S3 E9 Ximena Bernal on Eavesdropping Animals and Bilingualism in Science

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Animal Behavior Podcast. I'm Matthew Zippel. And I am Maximilian Solagofredo, a graduate student in the neurobiology and behavior department for NEL University. In this week's episode, we speak with Dr. Jimena Bernal, Fester of Biological Sciences at Purdue University. Jimena is a bilingual latin scientist, so this week we are going to try something new. We will be releasing two versions of this episode, one in English and one in Spanish. What you're about to hear is the English language version of this episode. You'll find the Spanish language episode, led by Maximiliano, immediately below this one in your feeds. Hemenas studies acoustic communication in frogs and other species, with a focus on how animals advertisement signals affect not just their intended targets like mates or competitors, but also unintended targets like predators. Hemenas was also the program officer for the 2022 Animal Behavior Society meeting in Costa Rica and was instrumental in facilitating a really innovative multilingual conference. So Hemena Bernal, welcome to the podcast. It's great to talk to you. Thank you for the invitation. I'm really happy to be here. So much of your work focuses on vocal communication in frogs. And if I think about most communication experiments, they're designed to study diatic interactions between one signaler and one receiver, but that isn't really how communication actually takes place in nature. That's right. Traditional definitions talk about communication between two individuals. They want that signals and the ones that receive that signals. But as we all know very well, they're usually others paying attention to the signals. We all love those concepts. And it's very important in many systems to get information that others may not be intending for us. So yeah, communication in nature is a lot more complex than traditional text definitions. In particular, much of your work is focused on eavesdropping. Could you just define eavesdropping so that we're all on the same page? Of course. Yeah, eavesdropping is a great term and it's basically the use of information in signals by individuals other than the primary target. And even though eavesdropping tends to allude to acoustic communication because the meaning of how it is used in common English, it can be used for any sense immorality. So we know that eavesdropping can happen not only with acoustic signals, but with chemical signals, vibrational cues, any kind of sense immorality that you can think of. That's a great point. I hadn't actually thought about that. Do you happen to know, have an example of a chemical eavesdropping experience? We know a few really interesting cases in ants, and actually for shell items that her grove recently wrote a little review of perspective trying to enlist more research on these because we know ants and other social species that use heavily chemical signals could be great system to better understand these because then they have like eavesdropping on these or annas to be able to sneak into the nest. And we know that exploitation of those chemical signals can shape the behavior and social communication in insects. But one of my favorite cases is some ball spiders because those are these spiders that have these, they make these big balls and they release them into environmental tractor prey. And this is an interesting case because in that case, what they do is rather than exploring this signal, what the signal is doing, they actually release chemicals that basically exploit this receiver end of the communication system and then they prey a common lure by this chemical thinking that it's going to be a conspecific and use this brother. Okay, so let's talk about tombrofrogs. We got a bit of an introduction to the system from Meg Ryan back in season one, but just give us an overview of the communication environment that tombrofrogs are living in. Who are they meaning to communicate with and who is eavesdropping on their calls? Well, I'm so glad that my boss here and took this first step talking about tombrofrogs. She is actually the one that started all this system, which is now one of the main systems to understand animal communication. So tombrofrogs are really small frogs. People see them in photos and they think they're going to be big, but they're just about an inch long and they look like a piece of dirt, so a little brownie thing. But despite the cryptic look and not very appealing, they have amazing voices. And that's why they've been stylish so much. And they can be found in Meso and Central America and Northern South America. And they have a leg insistent in which males come during the rainy season and they aggregate in response and start calling and calling like crazy to attract females. The males can produce, they produce a wine, that's all. And they can add secondary components that are really brief borst that are called chucks. And a male can add from known to up to seven chucks and any male can add chucks. So when a male is calling by himself, he will do mostly wines. But as all males come to the point, they start competing and interact necoustically adding more chucks. And when they produce calls with chucks, females like them better. So females like those more complex calls with chucks. But those are not the only ones that like all complexity. So tombrofrogs are actually eaten by almost everyone in the forest. They are a little yummy snack. And it is so bad that the bad lab in Panama, a virtual pages lab, her crew calls them the chicken nuggets of the forest. Because everybody loves them and eats them. And among those, the two many suffers in the system are frog eating bats and the frog body mittes. So when a male tombrofrog is calling and is calling their heart out, trying to attract a female to mate, there are these frog eating bats and frog body mittes that