Hey, everybody. This is Ellen Weatherford. I'm here with Just the Zoo of Us. This is your favorite

animal review podcast and today I'm really excited to be talking to a friend who has been a Twitter

friend of mine for quite a while and I'm really excited to finally be virtually meeting. This is

Dahmar Der Vedavan. Say hi. Hi. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for

having me on. Of course. I'm so excited to talk to you and talk about your buddies today,

your little fish friends. We've got Archerfish, right? Yes. So before we talk about

archerfish, let's talk a little bit about how you got into working with Archer Fish.

What was that journey like for you?

So it's been a bit of an accident that I've ended up working with Archer Fish.

I'm an ecologist by training.

I did an undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland on ecology.

And I spent a lot of time working with birds, blue tits specifically.

They're a bit like chickadees for you Americans.

Little bores.

And I really, really enjoyed working with birds.

And I got to do all this fieldwork in Scotland.

But then I decided, you know what, maybe I don't want to study birds or animals for the rest of my life.

So for my master's, I took a detour into plants, and they studied sycamores and seed dispersal.

And I realized that, as fun as it was, I really missed animals.

So I just started applying to PhDs, basically, wherever I could find them.

And I came across an ad for this Archerfish PhD, advertised by the guy whose office I sat next to in my department.

So I just knocked on his door and said, hey, what are these fish about?

...