Hey everybody. This is Ellen Weatherford. I'm here as usual with just the zoo of us. This is your favorite animal review podcast. I'm super excited to bring to y'all this week a brand new friend. We have Alice Chow. Say hi, Alice. Hi, everyone. Hi. I'm so excited to talk to you and talk about mantis shrimps today because I think mantis shrimps are really, really cool. We've briefly touched on them in the past, but this time we're bringing in the big guns. We got an expert in here. But before we talk about mantis shrimps, I would like to kind of talk about you a little bit. Can you let us know, what kind of work do you do and how did you get into it?

Yeah, absolutely. So Alice Chow, that's me. I am currently a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

So I work in a mantis shrimp lab, specifically a mantis shrimp vision lab. And of course, mantis shrimp are famous for two things, and that is their vision and they're

punching.

I, for my graduate work, I don't actually study either of those things.

I study what's in between them.

So their brain.

Ah, where it all comes together.

Exactly.

Like where does that information go and how does it feed back out as behavior?

I've been doing this work for almost seven years now.

But yeah, I study Manish shrimp brains.

That is, I think, really, really cool because, like, if you're going to study an animal's brain,

I feel like a mantis shrimp is the one that's like highly sought

after. Are they like a rock star like in the neurobiology field? Like everybody wants to study

mantis shrimp. Oh, I wish I could have more collaborators on this. I think off the top of my head,

I can only think of maybe one or two other people who are studying this. Really?

Yeah. Which is kind of cool that I can, you know, collaborate with these people to discover things that really we don't know anything about.

But it's also extremely fun to share these sorts of questions with other people.

Yeah.

Are you studying them like in a lab setting or in the wild? Like what is,

what does your research look like? A little bit of both. So most of my work is in the lab. I study

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