use the same call. And they sit to the tag, recognize their prey, localize it and go there. And the frog eating bats come and eat the frog right away. And of course fitness goes down to zero. With the frog having mittes, it's a little more subtle. They come attracted by the call, they line on the back of the frog and they walk all the way to the nostril. And that's where they bite them. So they get a blood meal. So like mosquitoes that bite you and me, all these like CO2 gradients, temperature gradients, and even visual cues, because what you mongoose targets, with these little frogs, the frog body mittes, the pen exclusively on the frog called. So they're hearing these frogs get to them and bite them. And some of your earliest work looked at the relationship between whether tombrofrog males included those chucks and the attractiveness then of those calls to eavesdroppers. Yeah, so there was this classic work that was done by Stan Ren and Mike Ryan. And they showed that this complex skulls, the ones with chucks, are more attractive to females. And then later on, by Mike Ryan and Berlin trolls show that this calls for more attractive also to the bats. So that was really neat. And then fast forward two decades or more, and then I came across these frog riding mittes, and it's a little bit of an interesting story because I was very ignorant on healing in insects, which actually work on my favor. I was raised up and said her pathology, so I knew very little about insects. And at that point, I was like, oh, what about the flies? Do they care if it's a complex color, not? So I set up an experiment as I will have done with the frogs. So I had the speakers that were two meters apart, and from one speaker, I'll play simple calls like, "Wine, stone, stone." And from the other one, "Which chucks, don't you get that?" And that's how we test the frogs. And lo and behold, I found that the flies also care and that they were able to hear the calls with the chucks. They were preferential attracted to those. So I'm like, that is really neat because here you have a system in which you have one signal and these different receivers with very different ear morphologies and sensitivities. Female frogs, bats and flies, they all have converged, not only on using the same signal, but having the same preferences. What I did not anticipate then is when I was trying to publish it, people were like, no, that's not possible. How? And I was like, what? How? I don't know how. This is what they're doing. I realized that this is what we knew on Insecure, it just was not possible. We will not expect the flies on my hand to hear the chucks and to to respond so from, from far away. And I could not explain it, but I went back and it's tested again. This time, it's in natural calls and I found the same thing. So I'm like, well, this is real, but I think that this is one of the cases in which being an eve of server coming into the system of the flies ended up being helpful. I'm going to ask whether there's been any clarity since that original finding as to how this might be possible. Oh, totally. So it was really interesting because at that point, given the reviewers, I was surprised and like, oh, I don't even know, this was not possible. And it was really interesting after that paper came out, a run-hoy from Cornell Contact to Me. And he was very sweet and he said, hey, I actually was one of the reviewers and I'm very intrigued, bring your little bits to my lap. I'm like, of course. So at that point, we started looking for an ear and we thought they really needed a tempanic ear because he asked me to do some behavioral experiments. And I went back to Panama and I will play a speaker from 20 meters away from the forest. And on the other side, it was the canal. Panama Canal, so they couldn't be coming from the other side, and it's to get them from the forest. So clearly, they were approaching long distances. So I went with the little midges, and we started to look brought in panic ear, and we look everywhere in the body, because in panic ears, have evolved in insects many times from many different structures. It's relatively easy, what I'm quote, to evolve an ear-front insect. Do you only need a tympanic ear? Do you need three things, a thin membrane that will vibrate with the sound, a cavity of air behind that allows it to move, and then sensory cells that detect that and send it to an integration center for the whole brain. And that can happen like in any place where the excess skeleton tins out. So they have ears like everywhere in their head, in their wings, in the abdomen, the legs, in the thorax anywhere. So we were just looking for that anywhere. And lo and behold, we found one, and we're like, okay, this is it, in the thorax, and we had these three features. So we were very sure that that could be an ear. Then we got funding, we got excited to test it, long behold, we shine a laser, where we thought that was the ear, and nothing happened. So instead of vibrating with the sound we were playing, it wasn't vibrating much. So we're like, oh, so with that, we decided to go back and look at antennae. And we knew that mosquitoes here with the antennae, because they was informating. However, it was an stool kind of, some people still believe that they can only hear in the near field. And that's very close to the sound source within one wavelength. So because of that, we had rollout antennae. But now we're learning a lot more about antennae, and all the styles are showing that the antennae were underestimated. They're actually amazing, amazing since really detectors, and it worked really well. So now we know they're using antennae. That's such a cool story, because I think it really, like you said, it really shows the value of bringing people from very different worlds of expertise to ask questions of the same system, questions that an entomologist would have just never asked, because they would have assumed it was impossible. So