Dr. Doug Nowacek, the Director of Undergraduate Studies at Duke's Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C., has traveled the seas studying marine mammals and their acoustic communication. With appointments in both the Nicholas School of the Environment and in the Pratt School of Engineering, Nowacek's research spans many disciplines, and this summer at the lab, he is co-teaching a course entitled, "Conservation Biology and Policy" alongside Dr. Mike Orbach. Dr. Nowacek sat down recently with The Chronicle’s Matt Pun to discuss his path to the Marine Lab, his travel and his interdisciplinary approach to research.
TC: You joined Duke as a faculty member in 2008, but your ties to Beaufort go back a bit further. How did you first get involved in the Marine Lab?
DN: So in 1990, the school year of 1989-90, I was at Ohio Wesleyan University in central Ohio, and my ecology professor came to me with a flyer for a program called The Carolinas and Ohio Science Education Network, and one of the things they were advertising was to come to the Marine Lab to do a group research project with a guy named David Grant who was from Davidson College at the time. He signed up to do this group project with seven of us out on Carrot Island [across the Beaufort inlet from the Marine Lab], and we were looking at the horses out there trace around the island. They cross these tidal creeks, and he was interested to look at what the infaunal community looked like there—so the worms and the stuff that was down in the mud and sand. That was the summer of 1990, and I had an awesome time as most people do when they come to the Marine Lab. For the next summer, I wrote a grant back to the same program—The Carolinas and Ohio Science Education Network. It was a Pew-funded program to come back by myself and work on the dolphins out in the area, and so I came back the summer of 1991 and did an independent study with Dr. [Richard] Forward. I was out in a little boat, most of the time by myself, with a hydrophone in the water, recording the dolphins and seeing where they were and how many there were and taking pictures of them and so on. And so that was a full summer. We ended up combining that with [the work of] a student who had been here the previous year, and we wrote a paper on it. In 1992, they started teaching the Marine Mammal class—either ’92 or ‘93—and I came the first time it was offered, which was basically six days and just a trial run to have a mammals class here. It was taught by Dan Rubenstein who was a big supporter of having of a mammal program here. Then I came back during grad school and helped teach the Marine Mammals class during subsequent years. So that’s how it started, and I came back periodically throughout that whole time
TC: Today, you hold appointments in both the Nicholas School of the Environment and the Pratt School of Engineering, and you specialize in acoustics. How did you develop the skills to bridge the two worlds of acoustics and marine sciences?
DN: When I started looking at what I wanted to do for grad school, I was already fascinated by the acoustic abilities of whales and dolphins—of cetaceans, and I knew I wanted to do something in that area, but I wanted to understand as much as I could about the acoustics, so I went to graduate school at M.I.T. and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and that gave me the opportunity to take some engineering courses at M.I.T., some signals and systems and advanced calculus. The other thing was that throughout graduate school, I started thinking about new tools to develop to use in the field, and that was sort of inspired a guy named Peter Wiebe, who’s now retired from Woods Hole who taught one of my classes. He said one of the great things about oceanography is if there’s a question you want to answer and there’s no data collection method to do it, you create it. Make it yourself. And that’s always been a lot of fun to me. It’s basically about getting to develop new, little toys, toys for big boys. I applied that to several different things, whether it was using head imagery to look at manatees to look at their hearing apparatus or helium filled balloons overhead with video cameras underneath them. So, developing those tools to get at questions I was interested in was really how it all got started. And then the position was created by Randy Repass and Sally Christine Rodgers. Randy was a Duke engineering grad, a PhD. grad. They are great friends of the Lab and are very intense about Marine Conservation, and they had a vision for a faculty member who would work between those two worlds and create tools for marine science research.
TC: Do you have any toy that you are most fond of creating or any experience designing a toy that stands out?
DN: I think it’s the experience of creating the toys that’s really fun, and I don’t know of any one in particular. Just to give you an example, when I was on leave in the spring, two of my graduate students built—and it had been built before, so it wasn’t a new tool, but it was a tool that we hadn’t used before—a directional hydrophone to listen to sperm whales. I was quite jealous of seeing pictures of the two of them in the lab building and creating this thing. It’s really the process of laying out what the tool is and how you build it, and the whole process is fun.
TC: Your research allows you to get out in the field often. Do you have any favorite trips that you’ve had?
DN: Absolutely. The trips to the Antarctic are hard to compare with anything else because the place is just phenomenal in many, many ways. So it’s hard to compare that with any other trip and have it come in anywhere other than first. The Antarctic trips are incomparable.
TC: What is it like traveling out there? How long do your trips last?
