Since our resident marine biologist seems to spend most of her life at sea nowadays tracking sperm whales (hehehe), I'm posting this on her behalf. Correction: she seems to be on her way to study river dolphins in Suriname. Yeah, I didn't know where that was either. -Kim Dude-
"As a marine scientist, studying your species of choice has a
lot of inherent difficulties, mainly your study species all are evolved for
aquatic life while us mere humans can only attempt to be aquatic, complete with
heavy, clumsy gear. The marine biologist
solution to this….let’s tag the animals and track them with satellites. This
method works great until all of a sudden your tag ping is on land and stays
there. You’re thinking, what the hell has happened, did it beach itself, was it
caught and killed, is it now in some marine park somewhere? All valid
questions…and is the case with this one shark, lovingly referred to as Brenda,
by some researchers I worked with in South Africa. Sadly, the shark was most
likely caught and killed but I can only imagine the puzzlement going on as the
shark’s tag continues to ping over land.
Probably thought the shark had hit the next phase of evolution and was
walking on land."
Photographic proof from her travels showing that biologists might have the funnest field research missions.
Great whites in South Africa.
Elephants in Zanzibar. It's a boring life that she leads I suppose.
PS- When I first met this contributor she was taking a graduate level class in biostatistics, which is when she also happened to be going to study elephants. It has since been my running (probably unfunny) joke that her career is weighing wild animals.
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