I think that's so cool. I agree. And I think honestly, it's really cool in perspective. But at the time, I felt so ignorant and kind of stupid for even doing it that way. And I just treated them like frogs. And what do the frog-biting midges game by prioritizing calls with CHOP? So why should they care about what call of their prey sounds like? Yeah, that's a really good question. And we did a few experiments to look into that. And we at first thought that maybe they run with the CHOPs were easier to localize. We know the properties of the CHOPs made them easier to localize for them panic years. So like, it's been tested with the bats. Like, racial page has shown that the bats have the ability to better localize complex calls when the environment is complex. So I tried that with the flies. And at least when you only look at where they land, they are equally good and landing on a speaker that is playing a frog called with wine or without a weed of CHOPs or without CHOPs. It may be that they follow different paths, but they're so tiny and they only fly in complex darkness, so darkness. So we haven't been able to check the paths yet. But it's something that is on my to-do list. And then we also look at somehow quality. Maybe the males that produce calls with CHOPs are bigger or somehow healthier. And that's not the case either. Males that are producing CHOPs are about the same size as the other males. But what we realize is that called complexity is correlated with abundance of their males because they use it to compete acoustically. If you hear calls with CHOPs, you're more likely to go to an area in which there's more abundance of frogs. So we argue that that increase the effectiveness of the tags and may have been one of the benefits that the flies get when they're cumin on these calls. So there are lots of moving pieces here in this system. Male trying to attract females, but also risking attracting bats and throttling midges. Females who want to find the best male, but who also presumably want to avoid those same predators. And then the other males who hear males calls and need to decide what to do in response. So how do you expect eavesdroppers to shape the evolution of calling behavior in the species? Yeah, this is an excellent point. I always say that it is hard to be a male. Well, a male frog, male-tongue frog, because they are trying to call and then they get all these eavesdroppers. So I think eavesdroppers can play an important role shaping not only the colony, but also the evolution of calling behavior. And we know from many styles that a lot of strategies that singlers use to avoid eavesdroppers. The basic one is to stop signaling, but you can also reduce this trade-out feature signal. We know extreme cases in which some signals have stopped signaling completely. Like is the case of the crickets that are attacked by the army of lies in Hawaii. There are even some cases of species that have moved into using a different sensuality. So I would like to argue that eavesdroppers do play a strong role shaping these communication signals, and even in complex and subtle ways. So I think that we're just starting to understand the merge and properties of these communication networks. And for instance recently, one of my students, Brian Lebel, former student, he graduated. He did this really neat style where he looked at the Tungar frogs are all calling, and we all have been thinking for many years that the main driver for called complexity, basically how ornamental their signals are, is what our males are, male male competition. However, he used this really neat analysis in a big data set that we had, and it was really neat because what he found is that actually these little flies are mediated this call complexity, and they're dampening the effect of male male competition. So when you take both into account, we realize that they can have a much larger fault than we ever anticipated. So I want to close this section by thinking about the future of studying networks of animal communication, because of course there's a reason that so much work focuses on the diad. It's tractable and relatively simple. And as you add in more and more intended and unintended receivers, the environment becomes incredibly complex. So what advantages have you seen that allow researchers to capture and decipher some of that complexity? Do you bring up an excellent point? So I love this complexity because it really reflects what I think happens in nature. And I think the combination of looking at the simple systems versus the adequate interactions and then adding these extra players makes it particularly valuable. But as you pointed out, we are getting access to new technologies, new systems. So I think that for instance the use of microphone arrays. So the way that now you can deploy multiple microphones and also with high-speed cameras being not as expensive as they used to be, we're getting access to equipment and technologies that allow us to track multiple players at the same time. And I think that will be very valuable for how we understand communication networks. Is that work with the microphone arrays and the cameras exclusively in the lab or can you deploy that in the field? Both. Yeah. So you can do that in the lab and in the field. And we've been even not only with the microphone arrays, but also you can use multi-speaker systems and now you can track multiple individuals even going to the different speakers. So I think there will be value on using those approaches both in the lab and in the field. I think let's leave things there for now. We'll take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk about your scientific journey and your efforts to increase communication between researchers in the US and Latin America. First, here's a two-minute takeaway. Sexual selection often favors the evolution of highly conspicuous mating signals. But as he men has mentioned, communication among organisms