Joy Reidenberg (Inside Nature’s Giants) interview

Inside Nature’s Giants was one of the surprise TV hits of last year. The show that uncovered the anatomical secrets of some of the animal kingdom’s most extraordinary creatures is back for a second series this June.

Among the highlights of the last series was American scientist Prof Joy Reidenberg’s gung-ho approach to a dramatic whale dissection, which saw her quite literally throwing herself into her subject matter.

Watch a clip...

Here, she reveals why the whale dissection was the most challenging of her life, what it’s like to drive with a dead dolphin as a passenger, and how she felt coming face to face with a Great White Shark...


Obviously you're a US-based academic. How did you end up involved in a British TV series?

It was kind of by accident. It wasn't something I'd been looking for - I'd never seen myself going on TV. I'm just a simple scientist. What happened was Windfall Films [the production company] was doing a documentary series on large animal anatomy, and they had already planned out the animals they were going to do. And then this whale stranded in Ireland. And they realised if they were going to do something on giant animals they really ought to do a whale.

So they asked the scientists they had already tapped to do the different episodes - so there was a guest scientist who was a specialist in each of the animals - they asked them if they knew anything about whale anatomy, and none of them did. But one of them happened to be a friend of mine who I'd met through work, and he told them about me. So I got this phone call from Windfall Films on a Friday afternoon before a four-day holiday weekend, saying "Would I be willing to fly to Ireland on a moment's notice and dissect a whale." I'm always up for a challenge.

The big problem for me was that I needed to get to the airport by 6pm. Getting out of New York on a Friday is hard anyway, but Friday traffic on a holiday weekend is much worse. And my passport was at home, so I had to go in the other direction first. So that’s pretty much how it started. I showed up, I had no idea who I’d be working with, I didn’t know any of the film people at all. I didn't even know where I was going. I got terribly lost driving there when I arrived in Ireland, and my phone didn’t work in Europe. So I basically just drove south until I hit the water and then turned right. And that’s how I found them.

So that’s how you ended up working on the whale programme. How did that then expand to working on the other programmes?

Well, I think they felt that they’d found a quirky personality in me, and they thought it might be fun to have me come back for the other episodes because they liked my energy, my enthusiasm and my fearlessness of diving right into the specimen. And when they realised that I had a very broad-based knowledge of comparative anatomy as well as human anatomy, they thought that perhaps I could bring something else to the table besides just being an expert on the one animal that might be featured in an episode. So I could talk about evolution in a broader sense, and relate it back to “How is this animal special, and how does it compare to what we understand of our own anatomy.”

What does comparative anatomy actually entail?

Comparative anatomy is looking at the structure of the body of lots of different animals, to see where there are similarities and where there are differences.

But you’ve concentrated particularly on whales, haven’t you?

Yes. Actually, our research is focused on animals adapted to extreme environments, so we are looking to nature for inspiration, perhaps to develop new protective gear for humans, or help us treat diseases or prevent injuries, based on whether humans might be in an environmental situation, artificial or natural, where they need to adapt and use something we’ve learned from studying animals. So, for example, one of the reasons we look at whales is that they’re adapted not only to living in the water, but they’re also diving animals, which means they can withstand huge changes of pressure. And one of the areas we’re trying to find solutions for is how do we help humans withstand pressure changes. I’m not only talking about changes that might occur with going into space or living deep in the water.

Our soldiers and construction workers experience changes in pressure much more often when they’re dealing with explosives. The danger from explosions isn’t just the shrapnel and metal flying around, it’s the pressure wave that emanates from the explosion. And that causes a huge amount of damage to the body. The areas that compress the most are the gas-containing spaces like the lungs, or the ears or the sinuses. My specialty happens to be the respiratory tract, which of course is all the gas-containing spaces. So if diving animals could handle the pressure changes of an explosion without damage, could we perhaps learn from their adaptability, how to make protective gear for our soldiers and construction workers so that they, too, can withstand those changes.

