Rose Fauché
Appearances
Short Wave
Anglerfish Ancestors Once Roamed The Seafloor
So my part of the project was... looking at the morphology of anglerfish skulls. I had to look at the skeletons of the anglerfish and then determine which bones are which and like the edges of all the bones and things like that. So I took the CT scans that we had of these anglerfish and And first I had to make them into like a 3D model.
Short Wave
Anglerfish Ancestors Once Roamed The Seafloor
And then we have this very fun software that basically lets me put a little dot on certain points of that skull model. We settled on, I believe it's 111 landmarks that I put onto each of these skulls.
Short Wave
Anglerfish Ancestors Once Roamed The Seafloor
So all these different museums across the world have like fantastic collections of fish that are basically just preserved in ethanol. And there is like an online database where you can search for, you know, whatever species of fish you're looking for and it will show you. And the fish world is actually, it's pretty small. It feels kind of like everybody knows everybody.
Short Wave
Anglerfish Ancestors Once Roamed The Seafloor
And so if you ask nicely enough, They'll FedEx you fish that have been sitting in a jar since like 1965. And if you're a very lucky undergrad, you get to open up a package in lab one day and you're holding like one of the rarest fish on earth. Were you one of these lucky undergrads who got to do this?
Short Wave
Anglerfish Ancestors Once Roamed The Seafloor
I did get to be an undergrad who opened up a box from FedEx one day and there's a football fish, you know, wrapped in cheesecloth, soaked in ethanol. And I picked up the fish and I was so excited. I ran down the halls of this building to like go and show all of my friends that I had a football fish.
Short Wave
Anglerfish Ancestors Once Roamed The Seafloor
Also, I'm sure it's, you know, shocking to hear, but 60-year-old fish sitting in ethanol do have a particular smell about them. Delicious.
Short Wave
Anglerfish Ancestors Once Roamed The Seafloor
I remember seeing this movie in the theaters. I was three in 2003. This is Rose Fauché from Rice University. And apparently when the anglerfish scene came on, I was so freaked out by it, I started crying and my mom had to take me out of the theater.
Short Wave
Anglerfish Ancestors Once Roamed The Seafloor
Rose? Well, so I think especially natural history and marine biology at this point in time can be a pretty devastating field to work in. You know, so much of what we do and what we think about is how much we are constantly losing that's already gone. But there's something about the scope of this project that felt positive and kind of like a nice reprieve from that. Yeah.
Short Wave
Anglerfish Ancestors Once Roamed The Seafloor
I think a lot of this project was... celebrating the biodiversity that we do have and yeah it's kind of nice to to for once not be like well here's a thousand genuses about to go extinct no here's a thousand genuses being opportunistic hunters in the ocean yeah