BMSC Blogs

Andy Spencer while Director at BMSC

Bamfield lost a long-time friend, advocate, and mentor this week with the death of Andy Spencer.

Andy was an active researcher at BMSC since the mid-70s. He was director for 11 years and oversaw expansion of BMSC to include the Ecophysiology lab, CFI funding for new docks, boats, and buildings, the Rix building, and Buchanan lodge. Andy’s vision has taken BMSC into the ranks of marine sciences centres recognized world-wide.

I met Andy as a beginning undergraduate student at the University of Alberta when he was still untenured. I have enduring memories of lectures on invertebrate nervous systems, demonstrations of intracellular recording of jellyfish neurons, hard fought volleyball games, and a two-week field trip for Marine Biology to Bamfield and Friday Harbor - after the final grades were submitted.

Andy shared his passion for all aspects of marine science in ways that can’t be measured. The last time he taught at BMSC, he was in the lab late with the students thrilled with the contents of a dredge brought in that afternoon. The big excitement was a large nemertean worm and seeing its proboscis in use in a living animal.

I consulted with him often over the last two years for his wisdom and historical knowledge. Even though we were on a first name basis for more than 30 years, I remained in awe.

We will all miss him.

Brad

The Fall Program 2009 wrapped up this weekend with the symposium and dinner on Friday and everyone leaving on Saturday.  Vehicles were packed to the gunwales and students each stood on the lookout to soak up the view one last time before heading back to their home institutions.  Many tears were shed.

The symposium was truly excellent.  Projects had multiple facets attacking a single problem and with a little more time many would easily be a publishable paper.  I saw several talks that would not have been out of place at the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution meetings.  They were well-polished and sophisticated.  The students deserve enormous credit for their hard work and long hours.  I also want to recognize the role played by Marjorie Wonham and Jackson Chu, instructor and TA, who provided the students with all the support they needed to get where they were going.

As sad as it is that the students  have headed home, I know that they will be back to visit, as previous fall students continue to come back.  And I also know that the next cohort will be as much fun and as interesting as the last.  So many fall students go on to grad school that it will be fun to start seeing their names cropping up in the literature.

While the students have all said their thankyous I want to extend our thanks to them for making this place such a fun and rewarding place to work.

Brad

Dr. Tim Higham

One of the great things about this place is discovering how successful BMSC has been in training marine biologists.   Many of our current researchers and instructors spent time at BMSC as undergraduates.  They were so inspired that they went on to graduate school, became professors in their own right, and returned to train the next generation.

Tim Higham was an undergrad at University of Calgary and is now a professor at Clemson University in South Carolina.  He now studies the functional morphology of feeding in the sculpins of the west coast and taught Marine Fishes this summer.  We hope he will be teaching a senior course in biomechanics next year.

Cory Bishop (Dalhousie University) and Chris Cameron (Université de Montréal), have active programs in evolutionary development and co-taught this subject this summer.  Both did graduate research here, and Chris also studied as an undergraduate here.  KC Burns (Victoria University, New Zealand), also a graduate student at BMSC, returned this year to teach Coastal Community Ecology.

Sally Leys (University of Alberta), Liz Boulding (Guelph University), both long-term BMSC researchers, were undergraduates here, as was Russell Wyeth (SFX). Iain McGaw (Memorial University) has had a long association with BMSC beginning as a Post Doctoral Fellow. These BMSC alumni are now successful researchers and bring their own labs here to conduct field and laboratory research.

The new University Programs Coordinator, Beth Rogers, was an undergraduate here at the same time as Liz Boulding in 1977. In fact, many of BMSC staff were students here, including Shirley Pakula, Anne Stewart, Heather Alexander, Sarah Tyne, Kelley Bartlett, and most of the Public Education staff.

This is only a partial list and doesn’t include students like Drew Harvell (Cornell University) that trained as research assistants in Bamfield and then went on to careers in Marine Biology.

We don’t have a complete list but would love to have a better one.  We want to hear from our alumni and find out what how their Bamfield experience affected their future.  Check out our alumni page http://www.bms.bc.ca/alumni/index.html and email our alumni co-ordinator.

Brad

One of the great pleasures of being an academic is being able to hear about your colleagues’ work.  Seminars have been a real pleasure and inspiration for me since I was an undergraduate at the University of Alberta.  Not many undergraduates attend seminars on campus anymore, but they are part of the curriculum here.  So, at least once a week, the community of researchers and students gather to hear about the latest cool stuff being done at BMSC or by our visitors - and, of course, partake of the cookies.

Seminars this year have really covered the whole gamut, including microarray work on human diving responses (Bruce Cameron), nitrogen metabolism in fishes (Chris Wood), fertilization in broadcast spawning urchins (Don Levitan), the ethics of sportfishing (Gene Helfman), and responses of marine larvae to global change (Jason Hodin).   Master Chief Thomas McAdams and his stories of time in the US coast guard was a real highlight.

Humpback whale lunge feeding
photo by Chris Neufeld

There was a great moment Bob Shadwick had explained the biomechanics of lunge feeding in humpback whales, the local humpbacks demonstrated this behaviour, specially for us, in the mouth of Bamfield inlet.

We are all very grateful to the time and care put into these presentations, and I know they have inspired some of our students to take on directed studies and consider the possibilities of graduate research.

See you there,
Brad

Randy Zohner

Friends and family of Randy Zohner gathered in the Rix Centre on Sunday to remember Randy in life. It was a grand blue sky day with the water coloured green from the summer plankton bloom.  Tish McPhee declared it to be “Sockeye water”.  We heard about rugby, clams,  helpfulness, smiles and laughs, dogs and puppies, and of course “Birthdays”.  Randy claimed many kisses on his birthday, which arrived several times a year.
We will miss him.  He was a Bamfielder through and through.

The summer is in full swing with more than 50 summer students on site and researchers coming and going.  This year promises to be very full with space at a premium.  Everyone has been very good about making room for all and sharing resources.  

We are very pleased to have Don Levitan back after a brief absence.  He has been doing research in the EcoPhys building and presented the first summer seminar on hybridization in Caribbean corals.   He began teaching the life-history course this week.  

Long time instructor Colin Bates and National Geographic photographer Jeff Morales offered a highly successful new course in scientific filmmaking this year.  Colin and Jeff were really pleased with the work done by the students and the students’ final projects were really impressive.  There wasn’t a dry eye among the long-time Bamfield residents when Paul Lemkuhl screened his interview with Louis Druehl.  We’ll add some links soon.  We are hoping to offer the course again next year and perhaps combine it with a science journalism course.

Our scientific diving course just started and it is nice to see Tom Bird again after most of a year in New Zealand.

Ian McGaw is back doing some research on kelp crabs before he heads off to Memorial University to take up a new position.  It’s very nice to have him back in Canada, but Nevada was closer.  I’m afraid we won’t be seeing him every year now.

BMSC has benefitted from NSERC Research Technologies and Instrument grants spearheaded by Greg Goss and Sally Leys.  A new atomic absorption spectrophotometer and another high end microscope will extend our capabilities nicely.

New regulations are in force for the use of skiffs.  They fall under Transport Canada regulations that require operators to have obtained a small vessel operator’s proficiency (SVOP) certificate.  So far the transition has been smooth.

Natural history miscellanea: An elephant seal captured a six-gill shark (ID tentative) in front of the north dock and ate it while many looked on.  Unfortunately none of the video camera equipped students in scientific filmmaking were on hand to record it.  

Hope to see you all soon.

Brad