In the footsteps of James Clark Ross: initiator of science in the Ross Sea, Antarctica

Abstract

Herein, I recount an incredible period of multidisciplinary, multifaceted, multinational, cutting-edge marine research that persisted in McMurdo Sound, Ross Sea, Antarctica, from the 1960s to about the early 2000s. It was inspiring and got me started. A cadre of researchers and their students and colleagues achieved what today is known as a “Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program,” but without the formal structure demanded for LTERs. In a way, it progressed from the scientific efforts that had been accomplished during the “Heroic age” of Antarctic exploration, in which McMurdo Sound played a huge part. That initial effort began with James Clark Ross, searching for the magnetic pole in the 1840s, through to E. Shakleton, searching for the geographic pole in the 1910s. Covered more recently by a succession of researchers was oceanography and glaciology, primary and secondary production, and food web dynamics at all levels from the benthos to midwater processes, including top predators—both bottom-up and top-down community processes. The effort persisted for decades somewhat by chance, or perhaps mutual admiration, with more than me being inspired. Sad to say, this provisional LTER is now gone, as funding and resources have been directed elsewhere. I am hugely thankful that I could take part in and be inspired by the earlier biophysical McMurdo Sound effort. This “LTER” that got me started led to my involvement in long-term, interdisciplinary research in the central California Current, centered around the Farallon Islands, and then to multidisciplinary investigations of the Southern Ocean marginal ice zone (AMERIEZ), and of the California Current food web through North Pacific GLOBEC. Current emphasis in marine bird and mammal research is returning to autecology studies of single species, especially in the use of micro-electronic devices applied to sea creatures. Thus, it is the study of marine species without the wet ocean involved. Lots learned, but without much in the way of ecological context, e.g. prey dynamics, competitors, and facilitators.

Many of us kid ourselves, thinking that by our own hard work, we achieved the scientific success that we attained. To some degree, perhaps true, but really, though, we are the beneficiaries, too, of circumstances that we had not anticipated, including the appearance of people who inspired us and helped us along. Perhaps our “brilliance” was merely recognizing the opportunity, accepting the help whether we viewed it that way at the time, and then going for it? I admit to that course of events in my science career. In my eventual career of research, seeking new information, I had the good fortune of having a Mom who was a city librarian and was always reading, or so it seemed. She had a poster prominently displayed in her work area of Darth Vader, of Star Wars fame, commanding: “Read, and The Force be With You!” My Dad, an engineer, savored the time he spent in the USA. Civilian Conservation Corps building trails, roads, and bridges in the backcountry of National Parks. I definitely had a good start!

Research beginning

As an undergraduate, I answered a notice on a Dickinson College bulletin board about a US National Science Foundation (NSF) Undergraduate Research Assistantship being offered by Bowdoin College, Maine, to help with field work on Kent Island, Bay of Fundy. Having grown up longing for and seeking wild places, I applied, because this was an opportunity to spend a summer on a somewhat remote island. There, Dr C.E. “Chuck” Huntington and associates were investigating the demography of seabird species, by engaging in long-term studies of marked individuals. As a “birdwatcher,” until then pretty much confined to the land, seabirds had for me a mystical quality, existing out there far away in the distant reaches of the ocean. Aye, those storm-petrels, in maritime mythology known to gather in sailing ship’s lee upon the winds rising to storm level, were figments of my imagination, but the Bowdoin studies included storm-petrels! So, I applied, was accepted, and by the end of that summer I was no longer a “pre-medical” student but became focused on what other biology-related opportunities similar to my summer experience might be available.

Chuck Huntington knew Dr W.J.L. “Bill” Sladen, MD, PhD, MBE, who as medical officer in the Falkland Island Dependency Survey (now British Antarctic Survey) had introduced modern science to the study of penguins, following the example of L.E. Richdale (1957). In 1948 at Hope Bay, Antarctic Peninsula, marooned after their station burned down just after departure of their supply ship, the party turned to dining on seals and penguins. Bill made sure that maximum physiological and morphological information was recorded from each penguin taken, and eventually during other deployments introduced a banding program that would allow penguin ages, individual recognition, and thus maturity stages, to be determined thus confirming his autopsy results. “Penguin science” had begun in the Antarctic. He had been recruited to be part of the Department of Pathobiology at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). So, it was to JHU that I applied for graduate school, where I'd be under the direction of Bill Sladen, with the added prospect of venturing to the most wild of places: Antarctica.

