Prosanta Chakrabarty discusses fishes as evolutionary puzzle pieces
How can small, blind cavefishes aid in uncovering the story of continental movement?
Dr. Prosanta Chakrabarty, Associate Professor in Biological Sciences and Curator of Fishes at the LSU Museum of Natural Science, travels the world researching the morphology and DNA of fish species to uncover
pieces of the world’s deep evolutionary and geological puzzles. (Transcript below.)
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LSU Experimental is a podcast series that shares the research and the “behind the scenes” stories of LSU faculty, student, and alumni investigators across the disciplines. Listen and learn about the exciting topics of study and the individuals posing the questions. Each episode is recorded and produced in CxC Studio 151 on the campus of Louisiana State University, and is supported by LSU Communication across the Curriculum and LSU College of Science. LSU Experimental is hosted by Dr. Becky Carmichael and edited by Kyle Sirovy.
Transcript
Becky Carmichael
[0:01] This is Experimental, where we explore exciting research occurring at Louisiana State University and learn about the individuals posing the questions. I'm Becky Carmichael, and today LSU's Museum of Natural Sciences Ichthyologist, Dr. Prosanta Chakrabarty tells us how he travels the world discovering new fishes to better understand Ichthyology, evolution, and the history of Earth.
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[0:23] I'm a very, very lucky guy. I get to study the history of the world by traveling the globe collecting fishes. It might not be obvious at first that animals living today can tell us so much about the past, but they really can't. I'm a natural historian at Louisiana State University's Museum of Natural Science and an associate professor in the Department of Biological Science. I'm an ichthyologist. People that can't say that say I'm the fish guy at LSU. I have a collection of nearly half a million fish from thousands of species housed at the museum. I use that collection to teach students about ichthyology and evolution. And we examine the bodies and the DNA of these specimens to discover who is most closely related to whom. And in turn that information helps us understand how different parts of the globe are interconnected, or were once physically connected. As an ichthyologist, I was really interested in discovering patterns of relationships. In fact, my very first research project was as a junior in university working at the American Museum of Natural History, describing a new species of Cichlid from Madagascar. Cichlids are a family of fish with a distribution in many southern hemisphere continents, but they live exclusively in freshwater. So how can they live on these landmasses that are separated by thousands of miles of salty ocean? How did they get there? This new species I was describing for part of my internship had some of its closest relatives all the way over in India, not in Madagascar. That was amazing to me. we hypothesized that the Indian and Malagasy Cichlids were last together when those landmasses were last together 88 million years ago. These two landmasses started to drift apart at that time, and apparently carried the ancestors of these species. I wanted to study other patents like this. And I went on to grad school and other academic positions hoping to do so. Luckily, I was able to do just that. I'm basically still working on that first research project I started as an undergrad even now as a tenured professor. One of the amazing things about fishes are their distribution in different environments. About half of all fish species are freshwater, and the other half are marine or salt water species. That is, despite there being a whole lot more salt water out there. If you look at a globe, there's lots of oceans, not many lakes and rivers proportionally. Only about 2% of the world's water is freshwater. The most of that is ice and the poles. Another large percentage of that is groundwater. So really half of the world's fish species lives in .02% of all the world's water. Why is that? That's the driving question in my research program. Why are species distributed the way they are? And how can they help explain deep evolutionary history or geology. One of my favorite examples are some from cave fishes I discovered with my colleagues in Madagascar. These species closest relatives are in Australia, and those are also cave fishes. There's no way a 3-inch long eyeless cave fish can swim across the Indian Ocean. They can't even survive a few feet outside of the cave. When we compare the DNA of the species, we found that they have been separated for almost the time that the southern continents were last together. The cave fishes didn't really move at all. It's the continents that separated them and bury them to their present location. I love discovering these patterns. Whether it's looking at Central American species or other species of cave fishes. It's a great excuse to see the world. I get to go to some really remote areas where people hardly travel, but I always travel with locals. I don't always get to see the famous cultural sites of some of these countries like the Sydney Opera House or the Taj Mahal, although I often do. What I get to see is something even more ancient and special. I get to see the untouched forests or cave systems or river bodies that have been there for millennia, changing ever so slightly. And as they change, the species they harbor change to. I love figuring out how all that change occurred and what it meant for life on earth.
Mark DiTusa
[4:13] We're talking here with Dr. Chakrabarty. Actually, I should have asked you how you pronounce your last name.
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[4:17] Like that. Yeah.
Mark DiTusa
[4:18] Okay. So, tell me about yourself. What do you study? Who are you?
