Zoology - Mechanics and motion of the shape-morphing armored skin of pufferfish

Supervisor: Dr Ariel Camp

Supervisor bio: I am a biomechanist using innovative 3D visualisation and animal models to study musculoskeletal mechanics at the interface between the head and body: the neck. I completed my BSc in Marine Biology with a minor in technical theatre at Hofstra University (US), and my MSc and PhD at Brown University (US). My PhD developed new ways to see and measure muscle motion and 3D shape change in living animals with x-ray video. I discovered fish power feeding not with head muscles as expected, but almost entirely with the swimming muscles of the body. As a postdoctoral researcher at Brown, I co-led (as Co-PI) a US NSF grant building a new framework for studying the anatomy, mechanics and evolution of fish body muscles as dual-function motors powering swimming and feeding. I joined the University of Liverpool in 2018 on a BBSRC Discovery Fellowship, during which overturned the idea that fish bodies only bend in 2D. I showed fish move the backbone three-dimensionally and have a functional neck. In 2022 I became a Tenure Track Fellow and then in 2024 a Lecturer in the Institute of Life Course and Medical Sciences, where I continue to use fish models to investigate spinal biomechanics, dynamic muscle deformation, and bio-inspired robotic devices.

Email: ariel.camp@liverpool.ac.uk

School: Life Sciences

Department: Zoology

Module code: LIFE398

Suitable for students of: Biology, engineering, anatomy and physiology

Desirable experience/requirements: Coding or data processing, 3D visualisation, dissection and/or vertebrate anatomy

Places available: 1

Start dates: 16 June 2025 only

Project length: 8 weeks 

Virtual option: No - Hybrid or In-Person

Project description: 

Pufferfish triple their body volume by pumping air or water into their stomachs in times of stress. This in turn stretches their soft skin and passively rotates/erects their rigid spines to prevent themselves from being eaten. Interfacing between hard and soft tissues is ubiquitous in nature like bone and tendon, but it is very unusual for such an interface to embrace extensive, lifelong distortions while maintaining the material integrity. Remarkably, the skin-spine interface of pufferfish does exactly this function. This project will thereby focus on the motion and material properties of the skin-spine interface that is surprisingly absent in current literature. You will measure the motion of the skin and spines from 3D x-ray videos. And you will compare the length change (strain) observed in pufferfish to measurements of the strain-force relationship in the skin of other fish. Skin samples will be dissected, mounted, and undergo known length changes. The results of this project will help us understand how the morphology of pufferfish skin encodes complex shape-morphing functions, which can be transfered to improving soft-robotics, prosthetics and multi-material manufacturing.

Additional requirements: N/A