Dr Sladen was leading an effort, then in its 10th year, to study the demography of Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) and South Polar skuas (Stercorarius maccormicki) at Cape Crozier, Ross Island, an island named after the European who first reported its existence, Sir James Clark Ross. With Robert LeResche, who was to become Head of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and Robert Wood, continuing as an assistant to Dr Sladen, we were the students assigned to reap the rewards of what a 10-year data set could offer, a long-term effort at the time. The “long-term” aspect of the project, added to that at Kent Island, made a lasting impression on me, to say the least. We did our part in an effort coming curiously from the JHU School of Hygiene & Public Health (penguin connection to medicine?), within the Department of Pathobiology—in the company of persons investigating the science of ethology (animal behavior), which was a prominent research endeavor at the time. Efforts in the lab were mostly directed at animals then used in laboratories, captive ones but in the wilds as well (monkeys, rats, canines, etc., think of the conditioning studies done by B.F. Skinner).

Antarctic endeavors

It was my time at McMurdo Station, stop-off to get to/from Cape Crozier, beginning at the end of the 1960s, that really set my course because there I found myself embedded within an amazing group of researchers who had found or were searching for their place in science, but doing so in a complementary way. In retrospect, becoming obvious at least to me (but also Paul Dayton 2020), was the genius of NSF Polar Biology Program Manager, Dr George Llano (who deemed himself a mere “civil servant”), by his assembly of a cadre of researchers, which then led to unintended consequences—in effect, development of an incredible, long-term, multi-faceted ecological investigation of the biophysics of McMurdo Sound/Ross Island, Antarctica (see below). In today’s much stronger, top-down bureaucracy, this would not have happened. And this was high-level marine research comparable to anywhere else on the planet, conducted by tracked vehicles and skidoos, and human divers, generally through holes drilled through the extensive, McMurdo Sound fast ice that was present for much of the year (Kim et al. 2018)!! Depths beneath the ice reached 1000 m—it was real ocean, the Sound being ∼55 km wide and long, but no research vessel was needed! The fast ice, thick enough upon which to land large cargo aircraft, lies between Ross Island, mainland Victoria Land, and the McMurdo Ice Shelf. These were the shores on which several heroic explorers (Scott, Shakleton, Hillary, etc.) had based their expeditions, and conducted the first science in Antarctica. Well, the more recent group effort was also carrying on from James Clark Ross himself more than 100 years earlier. Later heroic expeditions, those of the early 1900s, led to many dozens of species and their habitats first being described from specimens collected by these heroic expeditions. Much of that is summarized in the classic The Fauna of the Ross Sea, a series of monographs appearing from the 1950s through the 1990s, published by the NZ Oceanographic Institute. Most recently it had become marine ecology research without a ship (though their availability from time to time did help)! The effort in McMurdo Sound became a de facto Long-Term Ecological Research site (nowadays, termed LTER), without any formal structure. The LTER program of NSF ties together multi-disciplinary, multi-institution research at an array of habitats, funding them for decades, mostly terrestrial but a few with a marine connection.

I cannot say enough about the inspiration received from mixing with the assemblage of incredible researchers, a relatively small community living together, in summer, essentially in what otherwise would be comparable to a “mining town,” if it was on some other continent. What was mined was science-based facts, from more than just an assemblage of individual NSF grants being completed at the same time. Lots of synergy became involved. While I was sold on long-term research, especially when dealing with long-lived animals, this experience sold me on the need for synergistic, multidisciplinary efforts if we are to understand how marine systems work.