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[4:22] Sure, I'm a curator of fishes at the Museum of Natural Science, and also an associate professor in biological sciences. But I'm also a dad with twin girls and bunch of other stuff, but I think we'll stick to the facts here.
Mark DiTusa
[4:35] Well I mean it's important to note that scientists are real people. I mean..
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[4:38] I'm a real person.
Mark DiTusa
[4:39] Yeah.
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[4:39] You can touch and feel me if you ask permission first.
Mark DiTusa
[4:42] Yeah, that that would be good. I would hope anyway. So just give me a general sense of what you study. and why you like studying it.
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[4:50] Sure. Well, I'm a natural historian. I focus on fishes. And I guess I study fish, because that's where my training was early on working as a as a a junior, when I was a McGill University student. And I went to the American Museum of Natural History. And I studied with a wonderful woman, Melanie Stiassny, who taught me all about fish and life and studying it. And now she's one of my best friends. And so that got me going in studying fish and natural history.
Mark DiTusa
[5:21] Pretty cool. And so you're a Ichthyologist. I love that word.
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[5:25] Ichthyologist. Yes.
Mark DiTusa
[5:27] And so you studied and you got a research project in McGill? Is that correct?
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[5:32] Yeah, it was actually, I was doing my major at McGill University, which is in Montreal. A beautiful school. And I grew up in New York City in Queens, which is not well known for its habitats for life, let's say. And I did that internship at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. And so I do the commute and everything. And I actually ended up going back there as a postdoc. So after I got my PhD, and I still love... That's still my favorite place in the world. The American Museum of Natural History.
Mark DiTusa
[6:05] I see. And how did you get on that project as a junior?
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[6:09] That's a good question. I asked Melanie about this last week when I saw her at the our annual meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologist. That's a fun show. It doesn't sound like one, but that's a good time. And I had to remember that I kind of wrote an application on a very serendipitous way where I found out... This is, you know, pre-internet for most of this stuff. And I mailed in an application. I didn't have a typewriter. So I like printed off copies. I cut and pasted the old fashioned way with like scissors and glue. And this was in 1999. And she accepted me for some reason. I kind of paraphrased some words from a textbook I had about the project that I had in mind. For some reason, you know, the fate fell on me and she chose me and that was really the start of my research career. So I'm really thankful that happened.
Mark DiTusa
[7:06] So you said that you kind of stuck with fish, because that was your... That's kind of where you got started. Was just kind of a momentum thing? Were you just kind of like, I'm excited for fishes. I, you know... It's kind of where I got my start in, so I'm just not going to change it or what?
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[7:19] Sort of. I mean, I grew up loving animals. I mean, at the American Museum, again, I was a five year old looking up at the dinosaurs. Just thinking, Wow, this is amazing. I just want to do this. And I never wanted to be an astronaut or a fireman or anything. I just wanted to study zoology. And when I got that start working on fishes, I realized I really liked it. And I got a publication out of it, which is something I try to get my undergrads here to do, because that's the currency of science, are those publications. So getting that really gave me a leg up on studying fish again, but I also loved mammals and herps, amphibians and reptiles. So I could have gone either way, but I stuck with fish and I love it. I'm glad I did.
Mark DiTusa
[8:04] Okay, so I know and you talked about in the monologue that you have gone and, you know, in done field studies in various places. And what is your favorite? What was your favorite trip? And do you have a funny or interesting story from one of those trips?
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[8:20] I guess I'll talk... I've been to now almost 30 plus countries for fieldwork and probably the most memorable was Madagascar. I would say parts of it were my favorite. The parts that are not my favorite were having a lot of the team get very sick. And like I tell people, you know, at first when people were getting sick, it was kind of funny. And then it really wasn't funny. And now it's kind of funny again. So it kind of goes full circle and everybody's okay. But we got weird diseases and sicknesses because we're going in places no one's gone, swimming around sinkholes and caves. And so it was quite scary. And I ended up spending, I think more than a month there just before I got here. To LSU in 2008. So it was a weird and an amazing start to come from Madagascar, basically, to move to Baton Rouge. But that trip, you know, we were going in places that even the locals wouldn't go because of the, you know, 20-foot Nile crocodiles. Or they just didn't like going into caves because they didn't have flashlights. Or many of the villagers hadn't even seen a car before. So it's a strange and wild place still. And that's so hard to find. I mean, it's hard to find a place where you really feel like you're in the wilderness where very few people have gone. And lots of Madagascar was like that. It felt like an alien world.