rarely occurs through secret channels. Instead, signals sent to target receivers are transmitted through the environment, which comes with the risk of detection by non-target receivers. Some of these receivers are enemies, such as predators, parasites, and parasitoids, that capitalize on the conspicuous signals of their prey to obtain resources. Yet, signals are not without strategies to minimize the risk of emitting a signal. Many signals assess and respond to variation in predation risk and can defend themselves through risk-dependent behaviors. Hi, my name is Brian Level. I'm the current sound engineer of this podcast, and also just recently wrapped up my PhD in Humanaburnal's lab at Purdue University. For part of my PhD research, I examined the effects of a Collington group of frogs swatting defense that targets eavesdropping frog-biting midges. When under attack, these frogs attempt to swat off the blood feeding flies with their arms and legs between calls. Because the frogs call in water, the swatts elicit a series of water ripples that propagate across the water surface. Previous work has shown that Collington swatter ripples elicit more elaborate calls in rival males, but the potential effects of swat induced ripples remained untested. To test this, I conducted behavioral experience in the lab in which I isolated the effects of airborne and ripple stimuli of a Colling swatting male on his rivals' signaling behavior. The swat induced ripples indeed caused the rival to increase his call elaboration. This effect has potential fitness implications. for these frogs. In subsequent female choice and predation experiments with eavesdropping French lip bats, females found the rival to be more attractive than the swatting male, while the bats exhibited no preference. Eavesdropping frog biting midges made us dynamically shape the relative fitness of males that compete for mating opportunities. Their influence extends beyond the victim by indirectly affecting their victims' rivals, signaling behavior, and by altering female mating decisions. This research highlights the complexity of communication networks and suggests that eavesdropping micropredators can have significant roles in shaping the evolution of signals and communication systems. Thank you so much for listening. Without further ado, I return you to Dr. Jimena Bernal. Welcome back. We are listening to Dr. Jimena Bernal, professor of biological sciences at Purdue University. Jimena, welcome back. Thank you. For the section where our guests suggest a topic, you propose a team of bilingualism. One of the mechanisms that perpetuates the gap in scientific development between the global north and developing countries is the language blur. Tell us about your research journey on how it has been affected by language barriers, as well as driven by specific privilege that you may have enjoyed. Yeah, and I think that's an excellent point. English is the main language for communicating science and we know very well that it biases. The findings that we amplify and how we think about the world. And there has been interesting work that has shown that review papers that do not consider styles that are in non-English languages are biased and this means a lot of science that is being done in the global south. So definitely a bit factor, but not only affects how we create science and the world we understand, but who gets to participate. And I was very fortunate because even though I did not go to a bilingual school, so in Colombia you can go to a school in which you learn English as a little more clear. I did not go to one of those. I actually started, we started English when we were in high schools, so it's like, it was very late. However, I was very fortunate that my parents thought that English was important, so I would go to basic English classes. But to be honest, I completely underestimated how important it was. I got to college and I was like, yes, I can test out of English one and two and then I had to take a few. And then when I took the last class and said, that's it for me. Never again. I'm done with English. And then I look at schools to go to your PhD and I started to look at a lot of these. And I was like, oh my goodness, I need to speak English. I thought I was done with that. And when I came to the PhD program, I had very low levels of English. I barely passed the exam to be able to be at the A. And I actually, I partly passed it because they asked me, one of the tests was to explain a lecture, like I did a mini lecture. And I'm very, like, I just wasn't going all with my hands and everything. They describe I'm mobile, but I'm like, okay, I think she gets a point across that I barely pass it. And on the downside, I could bar about the students that were my class the first semester. Like I could barely communicate with them. And I thought I love on animal communication. And it was really beautiful on both sides. Let me tell you. And even for me to take the first classes and everything, I felt I could barely speak English. And it's like, I will open my mouth. And I thought there would be speaking. And I was like, that is not what's happening up here. I swear, I'm smart. I can't think. So that was really hard. And of course, I had always been a good student. I was, I thought I was smart. And then I, when I was speaking, I felt like if there was not the case. But it was also a very lonely process at the beginning because when I started, I did my PhD at the University of Cancer Sarasya. And in my cohort, we were two international students, but the other one had come to the US to do high school. And then they got like the undergrad size here. So I just felt that I was the only one that couldn't communicate. And which made it a little painful. And I cried a lot that first year. But I think that's one of the challenges you have. And when you come, and it's not only the cultural shock, understanding what is a PhD like being a craftsman is