skeleton art using a technique known as clearing and staining. Adam taught me clearing and staining as part of the course and I used it to study fish functional morphology. When I started my PhD program in the fall of 2016 at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the walls of my house were pretty empty and boring. I went to a local art gallery to get some decorations. That’s when I realized that art is expensive, at least on a graduate student budget. I had a lot of cleared and stained fish, so I decided to try to make images like Adam’s to decorate my house. Unfortunately (though now I see it as fortunate), I didn’t have a nice camera, light table, or set-up like Adam, so my images were not as great quality. To fix that, I tried to Photoshop my images, and discovered cool effects in the process. Instead of simply taking photos, I started creating pieces of abstract and modern art for my walls. I went to Kinkos to print out my first pieces for my house, and was excited about how they came out. With the art in my car, I went for lunch across the street at a restaurant called Vin205. I noticed they were taking the art down, and asked if they put up work from local artists. They said they sometimes do, so I went and brought in my artwork. They loved it - I later found out
that one owner used to be an underwater photographer and the other is an avid fisherman, so it happened to be a perfect fit. They put my art up in their restaurant – which is still there – and that’s when I realized that I was an artist. Any interesting fish functional morphology, biomechanics and/or behaviour stories you can tell us? The best story I have for this is probably how I got into the field. I was born a fish biologist. I always had an inexplicable passion for fish, but thought I would get into some flashy aspect of it like studying the predatory behavior of shark and big game fish. This changed when I was taking a course the summer after my first year of college at
Remora Disks
Zygote Quarterly 28 | vol 2 | 2020 | ISSN 1927-8314 | Pg 103 of 140