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‘The fish will tell you everything,’ says Sac State’s Ron Coleman, who has spent decades studying their parenting habits
December 03, 2024
Inside 180 bubbling tanks in Biological Sciences Professor Ron Coleman’s lab, fish called cichlids practice complex courtship rituals, build nests and fight to protect their young.
They do so under the watchful eyes of Coleman and his students, who document fish parenting habits for scientific purposes.
“The fish will tell you everything if you know how to read them,” said Coleman, who built the lab in Humboldt Hall from scratch 24 years ago and visits Costa Rica annually to study cichlids in the wild. “We still have much to learn."
In the latest episode of “Beyond J,” Coleman shares how he first became interested in studying fish, adventures in Costa Rica, how he involves students in his research and why he insists that his lab be open to the public.