a big difference to what you were doing before. And add on top of that, not understanding the culture very well, and not even understanding the English. So sometimes I wasn't even sure what was happening because of the language or because of the culture. I'm like, so it's challenging to make sense of out of all of that. And I think it's funny, but you are very different in a different language. And we know that, for instance, there's a study that recently showed that in Colombia, English proficiency is closely correlated with socioeconomic status. And that is really troublesome because we all know that talent is everywhere. Opportunities are not. So by limiting the way we do science to English, really limits who gets a chance to be inspired by science, and to think about being a scientist as a potential path. It's very interesting that you sell that you were being the only one that we're struggling, because in my personal experience, I feel that we all feel the same and we all feel alone, right? That's an excellent point. And good is for social media. Now, you see people talking about this. So I'm old. When I started my PhD, it was 20 years ago, and no one was talking about it. I was at a very competitive program, and everybody was just going out and doing their own work, and no one talked about this language difference. And I only had the students complaining that they couldn't understand me. And I'm like, right, I don't understand you either. So yeah, I think that I think that what I like about now of having this conversation, I still we still need to do more, but I feel that it's also difficult for people that only speak one language to understand how challenging it is to think and to be eloquent in a different language. So people underestimated and I think they judge very quickly, and I felt that at the beginning that like they will be dismissive right away. And I'm like, no, give me a chance. I just need you to walk with me and like through this part of not knowing the right words or not knowing how to pronounce them. So yeah, like it's just it's upsetting. Like I remember very clearly I have this memory. I was trying to make a case in a discussion about evolution. And I didn't know. And I said, so the word island. And I read it. I said, I'm like, Iceland. And then they were all confused. And then they all started laughing. And I remember everybody was laughing. And I was so lost. And they're like, why are they laughing? And trying to think about like evolution and islands and all these things and they're all laughing and confused. And I'm like, so it can be just very frustrating and not the most efficient way to have a conversation about science. How do you believe language barriers accumulate with other categories of inequality such as phrase gender or socio-economic status to increase the challenges faced by scientists from the global south? Well, as I was just mentioning, we know that English proficiency is highly correlated with socio-economic status. And we know that trace in many countries in Latin America is also correlated with socio-economic status. So all those dimensions are at the intersection in which a lot of people that have great talent may not have opportunities to learn English, to be able to continue advancing as expected from any scientist because they don't have the level of English that they need. So I think it adds yet another burden to who gets to participate. Through your career, you have confronted inequalities within the scientific system in many countries and institutions. In response, you have proposed concrete actions and developed various strategies to combat these inequalities. What are the concrete strategies that institutions and scientific communities can adopt to reduce the barriers imposed on us by language, phrase, gender, or socio-economic status? Well, that's a deep question. We could talk about it for hours. But I think that we need to start with a long-hungry, low-hungry and crude. So even polishing in different languages, like having your abstract, I think that every scientist will have the abstract at least in the language of where they did the study. And if you did it in a country that speaks English, well, choose one of your preference and have it in the supplemental material, have it somewhere else, that will allow to have a broader audience that can read it. So like that's the easy stuff. And when we have meetings, so as Matt mentioned, when we organized the animal behavior society meeting last year, we made a conscious effort to try to break those barriers and allow bilingual access. We were running this meeting in Costa Rica. So we spoke English, we spoke Spanish. I tried my best to include Portuguese begins. I actually practiced the whole year before the meeting. I wasn't doing a link to import Portuguese. So I could say just a few sentences in Portuguese here and there. Because I wanted really hard to make everyone welcome. And we knew we had people from Brazil coming to the meeting. So I think it's just going that little bit, put in a little bit of effort to make it at accessible. And that's something that we all scientists can do. And I even have conversations with my students in the audience about the wording we use in titles, in abstracts, not using slang. So sometimes using like catchy slang for sentences or for titles can be really fun, but it make it tricky for non-native speakers. So we have those conversations or even using any frasal verbs, those are hard. So I'm like, no frasal verbs, because those make it harder. You need to have a higher English proficiency to be able to follow those. So in my lab, for instance, we do all those little things, conscious efforts to open in app for people that are like, if you need to use overly complex English don't, use basic words that anyone can understand. So that on one hand, and then I think that society is like the animal behavior society are working really hard to make that