It's winter in Florida and I'm at the Keys Marine Laboratory holding a hairy spider crab out of the water so we can get a glamour shot showcasing the crab's carapace and its fast-moving mouth pieces. It's a moment I'll remember for multiple reasons, the first being the moment that immediately followed where it maneuvered itself in my grip and was able to pinch the tip of my finger! It didn’t break the skin, but it did sting more than I was expecting from its tiny claws. Another reason I'll remember this moment is because it’s really when I started to fit into the stereotype of a marine biologist.
My fellow scientists and researchers may think, 'Wow! What a compliment!” I will admit it is an odd thing not to fully embrace but given some of the social expectations in Science and in my local community, it’s a title I’ve been conditioned to correct folks on. From certain academic and Scientific community perspectives, I’m a developmental biologist, one who dabbles in other fields of study. Developmental biology is a field that uses a wide variety of organisms for basic research. Sea urchins were the species we used in my graduate work where the lab mostly worked on developing sea urchin embryos and larvae.
Sea urchins are echinoderms, close relatives to sea stars/starfish and sea cucumbers, and are all throughout the world's oceans. They come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, some with long, needle-like spines, and others with thick, relatively blunt spines. In the McClay lab at Duke University, we used a U.S. East Coast species Lytechinus variegatus for our work, while those closer to the West Coast use the Strongylocentrotus purpuratus. When my interest in Indigenous Science & Technology Studies was growing, I made a pointed effort to learn beyond the cell and tissue biology of sea urchins, to holistic perspective including their place of origin, their history, and their social influence in my dissertation writing.
When I was debating a career in Science Communication, I tried to post on my social media about sea urchin biology and other aquatic organisms (e.g., fish) I came across at home and abroad. I thought it was important for folks at home and friends outside of grad school to see that I was still around doing things. Though I don't post these types of Science Communication posts as often, mostly because I found this format can promote extractive science and tourism, I think folks who knew of me superficially came to think I was a marine biologist.
As I've talked with folks who study the ecology of marine organisms and whose degrees are in the field, I've learned about the amount of money, time, and resources it takes to work in these aquatic ecosystems. Being fully scuba certified or having access to a large boat or underwater vessel come to mind as some of these bigger ticket items. The title of marine biologist felt more and more distant from my identity as a scientist. In the past I've sometimes referred to myself as a 'pseudo-marine biologist' to people because though I studied the biology of a marine organism, there was still so much I didn't know about the ecosystem, evolution, and diversity.
During my time in Tribal politics, it was a new experience for me to watch folks try to make excuses for why my opinion or expertise didn't matter for the topic at hand. A memorable one was an individual who was trying to leverage the trope that Tribal officials were 'uneducated' by pointing at all of us at the table and saying 'None of you have an education. . . ' a point and cliche that was immediately undermined when they remembered I was sitting at the table. To make up for their mistake, they quickly said, 'Well, except you, Ray but your degree is in marine biology.' An error I quickly and publicly corrected them on, and one I thought was particularly hilarious because I now work full-time in freshwater systems and the nearest ocean is hundreds of miles away. This is also a person who had talked to me multiple times, listened to me speak about my postdoc research in limnology, and still concluded I was a marine biologist.
Later, a different person was arguing on social media on what is important (or not important) for a Tribal citizen to be elected for the Tribal government, relevant in the moment because Tribal elections were coming up. Circling back to the uneducated trope, I would often see folks saying that an education or degree is what is needed (e.g., should be a prerequisite) for folks running for Tribal elections or that's what is missing to “fix” the Tribe. Again, with my presence in the political arena, the trope isn't as relevant, especially if a person doesn't agree with the platform I was running on, or they didn't agree with a decision I made. In another attempt to undermine my training, the person made a comment on how education isn't even relevant for those running for Tribal Council and how an individual who was a 'doctor of crustaceans' received the highest number of votes in a prior election. I find it extremely unfortunate that these folks had internalized these stereotypes put on Indigenous folks that the tribe is “broken” and that it can only be “fixed” through a specific type of Western education.
Circling back to my new moniker of Doctor of Crustaceans, in all my science communication posts in the past decade, I have posted about a freshwater crayfish and a marine rock shrimp once, both in 2019. It got me really thinking, what do I know about crustaceans? Turns out I knew a little bit, but I'd bet money that an undergraduate who had taken an invertebrate zoology course knew more than I did at that moment. I also started wondering if this person had mistaken a sea urchin for a crustacean and I determined that a sea urchin covered in hundreds of large claws and jointed legs would be a horrifying sight.
Like a double-edged sword, the mystified academic degree simultaneously can solve every problem but only the specific problem that is associated with the degree type. In my experience, it was that I only knew about Biology, and when it served the person the most, it was Marine Biology. Reflecting on these experiences has really made me want to restructure how I talk about and promote interdisciplinary and graduate level training. The biggest strength graduate level education has offered me is not to know every little thing about a hyper-specific item, but the ability to quickly learn about and incorporate prior adjacent experiences to understand, adapt, and create in a new system.
Starting my term in Tribal office was like drinking from a fire horse but I had done that in graduate school and the hose pump was often operated by the person who created the technique, discovered the phenomenon, and/or had just written an entire book or decade spanning review on the subject. I also had experience in student government in undergrad, took courses in a wide variety of subjects (yay liberal arts degree!) and I had been reading and listening to what was happening in Indian Country broadly for years. All this to say that I knew a lot coming into the elected position, and what I didn't know I was willing to read up on or unapologetically ask questions. If the goal is to support and strengthen Tribal Nationhood, having folks willing to learn, adapt, and support is needed in a close-knit community.
