School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences

My interest in fish and marine mammals started young. While other kids were memorizing baseball card statistics or the pathways on Super Mario and Zelda, I was memorizing fish identification books. My interest was driven by the fact that my father was a fisheries and marine mammal biologist, and I was fascinated with fishing and fish in general.

During my childhood, I had many opportunities for my love of fish and marine mammals to grow. My father coordinated the marine mammal stranding network for the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northwest Regional Office and was the lead on marine mammal issues, and I got to accompany him to strandings on the Washington coast. My dad also worked with a team to address the issue of Hershel, the California sea lion at the Ballard Locks. In addition to time with my father, I also spent a lot of time fishing at the Edmonds Pier with my brothers, and I maintained up to three aquariums while breeding cichlids and observing their behaviors.

Given these opportunities, it is not surprising that upon completing high school, I chose to apply to the University of Washington to join the School of Fisheries—only I wasn’t accepted. I was a goof off  in high school and rarely turned in my homework, which resulted in a subpar GPA and a not very surprising rejection by UW. I had only applied to UW, knowing that I wanted to work with fish or marine mammals, and the rejection was an embarrassing revelation alerting me that I needed to put in the effort if I wanted to do the things I enjoy in life.

I was very fortunate that I had filled out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) for Western Washington University, Washington State University (WSU), and UW even though I only applied to UW. A week or two after UW rejected me, I received a letter from WSU saying that they had received my FAFSA application but could not find my application for enrollment. They offered me a chance to send in another application, and when I did, WSU accepted me. I often wonder where my life would have gone if they had not sent me that letter.

At WSU, I found success in the classroom while taking classes in the Natural Resource Science program. I was very grateful to WSU for giving me an opportunity to prove myself in college, but I still wanted to pursue studies of fish and marine mammals and knew that my best opportunity would be at the UW. After my sophomore year at WSU, I applied to UW again, and this time, I was accepted as a transfer student.

At UW, I wasted no time in enrolling in classes in the School of Fisheries. I had finished nearly all of my prerequisite and general education classes at WSU, which allowed me to focus on upper division fisheries science and statistics classes while at UW. I completed enough course work by the end of the first quarter of my senior year to graduate, but instead I decided to add a second degree in Wildlife Science and stay through the end of my senior year. I graduated in 2002 with BS degrees in Fisheries Science from the School of Fisheries and Wildlife Science from the College of Forest Resources.

The course I enjoyed the most was a six-week course that immersed me and five other students in the beautiful field settings at Lake Aleknagik, Lake Nerka, and Lake Iliamna in the Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska, with faculty Daniel Schindler, Thomas Quinn, and Ray Hilborn. At the time I took the course, I visualized a future career of studying bears as an interface of fisheries and wildlife. I learned quickly in Alaska that the study of bears was not in my future—I was too allergic to grass.

During college, I also pursued work and volunteer opportunities that helped shape may career. In 1999, I had the opportunity to observe the Makah whale hunt and to help perform the necropsy on the whale they successfully harvested. It was an eye-opening experience on treaty rights and how important traditional activities can be for an indigenous group. I also worked for Edmonds Parks and Recreation. I thought at the time that being a park ranger could be a fun career—instead, the experience of cleaning toilets and picking up the litter of inconsiderate guests soured me on the idea. I also worked for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Marine Mammal Program. This was my first experience in marine mammal science, and despite spending most of my time cleaning fish bones in seal scats, I really enjoyed the job and cemented my desire to work with marine mammals in the future.

Following college, I worked a couple of jobs that expanded my world views as a biologist before returning to school for an MS degree at Oregon State University. My first job was a six-month contract as an at-sea observer in the West Coast Groundfish Observer Program. I suggest that all graduates in fisheries science or management should work at least one contract as an observer. As an observer, I received a hands-on point of view of how fisheries work, how markets affect catch and discards, and how fisheries management decisions directly affect fishermen and their families. My next job was as a contractor to NOAA’s National Marine Mammal Laboratory. This reignited my interest in marine mammal science and exposed me to a variety of marine mammal studies and research methodologies.

Since 2007, I have worked for the Makah Tribe as their marine mammal biologist. I did not expect to spend my career in this position, but I have now worked here for 11.5 years and do not see another position that would work as well for me. I love several aspects of this job. First, I help the Tribe protect their treaty rights through improving understanding of marine mammals to allow sustainable management. I feel proud that my work is helping to address a social injustice issue as well as contributing to research and management. Second, I am able to study many topics; my primary study species are gray whales and Steller sea lions, but I also work on other marine mammals, including California sea lions, killer whales, and humpback whales, and non-marine mammals, including river otters, Pacific halibut, and purple olive snails. Third, I have had an opportunity to travel and see the world while participating in the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission. Last, I have developed great relationships with co-workers, collaborating scientists, and the Makah community.

The foundation of knowledge I gained while a student at UW has helped me throughout my career. In my professional life, I have worked with UW professors on a variety of projects and have collaborated with former classmates on research projects. I hope that the School of Fisheries will continue its role of shaping the careers of fisheries scientists and managers for another 100 years.

