sage advice coming from parents who hadn't gone to college before.

And, again, it wasn't a thing where you could look up on the Internet and find all this. So you had to wait for the brochures to come in the mail and read them and then write away for more material or actually go and visit the places, which was 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 11th grade or even early 12th grade

exactly what they want to do. I mean, some people might have a good idea. They 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 5% of my class. And I'm thinking, okay, what am I going to do with all this information, right? Now I want to be a dog walker. I've got to do something more.

Besides, 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 could only do what I could do when I get that close. The rest of the time I'd spend 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 it was like crazy to 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 tanks all over the garage. That's so dope. We would have been such good friends. Are you kidding me?

We once put a dead snake with a Ken head on it in the freezer to surprise my grandma. It did not go over well, but we loved it. But yeah, I get it. Now it's starting to sound a little bit like that kid next door in Toy Story. Oh, no.

You guys don't get it, do you? Once we go into Sid's 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 here I am 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 thing online. And, you know, we up until then 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. Yeah.

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, again, there 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 classifieds. Which is even more boring. Yeah, I know. Quick question. When was the internet invented? I'd

I didn't know, so I did look it up. Now, in 1983, by a Connecticut chap named Vint Cerf, V-I-N-T C-E-R-F. 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 1990 when Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, his

His friends call him Tim Biel. 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 monies. 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, Tim Biel. Anyway, Joy was leafing through physical paper and yellow pages, browsing for her future. And I'm looking through, and what am I not seeing? I'm not seeing anatomist. I'm not seeing comparative anatomist. I'm not seeing biologist. I'm not seeing scientist. I'm not seeing researcher. I'm not seeing professor, scientist.

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. Because maybe I'd be zookeeper, 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, medical.

Maybe that's a career for me because it's animals, you know, and they don't have to be dead animals. I didn't 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, whatever I could collect. Teeth. Nature stuff. Nails. Sure. Everything. So I thought veterinarian. So 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 gonna do an operation. And he invited me to scrub in on this operation and show 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, and I don't mean neutered, I mean, fixed up. And the dog was, you know, definitely had a terrible injury. And I thought, well, I'm going to get to see the inside on this animal. That's pretty cool because it's a living inside. It's not like the dead stuff that I'd seen before.

And I was so fascinated, I was riveted, I was watching this wide-eyed and 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 nauseous, 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 veterinarian, I was getting a little lightheaded. I thought, "Well, maybe the room is too warm or maybe I didn't eat enough breakfast or something."

What I was having was called a vasovagal reaction, which is something you absolutely can't control. It's essentially an autonomic discharge of your nervous system that...

No one can predict it's 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 a sudden drop in heart rate and also maybe the dilation of blood vessels in 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 pit bull, Kesha duet. 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? Yeah.

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 anesthetized, 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 round and round 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. 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 a setting where it was alive. There was just so much happening. Mm hmm.

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 costs 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.

Oh, you are. 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 musician. 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 can walk straight and not fall over, right? 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 Joy 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. I was like, totally not into that. Yeah. All right. So then there's this program called Aquavet. I thought, oh, that's where I belong because I really love marine biology.

Because I still never left that fascination on fish. Right, of course. I had actually, in the interim, had worked for the National Marine Fisheries Service. I'd worked for the National Oceanic Society. I'd spent a summer working at the Bermuda Biological Station for research. I had done a lot of marine-oriented things. I was very interested in that. I wanted to be an aquavet.

Now, this would be the veterinarian for all the aquariums or the oceanariums. Oh, cool. You know, 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 Aquavit.

And he won for the whole Northeast coast. That was it. That's ridiculous. Even, even Pepsi has Coke. I mean, come on, you gotta have a little competition. So I thought I'm going to have to wait for this guy to retire before I'm going to have a career. 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.

Mega bummer 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. Too removed from science. So what was she to do? But I still liked working with, you know, 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 veterinary college not be a veterinarian? Right. He's like, surprise. Surprise. I'm a PhD. Now, I was really confused. 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 medicine.