McMurdo has been, since the 1950s, the logistics hub of the US Antarctic Program, as is next door Scott Base, hub for the NZ Antarctic Programme. From McMurdo, mostly physical-science researchers spread out to the South Pole and multiple sites in West Antarctica, conducting mostly glaciology, obtaining ice cores, and the like. However, an assembly of marine biologists was created and managed to persist, thanks in part to George Llano and the NSF Biology Program Managers who immediately followed. The group effort included—this could not have been by happenchance, could it, but it seems by NSF wanting an array of disciplines represented? — sea ice and current dynamics, water column production, sea ice microbial production and communities, benthic community structure and trends, fish community structure, fish physiology, seal and penguin ecology and population dynamics, seal reproductive physiology, seal and penguin diving physiology, and fish, penguin, and seal food web interactions (Table 1).

Meanwhile, relevant biological oceanographic investigations were underway in the southern Ross Sea, including interest by NASA in its sea ice dynamics (“sea truthing” of satellite imagery became possible; e.g. J. Comiso, C. Parkinson, R. Kwok). It is truly amazing how it all came together, including the cross-discipline germinations! Findings from a lot of this effort are summarized in Ainley (2002, 2004), DiTullio and Dunbar (2003), Smith et al. (2006, 2012, 2014), Smith and Barber (2007), Ainley et al. (2006, 2010), and Ballard et al. (2010). The Ross Sea, centered on McMurdo Sound and its adjacent southwest portion, has become the best-known stretch of the Southern Ocean, in terms of its marine biology, biological oceanography, and even its marine geology and glaciology.

Moreover, I had success in collaborating with physical oceanographers, especially S. Jacobs, of whom I admire greatly, to piggy-back on cruises in order to conduct at-sea surveys of birds and mammals thus to complement the colony-based work (Ainley and Jacobs 1981, Ainley et al. 1984). Also, I did eventually work with the various McMurdo Sound investigators in processing some of their long-term data sets, though with a more ecological orientation (e.g. Ainley et al. 2005, 2013, 2024a, b). The McMurdo Sound “LTER” thus continued to bear fruit with these collaborations.

My time at Cape Crozier and McMurdo Sound instilled in me the critical importance of latent heat polynyas, and their marginal ice zones (MIZs), to the biota of the high latitude Southern Ocean (see, e.g. Smith and Barber 2007, Arrigo et al. 2015, Santora et al. 2020). Cape Crozier is windy and thus is on the edge of the Ross Sea Polynya, the largest such feature in the Antarctic. Winds of 140 kts (72 m/s) are not unusual there. On more than one occasion I had to crawl from tent to hut. Once, in my zeal as a graduate student, I ventured down to “my” penguins during a lull in the storm, a kilometer down a steep slope. The wind and a white-out returned, but knowing the shape of penguin subcolonies, I crawled a hundred meters or so to a phone-booth-sized observation blind, where I spent the next two “days.” When the white-out disappeared, but not the wind, I then crawled back up the slope, with Bob Wood waiting for me at the top, over-joyed that I'd not disappeared.

This personal and intellectual relationship to wind, polynyas and MIZs, led to my involvement in—participating and helping to organize—what remains the only multi-disciplinary investigation of the Antarctic MIZ, thought to be key to Southern Ocean ecosystem dynamics (i.e. “the whaling grounds” Hardy 1967, TØnnessen and Johnsen 1982, more recently, e.g. Brierley et al. 2002), and proved by us to be so (e.g. Ainley et al. 1986, 1991, Rau et al. 1992, Hopkins et al. 1993, Ribic et al. 2011). The project was named AMERIEZ (Antarctic Marine Ecosystem Research in the Ice Edge Zone) and was conducted by researchers on two vessels, plying in synchrony the waters of the Scotia Sea-Weddell Sea Confluence during three seasons (summer, autumn, and winter) during 1983–1988. One vessel was an icebreaker, which conducted stations and transects within the sea ice pack, while the other vessel, not ice strengthened, met those transects in adjacent ice-free waters, conducting stations and transects there. The findings were especially pertinent to the Ross Sea, which contains the largest latent heat polynya in the Southern Ocean, with accompanying MIZ. Like the de facto McMurdo Sound “LTER,” the representation of complementary disciplines and the synergy among participants was incredible (Table 2). This proved to be another effort on the part of NSF Office of Polar Programs that no longer appears to be possible—a multiyear, multidisciplinary, this one even multi-ship biophysical ocean investigation. A group of us actually did subsequently attempt, several times, to find NSF interest to conduct a similar effort in the Ross Sea. However, NSFs resources had been ebbing, including the opportunity for ship-based ocean research. The Palmer Station LTER/S0-GLOBEC comes closest, although the multidisciplinary cruise in support of APIS (Antarctic Pack Ice Seal) project was a respectable and a valuable ‘last gasp,’ with many of the same participants as in AMERIEZ (Table 2) (Ackley et al., 2003).