effort. And I it's very gratifying to see that. And then institutions, I think, throughout institutions, universities, I think that there is still a long way to go because the way international students are welcome is like, come on, you need to learn English and simulate, can you TA or not? And I think that there should be an extra layer there of like, okay, we know how hard this is. And support, and even if your English is or is not, can you teach or not? Provide that extra support that allows you to keep improving your English, but in a way that is also kind. It's not just because you need to teach, not because all of these things, it's because it's important for you and your life. So I can think about ways in which universities are trying to do it, but it's like yet another workshop that is listed. Those are just the tip of the icebergs so much that could be done to feel people more welcome, value, yet, and embrace other languages too. What specific actions do you think are ideal for addressing difficulties at each stage of the scientific career and overcoming them? So I don't think there is a cookie cutter answer to that. I think the way we all learn different language and related culture will be slightly different, but I can take you a little bit about how it went for me and my approach to it. So as I mentioned, my English was not very good when I first started my PhD and I was really worried about it. And I knew it was a big hurdle to pass. And so I actually started reading a lot about how to even understand English because I felt that in English it's kind of funny because at first it seems easy because we're familiar with songs, with movies, although to be honest, now I understand the songs. I'm like, what? That sounds so bad. I'm horrified of some of the songs I thought maybe say something right didn't understand. And now I'm like, I didn't know it said that. But at the beginning it seems kind of easy, but you very easy. My feeling was that very quickly, I reached upon it, which it was really hard to get better. And I will just read paper, so it will take me forever. And every single word that I didn't know, I was like, like, the dictionary, I will use it. And I read books about how to write that are written in English for English-speaking people. And every time I will just look at online synonyms. And at that point, the University of Austin, they had in one workshop that I remember was really good. And they're like, okay, these are the main points in which people can struggle, like transitioning, how to start sentences when they're transitioning. And they give us a list of words that were good for transitioning. And actually I recently found a little piece of paper. I'm like, oh, look at it. I carried it around all the time because I had, and I started accumulating, list of words that were useful. And to be honest, I have a list of words that also I never say. Like, the words that I know I can't pronounce and are bad if I miss pronounced. I'm like, I think we all have this list. I'm like, okay. And so I'm like, I need synonyms for these words because I don't want to say this word in public. So you find your own tricks. And for me, it's really funny because I love, like, structural logic. So I know a lot of the rules in English. So when I sometimes editing manuscripts from my students, some of them you mentioned like, oh, my goodness, because I'm like, based on this rule, this is not a property. And they're like, oh, I didn't know that. But yeah, that makes sense because I know all the rules and all the grammar really well because that was the skeleton, the foundation I needed to feel comfortable writing science in English. And then I felt that then I advanced. And now I'm at the pro level in which my students, especially the other guys are teaching me slang and all of these fun words that I never know. And they have, yeah, they just find it's hilarious because there was a time in which I will speak. And everybody was like, I will speak in English. And my friends were like, why are you so formal? And I'm like, I'm not being formal because all the words I knew were from papers. And I still feel like I know very few adjectives in English because I never used them. So then I had to try to learn other words to make it less formal. And now I'm in the party which I'm learning like fun and news land from the kids nowadays. So the challenge changes. And from your current professor and faculty position, what other strategies have you experienced as effective ways to increase inclusion in science? Oh, there's so many. That's such a broad question. So what I always try to keep in mind is that I want to create an environment in which everyone can be and bring their tenting self to where we are. Keeping that at the front of your mind is really important because it's like whatever people do, if you're not there to judge them, if you're not there to make a mini me, I don't want all him in as going out to the world and doing exactly what I do. I can share how I did things, what things work with me, but then everybody should find their own way and express it their own way. And I think that's important to keep in mind at the daily interactions, at the way you set up conversations in your lab and across all scales. And that translates into many different strategies. But I think that's the core of what I've always tried to keep in mind. That I'm not there to force people into things that I think are the right thing, but trying to understand what they're coming from and helping them maximize their potential, but always be their tenting self. I honestly feel that, to be honest, when I first started in science, I wasn't myself. I would, the first talk that I gave in English, first I was freaking out, but second, I went back to the lab and there was an aircraft from Brazil. And he looked at me and he said, "Shimana, I can't believe you can be this serious." And I'm like, "What?" He's like, "Yeah, I'm