From Surfing to Science
I grew up in a Navy family, moving from place to place, but wherever we lived, the ocean became one of the constants in my life. As a teenager, surfing transformed that connection into something deeper. I learned to read waves, tides, winds, and coastlines, but I also began wondering about the largely invisible world beneath my board. That curiosity led me from surfing to snorkeling and diving, and eventually to marine biology, graduate school, and a Ph.D. in marine zoology. What began as a desire to spend my life near the ocean gradually became a desire to understand how the ocean works—and how the extraordinary communities of life within it are connected.
Over the next thirty years as a marine ecologist, researcher, and university professor, that question took me through an enormous range of marine environments, from rocky shores and kelp forests to tropical coral reefs and the deep sea. I studied abalone and watched once-abundant populations collapse; explored coral reefs in Hawai’i while working with communities to balance conservation and human use; descended into the deep sea to investigate ancient corals, fishes, and the impacts of bottom trawling; and helped monitor Northern California’s kelp forests as they transformed into vast urchin barrens. Along the way, I taught and mentored generations of students and worked with scientists, fishermen, community members, Indigenous partners, conservation organizations, and government agencies to turn scientific knowledge into practical conservation.
Those experiences changed the way I see the ocean. Again and again, I witnessed both the remarkable resilience of living systems and how quickly seemingly abundant species and ecosystems can disappear. The stories below—abalone, coral reefs, the deep sea, and kelp forests—represent different chapters of that journey, but together they tell a larger story about my life in science and the growing conviction that understanding the natural world also brings with it a responsibility to protect it.
Chasing Abalone
Abalone played a surprisingly important role in turning me from a surfer into a marine biologist. While surfing around Shell Beach in college, I began exploring the rocky shoreline after sessions and became fascinated by the black abalone hidden in its cracks and crevices. Curiosity took me progressively farther—from tide pools to snorkeling and eventually SCUBA diving—and what began as a search for something to eat became a desire to understand where abalone lived, what they ate, how they grew and moved, and how they interacted with the rocky intertidal and kelp-forest ecosystems around them. That fascination became the foundation of my graduate and doctoral research and took me into some wonderfully remote and occasionally dangerous places, including Año Nuevo Island, California’s Channel Islands, Baja California, and Guadalupe Island, where I spent countless hours tagging, measuring, diving for, and following wild abalone.
But the work eventually became about something much larger. At Santa Cruz Island I watched extraordinarily dense populations of black abalone—sometimes stacked several animals deep—collapse by more than 99 percent as withering disease swept through Southern California in the 1980s. The epidemic ultimately eliminated more than 95 percent of historic black abalone populations in the region. Watching an animal I had spent years studying virtually disappear transformed the way I thought about marine ecology and conservation. I later contributed to the science surrounding the species’ declining status before black abalone were federally listed as endangered in 2009. Abalone began my life as a field biologist, but their disappearance also taught me one of my earliest and most enduring lessons about how quickly an abundant species—and the ecological world surrounding it—can change.
Coral Reefs & Community Conservation in Hawai’i
Much of my work in Hawaiʻi focused on coral reef ecology and the difficult challenge of balancing conservation with the needs of people who depend on reef resources. Beginning in the mid-1990s, while I was a professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, I became involved in a growing conflict over the West Hawaiʻi aquarium trade. Working with state biologists, fellow scientists, aquarium collectors, dive operators, community members, and policymakers, we used long-term underwater surveys to document how collecting affected reef-fish populations and to provide objective science for community discussions.
Our research helped inform the creation of a network of Fish Replenishment Areas protecting more than 30 percent of the West Hawaiʻi coast from aquarium collecting, an approach developed with extensive community participation. Subsequent monitoring showed substantial recovery of important aquarium species within protected areas while the fishery continued outside them, demonstrating how science, protected areas, and community-based management can work together to conserve coral reefs while accommodating different human uses of the ocean. The experience also taught me that conservation is rarely just about biology—it is about people, competing values, ethics, livelihoods, and finding enough common ground to protect the ecosystems we all depend upon.
Exploring & Protecting the Deep Sea
A major part of my research career took me into one of the least explored environments on Earth: the deep sea. Working with NOAA, marine sanctuaries, state agencies, universities, and conservation organizations, my students, colleagues, and I used research submersibles, underwater video, sonar, and seafloor mapping to explore deep habitats from Washington and Oregon to California, descending to depths of over 1,500 feet. We studied rockfish and other groundfish and investigated how ancient cold-water corals, sponges, sea pens, and other invertebrates create complex habitats that provide food and shelter for deep-sea communities.
An important part of that work was understanding how human activities affect these remarkably fragile ecosystems. Our research off Oregon found that bottom trawling reduced sea-pen abundance by 99 percent and cut the overall abundance of bottom-dwelling invertebrates by more than half. Because many deep-sea corals and sponges grow extremely slowly and can live for centuries or even millennia, damage can persist for generations. I increasingly worked at the intersection of science, conservation, and public policy, using our research to help guide West Coast trawl management, marine protected areas, energy-project planning, and broader efforts to protect deep habitats before fishing and mining expanded into them. For me, the deep sea became a powerful reminder that some of Earth’s most extraordinary ecosystems exist far beyond our everyday experience—and that we have a responsibility to understand and protect them before they are altered or lost.
Kelp Forests in a Changing Ocean
Some of my most recent work has brought me back into the kelp forests of Northern California, where I led the North Coast team of a statewide SCUBA monitoring program designed to track the health of California’s kelp forest ecosystems (NEREO). Beginning on the North Coast in 2017, our team used standardized underwater surveys to monitor fishes, invertebrates, kelp and other algae inside and outside marine protected areas, contributing to a statewide effort involving several California universities. During this period, Northern California’s once-lush bull kelp forests underwent dramatic changes associated with marine heat waves, the loss of important predators, exploding purple sea urchin populations, and the development of extensive urchin barrens. The changes were especially striking to me because they were intertwined with another story I had followed throughout my career—the decline of abalone.
Our work helped document these changing underwater communities and provided information for marine protected areas, fisheries management, and efforts to understand how kelp forests might recover in a rapidly changing ocean. After decades spent studying marine ecosystems, watching forests of kelp disappear reinforced a lesson I had first learned with abalone: even ecosystems that once seemed extraordinarily abundant can change within a human lifetime, making long-term scientific monitoring and conservation increasingly important.
Here’s my advice to those seeking to become marine biologists:
To learn more about the science
Take a deep dive into my marine research on my Lab website
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