Oh my, where do I start? I suppose I should begin in 1975 as I’m completing my MS thesis at the University of Hawaii (UH), studying the life history of a butterflyfish. At the time, I was fully submerged in reef fish ecology and thought Peter Sale’s lottery hypothesis was “the thing.” I was hoping to continue on to get a PhD, perhaps at Scripps or the University of California, Santa Barbara. However, a new faculty member had recently joined the Zoology Department at UH, and I had taken his fisheries seminar. Tim Smith (PhD, Biotstat, 1973)­­ encouraged me to apply to the UW and to consider a career with NMFS. So I went off to Seattle in 1976 with the idea of studying Hawaiian reef fish recruitment using SCUBA and artificial reefs, a plan that was not surprisingly a difficult sell. I was the tropical outlier that few members of the faculty were willing to entertain. Would I consider Alaska and/or perhaps salmon?

As I was pondering the problem, I lost my Center for Quantitative Science TA-ship in spring quarter 1977 due to a lack of funding. Having completed only two quarters of study, I was unable to afford out-of-state tuition. The timing was propitious however, because the Magnuson-Stevens Act had just been passed, and observers were needed to quantify bycatch in the Japanese fishery for walleye pollock in the Bering Sea. So I signed up with NMFS and spent 74 continuous days at sea on the Nissan Maru No. 2, the largest fishing vessel in the world at the time. What an epiphany this experience was for me. I became very appreciative of the large scale of fisheries impacts and the need for management to protect things.

I returned to my studies at the College of Fisheries in fall quarter 1977 and, once again, the timing was perfect. A large-scale marine and terrestrial research program was developing in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands to study the area. Several agencies were involved, including the NMFS, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Hawaii Division of Aquatic Resources, and Sea Grant Hawaii. I prepared a proposal for submission to Sea Grant to study the Hawaiian deep-sea handline fishery for bottomfish, including especially the deepwater snapper opakapaka.

Simultaneously, I brought together my dissertation committee chaired by Bud Burgner, who to his credit, supported my desire to return to Hawaii to pursue my research. The grant was funded and I was contracted to the Fisheries Research Institute at the UW, which hired me for three years to do the work. I was admitted to candidacy and returned to Honolulu with funding in spring 1978. Moreover, because the NMFS Honolulu Laboratory was very interested in my research, Richard Shomura provided me with an office and full support for the next three years as I completed my field work. I returned to Seattle, defended my dissertation in the summer of 1981, and was hired by NMFS Honolulu shortly thereafter. While working at the Lab, I continued work in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, was involved in a resource assessment of the Mariana Archipelago, and studied deepwater caridean shrimp.

Having started a family and wanting to return to the mainland, I transferred to the NMFS Tiburon Laboratory on San Francisco Bay in 1988, where Bill Lenarz (MS, 1966; PhD, 1969) gave me responsibility for running a midwater trawl survey for pelagic juvenile rockfish. The survey was designed to estimate pre-recruit abundance to forecast impending recruitment. I was back to my original interest in studying recruitment. Then, following Lenarz’s retirement in 1996, I started doing committee work with the Pacific Fishery Management Council (Groundfish Management Team and Scientific and Statistical Committee, [SSC]) and completing groundfish stock assessments. At one point while chairing the SSC, I found myself on thin ice with the Council for my participation in the “Groundfish Players” video, produced by Milton Love for the 2008 West Coast Groundfish Conference. Fortunately, I recovered from the scandal and my standing was restored. To the end, I found working with the Council to incorporate our best available science in the management of West Coast fisheries to be very gratifying and rewarding. Now retired, I’m enjoying travel, volunteering, cooking, music, family, and friends.

After completing a BS in Zoology at the University of Montana and working in Florida’s mangroves for a year, I was drawn to University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fisheries Science (SAFS) by its strengths in sound science and effective application. I entered SAFS in 1990 as an MS student. During a scoping visit the year before, I had been lucky enough to connect with Si Simenstad and learn more about his estuarine research and potential research opportunities. I worked with Si, Bob Wissmar, and a team of others, including Jeff Cordell (MS, 1986), Greg Hood (PhD, 2000), Cheryl Morgan (MS, 1993), and Laurie Weitkamp (MS, 1991; PhD, 2004), to name just a few. At that time, Si was in the process of creating the “Wetland Ecosystems Team” or at least creating the first logo and sweatshirts! This was a busy, challenging, and rewarding time for me that was made possible through Si’s unceasing efforts to increase understanding and management of estuarine systems as well as his academic, financial, and moral support.

My thesis focused on assessing the ecological function of created wetlands. After my MS, I went on to research positions at the Tillamook Bay National Estuary Partnership in Oregon and then at the Willapa Alliance in southwestern Washington. I am absolutely certain that these positions were available to me because of my degree from SAFS and due to the high esteem people held for Si.

