Among the Academies: A Lifelong Fascination With Fish

For Peter Wainwright, the academic path was simple: he simply followed his fascination with fish.

“I dare say there wasn't a lot of deep thought about what direction I should go in my life,” he said. “It was more, I like fish, let's see if I can do something with fish. It was all very organic.”

Wainwright, a distinguished professor emeritus of evolution and ecology, has dedicated his career to understanding how fish feed and how fish feeding methods evolved. He joined UC Davis in 1999 after four years on the faculty at Florida State University. In honor of the fundamental insights that he provided into the mechanics and evolution of fish feeding, he was elected to the California Academy of Sciences in 2010 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.

Fish first caught Wainwright's attention as a child, when he visited coral reefs with his father, who was also a biologist. When he discovered fishing as a teenager, it only increased his interest in fish. And after more than 40 years studying fish, he's still captivated by them.

“It’s on coral reefs where fish do their most magnificent things,” said Wainwright. “There's just an endless supply of interesting behaviors and feeding ecology.”

Fishes’ fathomless feeding diversity

Fish were the first vertebrate or “backboned” species to evolve, which gave them more time to diversify than reptiles, birds, and mammals.  And they haven't wasted any time developing innovative ways to feed — from scraping food off of hard surfaces, to sucking food out of the water column, to grabbing prey using a second set of prehensile jaws.

“Fish jaws are way more complicated than mammal jaws. We have one bone that moves, our mandible, but fish have two dozen independently moving bones in their skull that are involved in feeding,” said Wainwright. “That means the potential for evolutionary diversification is crazy, because every one of those elements can be modified somewhat independently of the others.”

Wainwright's research group uses a range of methods to zero-in on how fish feed, including laboratory experiments and field research. He's studied fish at field sites around the globe, including Japan, Hawaii, Mexico, Belize, Tahiti and Australia.

“When I got started, almost nothing was known at scale about the anatomy underlying how fish do different things,” he said. “We now have a much better understanding of the functional roles played by different kinds of fish in the reef ecosystem.”

Maximizing mentorship

Mentoring junior researchers has always been a priority for Wainwright. 

“I take my mentoring seriously, and always have,” he said. “I really do try to develop people when they're a Ph.D. student or a postdoc to promote their career and help them get to as far as they can.”

By Wainwright’s count, more than 35 of his mentees have gone on to faculty positions.

“What matters to me most on my CV is the list of people I've worked with who have then gone on to have faculty positions all over the world,” he said. “People joke in the academy that, in your career, you might replace yourself by training somebody, but I've replaced myself three dozen times over or more. That's something I'm very proud of.”

Out of the office and back to the field

Wainwright retired from teaching this summer after 27 years at UC Davis. But so far, his research routine hasn't changed.

“I still feel very connected to the university and  I've been going into my lab pretty much every day,” he said. “Life hasn't changed too much yet.”

Now, he's excited to dive back into fieldwork — starting with a trip to the coral reefs of Panama this October.

“I’m most looking forward to getting back out onto coral reefs in different locations,” said Wainwright. That’s where the inspiration all comes from.”