Saving Seafood

From ‘The Water’s Edge To The Cutting Edge’: Fish Skeletons, CT Scans And Engineering

August 1, 2016 — Adam Summers used to trade Snickers bars to get free CT scans of dead fish.

He likes fish. A lot.

Summers is a professor at the University of Washington in the biology department and School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences.

“I’ve always been a fish guy,” he says. “It’s just been in my blood since I was as small as I can remember.” Summers was a scientific consultant on Finding Nemo and did similar work with Finding Dory.

He describes himself as a biomechanist — he studies “how physics and engineering govern some parts of biology.” Some of that refers to, for example, studying how humans could use ideas from the structure of a fish skeleton to design an underwater vehicle.

“A lot of what I do is in the realm of what’s called biomimetics,” Summers tells NPR. “I’m looking to the sea for inspiration, for biomimetics solutions to technical problems.”

He’s based on an island about 60 miles north of Seattle, at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories. The lab is only a short walk from the water — from “the water’s edge to the cutting edge,” Summers says. As part of his work at the lab, his team is trying to make 3-D CT scans of all 33,000 varieties of fish.

So, why?

Researchers like Summers want to understand how fish work. To do that, he says, “one of the very, very useful things is to understand exactly what the skeleton looks like. It is shockingly complex. Your skull is just a few bones. Fish skulls are dozens and dozens of bones.”

That’s where the CT scans come in. The machines are usually used to see the insides of humans. Many years ago, Summers wanted to see the insides of fish.

Read the full story at KPLU

University of Washington scientist launches effort to digitize all fish

July 27, 2016 — SEATTLE — University of Washington biology professor Adam Summers no longer has to coax hospital staff to use their CT scanners so he can visualize the inner structures of stingray and other fish.

Last fall, he installed a small computed tomography, or CT, scanner at the UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island in Washington state and launched an ambitious project to scan and digitize all of more than 25,000 species in the world.

The idea is to have one clearinghouse of CT scan data freely available to researchers anywhere to analyze the morphology, or structure, of particular species.

So far, he and others have digitized images of more than 500 species, from poachers to sculpins, from museum collections around the globe. He plans to add thousands more and has invited other scientists to use the CT scanner, or add their own scans to the open-access database.

“We have folks coming from all over the world to use this machine,” said Summers, who advised Pixar on how fish move for its hit animated films “Finding Nemo” and “Finding Dory” and is dubbed “fabulous fish guy” on the credits for “Nemo.”

He raised $340,000 to buy the CT scanner in November. Like those used in hospitals, the CT scanner takes X-ray images from various angles and combines them to create three-dimensional images of the fish.

With each CT scan he posted to the Open Science Framework, a sharing website, people would ask him, “What are you going to scan next?” He would respond: “I want to scan them all. I want to scan all fish.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Bedford Standard-Times