Given the supposed importance to Southern Ocean ecology of MIZs, it is strange that the AMERIEZ effort has not been repeated in its intensity by other national groups. Leastwise, the central importance of this habitat is what the whaling showed and all the subsequent, modern tracking of birds and mammals has shown. Well, for sure such an effort requires significant resources (e.g. two ships working in tandem or at least an ice-breaker), but was somewhat repeated once by the Australian BROKE expedition, in which a vessel plied East Antarctic waters adjacent to the sea ice in summer 1996; and by the Southern Ocean GLOBEC cruises along the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula in winter 2001. Research vessels since then have become increasingly too expensive to operate, and opportunities for their use have dwindled, which may explain why further MIZ work has not happened. Research ships are being replaced by autonomous vehicles, which like the animal-borne biologgers do reveal new information but fail to provide ecological context to the ocean measurements made. The presence of human researchers, with eyes wide open, is needed for that.

The research attention to McMurdo Sound and vicinity has been deserving, at least as indicated by the Ross Sea’s many abundant “indicator species,” characteristic of a robust food web and one little affected by the bioresource extractions that have seriously affected food webs elsewhere. The Ross Sea is “home waters” of most of the world’s Type C killer whales (Orcinus orca; fish eaters), a significant portion of Antarctic minke whales (Balaenoptera bonaerensis), 70% of South Polar skuas, 25% of the world population of Emperor penguins, 33% of Adélie penguins, 40% of Antarctic petrels (Thalassoica antarctica), and 45% of Weddell seals (summarized in Smith et al. 2014). The abundance of these creatures and all the knowledge obtained about them and the Ross Sea ecosystem, courtesy to a great extent of the McMurdo Sound vicinity effort, became, in part, the context behind the designation for science, under the Antarctic Treaty, of no-take seal areas, several Antarctic Specially Protected Areas and, eventually, the Ross Sea Region Marine Protected Area. The added impetus for working to enact the latter was a response to a “scientific” take of minke whales that arose in the mid-1990s, the only baleen whale species left in any number by the 1970s (though the great whales were never denizens of Ross Sea Shelf Water), and initiation of an industrial fishery for Antarctic toothfish, “shark of the Antarctic,” a long-lived, slow to mature (thus easily over-fished) species for no reason except profit, given that their price, even that at the dock, is only affordable by oligarchs. Why?

Losing the Ross Sea and McMurdo Sound “laboratory,” the last relatively unaltered (by direct human activity) stretch of ocean on the planet was too much for me and others to accept (see Ainley 2002, 2004, and other summaries mentioned above). Yes, the toothfish vessels even showed up at the northern edge of the Sound. Fortunately, through The Last Ocean Trust that three other persons and I founded (P. Young, J. Weller, and P. Wilson), we succeeded in gaining the support of the managers and politicians, in part through engaging the public through books, films, and presentations. The Last Ocean, a coffee-table, photographic book by John Weller, was given to all commissioners of CCAMLR (Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources), and The Last Ocean, full-length, documentary film by Peter Young, was shown around the world at ∼45 film festivals, winning prestigious awards at half of them—e.g. a standing ovation following presentation at the Explorer’s Club—as well as in a special showing at the National Geographic Society to the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, ambassadors, and other dignitaries, who became inspired to put the formal proposal before CCAMLR. Another standing ovation was garnered at a showing at the Royal Society in London, a showing hosted by JC Ross’ great-great grandson, John Ross. And, finally, we had developed a petition, Friends of the Ross Sea Ecosystem (FORCE), signed by more than 290 researchers and conservationists and presented to CCAMLR.

