A visit to the San Diego Natural History Museum

The first-year cohort of grad students for our Environmental and Ocean Sciences MS program went on one of their site visits recently, exploring career paths outside of traditional academia; learning how other scientists ask and answer questions; and discovering how incredibly nonlinear almost every scientist’s pathway is on their journey to their career.

This week, we were fortunate to visit the San Diego Natural History Museum (the Nat). I have had a lifelong relationship with the Nat - I LOVED visiting there when I was a little kid, and I have had the good fortune to work with them over the years, starting with back when Exequiel Ezcurra was there in the early 2000s (if you do not know him you SHOULD! Not just a brilliant scientist, but a delightful, wise, and kind person).

This trip we got to meet with Jon Rebman, the Nat’s curator of botany, and one of the luminaries in botanical research. Jon is not just a remarkably nice person but is also among the world’s experts on plants in southern and Baja California. He talked about the range of valuable lessons we can learn from these museum collections - not “just” what species we actually have, but what ones we have lost, what ones we have rediscovered, records of indigenous uses and language, what the relationships are between these species - the list honestly goes on and on, but the short version is that the work the Nat and other museums are doing is extraordinarily valuable across a range of disciplines! Just one small example - Jon Rebman and researchers from the Salk Institute extracted multiple chemicals with neuro-regenerative and anti-inflammatory properties from dried museum specimens of Yerba Santa, a common plant in San Diego County that the Kumeyaay (and other indigenous people) have used to treat a number of illnesses. These chemicals could be an effective therapy for people with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

And seeing row upon row of samples dating back hundreds of years was inspiring!

We also got to see a part of the museum I have never seen before - the Research Library. Ariel (Arie) Hammond is the Director of the Research Library, and her job seems simultaneously daunting and amazing. She showed us these amazing collections of - well, seemingly everything! She curates the Valentien collection - >1,000 exquisite watercolors of wildflowers, commissioned by Ellen Browning Scripps (yes, THAT Scripps) back in 1908.

But the collection has so much more - boxes holding thousands of amazing 35mm slides of birds, rare, one-of-a-kind books - all of it irreplaceable and being curated and preserved by the Nat, under Arie’s guidance.

Probably my favorite piece that Arie showed us was a book, commissioned for President Grant by his grandson (who was a paleomalacologist - who knew?), titled “Most Important Grasses of the Field and Forest”, published in 1871. This magnificent book is in three languages, with gold leaf everywhere, and within the pages he affixed numerous dried specimens.

I am deeply appreciative of the Nat, Jon, Arie, and honestly all of the amazing staff there who do such important work. It was a delight that they made time for Environmental and Ocean Sciences students from University of San Diego to experience these wonders!

Dunes in Baja California

Last month I had a research trip to Bahía de San Quintín in Baja California, and it was kind of amazing.

If you didn’t know, Bahía de San Quintín is one of my favorite places on earth, and one of my research sites since the mid 1990’s, when Paul Dayton introduced Theresa and I to the region. San Quintín is a beautiful bay, dotted with volcanoes, and full of relatively pristine wetlands, mud flats, sand dunes, coastal scrub, and lush, extensive seagrass beds. It is not a downside that the oyster farms in part of the bay yield delicious, inexpensive oysters.

But in all of my years in Bahía de San Quintín, my research has exclusively been around the bay itself. What I didnt realize until a few years ago is that there is a system of dunes just south of the bay that are stunningly beautiful and fascinating - the El Socorro Dunes. These dunes are a real biodiversity hotspot, full of endemics (species that live nowhere else), and like many coastal habitats, gravely threatened by human activity.

The purpose of my trip was to go down and learn more about the dunes with my graduate student, Natalie. Natalie’s thesis project is re-visiting the vegetation of the El Socorro dunes, which were last comprehensively censused back in 2010 by Dr. Sula Vanderplank. If that name sounds familiar, it is because A) she is an amazing and prolific scientist who specializes in plants of the Baja California peninsula, and B) I posted something praising what a great mentor she is HERE. The fact that the author of the study we are replicating is actually assisting with this work is a real asset, both scientifically (we will be certain all methods match perfectly) and personally (we get an excuse to spend time with Sula).

