I spent many polar summers diving under a frigid sun.
Stunningly beautiful and shockingly harsh, as the season closes it can take convincing to clamber into a drysuit. Of course, the Southern Ocean is only accessible to ship traffic for a small portion of the year, and the creeping southern autumn mandates emigration.

My vessel would travel north of the Antarctic Peninsula. Just enough to reach the nearest sub-Antarctic and Patagonian islands, where leafy greens both above and below the tideline might as well be candy for the eyes. The truth is, rolling back into 7 degree seawater after months of working below zero feels luxuriant.

And so my affection for kelp forests blossomed.
After some time my interest in the seascape graduated from aesthetic to ecological, and I began to notice major differences between these southern giant kelp forests and their parallel northern hemisphere systems.

Eventually, I asked a question I couldn’t answer through literature review – an itch I couldn’t scratch. As a naturalist, there is nothing more maddening than not being able to theorize your way out of a question and into an answer. Ultimately I enrolled in a Ph.D. program, in pursuit of the answer I couldn’t find.

This past year I’ve been conducting my own research in the field, focusing on the southern stretches of Patagonia and neighboring archipelagos, including the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas). My work is in community ecology, investigating the relationship between organisms in the ecosystem. I focus on interactions among predators, grazers, and foundation species. In this context, predators can be defined as animals that eat animals, grazers as animals that eat primary producers, and foundation species as organisms which have a strong role in creating habitat. I aim to disentangle the relationship between these “trophic levels” in this system and across hemispheres.

My goal is to understand mechanisms behind balance in the system, particularly with respect to predator presence.

Each portion of this big question I originally asked is now separated into three smaller chapters, and through these chapters I will tell a story, which will become my Ph.D. dissertation.

A project like this is broken into several stages – sampling design, data collection, processing, analyzing, and finally publishing findings (celebrating!). Of these, data collection is undeniably the most fun and seems to never last as long as I’d like. For this study, data collection entails donning a drysuit and scuba kit, then conduct surveys on the rocky seafloor substrate at a shallow depth to take note of each site’s marine organism assemblage, and record details of the kelp itself. I collect samples which I’ll later process in a lab to note grazer pressure on certain sections of kelp, and attempt to capture that kelp’s morphological response to the pressure.

Once I have all this data collected and samples processed, I will use statistical tools to compute the relationship between my key variables.

This is scientific storytelling, and is the method some scientists use to build our understanding of environmental patterns and processes.

At the culmination of this body of work, if all goes well, my university advisors may rub their chins and hand me a new fancy title. For now, I will enjoy the fieldwork while it lasts, with every bubbly temperate breath.