About Dylan

Dr. Dylan Wainwright is a professor at Purdue University in Indiana. As a professor, Dylan is in charge of both planning research projects and mentoring graduate students who want to have their own research lab someday. Dylan grew up in Davis, CA and, as a kid, he spent a lot of his time fishing. That’s one of the reasons he now studies fish as a scientist. His dad is also a scientist who studies fish, so Dylan spent lots of vacations helping his dad catch specimens. When he’s not in the lab or fishing, Dylan likes to play soccer, tennis, and field hockey.

In his words...

"Organisms interact with environments using their surfaces. I am interested in this interaction between organism and environment in swimming creatures like fish and cetaceans [whales and dolphins]. In particular, I study the [microscopic structures] present on the scaled surfaces of different fish species to ask questions about the evolution of scales and potential hydrodynamic impacts of different scales on swimming performance."

Why does he love his job?

"As a researcher, I get to push the boundaries of human knowledge forward, if just a little bit! I believe it's a real privilege to see and discover things for the first time, and by doing those things I get to help humanity understand life on our planet."

One of the studies Dylan has done on fish was with a species of fish called the northern clingfish (Gobiesox maeandricus), which lives in the rocky intertidal zone right here in the Pacific Northwest! Life in the rocky intertidal zone can be tough for the organisms that live there. There are crashing waves that can whisk an organism about if it’s not good at holding on. Gobiesox maeandricus (G. maeandricus) has evolved a very special way of holding tight--it’s pelvic fins have been modified into a suction disc that lets them adhere to rocks. It even lets them pry molluscs off rocks to eat!

Dylan wanted to know just how strong the suction of G. maeandricus could be. To investigate this, he collected and euthanized some clingfish (their sucker still works when they’re dead), and stuck them to surfaces of different roughness. Then he tried to pull them off with a machine that measures force, and recorded how much force it took to remove the fish from the different surfaces. What he found was that clingfish are excellent at sticking to even the roughest of surfaces and can’t stick to smooth surfaces. Man-made suction cups, on the other hand, will only stick to the smoothest of surfaces. Dylan thinks that clingfish are so good at this because their suction disc has many little fringey fingers called villi around the edge, and each of those has even more villi, and so does each of those! All that fringe fills in the tiny crevices in the rough surface, and keeps air or water from leaking in and ruining the suction. This is an exciting thing to understand, because we could mimic clingfish fins to make suction cups that would be better at sticking to wet or rough surfaces.