That’s just an example. We’re looking at lots of applications, we have a lot of diverse projects going on. Why are we looking at all these weird animals? It all relates to “Can we learn from nature? Can we mimic something that nature’s already developed, and co-opt that into a treatment or a prosthesis for people?”

You referred to extreme environments, which brings me back to your whale dissection in Ireland. You had to deal with some pretty extreme conditions then, didn’t you?

You know, I fondly refer to that programme as a docudrama, because there was so much drama in that episode. We were trying to fight the weather, which was not only freezing cold but also raining and hailing on us, and 60mph winds, and we were out on a little sand bar, which meant we only had four hours between tides to work - as the sun was going down. Low tide was about 4:30pm, so we didn’t have a lot of light to work with. So we had all these factors working against us, plus the politics of the situation - rival towns both wanted to keep the whale’s skeleton. So there was a lot going on. That was by far the most difficult dissection I’ve ever done.

Plus, I didn’t have my crew with me, or all my normal equipment. I had some equipment there, but it wasn’t the right equipment. The stuff that I really wanted to use wasn’t the stuff I could get onto an plane with an hour’s notice. Going to Ireland was a very interesting experience because there I was kind of by myself. Nobody else had ever done a whale before. I had wonderful people there from the Whale and Dolphin Group to help me, who were very enthusiastic, but they had never done a whale before, and also they weren’t comfortable with some of the big tools they were using. So trying to direct them in the middle of a storm was also a challenge. I might have sounded angry on the programme, but I really wasn’t - I was just having to yell over the 60mph wind.

It all looked incredibly messy and smelly. I take it that side of things doesn’t bother you?

That whale was actually fresh relative to some of the ones I have worked on here in America, because baleen whales almost never come in alive. They almost always come in already dead. So I’ve dealt with way, way, way more decomposed animals than that one. So the smell really wasn’t too bad - especially as the wind was blowing so nicely! It did smell awful, I have to admit, but for me it was just a matter of comparison. It wasn’t green inside, it wasn’t soupy. I’ve dealt with animals where you could just reach in and pick out the bones one at a time because it’s just soup. So compared to that, it was in pretty good shape. In fact, working on the whale didn’t seem so smelly to me until I got back to the hotel, and there, when I tried to change out of my clothes, I just stank everybody else out of the room. It’s amazing what a difference it makes when you don’t have a 60mph wind carrying away that odour any more.

How many whale dissections have you done over the years?

That depends on whether you include everything that’s a cetacean - if you include dolphins and killer whales and stuff like that. If you include all of those then the numbers would be in the 200s. If we’re talking about big whales, then somewhere around 30.

On the subject of dolphins, is it true you were once stopped going through the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan with a dead dolphin alongside you in your hatchback?

Yes, it’s true. We had a mass dolphin die off on the north-eastern coast of the US in 1987, and we were getting so many dolphins each day that we didn’t have time to necropsy them right there on the beach. So they asked me to take a whole animal back and necropsy it at Mount Sinai, which is not what we normally do - we normally do that out in the field. So I did - I took the whole thing back. But when I went out there, I didn’t expect to bring a whole animal back with me. So I didn’t have a really big car. I had rented a car. So we had to stuff this 10-foot long animal into a hatchback which only had two doors.

The tail was stuck against the back windscreen, and the beak was sticking out of the passenger window. I had to go through the Lincoln Tunnel, and I was wondering if the dolphin counted as a passenger, allowing me to use the high occupancy vehicle lane. I think the guy at the toll booth where I stopped must have just assumed it was a big inflatable.

Did you say this was in a rental car?

Yeah, but don’t tell the rental agency.

I also heard a rather disturbing story about you, as a child, deciding your doll needed a new coat…

Well, that’s not exactly right. I was really little, and I wanted a fur saddle blanket for my Native American figure to ride his horse. It wasn’t like a Barbie doll. And I found a dead chipmunk in our yard, and I happened to have this penchant for picking up dead things - my mother never liked that habit! Though this was a great opportunity to see animals up close without them biting me. I’d always trapped animals as well, and then been bitten by them and had to be taken to the doctor, so in some ways this was less traumatic for my mother. So I found this dead chipmunk, and snuck a knife out from the kitchen and went to town.