However, several years of working at the interface of science and management were enough to propel me into a PhD program at University of Oregon’s (UO) Institute of Marine Biology (OIMB). Once again, I was fortunate to have a supportive, engaging, and creative mentor, Alan Shanks. After years of working with Pacific salmon in coastal systems, I wanted to examine the movements and transport mechanisms for non-salmonid fishes and invertebrates and understand how they influenced population connectivity. OIMB is a wonderful marine laboratory and, for anyone interested in marine biology, living and working at a marine lab is an experience not to be missed. During a post-doctoral position at UO, I was fortunate to be offered a tenure-track faculty position at Oregon State University in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. The position is also within the Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station and based at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon, so I am lucky enough to continue to live and work on the ocean.

My current research focuses on understanding mechanisms and patterns of dispersal, movement, and mixing in marine organisms and quantifying aspects of life history variation in marine and anadromous fishes that are relevant to conservation and management. I often use biogeochemical markers to address basic questions in ecology that also provide information critical for management and conservation efforts. My position is exciting and rewarding because it combines my interest and training in fisheries science and marine biology in an applied research environment that involves effective collaboration with state, federal, and industry partners. I now mentor graduate students and also teach a course on the early life history of fishes. Throughout my professional career, I have often marveled at the size and the reach of the SAFS network. In my current position, I am fortunate to regularly interact with so many successful SAFS alumni. Congratulations on 100 years of education, research, outreach, and training!

My path to, and back to, UW SAFS has taken a few turns. An impressionable high school sophomore in Massachusetts visited John Hughes at the Massachusetts State lobster hatchery and caught the aquaculture bug. Two years later, I was enrolled in the UW College of Fisheries. There I made ends meet by guiding tours of the salmon hatchery and keeping Frieda Taub’s continuous culture glassware ultra-clean while learning what fisheries was all about. During my first year, Vince Gallucci stood before our intro statistics class and informed us that he was not going to teach us statistics, he was going to teach us how to talk to statisticians. This was prescient of my jack-of-all-trades path to success. A year later, I found myself dissatisfied with scratching the surface of math, so I dropped the Differential Equations for Biologists class and headed to the Math Department where I got the quantitative background that has served me well. I am not a mathematician or a statistician or an ecologist or an oceanographer or a computer programmer, but have dabbled in all enough to connect the dots and write Stock Synthesis; I get ahead of myself. Doug Chapman and Allyn Seymour facilitated my eclectic tendency and I flew the nest again to Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) to work with Allyn’s colleague, oceanographer and engineer John Isaacs.

At SIO, I soon developed an affiliation with Reuben Lasker’s laboratory in the NMFS Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC). It was the right place at the right time, and I was able to conduct the first field applications of daily growth increments in larval fish otoliths for my PhD thesis. I became fascinated with the fish recruitment process and designed a net to sample 2–3 cm fish that were too quick for plankton nets and too small for midwater trawls. Alas, I never could get ship time to use it, but today I still get inquires about it, and I am pleased that others have found it useful. At the time, UW’s quantitative fishery science diaspora was becoming well represented in La Jolla, and I fell in with that crowd, particularly Bob Francis, and I saw my future in stock assessment, not juvenile fish ecology. In 1980, my postdoc with Loo Botsford at Bodega Marine Laboratory briefly brought me full circle as the lobster culture work at Bodega had been influenced by the same John Hughes that had gotten me started.

In December 1981, my long tenure with the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service began. I started working on anchovy assessments at the SWFSC, and in 1983, the germ of Stock Synthesis (SS) was fertilized. In hindsight, it seems I was able with that model to bridge what I often see today as a gulf between the reductionist paradigm of the statisticians and the idealistic mechanistic models of ecologists.

I made it back to Seattle in 1988 with the NMFS Alaska Fisheries Science Center, where the strong connections to UW were active and productive. My work with Pamela Mace as the Northwest representative for development of the Stock Assessment Improvement Plan put me again in the right place at the right time, In 2002, I managed to get a NMFS position that allowed me to stay close to fishery science in Seattle, maintain my active affiliate position at the UW, and inherit leadership of this plan that she and Bill Fox (PhD, 2012) had developed.

My portfolio as national stock assessment coordinator included messaging the “bang-for-the-buck” to garner Congressional support for stock assessment science. It was a straightforward message:  we had the 1996 reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act calling for quantitative science to guide the ending of overfishing and we knew how to do the stock assessment science; we succeeded remarkably.  NMFS added surveys and staff and started new programs.  Meanwhile, my science project was converting SS to ADMB and take its outreach national and global, for which I earned the Deptartment of Commerce Gold Medal in 2008.