So it means you have to philosophize. So why is somebody in science philosophizing? Didn't make any sense to me. So I really didn't get it. The science world, 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 in 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. You would have seen it. Oh, God, no. And then you realize, oh, they're still cracking things open and being like, what does this little fadoingy-doing do? There you go. 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 had to do work study to pay for college anyway. And so he had me working on this big jar of toadfish. No, I like fish, but 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. Game of halfway. Or a fish didn't quite become a frog. They just have these giant, biggy, froggy eyes and giant, big, froggy mouths. It's

skin tags hanging off of them that make them look like seaweed, you know, ugly looking things. Okay, quick aside. I just looked these creatures up and they are gloriously unsightly. They have a wide, warty looking face and a just massive downturned mouth with the expression of like, if Jabba the Hutt 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. And they were just gorgeous, you know, really pretty. And so these fish were fascinating. And I spent forever drawing these fish. And I was like, oh, my God.

And he said, I want you to cut them open and draw what you see on the inside. Hey. Oh, I was in pig heaven. That's great. 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. No, it's an anatomist. And then I discovered research. And that's when 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 in creative freedom, which is what every artist really wants. 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 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 morphologist 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 said, okay, I'm in. This is the career for me. And that's when I realized that I was going to be an anatomist. Before that, it was just science.

science, you know, veterinarian, animal. But anatomist really came in my senior year. That's when I realized that. And what does it involve? I mean, like we're at a medical center, but as an anatomist, do 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 an area where people are coming to me saying, how does this antelope work? Yeah.

That might happen more at a veterinary college, I think. And maybe that is a better fit for what I know. But in a medical center, I feel like I've added 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 leftovers. We don't have to go out and kill the animals to get them. They're already dead. People give it to us. If something dies at a wildlife center, we get it. If it dies on the road, we could get it. If it dies on the beach, we get it. If it dies in a lab, someone's using it for an experiment. We could also get that too. So we get all kinds of leftovers 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. Oh. 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...

Emphysema 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 anatomists 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 whatever else. And so people who have that problem, they have trouble breathing out.

Oh, I didn't know that. Because 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 they're stretchy. They're elastic like rubber bands. Yeah. So the only time you actually force your lungs is when you blow out birthday candles or blow up a balloon. The rest of the time, you breathe out passively. Right. But 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 stretchability. Mm-hmm.

We don't. We have fixed stretchability. And if you lose it with a disease like this, you can't get it back. So there 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 in their lung tissue. Mm-hmm.

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 emphysema. So an anatomist or functional morphologist looks at structures and says, that's tight. How can humans do that too? Like the animal kingdom's an 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, gastroesophageal reflux, which is also a grade A bummer for those afflicted. Yeah.

People who are burping and regurgitating their food and the acid is getting up into their throat and it's irritating their larynx, can even get down into their lungs and cause asthma, get into the back of the mouth and erode the back of teeth. You know, your molars can be eroded away from the acid. All kinds 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. Right.

Are they like ruminants? Yes, ruminants do it. Now, maybe they've already got rid of the acid component because they're dealing with a multi-chambered stomach and acid digestion is in another part of the stomach. Okay, so they've deacidified what it is they're going to be bringing up. But they also don't insult their larynx. Colonel Larynx, you're nothing but a nonsense spewing throat accordion. Oh, okay.

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 and have them gagging and coughing and having a sore throat kind of 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. But we don't have that. So if we regurgitate, it goes right into the opening of the larynx and causes all kinds of problems. I just love the idea of you looking starry-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 cow's like, well, I've got a splash guard. 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 there 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 at a medical center, I'm prepared by understanding the sort of, you know, the whole human condition and the various diseases that can happen or various injuries that can happen. So having that awareness and most of that's through my medical colleagues, okay, teaching me about it.

Makes me 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 prepared to find the fun things in these animals that I then think can be developed into a protective animal.

or a treatment 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 could fit. I'll know it when I see it. It's one of those things. Yeah, one of those things. Just like pornography and obscenity. I'll know it when I see it, as they say. Now, how many different animals are you dissecting and studying 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? Yeah.

Later today, I'm expecting an aye-aye. What in the hell is that? What is an aye-aye? It's a lemur from Madagascar. Are you serious? Where is it coming from? From Madagascar? It's 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 toadfish to dissect, Dr. Howie Evans. Oh, my God. This is his 90s.

And you guys are so close. He's loaned me this aye-aye to look at. We've just finished getting it MRI scanned. So it's supposed to come back up here later today after the scanning. And this aye-aye is a really, really rare lemur. And it was actually collected in 1875. 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 how old and precious this particular specimen is. Damn. And so it's...