I’d learned all about Native Americans at school, and now I was going to go and tan myself a fur. So I did. That was probably the first dissection I ever did. But then a raccoon snuck in and took the hide while it was laid out to dry. I was really upset. My parents were not sympathetic at all.

Looking ahead to the new series of Inside Nature’s Giants, what animals are featured in the new series?

It’s going to have Great White Sharks, which I’m really excited about - it’s a beautiful specimen; a lion and a tiger, a two-for-one special there, which was really exciting and special; and a Burmese Python, which was probably the biggest snake I had ever seen. The girth of it was like my thigh - and I’m not a really thin person. And I don’t want to give too much away about what we found, but it did eat something big. This was a really big animal. And with any luck there will be some more big animals coming down the pipeline after that.

You did a cage dive and came face to face with a Great White for that programme. What was that experience like?

It was an awesome sight - emphasis on the "awe". I was especially attracted to the shark's eyes. Yes, they were big and black, but they didn't seem "dead" and "empty" as others have described them. They seemed thoughtful and curious to me. I had two such moments like this. The first was when I was above the water, in the boat. The shark actually turned on its side on purpose so that its eye could look up through the glassy-smooth water's surface. As it glided so gracefully past me (all 10-12 feet of it!), I couldn't help but lean over the edge of the boat and look back at it. It almost paused while swimming so we could make eye contact! I think it was as curious about me as I was about it. I didn't feel threatened. I felt like it was just calmly surveying us.

And the second was during the cage dive?

Yeah. The sharks swam gracefully past the cage. They never turned and tried to attack. In fact, I think they were a little more afraid of me than I was of them. At one point, there were five sharks swimming around the boat (we saw more than 15 different individual sharks that day!). Each one kept a safe distance from the cage, but they kept watching us (the camera man and I) as if they were trying to figure out why we had invaded their world! At first, I was amazed to see the mouth full of sharp teeth. From the cage, I had the advantage of being below the sharks, and could easily see into the open mouth.

When one passed right over the cage, and accidentally bumped into it, we were thrown around in the cage. What power in that tail! It was frightening to see the open mouth and teeth so close to the cage. However, I realized that the display of teeth is only a side effect of their ram-jet style of breathing: water must flow in through the mouth in order to pass over the gills as they swim forward. The teeth being exposed is a wonderful and terrible sight to see, but not a sign of aggression as it would be for a land animal.

For example, you would not want to pet a dog that is smiling - it's showing you its weapons for a reason! After marveling at the teeth and the graceful swimming movements of the body, I was drawn again to that large, black eye. I am sure the shark was staring right at me on purpose. It was probably thinking the same thing, though: "Why is that human staring at me with two big brown eyes?" I'm quite sure my eyes were opened wide with excitement too!

What can people learn from watching Inside Nature’s Giants? Why should they watch?

I think if you have a curiosity about the natural environment around you, you should tune in. It’s exciting and educational - people will learn not only about the anatomy of the animals, but about how they evolved, how they fit in to the whole scheme of understanding nature, how they manage to look so weird. It’s fun to see the diversity that’s out there, and also to see the commonalities - sometimes you can look at animals that look so different until you open them up and realise that they’re not all that different - they have the same organs inside - it’s got a heart, it’s got lungs, it’s got a liver, it’s got intestines. It’s all the same stuff.

Maybe it’s packaged a little differently, but we all have a lot in common. They’re really all like us, and that helps us understand that all these animals came from a common origin - there is an evolutionary radiation that we’re showing, and I think that’s an important message for a lot of people.


Inside Nature's Giants airs on Channel 4 on Tuesdays at 9pm from 8th June 2010.