Associate Professor Abby Smith, from the University of Otago, is passionate about working with bryozoans. In this video, she talks about what she finds so interesting about them and why studying bryozoans is like charting the unknown.
Transcript
ASSOC PROF ABBY SMITH
Bryozoans are gorgeous and incredibly diverse. It would be hard for me to imagine being in love with oysters in the same way. It’s not that they aren’t interesting, you know – I get that oysters are cool and yes, of course, they taste nice, you know – but bryozoans are stunning. They are very complex, and they are very beautiful, and they are very interesting. But I think, really – if you want to say the romantic side of it – the romance of science is charting the unknown and being the only person who knows this is quite nifty, so I think probably the reason I got so hooked by bryozoans was that it was such a big open, wide open empty field.