The timing of the trip could not have been much better either. First, we were picking Sula up in Ensenada, where she was at an event for her newest book, A Guide to the Flora of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir. Better still, that meant I got to see two of my other favorite people, Alan Harper (Ecologist/Photographer/Philanthropist) and Jon Rebman (Curator of Botany for the San Diego Natural History Museum, expert on Baja and San Diego plants, and all around nice guy). More about them in the future, but I got to say hi to them when we passed through Ensenada.

We were joined by someone I had never met before, Dra. Natalia A. Rodríguez-Revelo, who quickly joined my list of “favorite people to do fieldwork with”. Natalia is, like Sula, one of those amazing ecologists who seems to know a LOT about almost everything. She started, I believe, as a geomorphologist looking at dunes, but is also a talented botanist, professor at Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, and, in recent years, has been involved with the Dune Bugs project at the San Diego Natural History Museum with Michael Wall and others, identifying and studying arthropods using the dunes. Better still, she is not just a great scientist but delightful to be in the field with.

While we only had a few days down there on this trip, we got a LOT done, saw some breathtakingly beautiful plants and scenery, and also got to overlap with friends from CSULB, SCCWRP, and Terra Peninsular (more on them in a future post).

This whole thing cemented my current attitude towards research - my priority is to do work with friends I care about, in places I love, on topics I find fascinating. This trip was a great example of that.

Reflecting on legacy again (or still)

As I mentioned here, when talking about the passing of my friend Martín, the price one pays for a long life is having to say goodbye to people we love. Unfortunately, my brother Brooks is now in the end stages of dealing with cancer, and has transitioned from treatments aimed at holding off the disease to palliative care aimed at making his passing easier. Not surprisingly, the idea of “legacy” has again been on my mind. And there is a lot to say about that with Brooks.

First, there are the legacies he left with me personally. As a kid growing up in a stunningly dysfunctional home, Brooks was one of the few steady voices I could always turn to, and he helped form many of the values I carry to this day. He always put a premium on doing what was right, even when it wasn’t easy, and on working to support those less fortunate than ourselves. When I was in elementary school, he would pay me to clean his car before he went on dates (an old-school VW Safari Van, with 23 windows that needed to be cleaned inside and out). He was generous with the pay ($5, which at the time seemed exorbitant), but also was very insistent that the job be done well (cleaning is not my strong suit, so it required a lot of QA/QC on his part). I recall once asking him why he needed the car to be so clean, given that it was a old and beat up. He told me that it was because if a girl didnt like him because his car was old or inexpensive, that just means that he didnt want to waste time with her anyway, because that means she cares about the wrong things. But that if your car was dirty and cluttered, that reflected on something you could do something about no matter your economic circumstance. Fifty years later, that still seems wise (full disclosure - my car is consistently a disaster inside and out, so wisdom observed is not necessarily wisdom received).

From the time I first recall, Brooks wanted to be a lawyer. But not just any type of law - he always aspired to be a public defender, so he could defend those who didnt have the means to defend themselves. He scraped by financially in law school at UC Davis so he could reach his goal - I recall that he would allow himself the luxury of as many banana pancakes as he wanted and a carton of orange juice on Sundays, to treat himself for his skimping the rest of the week. And right out of law school, he got a job at the Orange County Public Defender’s office, where he spent his career until retirement, doing exactly what he hoped to do. I recall him coming home with his brand new vehicle - a white, 1984 Toyota pickup (base model, of course). Years later, he gifted that truck to me, and that was the car Theresa and I used to travel down Baja in 1994 where we got engaged.

Years later, when I was finishing graduate school at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Theresa had started classes at UC Davis herself, I was living in my office for 6 months while I finished my thesis. I was sleeping on the floor at night, and eating ramen 3 times a day, when one night Brooks called from outside the building. He had brought a foam chair that folded into a bed, blankets, and boxes of food and drink. He didnt stay long, and certainly was not looking for gratitude or plaudits - he was just being generous for the sake of being generous.

This was how he lived his life. I could tell a thousand similar stories, but the one that strikes closest to home is when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He had the misfortune to have some doctors who did not think his symptoms/PSA levels merited more than watchful waiting of annual blood test results, and by the time he got treatment, while things initially looked successful, his PSA essentially never got to zero, so they knew that it had metastasized. Unfortunately, they could not find it on any scans for quite a while, making it tough to treat. Brooks used this experience to tell all of his brothers to be vigilant about bloodwork and checkups.

