The course will use the diverse marine fish community of the San Juan Islands as a platform for exploring how form, function, and mechanics interact to shape organismal performance in ecological contexts. Integrating concepts from biology, physics, and engineering, students will investigate how structural design principles—from materials and leverage to hydrodynamics—underlie fish movement, feeding, and survival.

Students will learn:

1. the evolutionary history and relationships of the major radiations of bony and cartilaginous fishes;
2. field and laboratory techniques for collecting and analyzing fish specimens;
3. experimental and computational tools for quantifying functional morphology, including biomechanical modeling, material testing, and motion analysis.

During the first half of the course, daily lectures and field trips will introduce key methods and provide hands-on experience with both biological systems and analytical tools. In the second half, students will conduct independent research projects that integrate biological observation with mechanical or quantitative analysis. Projects may span topics in ecology, ecomorphology, comparative physiology, biomechanics, biomaterials, or bioinspired design.

The course culminates in an oral and written presentation of each research project. Building on the long-standing tradition of this course, we continue to expand its interdisciplinary focus through mini-seminars in phylogenetics, materials science, computational modeling, and R-based data analysis, ensuring students gain both biological insight and quantitative, engineering-relevant skills.

Course title note: Courses offered at Friday Harbor Laboratories (FHL) are credited through University of Washington (UW) and therefore the UW “umbrella” course title listed on the UW transcript for all courses numbered “FHL 528” will be “Advanced Topics in Fish Biology.”

TAs for this course will be Meg Vandenberg and Brenlee Shipps.

Enrollment is limited to 18 students. No textbook is required for this course.