The Present

Gaia Meigs-Friend

Growing up on the coast, near Santa Barbara, California, I have always felt a link to the sea. It has been a part of me since I was born. Snorkeling trips in elementary school only served to deepen my appreciation for the life it contains. I have always loved all types of animal life, though marine life and herps have a special place in my heart. I recall being very enthused by a banana slug on a pre-school hike. I used to read field guides from cover to cover. That enthusiasm for anything alive has not diminished. I have always loved observing animals and trying to figure out why things do what they do. As I write this, I am watching with interest as a colony of ants is effectively burying a Tootsie Pop ®.

I have always been fascinated with unusual creatures. Monotremes, especially the platypus, were a love for my early youth. Then I learned about manatees when I was about 10. I thought they were neat because they were different from anything else out there. From then on, I decided that I would study manatees, and that is what I am doing today. My undergraduate institution was Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. It had many attributes in its favor. Most importantly, one of the top manatee scientists in the U.S., John Reynolds, taught there. In addition, it is on the coast, which is a must. My major was biology.

I'd always planned on being a straight biologist, but several of my classes at Eckerd, especially wildlife policy, lead me to realize the importance of appropriate management so that all those interesting creatures I love observing will be around for a long time. If I am going to study an endangered species like the manatee, knowledge of and attention to policy and management will be important. This is why I decided on a CEM degree rather than a degree in biology.

This summer, I interned at the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge in Crystal River, Florida. I entered manatee locations into a GIS based on the original paper aerial survey records. It was a great experience. I am going to use the GIS data I created to identify areas where winter boat speed zones and manatee sanctuaries may need to be created or modified on Kings Bay for my Masters Project. Kings Bay is the most important natural warm-water refuge for manatees in Florida.

When I'm not off in nature or playing with wildlife, I am probably watching a car race or involved in some sort of artistic endeavor. I am currently trying to learn to play the fife. I ultimately hope to get a government or non-profit job relating to manatees.

Elizabeth Griffin
My interest in animals and conservation began as a child and steered my decision to major in biology at Loyola College in Baltimore, MD. While in college, I was a Conservation Education Assistant at the National Aquarium in Baltimore. This job gave me the chance to foster an interest in conservation in aquarium visitors while continuing to learn myself. I later became a marine mammal intern at the same aquarium. As marine mammal trainers, we focused the dolphin show and seal exhibits to promote an appreciation of the animals and an interest in conservation. I was truly amazed by these marine mammals and I realized I wanted to spend my life working with them. In the summer of my senior year of college I was part of a group from my undergraduate institution that traveled to and did research in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil. I had the very special experience of seeing Amazonian River dolphins (called Botos) in the wild. This experience convinced me that I wanted to work in marine mammal conservation. I decided to attend the CEM program at Duke so that I could add an in-depth knowledge of marine and environmental policy to my science background and thus make a greater contribution to the conservation arena.

My specific areas of interest within the marine policy arena are marine protected areas, endangered species, marine mammals, and international cooperation on marine issues. In the past few years I have worked in both science and policy. I worked on the scientific portion of policy development with Tetra Tech, Inc., an environmental consulting firm in the Washington, D.C. area. In this position I mainly concentrated on helping the EPA develop aquaculture effluent regulations. During the summer of 2002, I did an internship with the South East Oceans Program of Environmental Defense. This internship allowed me to use my science background to analyze complex environmental issues and policies such as fisheries policies being proposed by the South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council. My most recently obtained position is a position as a National Science Foundation K-12 Fellow. This program is designed to help improve public schools by providing help in the classroom, technology training for the teachers and equipment for the schools.

My master's project analyzes a network of marine protected areas being proposed by the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council and establishes a plan for the most efficient protection of the deepwater reefs species of the region. I hope to finish my master's degree in May of 2003 and obtain a job working in marine conservation biology and policy.

Amanda Kozuck

"I love dolphins" (even though we know Andy doesn't). That's what the bumper sticker on my car says. In the sixth grade I did research on and presented a poster about the bottlenose dolphin, blue and humpback whales. I even bought a tape from the Whale Adoption Project (my adopted whale's name is Olympia) of the eerie songs of male humpback whales and played it during my presentation. My class was in awe, and we were actually listening to sounds of the open ocean. It was then that I realized I wanted to become a marine biologist when I grew up.

