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Sea robins are ocean fish particularly suited to their bottom-dwelling lifestyle. Six leg-like appendages make them so adept at scurrying, digging, and finding prey that other fish tend to hang out with them and pilfer their spoils.

A chance encounter in 2019 with these strange, legged fish at Cape Cod's Marine Biological Laboratory was enough to inspire Corey Allard to want to study them.

"We saw they had some sea robins in a tank, and they showed them to us, because they know we like weird animals," said Allard, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Nicholas Bellono, professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. The Bellono lab investigates the sensory biology and cellular physiology of many marine animals, including octopuses, jellyfish, and sea slugs.

"Sea robins are an example of a species with a very unusual, very novel trait," Allard continued. "We wanted to use them as a model to ask, 'How do you make a new organ?'"

Sea robin. Credit: Anik Grearson, MBARI, CC BY-SA

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