One national program sought to develop the NMFS-academic connection to support a pipeline of qualified fishery science candidates for NMFS positions. This included the NMFS–Sea Grant fellowships in population dynamics and support for key academic positions to serve as the nexus for the pipeline. What better place to do that than in Seattle with the critical mass of UW, NMFS, and the International Pacific Halibut Commission? Soon I was on a UW search committee with Ray Hilborn, interviewing a candidate, the young André Punt, for that nexus position. We chose wisely. The UW quantitative fishery science program has been a tremendous boon for NMFS. With André and/or Ray, I have served on committees for UW SAFS graduates Jason Cope (MS, 2001; PhD, 2006), Melissa Haltuch (PhD, 2008), Carey McGilliard (MS, 2007; PhD, 2012), Ian Stewart (MS, 2001; PhD, 2006), and Ian Taylor (PhD, 2008; QERM). Several were Sea Grant fellows, and all went on to work for NMFS as stock assessment scientists. Heck, we now even have NMFS staff leading a SAFS graduate class—the class project being the mainline stock assessment for a west coast groundfish stock. A greater success I cannot imagine. The SAFS weekly quantitative science seminar and weekly assessment ThinkTank catalyze the innovations occurring here. Following one amazingly insightful ThinkTank discussion, Arni Magnusson (MS, 2002; PhD, 2016) wrote me to remark that only at UW could such a discussion have occurred.  I am proud to be a graduate and a continued affiliate.

Having a primary interest in fish behavior and ecology, I decided to come to the UW College of Fisheries in the fall of 1963 after earning a BA in biology from Occidental College (CA). Initially, my major professor was Alan DeLacy (MS, 1933; PhD, 1941), but in January 1964, I became Don McPhail’s research assistant and his student. Don introduced me to the Olympic mudminnow (Novumbra hubbsi) that month, and it became the subject of my thesis research. As a graduate student, I joined the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH) and presented several papers on Novumbra at their annual national meetings. Additionally, in 1965, I joined the American Fisheries Society (AFS). The student presentations I gave at the ASIH meetings and my activities in AFS after UW resulted in network connections that were of great help for my employment and career.

In addition to my thesis research, I did an independent study under Paul Fields on sound production by northwest Pacific marine fishes (the first such research on these species). Those who remember the aquarium in the basement of the old College of Fisheries building may also remember that there was a large oval tank in the aquarium that held three sablefish (black cod). I plunked my hydrophone in that tank and found that sablefish made a very high frequency click. I used Gordon Orians’ sonograph (from UW upper campus) to print the graphics that showed the sound frequencies. (Gordon used the machine for bird sounds, but kindly let me use it for my fish research.) The sablefish click frequencies reached 22KHz, the upper limit of my hydrophone!  (Most fish sounds are blow 8000 Hz.) I did more research in the oval tank and found that sablefish possibly used the clicks for auto-orientation.

My report on fish sounds apparently became known to fish sound researchers elsewhere in the country, and I was contacted by a researcher in New York about the sablefish finding some years after I left UW. Subsequently, I arranged to have all my fish sound recordings archived in the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology collection (the recordings are available from the Laboratory for your listening pleasure).

After completing my PhD in 1968, I found employment in the private sector with Cornell University Professor Ed Raney’s company, Ichthyoloogical Associates, Inc. (IA). He remembered me from my student presentations at ASIH and offered me a position in Delaware. While at IA, I conducted behavioral studies on responses of mid-Atlantic fishes to temperature and chemical pollutants; I presented the findings at AFS meetings and published them in IA bulletins and local journals. Following 15 years with IA, I joined Harza Engineering Co. (subsequently MWH and now Stantec) in Chicago and worked all over the world on water resource development projects. I retired from the corporate world in 2005 and have been doing independent consulting since then.

After leaving UW, I also became active in AFS. One of my office mates at UW was Howard E. Johnson (PhD, 1967), who finished his PhD (under Max Katz) ahead of me. Howard was quite active in AFS and organized the AFS Water Quality Section in 1976 (the first meeting was held in 1977). As its first president, Howard appointed me secretary-treasurer, a position I held at the founding of the section and for the next 30 years. When Howard completed his two-year term as section president in 1979, I presented him with a plaque for his service at the annual AFS meeting in West Yellowstone, Montana (Photo 1).

Interestingly, my independent research on sablefish sound production at UW has resurfaced in recent years (some 50 years later!). In December 2018, I was contacted by a researcher at the University of Victoria (British Columbia) who recorded the high frequency clicks made by sablefish in a large outdoor pen. That same month, I spoke about my thesis research at the Novumbra Symposium held at Evergreen State in Olympia. The symposium (the second such symposium to be held) was sponsored by the UW (Julian Olden and Lauren Kuehne [MS, 2012; PhD ongoing] at SAFS) and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. I was the lead speaker at the first Novumbra symposium in Lacey, WA (2012), and was invited to give a summary of that presentation.

I still stay in touch by email with several former UW grad student colleagues: Larry Gilbertson (PhD, 1980), Dave Greenfield (PhD, 1966), Boyd Kynard (PhD, 1972), Dick Lichtenheld (PhD, 1966), Bruce Miller (MS, 1965; PhD, 1969; faculty) and Don Weitkamp (MS, 1971; PhD, 1977)—who apparently prompted this article—and also with Jerry Stober, who, when at UW FRI, used my Ichthyological Associates design for an apparatus to determine temperature preferences of fish.