My first whale watch excursion was aboard a commercial vessel out of Montauk, NY one summer when I was taking a weeklong class at Long Island University, Southampton Campus. It was a memorable experience because the one whale that we happened to see (that's right, ONE) was a minke and I remember our boat going to search for a supposedly entangled finback that we never found.

The summer before my senior year of college at the University of New Hampshire, I worked as an intern on a whale watch vessel out of Portsmouth, and learned about the different species of whales and dolphins in the Gulf of Maine. It was an amazing experience to be able to go out just about everyday to see whales and to see the interest in the marine environment that was expressed by many of the passengers. Interning a year later at the Mingan Island Cetacean Study in Quebec taught me a lot of valuable information as well. First, it taught me that I should have learned French before going there. Big mistake! I learned how to photo ID whales and to develop black and white pictures. But the most incredible part of the internship was going out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence in our little zodiac boats and riding right next to the largest creatures on Earth. It was a humbling experience, seeing a 50-foot humpback whale hanging out underneath your boat, upside down, with one flipper extended out on each side.

Here at Duke, I chose the coastal environmental management program to complement the background in marine biology that I acquired at UNH. My master's project focuses on tracking the changes in fishing practices and fishing gear and rope from the mid-1940's to the present. After WWII, many changes were occurring in the world, and many nations turned their attention to fishing the high seas. Today the North Atlantic right whale is the most endangered whale, and numbers probably do not exceed 300 animals. This population was decimated by the onslaught of commercial whaling, and despite over 60 decades of international protection, the population is now in decline. Anthropogenic factors, such as entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with ships, are thought to be the primary factors inhibiting the recovery of this population. My MP, besides looking at gear and rope, will examine fisheries (both regulated and non-regulated ones) in the northeast, as well as the configuration of lobster traps and gillnets, the two main types of gear involved in large whale entanglements. I will then examine gear modifications more closely, which are specialized parts added to gear to either reduce the chance of a whale becoming entangled or to increase the chances for a whale to escape, to try to see which ones appear to be effective and those that do not. It is a difficult task but hopefully this project will be beneficial to both this population and the researchers working to save it. After I graduate, I hope to pursue these studies further and try to help find ways to mitigate entanglements, with the cooperation of fisheries, scientists and policy-makers.

When I'm not trying to gather information about my MP or in class, I am usually at the gym working out and running, or helping out with the OBIS project, creating an interactive digital database for marine species by describing their distribution and abundance. Dave Johnston also has me slaving away at his harbor porpoise acoustic data taken from Grand Manan (!).

Jess Maher

Although I have spent half of my life in North Carolina, I am definitely a Midwesterner at heart. I was born the day my family moved to Lawrence, Kansas (home of the Jayhawks for any college basketball fans), and I spent my childhood in this wonderful town.

After graduating from boarding high school in North Carolina, I went back to Kansas to attend The University of Kansas (KU). It was during this year at KU that I decided that I was interested in studying marine mammals, and more specifically, studying the impacts of human activities on marine mammals. Clearly Kansas and marine mammals don't really mix, at least not at the geologic time period that I am most interested in, so I started looking into other programs.

I ended up at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW), an amazing institution truly dedicated to undergraduate teaching and experiential learning. At UNCW, I was part of Laela Sayigh's lab group. For three and a half years, I spent at least one day a week on the water (intracoastal waterway, Cape Fear River, and coastal ocean) participating in bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) surveys. In addition to this field work, I spent time in the lab doing data compilation and analysis. Under Laela's guidance, I completed an undergraduate honors thesis on the potential impacts of underwater explosions on bottlenose dolphins in the Cape Fear River. This work was done in conjunction with an Army Corps of Engineers contract to survey for dolphins in areas of the river where underwater blasts were required to deepen and widen the river channel.

