Okay, I am here with my new friend all the way from Sydney, Australia.

This is Ikai T. Say hello, Ikeye.

Hey, good morning, everyone.

Good morning for you. It's currently a 9 o'clock p.m. where I am.

It's 11 here in Sydney. It is a great morning today. How are you, Ellen? Oh, I'm doing great.

I'm so glad to be talking to you. I'm really excited. So you are the first ichthyologists that I've

talked to, I think probably not just on this show, but like ever. I don't think I've ever spoken

to an ichthyologist before. So I would really like it if you kind of introduced yourself and your

work and how you got into ichthyology. I guess that's a great honor for me. So yeah,

I'm a systematic ecteologist. So I study fishes and kind of work out how they relate to each

other and the bigger kind of evolutionary contexts, how they relate to each other and the bigger kind of evolutionary

contacts how they relate to each other in in a genus level or a family level so I work on

phylogenetic relationships I also do taxonomy which is describing and naming new species

so a big component of my research involves that. So all together,

I kind of, yeah, consider myself more of a systematist in a way, where I, yeah, combine my

taxonomic research, as well as my phylogenetic interest in kind of resolving the evolutionary

history of fishes. More specifically, I work a lot of

rasses, which is what we're going to be talking about today. Yes. And I have followed your work

that you post a lot on social media, your pictures of the rasses. And they are so incredibly diverse.

Yeah. Like there is a lot going on with Rasses.

They are.

They're so beautiful.

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