A Scientist’s Life: Dahiana Arcila

Dahiana Arcila is a marine biologist and curator of the Marine Vertebrate Collection at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. She received her bachelor’s degree from Universidad del Quindío in Colombia and received her PhD at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. in 2012. She served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Institution’s National History Museum in Washington, D.C. and at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining Scripps Oceanography in 2023, she was an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma.

explorations now (en): What do you do for a living?

Dahiana Arcila (DA): I work with fishes. My research is centered on examining the genealogical relationships among fishes, exploring how they have evolved over millions of years to adapt to different marine environments, and investigating the genomic and morphological basis of these adaptations.

en: What are some of the main questions in your field?

DA: We are in the middle of a huge genomic revolution. We are trying to address questions such as how do genomes evolve over time? We want to understand what are the genetic bases of the evolutionary traits that we see across the diversity of fishes. For example, I work with pufferfish, box fishes, and molas. They exhibit unique adaptations such as body inflation, armored bodies or venom resistance. These unique adaptations are very interesting to investigate from a morphological standpoint, but actually when we look at the genomes, we are able to investigate the genetic basis of these adaptations, how they have evolved, what are their genetic mechanisms, and what are the underpinnings of these novelties. Once we identify these adaptations, we can do validation. We can look at how these genes are actually able to be turned off or turned on. 

en: What tools do you use in your research? 

DA: We want to document fish biodiversity. For this, we use biological collections and we also go to the field to document the diversity. We are also using large datasets that require us to get access to supercomputers and to a variety of bioinformatics tools.

Additionally, more recently, we have been applying new statistical models to investigate the role of ancient climatic events in shaping the evolution of fishes. We can also use a variety of new techniques, such as CRISPR-CAS9. With this technique, we are able to validate the function of genes. We have been going through this incredible genomic revolution and this has led us to use large datasets. One challenge we have is how to analyze these large datasets. We are very lucky because here at UC San Diego, we have access to Expanse, which is a very powerful supercomputer that we have access to and run with hundreds of genomes.

en: What makes the Marine Vertebrate Collection so special?

DA: Biological collections are like time capsules in that they can actually take us through time. We can actually see how biodiversity has been changing through time and that's very powerful. That's something that we can only do when we have access to collections. Without collections, there is no way to record what it was before and what is still there. This is the way that we can document biodiversity through time.

en: Why did you want to come to Scripps?

DA: It's really inspiring to be in an environment in which people really care about the ocean and to investigate its biodiversity. At Scripps, we also have one of the largest collections of deep sea fishes and historical holdings from the Pacific Ocean. We are in a unique location here in the Pacific, and we have access to rare specimens such as an oarfish that washed ashore in La Jolla Cove recently. This is the only 20th discovery of a specimen that has been recorded since 1901. I can say that I'm very lucky to say that I have my dream job.

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