The way animals are constructed and built, it's awe inspiring.
And partly because I'm a very visual person – so morphology, I find it to be beautiful
in a way that art is beautiful.
I had, since I was very young, just a particular interest in reptiles.
Really just an aesthetic thing, I can't explain it, I just always liked them.
When a lot of lizards feed, they're using their tongues to capture prey,
not their jaws, not their teeth.
And they're using their tongues to manipulate the
food when it's in the mouth.
And I just began to realize if I wanted to understand feeding function, I needed
to understand something about the tongues.
When I was just a beginning graduate student, I was talking to another young
member of the department, and he said, oh, do you know what you're going to study?
And I said, yeah, I'm going to work on lizard tongues, and he burst out laughing.
So I realized at this early stage that I'm going to have to explain
to people why this is interesting.
I see lizard and snake tongues as being my Darwin's finches.
They're this incredibly variable system.
And we can start understanding the diversity in terms of
how one lineage optimized.
The sensory function of the tongue.
And this other lineage, they've optimized the feeding function of the tongue.
You look at other lineages and you find really interesting compromises where
they try to do both functions and that's exactly what we're trying to understand.
We're trying to understand the basis of diversity.
When you are interested in the functional aspect, typically
happens so fast you can't see it.
Finally we got to the place where video now, the video resolution
and frame rate is astonishing.
So it just opened a whole new world on this behavior I was interested in.
And so anything that comes across into my view, I try to put in
front of a high speed camera.
You see things that you had no idea were happening, things that were unpredictable.
I've been studying specifically how chameleons are able to hold
on to their prey so effectively.
People have thought it was pretty much just stickiness, but what I've
learned is that they actually, with their tongues, are able to wrap
around and grasp the prey item.
It looks like a pair of lips or maybe the, uh, tips of an elephant trunk.
It's astonishing.
There are salamanders that don't actually project the tongue, but just
have this very soft, compliant blob in the mouth and It's, it's very dramatic.
It just kind of goes, blah.
It's so soft and gooey looking.
It's bizarre.
It contacts the prey item, and right at the point of contact,
then the tongue surface begins to fold into a vertical crease.
And so it gets pinched between two surfaces.
It's never been described before.
We just had some tadpoles in the lab because we were actually studying
feeding in larval salamanders.
and the larval salamanders would eat tadpoles.
So, they were swimming around in a tank, and I was just sitting there staring at
them, and I saw the tadpole swim really fast up to the surface of the water.
It just swam up and swam away, and then a little bubble came out of its mouth.
I couldn't figure out what it had done, so, well, it turned
out it was breathing air.
And that wasn't so sho I mean, it's actually unknown to many
people that tadpoles have lungs.
and breathe air, most of them do.
Um, but what turned out to be particularly interesting was
the way they were breathing air.
I assumed it was a well known behavior.
But I, you know, you have to keep in mind that things like high resolution, high
speed video haven't been around that long, so people have been studying tadpoles.
For a long time, but they didn't have the benefit of these tools.
And so, it turns out this was a novel behavior that no one had ever seen before.
And that actually, that single completely chance observation led to a whole branch
of research and a series of publications.
It's the kind of thing that You can discover by visualizing something,
slowing it down, seeing it close up, and, uh, when you're lucky, you just
discover something completely new.
Research is a very creative process.
It's challenging.
It certainly is not always rewarding.
But, uh, when you see something so unexpected, or you understand
something that eluded you, They are real moments of, you know, real highs.
And every day, it's a possibility that you're going to discover that next thing.