Coincidentally, I at the time had elevated PSA, but my General Practitioner confidently assured me that, despite family history and elevated PSA, he was certain there was nothing amiss, and refused to refer me to a specialist. Brooks, as usual, helped me. He spoke with his oncologists to find out who *they* would turn to if they wanted the best possible care, and they all recommended Dr. Christopher Kane at UCSD (who is, by the way, phenomenal, and now dean of clinical affairs for UC San Diego School of Medicine and CEO of UC San Diego Health Physicians). Unfortunately, Dr. Kane was out of my network, and it was going to take weeks to transfer primary care physicians to get to see him. So Brooks, being Brooks, paid for me to go out-of-network for my initial testing, and the results showed I needed to immediately get surgery to avoid metastasis. Dr. Kane and his staff helped me get through the administrative mess, and I had surgery in 2014. Of course, when I woke from surgery, there was Brooks - sitting in my hospital room, reading a book and offering to get me water. Now almost 8 years later….well, I am still here and feel healthy. And I quite literally owe this not only Dr. Kane and his staff, but to Brooks, since I would undoubtedly have let my GP doom me with his incompetence.

I was fortunate to get to spend a good deal of time with him near the end, while he was still in full control of his (remarkable) faculties. As always, he had a sober, rational attitude about his fate that I am confident I could never manage. I once mentioned that it seemed particularly unfair that he, who almost never drank, never used recreational drugs, and worked out his entire life, should get struck down by multiple cancers while we less-salubrious Talleys were still around. He replied that life simply wasn’t fair, but that had he not been so healthy, he might not have made it so many years, and been able to spend so many great years enjoying his family. I can guarantee I would not be so sanguine in similar circumstances.

So back to legacies. It is easy to get caught up in the “big” stuff…Brooks saved my life, he supported friends, family, and strangers; he raised two wonderful kids, and left a legacy by instilling knowledge, ethics, and life lessons in many of us. But I also am kind of blown away by how many lives he touched - the literally hundreds of people he defended who had no one else to defend them; the thousands of people he touched by the small acts of kindness that typified his life….the ripples from where he stepped in the world will be radiating out for many, many decades.

Brooks passed away early this morning, and while I miss him already, I also feel very fortunate to have had him as my brother.

Martín's legacy

One drawback of getting old is that we have to say goodbye to loved ones along the way. That really hit home when my friend and collaborator Martín Cortes passed away recently. When I think about legacies people leave behind, it strikes me that there are the ones that most people think about - acts of bravery; unraveling some mystery about the world around us; raising the next generation; or maybe inventing some idea or device that makes the world a better place.

But recently I been thinking a lot about the “invisible legacies” people leave behind - lives that we touch without us ever knowing how impactful sometimes seemingly small interactions become. For Martín, his legacy runs the full spectrum, from classically heroic (risking his life for others), to the more subtle, such as inspiring an appreciation for the world around us in others.

I met Martín in the summer of 2000, when I started research in Bahía de los Ángeles as a postdoc. Martín was a pangero in Bahía, and was the most talented boat driver and fisherman I have ever met. But that barely scratches the surface of what a phenomenal person he was.

When I first met Martín that summer, it was just a few months after the terrible accident in Bahía de los Ángeles that took the lives of Gary Polis, Takuya Abe, Masahiko Higashi, Shigeru Nakano, and Mike Rose. Martín had been on the water with Gary the day of the accident, carrying half of the research crew on a small panga that, thanks to his skill and experience, made it back to shore in the sudden, violent windstorm that claimed those lives. Not only did Martín manage to bring his passengers back to shore, but he went back out into the storm, *twice*, to try and find survivors, despite the risk to his own life.

Martín was quiet, calm, and unflappable. It was always tough to guess how old he was - it turns out in his 50s back then, but with his muscular frame and ease of handling intense work for hours on the boat in >100° heat, he had the energy of someone literally half his age. He was taciturn, but laughed and smiled easily.

I have 20+ years and a heart full of stories about Martín, but wanted to share a couple of them here, mostly to memorialize them for myself, but also just to give a tiny insight into how wonderful Martín was, and why he will be so missed.

