There’s no need to say cheese when Max Arseneault clicks his camera—most of his photo subjects couldn’t hide their teeth if they wanted to.
By day, Arseneault, ’19, MS ’21, works as a software engineer on a human genome browser that he describes as Google Maps for DNA. But in his free time, he’s in the water off the coast of San Diego, or West Palm Beach, Fla., or Cape Town, South Africa, chumming the water for sharks. He’s been fascinated since childhood with shark phylogeny (the evolutionary history of a species). “I’ve always just liked when there’s a template, and then variations on that template,” he says.
STRETCH GOAL: Arseneault gets some shark time at the Seattle Aquarium. (Photo: Ali Randolph)
His dream is to photograph every shark species in the world (to date he’s snagged 43) and post them on his website, treeofsharks.com, where he’s already mapped the lineage of 497 shark, ray, and chimaera species. “You’ve taken the most chaotic field, which is biology, and you’ve very cleanly put it in a box,” he says. “You’ve made a whole story.”
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
