Becoming a Marine Biologist by Virginia Morell

Author:Virginia Morell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

As he had in New Zealand, Baird shot the device from a crossbow or leaned over and used a long pole to tap whales that had quietly surfaced near his boat. The impact startled the whales, as it had the New Zealand dolphins, but this time the animals soon settled down and continued their normal behaviors. Hooker and Baird collected sufficient data on their dives to write publishable articles, lengthening his resume.

Despite his five trips aboard the Balaena, Baird and Whitehead were never at sea together. With young children at home, Whitehead had begun turning over his usual role of skipper to graduate students. But the two scientists did see each other at Whitehead’s lab. Baird had a desk just outside Whitehead’s office, and Whitehead, he said, “would wander over from his office and run ideas past me. He was just developing his ideas about the culture of whales and in the process of developing his software programs for analyzing animals’ social structures.” So many people had been asking Whitehead to help analyze the social data they’d collected on various species that he decided to create SOCPROG (Programs for Analyzing Social Structure, a series of programs available to anyone online), so they could analyze their data on their own.

“In a postdoc, you want to develop different ideas and a different set of skills than what you did during your PhD,” Baird said. “And that definitely happened for me in Hal’s lab. You actually find several of his papers in mathematical journals.”

For three years, Baird researched beaked whales and killer whales through his postdoc with Whitehead. Since Baird had raised his own funding, he chose what he wanted to study, and it was a productive time for him. His finances were somewhat more stable, too: he’d finally paid off his credit card bill, and begun paying down his student loans, and no longer received threatening letters from creditors. But his long-term career plans remained uncertain. He continued to apply for faculty positions but wasn’t making much headway.

Then one day in early 1998, the phone on Whitehead’s desk rang. Hal wasn’t around, so Baird answered, as he often did.

“This person—a man—was calling from Hawai’i,” Robin recalled, “and by the end of the call, he’d offered me a job as research director of a whale organization there. Now, Halifax is a lovely city, but I was envisioning my third winter there.” He shivered at the memory. “I told him I’d think about it.”

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