I graduated from UNCW in May, 2001 and three months later started the Master of Environmental Management program at Duke. Although I would describe my interests as broadly including all aspects of environmental and natural resource conservation, I am currently focusing on marine mammal conservation. My Masters Project deals with marine mammal/fishery interactions. I spent this past summer doing an internship with the Resources Committee of the US House of Representatives. This was an amazing experience and I am fortunate to have had funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

After my time at Duke is over, my first order of business is a road trip with my two closest friends! Then, when it is time to get a little more serious, I hope to work on the legislative side of environmental management. Specifically, I want to help formulate public policies that are based on the best science available. Ideally, I will work for a House or Senate committee that has jurisdiction over resource and conservation issues or for an individual member of Congress coordinating her or his efforts on environmental protection and conservation. I am also interested in working on the Executive side, for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the US Fish and Wildlife Service for example, implementing policy.

Holistically, I am dedicated to applying leadership to affect social change and I am particularly interested in bringing about environmental, economic, and gender -related attitudinal changes. I firmly believe in the power of individual action and I attempt to empower others to challenge the status quo and to be active in shaping a future that celebrates diversity, nurtures respect and equality for all people, and that promotes reverence of non-human elements of the earth.

Melissa Mooney

I got my undergraduate degree in psychology at Emory University and went on to pursue a graduate degree in psychology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. I did not even see the ocean until I was thirteen years old. I might not have memories of summer's at the beach as a kid, but I did have cable television with National Geographic and Discovery channels that brought the ocean to me in my land-locked home of Poplar Bluff, Missouri. These programs were enough to make me fall in love with the ocean and marine mammals. After two years, I quit a graduate program in a field I did not truly enjoy and decided to take a chance on a field I knew little about, but had always interested me as a child. I have not regretted that decision. I am now a 2nd year masters student in the Coastal Environmental Management Program at Duke University. Since beginning this program my interest in marine mammal conservation has grown and I have developed interests in endangered species policy as well.

I spent this past summer interning in the humpback whale research program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts. During this internship, I collected behavioral and individual identification information on the Gulf of Maine humpback whale population while working on whale watching and research vessels. While in the lab, I spent most of my time looking at fluke and dorsal fin pictures and matching them to the Center for Coastal Studies catalogue of identified whales. My internship culminated in a three-week research cruise of the Gulf of Maine. My summer internship allowed me to receive hands-on experiences in marine mammal research and conservation field. These wonderful experiences gave me a more complete understanding of the issues of conservation.

For my Master's Project I will be using the Center for Coastal Studies' database of documented entangled humpback whales on the East Coast. I have compiled information on the cases in which fishing gear has been identified. I have photo documentation of each of these entanglements as well as written reports on what was seen during the rescue and type of gear found on the whale. In some instances, I have photo documentation of the whale right before entanglement and days after entanglement. I plan to categorize these cases based on fishing gear type and will then qualitatively analyze the photos to look for patterns of injury.

After graduating in May 2003, I hope to pursue a career in marine mammal conservation in a government or non-profit organization.

Erin Vos

I grew up just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota (Land of 10,000 Lakes but no salt water). In spite of my land-locked upbringing, I became interested in marine mammals as a kid on family vacations to the east and west coasts. Yes, I was one of those kids who told their teachers that they wanted to become a marine biologist.

I graduated from St. Olaf College (a private liberal-arts school in Northfield, MN) in May 2000 with a B.A. in Biology and Environmental Studies. During my undergrad years I worked at the University of Minnesota's Cedar Creek Long Term Ecological Research Station. While there I completed an NSF undergraduate research fellowship, working with Dr. David Tilman on global carbon budget research. I also spent a summer working as a naturalist for a YMCA camp in northern Minnesota. By the time I graduated I had decided that I wanted to pursue a career that dealt with the interface between hard science and applied conservation work.

After graduation I worked for the School Nature Area Project, a non-profit group that provided environmental education grants to Minnesota K-12 schools, helping them to restore and preserve natural areas within walking distance of the classroom, and to develop curriculum to encourage science learning and environmental stewardship. Meanwhile, I got my act together to apply to graduate school, and ended up choosing to come to Duke.

Thanks to a Doris Duke conservation fellowship award, I spent my summer internship working at the Grand Manan Whale and Seabird Research Station renovating a small natural history museum. My master's project is based on an overall exhibit design plan for the museum. While here at the Marine Lab I'm also working as an NSF K-12 teaching fellow at Smyrna Elementary.

After graduation, I plan to look for gainful employment in the government or non-profit sector, doing conservation education work.

Environmental education is cool!