As we take a break from FHL teaching for the winter quarter and retreat to warm labs full of good questions and better critters, it is a nice time to reflect on the impact of our educational mission. This “Bite” is about a particular summer course but it could easily be about other courses from summer, fall, or spring. In 1993 I came to Friday Harbor Labs to take the Fish Biomechanics course from Karel Liem and Bruce Miller. Like many before and after me, the experience changed my life. Karel, the Henry Bryant Bigelow Professor of Ichthyology, was my earliest and clearest example of the sheer fun to be had in the world of biology. As Bruce identified fishes on the gravel of Jackson Beach, Karel walked around the group pointing out unusual morphology, strange behaviors, and interesting associations. His wide grin and easy laugh made the waterside quizzes shine as opportunities to reveal preparation or show a currently-empty head ready to be filled. Karel asked questions he did not know the answer to, some he should have (like the identity of tidepool sculpin number 3042) and many for which no one had an answer. It was illuminating to see someone take joy in not knowing things; he viewed not knowing as an opportunity to learn. I have never shaken that course. I was the teaching assistant and eventually the instructor, and have continued teaching it with a distinguished cast of co-instructors. In that time I have met so many wonderful students through teaching the Fish Biomechanics course. Some have in turn sent their own students who are now moving onward and interviewing for jobs.

I just had a scientific paper come out that sent me back to the summer of 2014, to a particularly special edition of the summer fish class. Dr. Misty Paig-Tran – who had been my graduate student, a student in the fish class, and a fish class teaching fellow – was now returning to teach with me. We were joined by Dr. Stacy Farina – at that time a graduate student at Cornell – and Dr. Stephanie Crofts, who was nearly ready to defend her dissertation. A dozen students enrolled from all over this country, as well as two from Canada. As usual, the five-week program brought guest stars: my own Ph.D. advisor Dr. Beth Brainerd made an appearance; Dr. Alice Gibb from Northern Arizona University showed up to talk about fish on land; and Dr. Patricia Hernandez came from George Washington University to show us the importance of looking at the mechanics of early life stages. Microcontroller operation was taught by my best friend Ilya Brook, and the fish were kept healthy and happy by a high school kid – now a Harvard sophomore and co-author – my nephew Dexter Summers. It was a convivial crowd, and though many of us dearly missed Karel Liem's wonderful stories of life as an academic, we did a good job of embracing his spirit of joyful inquisitiveness.

The 2014 fish class on a collecting trip on the R/V Centennial. Fish were sampled is a variety of habitats – intertidal dip netting, subtidal seining, and here we are returning from deep water otter trawling.

We made robots, filmed fishes, molded teeth, wrote computer code, identified sculpins, and had a marvelous time in the intellectual hothouse of an FHL summer. As the course wound down I was sad, as I always am, to see the students drift off to their respective bases of operation. We had plans to meet again, and so we did at the 2015 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting in West Palm Beach, FL. There was great joy in seeing the gang again, and connections were made with previous fish classes. I had an inkling this was a special group when Science Magazine selected two of the fish class projects as meeting highlights: Katherine Corn's shark-toothed saw and Dr. Mackenzie Gerringer's deep sea snailfish robot. Events proved my intuition correct: shortly after the meeting, the final draft of the first manuscript from the summer's data collection went off to a journal. This first piece of work was Kate Galloway's examination of the ontogeny of lingcod teeth, which became a cover article in the Journal of Experimental Zoology (Galloway et al. 2015).

Dr. Matt Kolmann, presently finishing up as the FHL postdoc, published his article on stingray jaw curvature in the Journal of Experimental Biology (Kolmann et al. 2015). He used CT scans as templates to carve jaws from aluminum and tested the ability of these jaws to crush snails. Then Amberle McKee also produced a cover article, this time for Zoology, on flatfish burial mechanics (McKee et al. 2016). The co-authors included a class teaching fellow and a former fish class student, Ian MacDonald. Just a few months later, Katherine Corn published on the “Jawzall,” a device that showed the performance differences among different types of shark teeth. This was in the open access journal Proceedings of the Royal Society Open Science, and it ‘saw’ wide press coverage (Corn et al. 2016). Several fish class students returned to FHL to gather more data, and others labored at their home institutions to round out data sets. This past year a few more of the class projects made it through the peer review process. Cassandra Donatelli – who was an FHL REU, fish class student, then a fish class teaching fellow – published her work on twisting fishes in the Journal of Experimental Biology (Donatelli et al. 2017). In consecutive weeks, Dr. Gerringer – a current post-doc at FHL – and Jean-Luc Stiles published their fish class projects. Gerringer's paper, a very complete study of the function of gelatinous tissue in deep sea fishes, incorporated her snailfish robot as a small part of a much larger and very elegant piece of work (Gerringer et al. 2017). Jean-Luc's data was a part of a larger project led by Sarah Boggett and Dr. Doug Fudge on how hagfishes resist the initial bite of a shark attack. Jean-Luc showed that it’s not because of puncture resistant skin, and Boggett demonstrated the importance of very loose skin barely attached to the underlying muscle (Boggett et al. 2017).

Louis Agassiz insisted that students ‘know’ a fish. That meant learning it inside and out. One of the first and most important steps is making careful drawings of fish to learn the important details. Here Matthias Bouilliart has drawn the eyed and blind side of an English Sole (Parophrys vetulus), along with a close up of scalation and various measurements and counts. The art of science teaches a good deal about the animal.

One class, five weeks, seven publications: that’s a Friday Harbor summer. The class did not just offer a one-time opportunity, it tied a group of young scientists together. They have been each other's biggest supporters at meetings and on social media. They look out for each other, point out opportunities, and buoy each other up when things don't proceed exactly as they should. I am incredibly proud of these early career biologists, and feel keenly the privilege that lets me associate with them in the intellectual non-pareil of the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories. We offer great opportunities, maintain daunting expectations, and demonstrate the highest standards of scientific curiosity. As Lab 8 marches towards the darkness of the longest night, I am starting the preparations for the Fish Biomechanics class in the summer of 2018. It will mark twenty-five years with the best fish biologists in the world.

References:
Boggett S., Stiles J.-L., Summers A.P., and D.S. Fudge. 2017. Flaccid skin protects hagfishes from shark bites. J R Soc Interface: 14.

Corn K.A., Farina S.C., Brash J., and A.P. Summers. 2016. Modelling tooth–prey interactions in sharks: the importance of dynamic testing. Open Science: 3 / 160141.

Donatelli C.M., Summers A.P., and E.D. Tytell. 2017. Long-axis twisting during locomotion of elongate fishes. J. Exp. Biol.: 220 (3632–3640).

Galloway K.A., Anderson P.S.L., Wilga C.D., and A.P. Summers. 2015. Performance of teeth of lingcod, Ophiodon elongatus, over ontogeny. J Exp Zool Part A: n/a–n/a.

Gerringer M.E., Drazen J.C., Linley T.D., Summers A.P., Jamieson A.J., and P.H. Yancey. 2017. Distribution, composition and functions of gelatinous tissues in deep-sea fishes. Open Science: 4 / 171063.

Kolmann M.A., Crofts S.B., Dean M.N., Summers A.P., and N.R. Lovejoy. 2015. Morphology does not predict performance: jaw curvature and prey crushing in durophagous stingrays. J. Exp. Biol.: 218 (3941–3949).

McKee A., MacDonald I., Farina S.C., and A.P. Summers. 2016. Undulation frequency affects burial performance in living and model flatfishes. Zoology (Jena): 119 (75–80).

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