Anna McCallum started her scientific career with the type of discovery that some biologists spend their entire careers chasing. In 2005, after earning an undergraduate degree, she worked as an assistant aboard the research vessel Southern Surveyor and discovered a new species of shrimp in the deep waters off the southwest coast of Australia. During the cruise, nets trawled the ocean depths from 100–1000 meters, dumping their catch on board for McCallum and her colleagues to sift through. “We found a lot of new species, not all as spectacular as the little shrimp,” McCallum recalls. (Indeed, McCallum says she was so busy sorting samples during her 3:00 PM–3:00 AM shifts, that she doesn’t even remember collecting it.) Finding and identifying the spotty, 5-centimeter-long shrimp was an opportunity to immortalize herself or a close colleague through naming the new species.
But McCallum, now a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, ...
