Lured by Fish

To some people, fish make a great meal. To others, they offer a fun way to spend a day. To Kassandra Ford, they are a full-time job and then some. And she loves (almost) every minute.

As an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology, Ford studies the evolution of facial features in electric fish from South America and Africa. As curator of fishes and mollusks for the Bell Museum of Natural History, she oversees the museum’s collection of fish specimens. Suspended in ethanol in glass jars in a basement vault in St. Paul, these fish, some of them more than a century old, provide a window into the world of underwater diversity and valuable insights into how fish populations, fish species, and the conditions in which they thrive change over time.

Q | How did you get into this line of work? 
I caught a few bluegills with my dad when I was maybe 10, but I didn’t really have an interest in fish until I went to college. Then I took an evolutionary biology class and learned that there are over 30,000 species of fish in the world. And I thought that that sounded phenomenal. The professor who taught that class convinced me that I could make a career out of my interest.

Q | Why would the Bell Museum want so many fish?
The collection captures examples of what fish looked like for the past 130, 140 years. Just as each individual person is different, each fish is different. It can tell us things about what life was like, what it was eating, where it was living, what was around it in terms of other fish or other aquatic life. We can use that to figure out what’s changing in our ecosystems and how we can ensure that we are preserving as much biodiversity as possible, so that our experiences as people who like to go fishing remain the same for as long as possible.

Q | What are your most and least favorite parts of your job?
I adore teaching. I come from a family of teachers, but I had no interest in being a teacher. That was until I saw the differences between higher education teaching and K–12 teaching. I get to guide my students toward their future careers. And they get to geek out with me over fish. Parts that I could leave? The accounting. It would be a miracle if some person just gave me money so I could do this without having to think about budget lines.

Q | If you could change one thing about how Minnesotans think of fish, what would it be?
I would like them to respect rough fish. Those species have just as much of a right to be here and are just as important to the ecosystem as game fish. The presence of native nongame fish in a lake is not going to ruin your walleye fishing. Everything’s connected, and the more biodiversity and the more nongame fishes we see in a given ecosystem, the healthier it is and likely the better the fishing is going to be.

Q | Do you have a favorite Minnesota fish?
The bowfin—they’re so cool! They have an eyespot on the back of their body that keeps predators from attacking their face. They have a rough structure on the bottom of their mouth that kind of sticks out and helps them crush prey. And their scales are like armor. It’s incredible. I understand that it has to be very frustrating to think that you’re pulling in a fantastic walleye or something, and then it’s a bowfin. But as much as seeing their teeth when you’re trying to get a hook out is not exactly fun, I think they’re fantastically cool.

Q | You said you did a little fishing as a kid. Do you fish now? 
A little bit. I am a bit of an impatient person, so the efficiency of scientific fishing, where you go out in your waders and catch fish with different methods, is a little more up my alley. We can get so many different species all in one net, and I find that cool.

Q | What career advice would you give to a young person who loves to fish?
Find that thing that brings you joy and see if you can find a career that involves that. And to those who belong to groups that have been historically excluded from scientific fields, I would say that it’s OK to be the first. It’s scary, but push through, because you can be an inspiration for the people who come after you. One of the reasons I chose to go into this was so that I could inspire others to remain in science, do science, and know that they belong here.