We caught up with 2015 TEDxPeachtree Speaker Al Dove right before he headed off to the Galapagos Islands to chase down some of the largest Whale Shark individuals. Dove is the director of research and conservation at Georgia Aquarium and a writer for the marine science blog Deep Sea News.

Q: This your first time speaking at a TEDx event, what are your thoughts?

Al Dove: I’m thrilled! It’s a great opportunity to reach a lot of people and cut across different audiences. It’s a chance to put all of the things that you’ve had in all sorts of different scientific talks and distill it down into one presentation and a common language that everyone can enjoy. It’s actually quite challenging too to take all that science and boil it down and make it relatable.

Q: What inspired you to get into marine science?

AD: I’ve wanted to be a marine biologist since I was a little kid. I had a brief period when I was a teenager where I wanted to design sports cars but there was way too much math and physics in that.

I also had a problem with my ear when was younger so I had to spend a lot of time playing around in rock pools while my friends were swimming because I wasn’t allowed to swim until I was a little older. I think that time I rummaging in rock pools I learned a thing or two about animals and developed a fascination for the little stuff you find under rocks and it went from there.

But, I think if you had told me back then that i would be working with the world’s largest fish and living in America studying whale sharks I would never have believed you.

Q: What is the most surreal moment you’ve had working with Whale Sharks?

AD: So many moments with whale sharks are surreal! I think one of the moments was when pulling into the harbor in Saint Helena (a very remote island in the middle of the South Atlantic). We had gone quite literally halfway around the world to visit whale sharks but we had no guarantee that we were going to see them. They’re one of the ocean’s most enigmatic and mercurial animals. We were pulling into the harbor in Saint Helena having planned and traveled for so long… and then we saw one in the harbor before the ship even dropped anchor. So that was surreal and a huge relief at the same time.

Q: Science doesn’t always go as planned. Have you had any fieldwork fails?

AD: Yeah, there’s always the days when you get skunked. You go out on the boat and you see nothing or the weather doesn’t play nice or the boat breaks down.

This year we had a boat break down and we had to be towed back to port. So it is not always beer and skittles, as we say where I come from, but at the end of the day it’s tremendously gratifying pursuit of truth. I think a lot of the stuff about when it goes wrong was encapsulated really nicely in the #fieldworkfails twitter hashtag recently. That was really strangely gratifying hashtag because it was reassuring to know that all these other scientists have bad days too. There’s a lot of really creative people trying to do really hard things in the name of science, and of course its not always smooth sailing.

Q:What is your favorite land animal?

AD: There are 6 million animals on the planet! I don’t know how you even pick! I have a soft spot for peripatus. They’re these worms that live in rainforest leaf litter. Beautiful purple velvety worms with little short legs. They’re very handsome animals. I like those a lot.

But I like anything that’s bizarre or colorful or has crazy biology. I tend to gravitate away from grey fuzzy animals.

Q: What is your favorite bad fish joke?

AD: ‘Just for the halibut’. Anytime someone says ‘just for the halibut’ I want to hit them with one. ‘Let me mullet over’, too. ‘Stop carping on’. There are so many fish puns. They definitely fall in the Dad joke category.

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Rachel Pendergrass is a writer, performer and science communicator in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the assistant director of the Dragon Con Science Track, a program contributor for the Atlanta Science Festival, and producer/host of a monthly science variety show called Solve for X. Find her on Twitter at @sharkespearean.