Dr. Catherine Macdonald
speaker
130 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Dr. Catherine Macdonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You're going to get answers that sound like white shark, tiger shark, hammerhead, bull shark, sometimes mako.
And those are all extremely cool shark species, but they're actually also very extreme outliers in terms of what a shark is.
So for all of our listeners out there, the average shark is three to four feet long, kind of brown gray, a little bit dumpy and lives in the medium deep sea.
So most sharks don't really look anything like those sleek predatory animals that we tend to come across in documentaries or on TV.
And you love them for it.
So working with our amazing collaborators around the world, my PhD student Emily Yeager wrote a paper reporting that remoras, which are a symbiotic fish that often travels with sharks or mantas,
are sort of popping up the cloaca, which is the all-purpose waste elimination and reproductive opening at the rear end of a manta ray.
Popping up?
Is that the technical term?
Well, we've called it cloacal diving.
And I will say that that is the most diplomatic of the terms that we considered.
But they're entering that cloacal opening and possibly feeding, possibly reducing their transportation costs, right?
Because you're obviously avoiding water pressure pushing against you while you're diving.
in the cloacal opening.
And possibly it's an anti-predatory behavior where you might be avoiding something scary that's happening on the outside.
Like it could be a subway car for that?
Yes, more or less.
A transit opportunity with enhanced comfort.
I think that there may very well be.
We know that remoras in general are open to eating poop.
Showing 61–80 of 130 · page 4 of 7
← Previous
Next →