It's pickled. Pickled in booze. It sounds like. Pickled in booze. Well, now it's in alcohol, but it was, you know, in normal preserving alcohols as opposed to 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 fine. And so you're going to look at an aye-aye later today or later this week? Well, we're going to look at the scans from it. Cool.

Because we can't open it. We have to return it whole. But we are going to look at the scans from this aye-aye. And is there a particular problem that you're looking for to solve with that? Like, does it have a crazy cranial structure? No, I actually don't even know what we're going to 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? Love you this much.

I can't wait to open the wrapper and see what's inside the present. I don't know what I'm going to 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, you've done a lot of work.

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 cutting it open and like blubbers everywhere. I would like to play you a clip from Inside Nature's Giants, wherein Dr. 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 walking down the butcher's aisle in the supermarket. All the meat's really fresh here. This animal, I think, is only around 24 hours dead. So we've got to wipe, give my face a wipe down around my lips. It's funny. The most dangerous thing is if you get it in your eyes or 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 just sprayed me in the face. How far are you? That was probably better in the mouth. 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 form 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 pieces? What happens? Side note, that was a lot of questions.

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Okay. Questions. Wow. That's a lot of questions. I know. I'm sorry. We'll start with the first. So, I don't remember which was the first. How did you get... 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 time I dissected a whale, it wasn't a really big whale. It was actually a fairly small whale. Buckle up, folks. This woman tells good stories. It was a pygmy sperm whale. Oh. And it was about...

I don't know, 15 feet long. Oh, okay. And it actually, it was on a beach, but not when I saw it. So it was my very, very first whale dissection. 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 going to 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. And at the time, I was very interested in how whales were making sound underwater. So I needed to get the voice box. So I rented a car. Oh, no. Car rental places in New York don't open until 8. 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 55 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 he was a little surprised I was already waiting for my shoulder. You're like, I got a sperm whale to cut up. Yeah, I got to move here. I got to move. And so he asked me, well, why are you?

Why are you going so fast? Yeah. They always ask that question because maybe, maybe you're going to have a baby or something. I don't know. Right. Right. I wasn't going to have a baby. So I told him I was on my way to a stranded whale, which I'm sure is an excuse he'd never heard before. 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 I thought I was being all official. I put on my white coat. I had my ID tag, graduate student in anatomy. You know, I was ready. I was ready for this, right? 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

I had all kinds of things back there. In a rental 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. No.

And I think he suddenly realized that I might be the murderer. Oh, my God. Because I had all the know-how 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 for murder. Oh, my God.

So 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. God, I hope you didn't get lightheaded. So I didn't get lightheaded. I didn't have a vasovagal reaction. I didn't pass out because that would have been really bad. So I said to him, well, that's if I don't get there in time. I did.

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 this flopping around whale on the beach. And if I don't 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 trying to figure out if I'm the murderer. 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 radioed back to headquarters, I'm sure, to say what kind of crazy person he had found. Yeah.

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. Can you even with the story right now, though? So the cop down there held up the Smithsonian so they wouldn't leave.

Oh my God. Because it was well past nine by the time I arrived, right? I'm sure, yes. And I'm following him and he says, you have to pay all the tolls. I'm like, okay, we didn't have easy pass back then. You know, you had to actually pay each hopper, you know, the little coins. Did you have to pay the cops tolls too? No, he went right through them, but I had to pay each toll. He would go through and he'd wait and I'd have to pay. And then we'd go on and, you know, sirens and everything. We were going really fast. Yeah.

And I arrived to my very first whale stranding with a police escort with sirens and lights and everything. I made a big deal entry. It was very memorable on many accounts. Oh, my God. That is the way to arrive, dude. That's amazing. So that was my first whale stranding. Did he stay to watch? No.

He did not. Once I climbed on top of the whale, he was done. It was like, okay, I'm out of here. She's going to make blood. I'm going to 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,

So it's a 15-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. So whether it's a 15-foot whale or it's a 65-foot whale, like the one that maybe people have seen on TV where I'm dissecting for Inside Nature's Giants, the whale has a similar body plant 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. Mm-hmm.

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 voice box is going to be in the neck. Well, whales don't have much of a neck. They kind of go from head to body. Right. They're kind of like dudes at the gym that are there a little too much. Yeah, exactly. Very built up. And particularly considering those muscles are being used for movement, 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 where it's going to be. So what does a voice box look like in a whale?