Mark DiTusa
[9:45] So how did you feel safe enough to go in those places where nobody wanted to go? What about those 20-foot Nile crocodiles? I'm sure you didn't feel that much safer from them than the locals, did you?
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[9:57] Yeah, especially since the first place we went is where we all got sick. And we had to send the lead on that trip home. And he had been there nine times. So if that's going to knock him out, then we're in trouble. But we... Maybe it's hubris or machismo or something, which I have little of, but we kept going. And we discovered some new species doing that. And I don't know why... You don't know what you're going to be like when you're in that situation. Some people, you know, are... You think they'd be great in the field. And maybe they're big and talk tough and then they get to, you know, see a tree with a snake in it and they run away or something. But other people who you wouldn't think would be great, and maybe I'm one of them, something happens where, you know, being in the wilderness takes over and you feel the need to go explore and discover. And for some reason I have that gene or whatever it is that helps me do that.
Mark DiTusa
[10:57] Wow.
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[10:57] So it's... I find it incredibly fulfilling. I love sitting out there and trying to discover things, even if the situation might be a little bit hairy.
Mark DiTusa
[11:07] I just find that interesting because as a physicist, like, you know, there isn't, at least for a lot of... At least condensed matter, maybe astronomy is definitely different. But for us, like there isn't any into the field, like our environment is the basement, any basement. And so I just find it interesting in talking to biologists kind of how different it is. How they get into the field, a lot of them, if it's especially like ecology, that they can still have kind of that interaction with nature. And that's important. And so was that kind of part of your appeal of the job?
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[11:44] I think so. Yeah. I mean, I had some formative time, even though I grew up in Queens, and you know, my only outlets were at first the zoo and the museum's there. I did get to go to India as an eight year old. And I spent four months there. And it was pretty rural. I mean, I had no... I was in New York City kid that had probably seen 5 stars my whole life. And then I was opened up to, you know, millions of them. And you can see the fishbowl of the earth and, you know, catch frogs and snakes. And I did, and I loved it. And so maybe that had a lot to do with me feeling comfortable in that natural environment. But I still do. That's just my favorite thing to do. And my kids feel that too. And I think Louisiana is a great place for people to be able to do that.
Mark DiTusa
[12:29] Yeah, I mean, there are more rural parts of South... North America. South America? I don't know.
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[12:36] South U.S.
Mark DiTusa
[12:37] South U.S.! There we go. And so yeah, there are places that are perfect to explore safely. Don't do it. Don't do it now kids. Um, so if you could tell your younger self one thing, what would it be?
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[12:52] You know I've thought about that a little bit. And I want to say to my younger self, be patient, but I also want to tell myself, younger yourself, you know, do at your pace, because part of what I do is kind of get anxious about the next project. And I like doing it and putting, you know, diving into projects. So maybe patience isn't what I should be telling my younger self, but there is definitely some pacing and an understanding of what I was doing. That would have made things a little easier, but maybe that's part of the learning process. So... I hope that's not a cop out to the question.
But I should have been more patient, but maybe because I wasn't so patient on jumping
on projects and saying, Yeah, sure, let's go, you know, to this thing that probably
made me who I am today. And so I can be more patient now.
Mark DiTusa
[13:30] No. But you didn't have the luxury before.
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[13:47] I didn't have the luxury, yeah. I had to keep pace and maybe go ahead of others that were more patient. So maybe it was good for me.
Mark DiTusa
[13:55] So what kind of difficulties came because you weren't so patient?
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[13:58] So you know, as a scientist, the big thing is getting scientific papers in the the best kinds of journals. And that takes a long time. And that would have been good for me career-wise. But also, if I had waited and tried to wait for those publications to come into fruition in a deeper way, I wouldn't have had the time to move on to a different kinds of projects. And I'm kind of a weird scientist in that I kind of have a lot of things going at the same time. And I think that's good and bad. But I think it's mainly been good for me. And so not being so patient and kind of moving on from something that I think is completed, has allowed me to go back to those things a little later, when I did have more time. And so... I hope that makes sense. It's kind of an academic thing. But what I tell my grad students is, I worry a lot more for the perfectionist than I do about the people that can think, learn, write quickly and articulate that in a fuller way than some of those perfectionists.
Mark DiTusa
[15:16] So for example.. And I always kind of come back to myself because I know myself the best. So I wouldn't be doing a science radio show, you know, if I wanted to dive deep into one thing and not have multiple irons in the fire, if that makes sense? And so I guess my question is like, one, how do you balance it? And two, is it okay that you... Have you... Has your professional career suffered, because you're trying to balance all these different things?