Like the paths that many others have followed, my road to becoming a stock assessment scientist was a series of fortunate events. I spent much of my childhood recreational fishing, but never really had the goal of becoming a marine biologist, mainly because I was unaware the option existed. I moved from a little dairy farming community, where I grew up, to Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand, to do a Bachelor of Science with a double major in zoology and computer science. I chose this unusual combination because, although I liked them both, I preferred zoology, but computer science was more likely to get me a job. The first fortunate event was taking an advanced calculus class in my first year in which the first couple of weeks focused on proving 1 + 1 = 2. I thought this made no sense and was just a complete waste of time, so I dropped the course and took a standard calculus course. After this experience, I took very few math courses during my undergraduate studies. Despite the obvious importance of math in stock assessment, I attribute the success in my career to intuition and creativity that I suspect would have been hindered by math courses. Interestingly, I now attribute some major failings in stock assessment to the reliance on theoretical mathematical ecology.

The next fortunate event was my inability to get the type of computer science job that I wanted. This was, in part, due to my inability to write essays, in combination with nonacademic pursuits that resulted in somewhat subpar grades. All the zoology midterm tests were short answer questions, but the final exams included paragraph or multi-paragraph answers, and I was unaware that I did not know how to write (some might argue that I still don’t). I did not want to be just a computer programmer, so I decided I should continue my education to enable me to get a more interesting job. It was not until my first essay in my MS studies that I realized I could not write. Fortunately, I found an engineering professor who specialized in helping students write better.

The fortunate event that turned my path towards stock assessment occurred when I was trying to decide how to continue my education. My cousin had just finished his MS in marine biology, and while I was discussing education options with him, he mentioned that you could use computers to model fish populations. I had absolutely no idea what that meant, but it sounded cool. So, I talked to a professor who did this type of work and he wanted me to model some Australian reef fish populations, but only if Prof. Brian McArdle, a biostatistician, would agree to be on my committee. I did not want to study a small Australian reef fish—I wanted to study a commercially important New Zealand fish. Brian said that if I was his student, I could model anything I wanted. Fortunately, the biology department was having trouble getting MS students, so they let me in even though my grades were not up to their usual standard. My thesis involved conducting a stock assessment of snapper (Pagrus auratus), an important commercial and the most important recreational New Zealand species. This was the first thesis in the biology department that did not include collecting data, and it took a bit of persuasion by my supervisor to convince the head of department that I did not have to collect data to do a good thesis.

Nearing the end of my MS studies, I started looking for job and PhD opportunities; I had a few interviews, one of which was for a fisheries management position at the New Zealand Fishing Industry Board (NZFIB). The interview panel thought that I was completely hopeless for the position, but one member, Paul Starr, was surprised to see someone coming out of a New Zealand university with stock assessment experience and convinced the NZFIB to create a new position and hire me to help him with assessments. Working at the NZFIB is where I met my future UW PhD supervisor, Ray Hilborn, who was working as a consultant for the NZFIB. I also met André Punt, who has been a mentor throughout my career and still is, as well as other UW postdocs and students. I learnt a lot about stock assessment at the NZFIB from the NZ scientists and UW consultants, and I took some distance learning courses in statistics to understand the more technical details.

Career advancement options in NZ without a PhD were limited, so Paul Starr encouraged me to obtain a PhD. With financial support from the NZFIB and through its connections with UW, Ray Hilborn took me on as a student. To be honest, my goal was not to go to UW to learn, but simply to get my PhD. However, I did learn a tremendous amount—from the projects I worked on and the people I worked with, many who were UW students (e.g. Billy Ernst [PhD, 2002] and Murdoch McAllister [PhD, 1995]), and alumni (e.g. Ana Parma [PhD, 1989] and Jim Ianelli [PhD, 1993]). One of these projects was to develop Coleraine, the first general Bayesian stock assessment package programmed in AD Model Builder (ADMB), long dead, but it’s influence can still be seen in the widely used general stock assessment program Stock Synthesis (developed by Rick Methot [BS, 1975]).

After receiving my PhD, I accepted a stock assessment position at the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) under the direction of Rick Deriso [UW Biomathematics, 1978], where I still work on stock assessments supervising other UW alumni (Carolina Minte-Vera [PhD, 2004], Haikun Xu [SAFS post-doc], and Juan Valero [MS, 2002; PhD, 2011]) under the direction of Alexandre Aires-da-Silva [PhD, 2008]. This was another fortunate event. My wife and I had lived in Wellington (New Zealand) and Seattle for six years and decided we wanted to move where the weather was a bit warmer. So, I wrote letters to the NMFS in Hawaii and Miami and to the IATTC inquiring about possible options for employment. Unknown to me, when the IATTC received my letter it was in the middle of interviewing for a stock assessment scientist, and so I was brought in for an interview. I was selected for the position, which was fortunate because stock assessment positions at the IATTC rarely become available, and I consider them among the best such positions in the world. My first task was to work with UW alumni George Watters to develop the stock assessment program ASCALA, an ADMB version of Dave Fournier’s MULTIFAN-CL, and apply it to the eastern Pacific Ocean tuna stocks.