In the same year I was wrapping up my term in office, I was invited to instruct for the UW-Madison Florida Marine winter session in 2025. I again recognized that I was not formally trained in marine biology and that my degree was not specific to the field, but I had spent post-secondary education learning in areas of marine biology. I have also traveled to the ocean during my graduate education and with my family where I fondly remember walking the beach in the early morning and evening with my auntie, picking up and pocketing shells on the beach, enough to fill up multiple glass jars. Like the shells on the beach, I've collected a wide range of knowledge on marine biology and thought it doesn't look like your usual degree in marine systems, its breadth and depth isn't trivial.
I think that's another beauty of developmental biology that isn't brought to the forefront of its public image. There are the most popular model systems that a majority of researchers use, but the field is also filled with the study of niche systems like turtles, dolphins, jellyfish, and other echinoderms. Whether you're hatched or birthed, a seed, or a clone, we all start somewhere.
Speaking of starting somewhere, I wanted to recap the marine course journey for folks interested in the field or taking the course themselves! The first half of the course involved getting familiar with snorkeling and the variety of different marine environments through lectures and visiting shallow beaches with folks and their snorkel equipment. On our first day in the water, we came across a lot of sea grasses, fire sponges (don't touch), and copious hermit crabs in a variety of sizes in the sand and crawling along the mangroves.
Every day for the first week we would lecture multiple times and snorkel in different marine environments. We either drove by car or were driven to snorkeling sites by the station's staff on their boat. Even though the temps were warm to us from what is currently called the Midwest of the U.S., the water was always a bit chilly getting in. In our first week, we came across immaculate Queen Conch, lots of young barracuda, moon and comb jellies, SEA URCHINS(!), clams, slugs, and many other marine creatures.
One of these mornings, I was responsible for lecturing on sea turtles and some marine mammals in the area. Given the popularity of dolphins, I made a point to talk about them in my lecture, specifically the common bottlenose dolphin. On the same day, we took the boat out to a reef normally packed with other boats bringing people to dive. It was partly cloudy that day and a bit cooler without the sun (no big deal for us Midwesterners) so we were the only boat and group out there. Almost immediately, a pod of dolphins showed up to hunt on the reef. All of us were ecstatic and the station's staff were extremely surprised, saying that they had not seen dolphins out here before. The dolphins appeared on and off during the dive, keeping their distance from us, but when we were underneath the water you could hear their echolocation clicks.
Mid-course, the students had a practical testing them on their new knowledge of these marine systems. A combination of written and oral exams, it was fun to see how much folks learned. Soon after, the course changes direction and we now work full-time on research projects. It was great seeing the variety of projects and systems the students were interested in pursuing. I became particularly interested in the ones focusing on hermit crabs, just because there were so many hermit crabs in our touch tanks and I found them so funny!
As the Dr. of Crustaceans, I had a great time observing the personalities of the most common species of hermit crab we found. Due to collecting them for the touch tanks for general learning, and the students collecting more for their independent projects, we must have had over thirty we could watch all day. When you'd walk up to their tank, they'd usually startle and retreat into their shell home, but if you kept still and didn't make too many sudden movements, they'd come back out and start crawling around again.
I would watch them climb over each other, be picked up and carried about by an urchin in the tank, pick at edible things, and, most interesting to me, watch how they'd inspect each other’s shells. For those who aren't familiar, as hermit crabs grow, they must swap out their shell for a larger one (the shell comes from a deceased snail or is a human-made object they can use as shelter). It's like you're walking around outside; you can feel your clothes getting too tight, and the next person you encounter has on the perfect pair of pants and shirt that is just the size up you need. And you go up to that person and you start physically inspecting their clothes, sizing it up, and you take mental note to wait for this person to change out of this outfit so you can take it. From a humanistic perspective, the hermit crabs had no understanding of personal crab space.
One student focused on this shell swapping for their project. In their original plan, they had hoped to find empty shells they could place in the tank with individual hermit crabs to see if they swapped. Unfortunately, we had a hard time finding empty shells for the experiment, most likely a combination of there being so many hermit crabs in the areas we visited and tourists over collecting the biggest shells they could find. We ended up looking for shells (3-4 inches in length) at local shops for the student to use in their experiment. They found four, quite beautiful, shells to use in their experiments.
At the end of their experiments, none of the hermit crabs picked the shells for their semi-permanent home (one went in for a moment, decided it was too big and went back to its old shell). Given that I like to do an experiment here and there, I took these shells and put them in the water tables where we kept all the marine invertebrates we were observing and working with. I watched with glee for about 10 minutes as the hermit crabs came across these empty shells and one finally really started monkeying around with a large, round, white shell we had. Finally making up its mind, it made the swap for this shiny new home, giving up its former shell with a large chip missing from it.
I left the tank alone for about an hour and came back to all the store-bought shells serving as new homes to some of the hermit crabs. The stark difference in how the cleaned and polished shells looked to the shells other crabs had been hilarious. It was like me wearing a washed-out t-shirt with a hole underneath the armpit and my brother standing next to me wearing a couture leather jacket. I like to imagine these hermit crabs flexing their decked out new homes to everyone around them, and the station staff and visiting students who used the hermit crabs for science outreach after we left being a bit confused.
I had missed all my marine invertebrate kin so much! I'm extremely grateful to have had this opportunity to teach a group of students excited about all aspects of marine systems, and to instruct next to other folks with similar but branched interests in different aspects of the ocean. With my new title in mind, I now wonder how expensive a custom hat or sweatshirt with “Doctor of Crustaceans” would cost me, and what crustacean should I put on it? The current lead is the box crab with its ideal body shape and form!