I have had the opportunity to study a diversity of structures and critters – from teeth and body armor like tough scales, to softer tissues like lips and the discs of fishes that suck onto surfaces. Each project requires a set of imaging tools that reveal hard and soft anatomy in different ways. One of the great joys of my work is translating careful observations of anatomy into beautiful images and figures. 2D visualization like histology and photography let me see the world through clearly arranged points of view, while 3D imaging shows me context and relationships.
I started as a histologist, someone who slices things thinly to allow stains to reveal different tissues.
I use paraffin and plastic histology to measure qualitative and quantitative traits of tissues like how collagen is arranged or how much muscle is present to make predictions about their mechanics.
Pacus, the herbivorous cousins of notoriously carnivorous piranhas, have large multi-cuspid teeth that are hidden by large lips analogous to the tongues and snoots of giraffes and rhinos (Cohen and Kolmann, 2021). Using plastic histology, I sectioned the lips of the pacus to find that they are not muscular like those of mammals, but are instead composites with layers of collagen, fat and keratin (the material that makes up our fingernails, Figure 1). Sometimes it's important to not just see the morphology and arrangement of tissues but also know their identity. This is where paraffin histology comes into play. It revealed that some of the soft tissue in pacu lips is elastin: a protein responsible for stretchiness.