The connections that I made at the UW remain invaluable. For example, a large part of the success of the award-winning Center for the Advancement of Population Assessment Methodology (CAPAM) stock assessment methodology workshop series is due to the involvement of UW professors, their students, and alumni—particularly, Brice Semmens (UW Zoology) who is one of the other two cofounders of CAPAM, and André Punt who has been a keynote speaker at many of the workshops, has edited the special issues in the journal Fisheries Research, has contributed many publications to the special issues, and has encouraged his students to attend and contribute presentations and papers. In 2020, we are planning to hold a CAPAM workshop on natural mortality in Seattle in collaboration with UW and the NMFS. Similarly, the success of the ADMB Foundation, that I cofounded with John Sibert and Anders Nielsen, was facilitated by people associated with UW, particularly Ray Hilborn who helped us obtain funding to purchase ADMB from the developer Dave Fournier and Rick Methot who helped obtain ongoing funding.

Finally, the most important piece of information I can transfer to current UW students is that working with others is the most effective way to learn. I have been fortunate throughout my education and career, including much consulting work, to work with truly exceptional people. In many cases they had already done the hard work and it was my task to understand what they had done and work with them to make improvements. Without them, I would not know what I know today. In particular, I am grateful to Grant Thompson for putting up with all my questions and model run requests for the Pacific cod assessment over so many years.

When I was a new graduate student at Florida State University (FSU) starting an MS on ant ecology, a post-doc told me to go somewhere else to get my PhD. Why? I asked. Had I made a mistake coming to FSU? Was there something wrong with this department? No, he just thought it was a good idea to spread your educational experience across more than one university, because each has a different academic culture, and you learn something different from each. It was great advice.

The UW School of Fisheries in the 1990s had a very different culture from FSU. FSU emphasized natural history and ecological interactions among species and with their environment. UW emphasized population modeling, as one would expect for harvest management. Si Simenstad’s Wetlands Ecosystem Team (WET), where I worked, also emphasized the emerging discipline of landscape ecology. Working with ants allows you to work at a small scale, independently, and with minimum logistic complications; working on salmon ecology is almost entirely the opposite, which required a significant adjustment for me.

The cultures of FSU and UW have both had a lasting influence on me. My PhD dissertation was an example of blending cultures. I was interested in leveraging my entomological background in my new focus on fish ecology, and I was interested in interactions between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, so juvenile salmon predation on flies, aphids, and other insects in the Chehalis River tidal swamps were my initial subject. This evolved into an interest in how allochthonous insect prey and other organic detritus varied in abundance and export according to the size of a tidal channel. This led to a fascination with tidal channel geometry. I applied what I had learned about organismal allometry during my FSU studies, and the emerging paradigm of fractal geometry, to tidal channels. This fascination with channel geometry continues, with the consequence that I have published more papers in geomorphological than ecological journals.

I now work for the Skagit River System Cooperative, a tribal natural resource management consortium, where I do mostly applied research on tidal marsh ecology and geomorphology in support of estuarine habitat restoration to provide rearing habitat for juvenile salmon, especially threatened Chinook. Tidal marsh restoration is primarily a process of restoring physical form to a site to allow hydrodynamic processes to operate as unimpeded as possible. Geomorphology and hydrodynamics interact to provide habitat for flora and fauna, which in turn can serve as ecological engineers to affect geomorphology and hydrodynamics. I also serve on a five-person committee that evaluates federal habitat restoration in the Columbia River Estuary, where I sometimes cross paths with old WET friends, Laurie Weitkamp (MS, 1991; PhD, 2004; currently NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center) and Jessica Miller (MS, 1983; currently University of Oregon).

Grad school is more than an intellectual experience. The large, international, Latino community at the School of Fisheries in the 1990s also had a big influence on my life. I remain close friends with Diego Holmgren (PhD, 2001; currently Stillaguamish Tribe), Billy Ernst (PhD, 2002) and Carolina Parada (SAFS post-doc; both currently University of Concepcion, Chile), Juan Valero (MS 2002; PhD, 2002; currently independent fisheries scientist/consultant), Anna Parma (PhD, 1989; currently Centro Nacional Patagonico, Argentina), Jesus Jurado-Molina (PhD, 2001; currently Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico), Julian Burgos (PhD, 2008; currently Marine and Freshwater Research Institute, Iceland), and Eugenia Bogazzi (Research Scientist at SAFS; currently Environmental Coalition of South Seattle). It was through them that I met my Chilean wife, Ximena Grollmus. Thanks to them I speak as much Spanish at home as English, as do my two children. And from them I learned to say, “Chao, pesca’o!”

I grew up in Miami, Florida and was introduced to the world of marine biology and fisheries at a young age. Like many SAFS alumni, my introduction came with a rod and reel in hand. Most of my experiences were with my father and brother in search of whatever fish were biting during that time of year. Fast forward several years, I completed my undergraduate degree at Duke University, where I was an early admission to play soccer. What I didn’t know when I matriculated, was that Duke had a marine lab on Piver’s Island where I would spend a semester my junior year and cement my love of marine ecology. Following Duke, I worked as a field technician at the University of North Carolina (UNC), which was truly a “dream-job”.  I spent most days piloting skiffs to various study sites located in bays of the North Carolina coast.

