Hey everybody.

Hey everybody. This is Ellen Weatherford. I'm here with just the zoo of us with a special guest this

week. We have a brand new friend. This is Jimmy Bernat. Say hi, Jimmy. Hi, everybody. We're so excited to be

talking to you. And we're talking about a really neat little marine friend. Are they marine? Mostly marine, although there's

some in freshwater too, and they're kind of everywhere, but we could get more into that later.

Yes, we're talking about some, I'll just say aquatic friends, copepods. But before we talk about

copepods, let's talk about Jimmy. Can you introduce yourself a little bit for our friends? Yeah, hi everybody. My name's

Jimmy Burnott, and I'm a postdoc researcher at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in

Washington, D.C. I just started a job there in January. Before that, I was a PhD student in D.C. at

George Washington University, so that has kind of made this transition relatively easy. And I've been studying parasites and kind of small marine invertebrates for probably almost 10 years now. I used to work on tapeworms, and then I focused on parasitic copepods for my PhD, and I'm sure we'll hear more about those today.

So copepods are, are they always parasites?

No, great question. So most people have never heard of copepods, but those that have are probably

familiar with kind of planktonic copepods. You could think of them as being small shrimp-like

crustaceans. Most of them are about the size and shape of either like a sesame seed or a grain of

rice. So they're pretty tiny, but they're found in anywhere you can find water. They're really

common and they're super abundant in the ocean. They are probably the most abundant

animal in the ocean, actually, because they really dominate the marine plankton. And they're found

everywhere from the surface of the ocean to the deepest trenches and even hydrothermal vents.

But you don't need to go to the ocean to find them. You could find them in freshwater lakes and streams.

If you've ever cleaned leaves out of the gutter on your roof,

there has probably been copepods even living in that.

And they're even known from some not-so aquatic habitats, like damp leaves or even, like,

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