Well, it's huge. Really? It's really huge. So imagine if your voice box was as big as a whale's in proportion to your body. Okay. Not absolutely big. Okay. Absolutely big. I've seen voice boxes of whales are like 12 feet long. Okay. They're huge.

And they have a big sack under them that they use for recycling air that I could just climb into like a sleeping bag. Oh, my God. That's a really big voice box. But how big is that? Considering the whale is really big, it's just as big as the whale's big, right? No, it's big even considering that.

Because the voice box of a big whale, 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, imagine your larynx voice box went from the top of your shoulder down to the bottom of your rib cage. That's like having a saxophone in your body. Yeah.

Talking through a saxophone. Well, 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 20 decibels. Normal speaking volume, about 50. Shouting is 70.

Jackhammers, about 100 decibels. Now music starts to hurt at around 120 and a jet engine is about 140. Eardrums can rupture around 165 decibels. And at 185, the noise can literally kill you. Whales, louder than that. The lovelorn call of a lonely blue whale.

reaches up to 188 decibels. And sperm whales like homobere, the clicks they use for echolocation...

You ready for this? 236 decibels, which can be heard by other whales for thousands of miles. So anytime you see a heavy metal band just thrashing, crushing, know 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 your way around? What does it smell like? Yeah. Well, first of all, it's a really good thing that smell-o-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 65 feet of rotting flesh, you know? You know how bad milk smells when it goes bad? Yeah. Now imagine you've got 65 feet of quarts of milk hanging out there, right? So it's a pretty bad smell when it's rotten.

But like most things, you get into it after a while. Like if you put on perfume, maybe an hour later, you don't even smell it anymore. But if someone else walks into the room for the first time, they smell it, right? I just looked this up and it's called olfactory fatigue or olfactory 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. The stench is like so five minutes ago.

Well, that's what it's like at a whale stranding. After the first hour, you don't smell anymore, but everybody who comes to visit smells it. And when you leave that stranding, everybody that you see smells it on you. Right. No matter how many showers you take. Really? Because the oil gets under your skin. Even when you're wearing latex gloves, it still gets under all that. And there's an aura about it. It's, you know, like when you're around someone who smokes cigarettes and your hair smells. Okay. It's the same thing. Your hair is going to smell. Your skin is going to smell. Your clothing, if it

Even if it was just in the vicinity is going to smell. What do you do? Is there like a special soap that you're like this, like this linseed? 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 the cetaceans, whales, dolphins and porpoises, oh, that number is going to be well over 300, maybe more. Wow.

So quick aside, quick, quick on whale evolution. Okay, this is not the cytology 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 as 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. Peace.

Burb-eye. And when you're dissecting any kind of animal or when you're mapping out the anatomy of any kind of animal, are you ever struck by similarities with humans? Like, do you notice certain things about the brain that you're like, no, that's a pretty human brain. That's surprising for this kind of animal. Or anything that makes you reflect on kind of 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? And even whales are tetrapods that used to have four legs. You know, they still have hindquarters and they still have a pelvis and they still sometimes even have a remnant of a femur or a thigh bone on that pelvis. How weird is that? Nubbins, but nubbins that are huge and pointless.

Again, you're looking at a body plan that'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 humerus, the arm bone. There's the radius and ulna, the two forearm bones. There's the carpal bones, all the little wrist bones. And there are, in fact, five fingers.

And all the little bones of our hands are in a whale's 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? Just longer phalanges. Exactly. Just very, very long.

fingers, but they're webbed. And that webbing has become very stiff. So instead of like webbed 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. Right.

But it is supported by essentially a hand inside there and a 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.

- 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. - God, that's so weird. - And if you look at cattle, they're walking on two of those toes. And if you look at a bird, you'll see, next time you eat chicken, go get a chicken wing and look at it really carefully. You'll see all the same bones that we have in our upper extremity, except 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 plan and you just tweak it. You modify it. You don't add something completely new. You take something that's there and you morph it.

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. Yeah. 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? 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 drawing do you do? Do you use like a Wacom tablet? Do you have your watercolors out? Like, how are you capturing this? I'm very old school. Pencil and paper most of the time. Is there any place people can see your drawings?

Usually the finished products can be seen in publications because I'll 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.

