David Blackburn, an associate curator of herpetology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, discusses the joys of working with amphibians, specifically frogs. Blackburn’s work with amphibian biodiversity involves tools like micro-CT scanning, which allows researchers to produce 3-D models and gain a better understanding of the internal anatomy of these animals. The 3-D models can be used in K-12 science classrooms and provided to other researchers around the world studying these species.
Interview and videos produced by Gordon Yoder for Explore Research at the University of Florida.
Transcript
David Blackburn: My research focuses specifically on studying amphibian diversity and trying to understand the sort of broad scale patterns of diversity in terms of species and diversity in terms of biology’s across the entire tree of life for living frogs.
So there’s more than 6,500 species of living frog, so that’s more frogs than mammals for those of you keeping count, and if you actually look across the diversity of living frogs one really exciting part is that every week we’re actually discovering new species. So on average the scientific community discovers about 150 new species of amphibians every year, almost all of those are frogs, and while we’re adding a new species to the list of species we know about, every time we find a new species we’re also adding all the biology that that species encompasses.
So what I have here is a 3D print out of the skull of one of these species and this is really neat because if you look at it this is not a toy replica that was made just by an artist’s interpretation. This is actually made using a micro CT-scanner, which is essentially taking two dimensional x-rays and then reconstructing it as a 3D volume to show, in this case, the skull of this animal that, in general, is very poorly known.
The exciting part is, not only can we use that data for describing species, for knowing more about the anatomy and diversity of these animals, but we can also print it, like this, give it to an eight-year-old. We can give it to colleagues around the world, we can share those data, just electronically with colleagues, and it makes the impact of our scientific collections much larger, because there’s a direct connection to other scientists that we can share those data very easily, sometimes more easily than the actual specimens, and we can also use these as products of our research that we can, you know, hand to a six-year-old.
One of the things that I think is most exciting about science is the fact that we – we tell cool stories, we find amazing things, and we can really help inspire, you know, kids, adults, to care about the natural world around them, right, and to the extent to which we find out cool things about animals and tell people about it.
Learn more about the Herpetology collection at the Florida Museum.
Learn more about the Blackburn Lab at the Florida Museum.