First, his work as a fisherman. We still use fish as bait for our pitfall traps, as Gary had since the late 1980s. It was not at all unusual for Martin to catch 20+ legal-sized fish **in an hour** to help us with our work. That means there were times when, in a single hour, he would catch almost enough to get us through the entire summer of sampling. But he also showed a rare compassion for the fishes - he was careful to release unharmed any that were too small or an unusable species, and those he kept he would be sure to kill before cutting them up for bait or food - something I rarely see fishers concern themselves with. And he was careful not to waste anything - he would use any “extra” or particularly tasty fishes to make ceviche, or to use for his own meals at home, or to share with townspeople who did not have the access he did to fresh fish. In this way Martín not only played a key role in groundbreaking science, but also in his community.

He also touched so many lives with these simple, kind acts. Through the years, countless scientists, and students from Ocean Discovery Institute were exposed to Martín’s kindness, and got to revel in some of the freshest ceviche anyone has ever enjoyed. Often, when asked about their fondest memories from research in Bahía de los Ángeles, Martín and his ceviche was prominent among them.

Martín was benevolently amused with our naïve gringo antics. On one trip to the midriff islands, where we spent a few days camping to complete our sampling, we all decided to stop in the geographic center of the Gulf to go for a swim. While we were in the water, Martín pointed out that there were a lot of sharks in the area that feed one sea lions, and as we made our mad dash to get back on the panga, he just kept shaking his head and laughing quietly.

Martín had not had an easy life, but I never once heard him complain. He would often remark that there was no time when he was happier than when he was in Bahía de los Ángeles and on the water. Even when he went through a rough period, where he was living essentially outdoors, sleeping on an old car seat, his demeanor didn’t change in the least. He ended up finding comfort and support in the church, and while we were on the islands doing work, he would spend his time on the boat, reading his bible and singing hymns.

These last 10 years our so, Martín had a place he stayed in town that was an abandoned concrete building, with a bed, an old wooden table, a stove, and a refrigerator. His health was not great - his knee really needed replacing; he struggled with prostate cancer; and he broke a vertebra while working on a boat in rough weather. He somehow managed to keep working. He built crutches out of discarded parts and PVC, he devised a clever set of pulleys and ropes that allowed him to get in and out of bed, and every time I saw him, his response to “how are you doing?” was always “when I see you walking down the beach, I feel that god has blessed me”. That was always followed with him asking about Paco Piñero and Gary Huxel (my friends and collaborators), and about Theresa and Anna.

The last time I saw Martín, shortly before the pandemic hit, I had dropped by his place to say goodbye before leaving town. I had to keep coming back, because despite his age and health, Martín was out late at night taking some tourists fishing. When I finally caught him home, he was sitting in the sweltering heat at his rough wooden table, using the light of a small lantern to go through a well-worn copy of the Bible, making extensive notes in the margins. We chatted for a while, talked about the weather (a very popular topic in Bahía de los Ángeles), and made plans to get together in the spring. Unfortunately, the pandemic hit, and Martín passed away before that could happen.

Martín made the world a better place. His legacy includes so many people who he affected that he undoubtedly never even knew he influenced. He will be greatly missed, but his impact goes on.

Silver Jubilee

I just wanted to use “jubilee” in the title because - well, how often does one get the chance to do that?

25 years ago today, Theresa (against her better judgment) married me, in a beautiful ceremony at T-29 (a cottage on Scripps Institution of Oceanography campus). It was officiated by my Dad, we had Mariachis instead of a band, and almost all of my best friends were there. It could not have been a better day.

Today, I feel as in love and lucky as I did that day. Tough to believe it has been a quarter of a century (except, of course, when I look in a mirror). I may try and add more picture later, but for now…

Ocean Sciences Bingo

I threw together some bingo cards for the Ocean Sciences conference. While admittedly a bit opinionated and cynical, I had the idea because I just taught a class in science communication, and have been thinking a lot about the mistakes we see in talks (and posters), often committed by those of us who should know better! Plus, I had just sat through an interminable “I have more of a comment than a question” ordeal at a recent seminar. So I thought this might be a fun way for some of my students to pay attention to the talks.

There is a wonderful website that saved me a ton of time - osric.com/bingo-card-generator/ lets you paste in a comma-delimited list of items, and will then generate randomized bingo cards for you to print and use. Hope this helps someone else!

Bingo!.png