never seen you so serious." And it was partly because I was terrified, but partly because I also was impersonating the people I saw doing science and they're all serious and they're like, "You mean so I did that?" And that's not who I am. And I feel that I've been slowly bringing myself out, of course, after I got there, and I'm like, "Can't get rid of me now." But even now, I feel like now that I'm a professor, I'm so happy because I feel like I finally can be my full-authentic self and not be so concerned about how people are judging me and judging me and what that may mean for my career. And like, I try to do this with the students, anyone around me and remind them that as long as they're being treated themselves, that's the right way to go. The team of our conversation has really been about communication of ideas of people of different backgrounds, son of frogs and their receivers. You have developed an approach to communicate biology to undergraduates that involves Pokemon. What does that look like? Yeah, this has been one of my recent, favorite projects and it is one of my favorite projects for several reasons. On one hand, it's a lot of fun. And on the other hand, it was a project that I co-created and co-developed with my 16-year-old son, Thomas. So we actually co-created and caught hot at class that is called "Pokey Value", "Exploring Biology" through "Pocket Monsters". And it's been fantastic because talking about language barriers, I think that one of the language barriers that people have when they like biology is all the jargon and all the species names. So I committed people that said, "Oh yeah, what you do is so cool, but I could never do it." It's a science and all the species names and all of that. I'm like, "Of course you could do it." And then people see that's a barrier, but we see all these kids that know all the species names of the dinosaurs. And then if you like Pokemon, you know all the Pokemon, like all the names. And if anyone knows about Pokemon, you're not only know all the names, but all the natural history, what they do, what are their tags, and what are their weaknesses. So we saw this great opportunity to kind of break that barrier and reach out to people that were interested in science in biology, but we're not excited about all that jargon and all that came in. So we had this class that we thought at the honors college that brought all the students from different careers who were really into Pokemon. So that was fantastic. And we thought about the ecology, the evolution, and conservation biology of Pokemon. And it's been one of the best classes that I think I ever had because for the first time, I found myself not only talking about the generalities, which I think when I'm teaching science, I'm also like, "Okay, this is the pattern. These are the generalities." But in this class, some of the students were like, "Hmm, but what about this Pokemon? This is very unusual. They do this and that." I'm like, "Well, actually, there is a species in nature that does this." And they're like, "What?" I'm like, "Yeah, nature is amazing, but we usually, when we teach those, especially those intro classes, we don't tell them the cool stuff they have. And there were a maze of clearing how nature is so diverse, so unique. So that was an unexpected side effect of teaching these glands that we got into all these cool, unusual cases that they thought were unique to an imaginary world. But no, nature has great imagination. Thank you so much, Emena. That sounds like such a fabulous class. I wish I could have taken it. Emena Rahul, thank you so much for sharing your research and your experiences with us. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I loved the idea of being able to speak science both in English and Spanish. And I'm very grateful for you providing this space for us. Thank you both. The Animal Behavior Podcast is created by a talented team of animal behavior researchers. We have three excellent content editors, Nico Hensley, an NSF postdoctoral fellow studying the evolution of neurocensory systems and their impact on animal communication and speciation at Cornell University. Camilla Cheney, who studies tool use, object play, and animal innovation in non-human primates. And Logan James, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, studying acoustic communication in frogs and birds. Our communications director is Casey Patmore, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh studying the behavior of varying beetles. You can follow us on Twitter at AnimalBegavePod or check out our website at AnimalBegaveYourPod.com. Our education team makes lesson plans and classroom materials that you can incorporate into your undergraduate classes. You can find those materials on our website. The education team is Emily McLean, an assistant professor of biology at Oxford College at Emory University. Georgia Lambert, a PhD candidate studying parental cooperation in varying beetles at the University of Edinburgh. And Smile Chaudry, a recent master of research graduate in biological sciences from the University of Exeter, who worked on camouflage and escape responses in green shore crabs. Our sound director is Brian Level, a PhD candidate studying the evolution of acoustic signals in Hemenna Bernal's lab at Purdue University. This season, I'll be recording my side of most conversations in the Cornell Broadcast Studios with engineering support from Bert Odom Reed. Our art is all produced by animal behavior researchers. Our logo was designed by Adelaide Jehan Montaille. Our theme music is by Sally Street and transitions are by Andre Gonzalez. I direct and host the show along with my co-host Amy Strauss. We receive financial support from the Animal Behavior Society. Finally, if you like the show, then please help us by telling someone else about the show and leave us a rating or review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening. See you next time.