DN: Assuming you go through the Office of Polar Programs at NSF, you’re on one of their ships, and they leave from Punta Arenas, Chile. From door to shore, it takes about a week to get down to the Western Antarctic Peninsula, which is directly south of the southern tip of South America. And then, hopefully you get a month aboard the ship of research time because you lose days to weather, and when you’re working with marine mammals sometimes you can’t find them. We haven’t had that problem yet, thankfully. But you’re on the ship for a month anyway. The trip ends up being long—six,seven, eight weeks—a long time away from home and family that’s for sure.
TC: So how do you balance it—having research trips, having the dual appointment at Duke, and maintaining a family life?
DN: First, you have to start with an amazing partner who does a phenomenal job. I have two boys, eight and 10 years old, and they understand. In some way they benefit from having a dad who does that, because they get cool pictures. I go to school and talk about what I do, and it fascinates all their friends. That maybe is the upside, but the way that I balance it is when I’m home, I come in when the kids go to school and I’m home for dinner every night. I refuse to let that suffer. So when I’m away, unfortunately I am away, but I call them and email them.
TC: Your research has a number of implications for conservation. You had a project before Duke testing the viability of a marine-mammal alarm system for boats. How do your engineering and your marine science specialties also connect to the policy realm?
DN: The two species where the idea of alarm systems has been discussed are the Florida manatees and the North Atlantic right whales. About a quarter of the annual deaths of manatees occur from boat strikes and usually small-boat strikes, and so one of the ideas that came out was, “why don’t we put some sort of alarm on the front of boats to move them out of the way?” which is really kind of a bad idea for a lot of reasons. One of them is that you need to teach the manatees that the alarm signal actually means something bad. A great analogy is that if you grew up in the woods and heard a siren, you’d certainly look at it, but you wouldn’t know to get out of the way. You’re taught certain things…. The first thing we did was actually the overhead video system, which was a little piece of ocean engineering, and we started to see that they actually do move out of the way, just when boats come running at them at close range. So that was the first insight—that they certainly can hear the boats and they have enough experience, unfortunately, because manatees get hit and survive. Some animals get hit 10, 20, 30, 40 times. I think the maximum is something like 53 times before it finally succumbed to a strike. So, most recently we put some tags, these multi–sensor recording tags that record the movement of the animal as well as the sounds and the environments to look at how they respond to boats…. And sure enough they respond to those boats.
For the right whales, same problem: ship strikes. Bigger whale, bigger animal, bigger ship. Some of them have prop scars from small boats, but an interaction with a big boat is almost always fatal, so they don’t have the opportunity to learn. So, maybe it’s a better environment for an alarm signal. What we did was we put the same tags, just a different attachment mechanism, on the right whales and then we put a speaker in the water and played back a variety of sounds, which you could envision using for some sort of alarm. When we played it back to the right whales, they were at depth, and all but one of the animals that we tested broke off their feeding dive and headed straight to the surface, and they did it fast. They took off, not in any particular direction, but they came to the surface, and not only did they come near the surface, but they stayed just below the surface, and they kept swimming aslong as the alarm was on. It made them what I would call vulnerable but not visible, because they were close enough to the surface to get hit and they were still cruising along, but they couldn’t be seen, so it had sort of the opposite effect you’d want an alarm to have.
Editor's note: You can hear the alarm calls here and here. WARNING: turn down your volume. Nowacek also provided sound clips of right whales, humpbacks and his own imitation of several cetaceans.
TC: This summer, you’re teaching a conservation biology and policy class with Dr. Mike Orbach. How has your research experience played into how you teach this course?
DN: Two main things. One is that having a basic understanding of the biology and the ecology of these systems that need attention in terms of conservation to me is very important. Yes, it’s important that we have applications for our research, but at the same time, I’m also a firm believer that there’s some basic information that we need out there to form the foundation for some of these decisions. This is where Mike and I like to spar a bit. He thinks we have enough information about all these systems, and I respectfully disagree. Sometimes, I do agree that there are some systems that we understand well enough to try to manage—and that is to manage the humans as well as the system for sure. So that is number one, to make sure that there is a good foundation for the students of understanding things like what is biological diversity, how do you measure it, how do you deal with small populations, what are some of the basic biology and ecology that you need to know. Number two would be that we all have our own opinions. We all have our own positions on these things, and to me, making it clear where you stand is part of the transparency, and having transparency in these things is very important. I get up in front of a group, and I say here’s the scientific data, and if you all are wondering where I stand on it, here’s where I stand, and you can take it or leave it. This is not a new issue. I’m holding a book called The Dialectical Biologist [by Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin from 1985 that says on the back cover] “Scientists act within a social context and form a philosophical perspective that is inherently political. Whether we realize it or not, scientists always choose science.” And so, it’s impossible not to choose a side. You’re a human. You just happen to be a scientist as well. And I think that that is the other point I think it’s very important for me to convey to the class. Don’t be ashamed of your positions, or don’t try and hide it. Be transparent about it. You can have your own opinion, but your scientific results and conclusions are separate from that.
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