FISH LOVE IN THE LAB
Meet Adam Summers, who wants to scan 33,000 different sea dwellers,
Adam Summers has a whale of a fish tale. The University of Washington professor is attempting to scan and create a 3-D skeletal image of every fish species on the planet that he will make available, free, online for research or education. That’s as many as 33,000 different fish.
He is using a computerized tomography (CT) scanner, like one you’d find in a hospital, which takes a series of X-rays that are then combined to create a detailed reproduction of the internal structure of each specimen. It is, he says, “a monumental exercise in data collection.”
Summers is passionate about fish. He kept aquariums while growing up in Manhattan and spent his summers on Lake Wahwashkesh near Parry Sound, Ont., “basically building fishing rods and lures, trying to catch fishes . . . I was a seriously obsessed child.”
As a university student in the Boston-area, he would take fish to medical centres at night and give techies chocolate bars in exchange for using the scanners. Scans, though, are expensive — up to $2,500 each at hospitals. But, thanks to private donations, the 52-year-old was able to purchase his own small scanner for his lab on the San Juan Islands, about 100 kilometres north of Seattle.
Summers gets fish on loan — typically wrapped in ethanol-soaked cheesecloth — from museums all over the world. They must be museum specimens so it always remains possible to examine the actual fish. The Royal Ontario Museum has sent him 56 so far. He puts as many as 20 specimens through at once, packed together in a cylinder “like a fish burrito.” The digital images are then separated. He has scanned about 1,000 since February and expects to be finished in two to three years as other scientists jump in to help.
The idea to scan every fish “started out as a joke,” says Summers. When he bought his scanner for about $450,000, a condition of the donations was that the machine could be used for free.
Among items brought to him to be scanned were fish, and he would post the results online. They were such a hit that people would ask him what fish would be next. To which he kiddingly replied, “I’ll get to all of them eventually, just be patient.” When he hit on the idea of doing several at once at a lower resolution, it went from an expensive, time-consuming lark to an affordable, all-consuming quest.
The fish scans help researchers study everything from medicine and anatomy to evolution and animal migration, says Summers. Already one of his colleagues is using the scans to better understand exostosis, where excess bone grows where it shouldn’t, a condition sometimes associated with arthritis. “It turns out that fishes are a good model for the study of exostosis,” says Summers. “If we understand how those come about and how to address them, that would be pretty powerful.”
Summers calls himself a biomechanist. He studies the physics and engineering of fish — he was the scientific consultant on both Finding Nemo and Finding Dory to ensure that the animated fish moved authentically — with an eye toward applying it to new technologies.
Studying fins, for example, might generate ideas for underwater vehicles; burrowing fish might lead to robots that burrow. He has scanned clingfishes to “figure out how they stick, because I suspect I can steal their methods for some brand new types of suction cups.”
While this project has a long way to go, Summers and some colleagues have already applied for grants to broaden their scope. They are now hoping to scan every vertebrate. That would be about 56,000 species.
“The whole plan is to recruit a ton of different people to help us scan things,” he says. “It’s a Tom-Sawyer-painting-the- fence problem. We’ve got lots of people lining up now to paint the fence.”