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. It's a good point. You know, that's 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. It's like, oh, it's the truth. I found it on the Internet. You'll have to follow my publications then. That's my version of Instagram, right? Yeah.

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 do scientists 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

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 do 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. Podcasts. Podcasts. Exactly. Ted Talks. 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. They encounter huge pressure changes.

If we can understand how they survive those pressure changes, maybe we can build better flak 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 swim 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 do they communicate underwater? How do 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've got to keep coming back to the surface 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, it'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 want to learn how dolphins make their sonar. We know a lot about how they do it. We don't understand how they process it, though. Marky.

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, what?

Okay, this is a thing. I just found myself on a wiki page entitled Military Dolphins. What? And it says,

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's owner reflects at the first density interface change. But they can tell you if that mine is flooded with water or air.

if it's made of plastic or metal, you know, if it's ticking, you know, there's 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, the dolphin is looking at a fish and goes, 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 its swim bladder is. You know, they can see all of that.

We can't. And how are they doing it? What's the closest we've come? Ultrasound. We can look inside and see someone who's 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. Oh, my God. Because they could see what's going on inside with their sonar. Oh, that's so nice. It was amazing. They stayed just out of reach. I could reach my hand out and almost touch them, and they would stay just beyond the edge of my fingertips. Wow.

And as soon as I would reach them, 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 bit?

being there. 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 and it looks like static. If you don't see this in movie, you really get lost in the dots. I'm sure they're seeing things in 3D 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 didn't 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 biologists about, and you're the one person I feel like will 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 wouldn't say it's such a duh, 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. Out in Oregon, Hank Bettis took a running start to fame and fortune with his version of what the latest birdman should wear. But his flyer went in the wrong direction. Down.

Harsh bale, old-timey bird dude. If you look at submarines and their rudders, it's really not all that different than a fishtail. And I think biomimicry 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 as stable on two. Look how long it takes us to learn how to walk on two legs. We start out crawling. It's way more stable. So it's just efficiency in design is based on nature. There are very few animals that walk around on 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 when 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 going to 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's the hardest part about your job? The most tedious? The most like, oh, God. Yeah.

Reading. Really? Believe it or not, reading. I hate reading. Really? I think that's why I went into anatomy because all the books have pictures in them. I think I'm mildly dyslexic in some way. 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. That's a lot of info. I would say 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 that are given to 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.

So reading and writing, I would say, kind of my nemesis. And that's so impressive that you have the job you have knowing that that is a strength, 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's even more inspiring. Well, thank you. I don't know if I would have qualified for extra time back in the day. Didn't have a label for what I had. Yeah.

What is the thing that you love about your job so much? I know there must be like 12 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, 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 exciting. 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 field work. They're just too big. You 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 going to exotic places to see exotic animals. It's so great that after going through Yellow Pages, going through all these different disciplines, you 1 million percent found the career that like is, you've nailed it. Like you found the career where you get to draw, you get to learn, you get to help people like

Like, like you, you figured it out. That must be, you must want to go back in time and be like, yo, little joy. You're going to be fine. Absolutely. Well, I think the, 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. Work's the wrong word for it. I'm excited about it when I come here. I'm, I'm here to play. Yeah.

That's rad. And I love that later you're just going to be like, lemur, I got a lemur coming up. 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 Dr. Joy Ridenberg, catch her on Science Channel's Mythical Beasts YouTube channel.

You can find her on Twitter at Joy Reidenberg. You cannot find her drawings on Instagram as discussed, but that's okay. She's also on Facebook as Reidenberg TV and Ologies is at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. Do give us a follow. I'm Allie 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.com slash ologies. You can get amazing merch at ologiesmerch.com. Feel free to tag or DM me photos of you in it with the hashtag ologiesmerch.

Mondays, I repost them on Instagram. Thanks, Aaron Talbert, for adminning the internet haven that is Zeology's Facebook group. And I owe a hoil of thanks every week to editor Stephen Ray Morris, who also hosts the Kitty podcast, The Purrcast, and See 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 listened 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 9.30 at night the night before. I am recording this with hair dye on my roots because for some reason going in with hair

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 anesthesiologist that I'm not a real redhead because I don't want to mess up the dosages. 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. Bye-bye. Hackadermatology. Homeology. Cryptozoology. Technology.

Wow, it's like even useful, you know, I'm not just having fun.