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Mesa Community College Professor Performing CT Scans On Fish For Project

Published: Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - 5:08pm
Updated: Friday, October 13, 2017 - 9:17am
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(Photo courtesy of Dr. Alex Cheroske, Mesa Community College Red Mountain)
A dragon fish head
(Photo courtesy of Dr. Alex Cheroske, Mesa Community College Red Mountain)
Measuring the lactoria cornuta fish.

We all know the phrase there are a lot of fish in the sea, but do you think it’s possible to document all of them?

Right now in a laboratory on an island about 60 miles north of Seattle, scientists are busy taking CT scans of every type of fish in the ocean. That’s about 33,000 species of fish.

Well, one Valley professor spent his summer break up there helping out with that project.

Alex Cheroske is a life sciences professor at Mesa Community College — and he is really into fish.

In fact, even here in the desert, at Mesa Community College, they have a huge collection of fish from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. So, when he heard about this scanning project in Washington, which is being run by a friend of his from grad school, he thought it would be a good collaboration.

So he went up to Washington with his collection of deep-sea fish and scanned them. I spoke with him more about this collaboration and what exactly it looks like when you perform CT scans on fish.

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