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[15:46] I think the answer of how I do it, and why I do is pretty actually simple. It's super fun.
Mark DiTusa
[15:52] Okay.
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[15:52] So I just have a lot of fun having lots of things going on at the same time. I don't get bored. I don't feel the stress of having you need to finish up one thing, because there's multiple things going on. And they do end up being finished. And sometimes they help each other out, those projects. I don't have a gigantic lab. But we have lots of ideas, and we try to complete those ideas. And I think it's good. You know, most ichthyologists work on one family, or one area, or one kind of thing. And I do both marine and freshwater. I do things that are in the deep sea. Things that are in caves. Things that are, you know, in Louisiana. And I think that kind of malleability allowed me to work on the oil spill when it happened. When I moved here from New York, I didn't think there was going to be anything new in the Gulf of Mexico. And my first trip out, we found two new species.
Mark DiTusa
[16:47] Wow.
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[16:48] So we saw that one species that was widespread was actually 3. And that first trip helped me realize that there's a lot to learn in the Gulf. And then when the oil spill happened, we realized like, not only is the Gulf poorly known, it's mostly unknown. And that's still true. So we're still trying to learn from the Gulf. So I have undergrads. I have my postdoc in undergrad in the Gulf of Mexico right now collecting things. And, you know, so going around and discovering new things has really been a luxury. But it's, I think, a good thing to have so many... What's the expression? Having thumbs in every pot or something like that? Or...
Mark DiTusa
[17:31] Fingers in every pie, maybe?
I'm making that up. I have no idea.
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[17:33] Something like that.
We'll Google that one later. I think it's better wrong, however it's supposed to be.
Mark DiTusa
[17:40] I believe that. And so if you wanted... If somebody was listening to this, and going, wow, I just kind of... I want to become a biologist, or any sort of, I guess any sort of academical person. And this might run counter to your own advice or it may not. Kind of... Or what you were telling your younger self. You know, what would you tell them how to do? What... How should they pursue this?
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[18:02] Sure. I tell them... And it doesn't have to be for biology. It could be whatever they want to be. You know, LSU is a research one university. All your professors and lecturers have done research or are trained in that. And so you can go to them and say, I want to get research experience. And they all should be able to help you do that. If you just leave with a 4.0 and no research experience, what are you going to show your next stage when you apply for a job? You know? What're you going to show them. You going to show them your GPA? You have to show them what you've learned and on how you can turn what you learned in a class into some real things. And I think I would... One thing I wish I had done earlier than my junior year was do those research projects, because I would have had more. But I'm glad it happened the way it did. But I hope the undergrads here... You know, classes might seem overwhelming, but there's always time for some additional research projects. And I think you should take advantage of being at LSU by going up to your professors that you like and say, hey, what can I do with you to get some more research experience?
Mark DiTusa
[19:08] And we have these opportunities at LSU if you're just a, you know, high school student or anyone who, you know, might want to pursue higher education. Those opportunities abound at LSU.
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[19:18] Yeah, absolutely.
Mark DiTusa
[19:19] So is there anything else you wanted... That was on your head that you wanted to bring out in the interview or...
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[19:25] I can't think of anything now. I mean, maybe given like, the, how sad the big outside world is now, you know, from Baton Rouge to Nice, just being able to kind of have this community that we have at LSU. That's a special thing. And I hope people understand that. There might be not as many opportunities as people would like to speak out. But I think there's a friend behind every door here. And I think that's a special thing. I think there's a reason that so many people from Louisiana still live in Louisiana. So few people leave, but it is good to go and travel the world. I think I'm very lucky to be able to do that. And you learn so much about yourself and about how people treat each other by traveling. And so, you know, spend your money on on traveling and discovering new things abroad, and not so much on maybe things that won't matter in the long term. That's my best advice I think for younger people. Just go out and have an adventure.
Mark DiTusa
[20:33] Well, thank you so much, Dr. Chakrabarty. This has been wonderful.
Prosanta Chakrabarty
[20:36] Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Experimental Podcast
[20:39] Experimental was recorded and produced in the KLSU Studios here on the campus of Louisiana State University and is supported by LSU's Communication Across the Curriculum and the College of Science. Today's interview was conducted by Mark DiTusa and edited by Bailey Wilder. To learn more about today's episode, subscribe to the podcast, ask questions, and recommend future investigators visit cxc.lsu.edu/experimental