ECR Spotlight is a series of interviews with early-career authors from a selection of papers published in Journal of Experimental Biology and aims to promote not only the diversity of early-career researchers (ECRs) working in experimental biology but also the huge variety of animals and physiological systems that are essential for the ‘comparative’ approach. Eleanor Caves is an author on ‘ Nanoscale ultrastructures increase the visual conspicuousness of signalling traits in obligate cleaner shrimps’, published in JEB. Eleanor conducted the research described in this article while an Assistant Professor at the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. She is now an Assistant Professor at the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Brown University, USA, investigating behavioural ecology, animal vision and evolution, particularly using marine cleaning interactions to ask questions regarding how organisms perceive their visual world, and how that perception influences how animals perceive, recognize and communicate with other individuals.
Eleanor Caves
How did you become interested in biology?
I'm one of those people who has known I was interested in biology ever since I was a kid. I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, which is a pretty long way from the beautiful tropical reefs that are now the focus of my research, but I credit Albuquerque's expansive natural spaces, its beautiful open skies, and its unique desert flora and fauna with sparking my interest in biology, and to this day, I think the high deserts of the American Southwest are still my favorite place on earth.
Describe your scientific journey and your current research focus
I had fantastic biology teachers in high school, who set me on a path to attend Pomona College for my bachelor's degree in Biology. From Pomona, I got a fellowship to do a master's degree at the University of Cambridge in the UK, where I worked with Drs Claire Spottiswoode and Martin Stevens on a project incorporating avian vision into our understanding of how egg phenotypes evolve under selection from brood parasites. The combination of behavior and sensory biology really sparked my interest, and I decided that for a PhD, I wanted to continue on the sensory biology path. I joined Sönke Johnsen's lab at Duke University, USA, where I got an incredible amount of freedom to develop my own project on whatever animal interested me most; Sönke told me to purchase an animal on the internet and watch it, which would give me something to do in my first year, and by chance I bought a cleaner shrimp and fell in love! My PhD research focused heavily on the visual physiology of cleaner shrimps and the implications of that sensory capability for their mutualistic partnerships with reef fish ‘clients’, and I have become more and more fascinated as I work with these animals by the mutualism that they have, and trying to understand how parties that could potentially be predator and prey come to cooperate with one another instead.
How would you explain the main findings of your paper to a member of the public?
Cleaner shrimp are small, tropical crustaceans that remove and eat parasites and dead skin from their reef fish clients. Many of their clients are potential predators that can and readily do eat crustaceans, but they don't eat cleaner shrimp. My research examines how these two parties recognize one another as partners, and we've identified that cleaner shrimp use signals – waving around their bright, white antennae – to initiate cleaning interactions. Thus, their long, white antennae serve as an important way that clients identify cleaners and visit them for cleaning services. In this paper, we looked at what makes cleaner shrimp antennae so brilliant white, using microscopy to look at the nanoscale structure of the antennae in three species of cleaner shrimp as well as two species of related non-cleaners. We found that all three species of cleaner shrimp have specialized nanoscale structures in their antennae that maximize their reflectance, making them very bright white and likely highly conspicuous to clients, whereas the related non-cleaners do not. Thus, cleaner shrimp seem to have evolved specialized structures that make their advertisements to clients as effective as possible.
What is the hardest challenge you have faced in the course of your research and how did you overcome it?
I have a 2 year old son, and being an academic mom has been a whole new ballgame and definitely the biggest challenge I have faced. It's hard to balance raising a child, being on-call all the time in case he gets sent home from daycare for being grumpy or whatever, having some kind of respiratory virus all winter, etc., with running a lab. But I wouldn't trade it for a thing. I've had so many people – especially early career folks, and largely women – tell me that it's very important for them to see other academic moms making it work, and sometimes I think that the most important thing I'm doing is showing others that you can have this career and a family and be successful at both. It's a challenge, and a new challenge every day, but I just hope that folks who want to be in academia start to see a whole range of lifestyles being modeled by those of us who are PI's, and to realize that there's a place for everyone here no matter how they want to live.
What is your favourite animal, and why?
Well it has to be a cleaner shrimp, of course! Honestly, they are just so cool. The more we dig into their lives, the more we are starting to uncover layers and layers of complexity. As an animal behaviorist, I see firsthand the taxonomic bias in research, and crustacean behavior is so highly underexplored compared to many other groups. But cleaner shrimp are showing me that crustaceans are capable of all kinds of complex interactions that we might not normally associate with a shrimp! So, cleaner shrimp are my favorite animal because, even though they're shrimp, they're charismatic, they have agency and they continually fascinate me by revealing something new every day.
What is the most important lesson that you have learned from your career so far?
Surround yourself with people, and an atmosphere, that make you happy. More than anything else in my career, I think I have benefitted from being part of communities – and now, as a PI, forming a community – of people who are kind, enthusiastic, supportive of each other and just all-around nice. I don't know what the secret sauce is to achieve this, but I do know that happy people do the best science, and that each lab member finds happiness in their own way, so I make sure to encourage my lab members to find and take time for hobbies, family, recharging, etc., and even when that takes some time away from lab work, I find that it repays 10 times over later in the quality of work that they do.
Do you have a top tip for others just starting out at your career stage?
Give yourself grace and patience. My PhD supervisor Dr Sönke Johnsen once told me that for any project, I should estimate how long it would take and then double it and go to the next time unit up to get the real time: so if I assumed something would take me 2 days, it would actually be 4 weeks; something I assumed would take 3 weeks would actually take 6 months. At first, I thought this was ridiculous, but the farther along I get in my career, the more I realize that it is the truth! Especially when starting up a lab, the pressure to perform immediately can be enormous and result in burn-out, but play the long game and realize that it can take years for lab members to start producing publications, to have all of the equipment you need in your lab up and running, or to have a community that sustains itself.
What do you like to do in your free time?
I love to cook, and especially to bake, and also to take hikes and walks with my dog and my toddler.
Eleanor Caves's contact details: Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA.
E-mail: [email protected]