Specimen Stories

There is a saying that someone is "eagle-eyed" if they spot minute details - and if I asked you to name an animal with good eyesight, you'd probably think of an owl or an eagle. But in this episode we'll hear that the largest relative eye size of any vertebrate is found in an entirely different group of animals - frogs and toads. Kate Thomas, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, surveyed eye size in hundreds of frogs and toads and asked how eye size has evolved in this diverse group. Why do frogs and toads have such large eyes? How does eye size affect vision in the first place? And did you know that many frogs can see colors in the dark?

Learn more about Katie's research on the podcast website at klaranorden.com/specimenstories.

Music from https://pixabay.com/music/ and https://www.purple-planet.com.

Fall is upon us and it is high time for many animals to be on the move. Millions of birds migrate south each fall. But another animal currently migrating south is the monarch butterfly. The monarch butterflies migrate over 2000 kilometers every fall to reach their wintering grounds in Mexico. It's an astonishing journey for an insect. But not all monarchs migrate. Some populations stay cosy and warm year round on tropical islands in the Pacific ocean. How did these monarchs end up there? And how did they loose their ability to migrate? Micah Freedman, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, realized that museum collections of monarchs could give us unique insights into these questions. In this episode, I talk to Micah about his research on monarchs, why they migrate, and how and why some monarchs lost migration altogether.  

To learn more about monarch migrations, head to the podcast website at klaranorden.com/specimenstories.

Music from https://pixabay.com/music/ and https://www.purple-planet.com.

Specimen Stories Trailer

How do we know what the climate was like thousands or even millions of years ago? We would need some kind of record of what the planet was like in the past. Ideally, we'd want a record with not only high temporal resolution - showing the changes year by year - but also with wide geographical scope, showing changes not only in one place, but globally. It turns out that an obscure microscopic sea organism can provide just that for us - foraminiferans. In this episode, I talk to Marina Rillo, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. Marina use modern and historical collections of foraminifera to study how ecosystems in the oceans have changed through time, and what we can learn from this in predicting future changes.

If you want to learn more about forams, head over to the show website at klaranorden.com/specimenstories.

Music from https://pixabay.com/music/ and https://www.purple-planet.com.

How do you evolve to have the entire right side of your face moving to the left side? Seems like a pretty outlandish thing to do - but the humble flatfish achieves just that feat during its lifespan. In this episode, I talk to Kory Evans, Assistant Professor at Rice University, to learn much more about how strange fish skulls evolve, and what this can tell us more broadly about how extraordinary lifeforms evolve. I promise, you will want to take a closer look at fish after this episode!

If you want to see some examples of diverse fish skulls, head over to the show website at klaranorden.com/specimenstories.

Music from https://pixabay.com/music/ and https://www.purple-planet.com.

Super-black materials are blacker than black - they are so good at capturing light that almost no light escapes them. While a normal black object still reflects some light, which allows you to see the shape of the object, super-black objects appear almost shapeless. You can see this in objects covered by a human-made super-black material, Vantablack. But how do birds produce super-black colors? And why do they produce them? What can engineers learn from nature’s way of making super-black? To answer these questions, I talk to Dakota (Cody) McCoy, who discovered super-black bird plumage while being a student at Yale University. Cody is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, and she’s interested in how nature have come up with clever ways to modify light, and what we can learn from nature in developing new materials.

If you want to learn more about super-black feathers, head over to the show website at klaranorden.com/specimenstories.

Music from https://pixabay.com/music/ and https://www.purple-planet.com.