After a couple years at UNC, I went on a road trip across country accompanied by two college friends with the intent of landing in Davis, California. We arrived in Seattle in August, and spent a month exploring the Olympic peninsula, the Cascades, and Lake Washington. At the end of that month, I truly could not see why I should leave. After a year of volunteering with NOAA on several projects, I applied to SAFS with support from Frieda Taub and was admitted in 1994. Frieda also helped me obtain an ARCS (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) scholarship, and I am exceptionally grateful for their support in the early years of my graduate career.

My graduate career focused on crayfish in the Florida Everglades. I was fortunate to team with the US Geological Survey (USGS), who were developing studies on the freshwater ecology to support Everglades Restoration under President Bill Clinton. I wrote several proposals with USGS colleagues to fund my graduate work through the Washington Co-op unit based at SAFS. This turned out to be an exceptionally good deal for me because I was able to spend the winters in Florida collecting data for my MS degree and seeing my family. After several years of ecology work, I came to a crossroads, and had to choose between continuing to study ecology of crayfish in the Everglades or developing quantitative skills to model crayfish population dynamics. I knew that SAFS faculty were strong in both areas and felt supported with either decision.  I ultimately chose to work with Ray Hilborn and his lab of quantitative modellers for my PhD, where I developed Bayesian models of crayfish response to hydromanagement in the Everglades.

Luckily for me, models of crayfish in the Everglades transferred remarkably well to models of salmon in the Pacific Northwest! In 2005, I moved back to Seattle with my wife just prior to the birth of our first daughter (our second would join us in 2007), to begin a position with R2 Resource Consultants, Inc.  Most of my work there (and afterwards) has focused on developing statistical methods and constructing life cycle models to evaluate factors affecting salmon. In 2012, I started my own “single-shingle” consulting firm largely using skills developed during my graduate career and codified in the book The Ecological Detective written by Ray Hilborn and Marc Mangel.

The skills and relationships developed at SAFS have provided opportunities to collaborate with former SAFS alumni on projects ranging from lobsters in Chile with Billy Ernst (PhD, 2002) to humpback whales in Alaska with Scott Gende (PhD, 2002). I’ve also been fortunate to continue my interaction with the SAFS scientific community by teaching classes, serving on committees (as an affiliate faculty member), and getting feedback on research ideas through the quantitative seminar series, which has been extremely valuable for me as an independent consultant. I really feel lucky to be a part of such a strong scientific community, and I look forward to contributing to this community during the next 100 years of SAFS.

Somewhere there is a picture of me about age 4, taken by my dad on a Staten Island beach in New York, standing at the water’s edge, arms in air, wind in my hair and butt naked! I think that is when I grew gills on the back of my neck and fell in love with the ocean.

Fast forward a “few” years, about a year and half after I finished my undergrad studies at University of Rhode Island (BS, 1999), and I was ready for a change. Seattle is where I found someone willing to hire me after a half-hour phone interview for a minimum wage AmeriCorps job, working with the Washington Conservation Corps on a salmon habitat restoration crew for King County. A couple of months into the job, our crew supervisor told us about an interesting seminar that was happening at UW SAFS, and he even let us off early if we wanted to attend. So a couple of us attended the seminar (I don’t remember the speaker or topic now), but it was the first year of the Bevan Series. I was hooked and signed up to be on the email list so I could see the lineup of talks.

In 2002, during the second year of the Bevan Series, I attended the seminar given by Chris Glass, who had been the director of the Center in Massachusetts where I had done my observer training. At the social hour after the seminar, I met Craig Rose (MS, 1982; PhD, 1993). During our conversation, it came up that he knew my undergrad advisor and that had I some background in fishing gear. Well, it took a year and a half, but in July 2004, I started to work for Craig in the Conservation Engineering group at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC) as a temporary employee. I had applied to SAFS twice and was rejected both times. Craig knew I wanted to go to grad school, but as a temporary employee of NOAA, there was no mechanism for me to do so. However, he let me take a couple of classes while I was working for him.

So, I took Tom Quinn’s salmon ecology class (FSH 450) in fall 2004 and Loveday Conquest’s statistics class (QSCI 482) in fall 2006. That fall, I found out about a NOAA program called the Graduate Science Program (GSP), which sadly no longer exists. If accepted, the GSP would give me funding for two years to pursue an MS degree and simultaneously a permanent job with NOAA. In the Conservation Engineering group, we worked cooperatively with the commercial trawl fleet in Alaska to modify fishing gear to reduce bycatch and the impacts of fishing gear on the sea floor. Craig and I had just started working on a North Pacific Research Board grant to investigate whether modifying demersal trawl sweeps could reduce unobserved mortality of commercially important crab (Red King crab, Snow and Tanner crab), so we could easily carve out a piece of the project for my thesis. Now that I had a project and potential funding, I needed to find an advisor in SAFS, and no one there did fishing gear research. Of the two logical options, Don Gunderson had retired, and Tim Essington’s lab was full. Ed Melvin (WA Sea Grant), suggested I talk to Loveday Conquest as Ed saw a heavy statistical component to the project. However, I was taking Loveday’s statistics class at the time and knew she was planning to be on sabbatical for the 2007/08 academic year. Not really seeing any other options if I wanted to go to grad school starting fall 2007, I reluctantly reached out to Loveday figuring I’d get the answer of no. After some discussions, and because she had just had me as a student, Loveday agreed to be my advisor. Phew! I could not have asked for a better advisor! Loveday was kind, generous, supportive, and she kept me on track (GSP had a fairly strict schedule) to finish my degree in just under two years.

