Confessions of an oceanographer
or why I should have been a botanist
Oceanographers by definition go to sea, but many don’t, or go to sea very seldom. Those include modellers, remote sensing scientists, palaeoceanographers, and lab-based experimentalists. For many oceanographers, going to sea means working on large research vessels, generally for weeks or months at a stretch, hundreds of kilometres offshore, out on the open ocean. It’s a different world out there in more ways than one.
My undergraduate training did not prepare me well for a career in oceanography. I was a marine biologist, well versed in the ecology of tide pools, capable of drawing a dissected dogfish, or preparing a herbarium seaweed collection. Going to sea for me meant going out into an estuary in a small outboard, or boarding the occasional coastal fishing boat converted to a research vessel for students. I was accepted for graduate studies in an oceanography department before I learned the difference between marine biology and oceanography. These days I tell people the difference is that marine biologists often wear the scuba tanks while oceanographers are on big ships, hanging computers over the side. There’s a grain of truth in that.
While ecologists talk about “going into the field”, and atmospheric scientists take part in “campaigns”, oceanographers going to sea say that they are going on a “cruise”. Most people think you are having fun when you go on a cruise. And for many seagoing oceanographers, a cruise is a lot of fun, or at least it is exciting. For me, research surveys were exciting at times, and they were certainly illuminating. But I quickly discovered the interaction between seasickness, medication, sleepiness and concentration. My first cruise in the Gulf of Mexico introduced me to transparent blue water with endless rolling swell that gently tossed the ship about in slow motion. The seasickness pills made me sleepy and sapped my concentration. Even a simple task like firing an XBT (essentially a weight dragging a wire that transmits the temperature profile measurements) was tiring because it involved climbing the stairs on the rolling vessel. Waiting to recover a huge mid-water trawl fished for four hours each side of midnight taught me another lesson. Don’t eat the chile nachos served up by the galley if you’re going to be seasick. The chile and the smell of a ships toilet is an experience burnt into my memory.
Cruises could be exhilarating. Dolphins popping out of a wave, orcas riding the ships bow, albatross looping and weaving around the ship, or a view of the rugged Antarctic mountains of Elephant Island looming out of the sea. The sheer energy of working with a team of scientists and crew on a common goal was always uplifting. Problems and delays had an urgency sharpened by the knowledge that each each hour at sea cost about a thousand U.S. dollars on a big research vessel. There were moments of shock, such as seeing a full CTD-rosette instrument package plunge to the bottom in 1,000 metres of water off New Zealand when the cable parted after the ship rolled, and snapped back. It could be dangerous, as when I slipped on a slick deck and slid underneath a 400 kg instrument package being lowered to the the deck on a California Current survey. I rolled out of the way, but found myself wondering how close I came to having my legs crushed.
There were procedural issues with potentially delicate implications. There was a scramble when I reported that the wire towing an acoustic torpedo caught and drowned more than 20 albatross as they fought for scraps being dumped from the research vessel fish factory. After that, no more scraps were dumped during towbody deployment. There were sometimes personnel issues to deal with. An angry captain once loudly read me the ships regulations in public in the ships mess hall. A rebellious technician ignored captains orders, and cultural differences between crew and science staff led to threats of a beating by a crewman. Harassment was not uncommon, as when a crewman wrote “Sam the good looking bastard” in my gumboots. When I saw my boots in the fish factory change room, I responded: “Joe, I didn’t know you could write!” making the crew laugh and defusing the tension. On another cruise, a woman scientist punched a crewman in the face after he abused her. Having to share the cabin of one of the ships cooks on another U.S. cruise felt like I was invading his already small personal space.
I did my PhD thesis in Canada and a subsequent postdoc in New Zealand on plankton, doing experiments on krill. They are delicate glassy crustaceans with luminescent spots, colourful stomachs, huge black eyes, and sensitive long antennae. I ended up working in fisheries because that’s where there were jobs. One of my lasting memories was sitting on a pile of trawled fish dumped on the deck of a small New Zealand vessel for hand sorting. Writhing dogfish, ugly stargazers, slimy eel-like ling with sharp teeth, and quick-flapping jack mackerel with a sharp dorsal spine that could slice your hand right through gloves. I realised that I hated fish like this. On bigger fisheries vessels the fish rolled down chutes into bins on conveyor belts. Bloody fish seemingly endlessly taken out, one by one, to be measured, cut and sexed, biological samples taken, stomachs gutted, and earbones removed for ageing. I never had the stomach for it. One night, as the fish factory backed up, I watched a pile of deep sea oreos on the back deck. They had huge, green or golden eyes, just staring. They seemed sad to me, but of course they were just dead. I think that was it. I had to move on to something else.
For the last 11 years of my career, I led the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation team for NOAA in La Jolla, California. I was senior by then, and didn’t have to cut fish any longer, if I didn’t want to. There were more cruises, and I was often reminded that the open sea horizon of wave after wave seemed desolate to me. I enjoyed watching my colleagues handle the fish egg samples, and the plankton tows, and the small midwater trawl catches, but I took refuge in the numbers generated, and in the writing of scientific papers based on the data. I still miss my exciting, wonderful colleagues, and the science, but I don’t miss the cruises, or the open sea.
Oceanography and fisheries was not a career that sat naturally with me, although I did well, according to many. I would perhaps have been more comfortable in my career as the director of a botanical garden somewhere. I grow plants naturally, and remember the names and habits of plants and birds as any good biologist should. My imagination plays tricks with me. I sometimes think of another life under a canopy of flamboyant and jacaranda trees. As I write from my study surrounded by the forest of the Waitakere Ranges in New Zealand, I look out on the Manukau Harbour heads. The open ocean is beyond, but it does not call me.
