• Question: what makes your work so interesting? What is the most exciting thing you have discovered in your research?

    Asked by 100034663susan to Ceri-Wyn, Betul, Bridget, Laurel, Maria on 14 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by sumaya, static, smirky105, amelon.
    • Photo: Maria Pawlowska

      Maria Pawlowska answered on 13 Jun 2010:

      What makes my research so interesting is that I get to explore the environment in which complex life eventually evolved – i.e. where the organisms we most likely are descended from came and the conditions in which they lived. My most exciting discoveries are still in the process of being published so I can’t give too much away bit it seems that my results show that shallow marine environments were pretty different from what we used to think they’re like.

    • Photo: Betul Arslan

      Betul Arslan answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      It is cool that through replaying the evolution of ancient proteins, you can actually travel in time.

      My doctorate thesis was on an enzyme (called MAO) that leads to aggression, depression and aggressive behavior. I looked at the properties of the last common ancestor of this enzyme, that belongs to fish. Discovering that fish contains only a single MAO vs. mammals (including humans) that has two was interesting. I also found out that a single gene in fish was capable of doing the work of two, talk about economy!

    • Photo: Bridget Waller

      Bridget Waller answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      The truth is…that most of the time I make very small discoveries that aren’t all that interesting to most people…For example, one day during my PhD I discovered that chimpanzees can’t flare their nostrils (like humans can). I was incredibly pleased with this discovery…but it also made me laugh as it seemed a bit trivial! On the other hand, when you look at all the work as a whole the picture gets more interesting. My team have shown that facial expression is very similar between chimpanzees and humans, and that they communicate in a very complex and subtle way with their faces. This helps us understand how and why emotion evolved to be such an important part of human life.

    • Photo: Ceri-Wyn Thomas

      Ceri-Wyn Thomas answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Well, I think my research is the bee’s knees because I am looking at the earliest animal fossils we have ever found on Earth. They are the embryos of early marine organisms (probably squidgy jellyfish-like creatures that roamed the Precambrian seas). The fact that such delicate little balls of cells have been preserved for nearly half a billion years is just incredible! I feel as though I’m looking through a window back into the deep past. When I look at these fossilised embryos down the microscope for the first time I know I’m the first human being to see this organism in millions of years. That is a huge privilege. When I find a specimen with its original cells still in tact I get goosebumps!

      I think my most exciting discovery was finding something called an ephyra when I was rooting through my specimens. An ephyra is a stage in a jellyfish’s life cycle (before it becomes all blobby and tentically!)- it looks like a tiny star floating about in the water. I found a fossilised star-shaped thing and realised what it was when I was leafing through an invertebrate textbook! We’ll probably never find a fossil one again from that time since they rarely landed on the seabed to become covered in sediment and eventually end up as fossils. This confirms that some of the Cambrian-aged embryos we’ve found, that look as though they belong to the life cycle of an ancient jellyfish, is likely to be correct! Hooray! It’s random but it’s so much fun too 😉

    • Photo: Laurel Fogarty

      Laurel Fogarty answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      It took me all day to answer this question! It is hard.

      The most interesting aspect of my work is finding out about animal culture. Humans have traditions and cultures- for example, our tradition of teaching and going to school and building on existing knowledge has enabled humans to land on the moon and build structures you can see from space.
      Even though no animal traditions have reached those heights, discovering things about how animals pass on traditions can help us understand how human traditions work and where our unique abilities come from.

      In our lab we have discovered the most efficient way to learn traditions from others in an environment that changes using a computer tournament where different strategies had to fight to stay alive in a simulated battle.

      I also worked with New Caledonian Crows who are known for their ability to use tools, with them I discovered that New Caledonian Crows can outsmart human researchers a little too easily…

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