In the end, I finished my MS in summer 2009, received my permanent job with AFSC, and some of the analysis from my thesis was presented to the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council to aid in the decision-making process for what became a new fishing gear regulation for demersal trawls in the Amendment 80 fleet in the Bering Sea.

To this day, I still enjoy attending the Bevan Series and other SAFS seminars on a regular basis, as they are great way to stay informed of interesting research being done in the fisheries world and to keep in touch with the SAFS community.

I was accepted for graduate study at the UW during the summer of 1950. I had never been on the west coast of the US, but was immediately favourably impressed.

There were six professors at what was then called the School of Fisheries: Richard Van Cleve, head of the School, who taught population dynamics; Arthur Welander, who taught classification of fisheries; Allan DeLacy, who taught three courses, one per quarter in three subjects; James Lynch, who taught invertebrate zoology; and Lauren Donaldson, who taught three courses on various aspects of salmon culture. Dr. Lynch was a colourful character, who had served in the Marine Corps during World War I. There were three courses in various aspects of processing fish, in which I had no interest. The professor, Dr. Hastings, had about eight students, all but one of whom were foreign. I took all of the courses given by Arthur Welander and Allan DeLacy, two of quarters of physical oceanography from Clifford Barnes from Oceanography, two quarters of statistics from Doug Chapham, and one quarter of analytical geometry from an instructor in the mathematics department.

During the first quarter, fisheries classes and laboratories were held in some wooden buildings that had been built during World War II. During the Christmas vacation, three students, including me, were hired to move virtually everything that was in the old buildings to the new building under the supervision of Allan DeLacy. It was hard work, but I needed the money. (Allan was a wonderful person to work with— he invited me to his house for Christmas dinner, but I had already accepted an invitation from fellow students.)

In summer 1951, I took a job working for the Oregon Fish Commission, during which time I touched a live salmon, and many other species of fish, for the first time. That was a great learning experience!

I can’t remember much of what I took during the next two quarters, as the courses blended in with those I took a couple of years later. At the end of winter quarter 1952, I interrupted my schooling to accept employment with the Washington Department of Fisheries. Before that, however, I wrote a paper with Kelshaw Bonham, who was the senior author, which was published in Copeia. It was about a better x-ray machine for fish, which the Smithsonian purchased almost immediately.

I graduated with an MS degree on a Saturday in May or June of 1954, and on the following Monday received a notice from my draft board to report for a physical examination, which I passed. However, I didn’t get drafted until January 1955. After basic training, I found myself on a troop ship headed for Korea—the fighting was over by then, so I just did what I was told to do. Then, I found myself on another troopship back to the USA. I immediately reported back to work at the Washington Department of Fisheries, but the work was not very exciting, so I applied for job at the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC). I was hired for a job in Panama. One of the things that we did there was tag anchovetas with steel internal tags. I perceived that our results could be used for a PhD thesis, so I received permission from Milner Schaefer (PhD, 1950), director of the IATTC, to use the results for that purpose. I returned to the UW, and Gerald Paulik was very much interested in my data and encouraged me in what I was doing. I received my PhD in 1965.

Somebody entered my thesis in a competition for the best student paper of 1965, and it eventually received the W.F. Thompson Award of the American Institute of Fishery Research Biologists for the best paper published by a student in fisheries in 1965.

The rest is history. I have done various kinds of work for the IATTC, especially writing and editing, and serving as head of its tuna tagging program. Years earlier, when I was in high school, I had read the books about the mutiny on the Bounty. I never dreamed that I would visit Pitcairn Island and meet the descendants of the mutineers, but that is exactly what happened. Also, we charted a small boat to Hawaii to tag tunas in the South Pacific. About halfway there, in the middle of nowhere, the boat caught fire! We managed to get it out, and made it to our destination with a sail for power. I thought at the time that it might be the end of us all!

Meanwhile Bob Kearney of the South Pacific Commission (SPC), which had far more money than did the IATTC, chartered a large Japanese baitboat, the Hatsutori Maru IV, with a highly skilled crew. We managed to tag large numbers of tunas, mostly skipjack, and got lots of tag returns. These data are analysed in numerous reports of the SPC.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that one of the members of the crew of the Hatsutori Maru IV was an American, Jim Ianelli. Jim had only a high school education at the time, but he quickly decided to enter Humboldt State, where he earned a BS, and then went to the UW, where he got his PhD (1993). Jim now works at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center and is an SAFS affiliate professor!