Complementary efforts oceans apart

The excitement and ecological viewpoints of the McMurdo Sound researchers rubbed off on me. Had I not been exposed to them, daily, whenever I was in McMurdo, I wonder what path I would have pursued? Clearly, I had become “sold” on multidisciplinary marine research, which led to my participation in other such efforts. My first “job” as a new PhD, mostly volunteering at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO, now Point Blue Conservation Science) on the California coast, I had invented myself. It was to initiate and oversee what has become a long-term study of the community of seabirds (12 species) and pinnipeds (5 species) on the Farallon Islands (off San Francisco). The Farallones host the largest seabird colony in North America, south of Alaska. Inspirational was the entire-colony research of Belopolskii (1957) and Uspenski (1958), which I had been exposed to at Kent Island. However, to understand the population dynamics of a colonial seabird community also requires, in my mind, information on the processes of the surrounding ocean. Sound familiar? These birds, after all, are sea creatures! Therefore, early on, I established collaboration with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), Southwest Fisheries Science Center, who were beginning a program to monitor certain species of fished fish and krill. Those fished species were also the prey (rockfish Sebastes) and competitors (salmon Oncorhynchus) of the Farallon birds. What their monitoring detected was immensely important to understand what was going on with the seabirds.

Intriguing was how these colonial avian species affected one another, through competition for nesting space and food, both intra- and interspecific competition. It is not possible to understand one in a vacuum, in the absence of understanding the others. One result, other than numerous journal publications, was a book (Ainley and Boekelheide 1990) and a conference (Ainley et al. 2015, and its spin-off publications). Indeed, our effort was and has remained somewhat rare in the marine bird research world: seabird natural history in the context of the wet ocean—co-occurring species and a quantified marine preyscape. The Farallon and surrounding preyscape investigations remain ongoing, though I am no longer part. The effort had led to my participation in another multidisciplinary effort, the Northeast Pacific GLOBEC (Batchelder et al. 2002), a multiyear, multi-vessel biophysical investigation of the northern California Current food web, funded by NSF and NOAA. That too was an effort that involved both NMFS and non-governmental researchers. In the end, the collaboration with fisheries scientists and managers led to the California Current becoming the “poster child” of ecosystem-based fishery management (Ainley 2019). The Pacific Fisheries Management Council had gotten the message.

This may seem strange, but to learn more about the South Polar Ocean and its seabird communities, along with my colleague, Larry Spear, we initiated a project in waters of the eastern equatorial Pacific. The contrast in species’ natural history patterns at sea, in a food-rich versus a patchy ocean, would prove a revealing comparison. Facilitated by a series of NSF grants from the Division of Biological Oceanography, we launched into an investigation of seabird communities and their ecological structure, along with their food web, along the Equator. To do this, we piggy-backing on the cruises of EPOCS (Equatorial Pacific Ocean Climate Study) of the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab (NOAA). The latter had emplaced a network of meteorological-oceanographic buoys along the Equator thus learning the secrets of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle, eventually to predict when and how strong El Niño would occur—indispensable information for the world’s farmers and others. Those ships, servicing the buoys every six months, as well as obtaining sea-truth data, served us well. Somewhat ironically, ENSO subsequently was found to affect the South Polar ocean as well, especially its sea ice. We had a head start!

The contrast between food web dynamics in the polar and equatorial oceans proved to be stark. In the polar ocean, the upper food web is structured by species out-competing one another for prey. In some cases, dynamics exhibit “intraguild predation”—predators at times becoming their competitors’ prey—another McMurdo Sound based research result (Ainley et al. 2021); or predators taking enough of what is available that competitors are negatively affected, e.g. whales vs. penguins (Ballance et al. 2006). In the topical ocean, the limited prey patches bring about marked ecological segregation among species, for instance among the various avian flocks foraging in the company of cetaceans and/or tuna; even the species of tuna affects what prey are taken (Spear et al. 2007). Wow, this stuff would never have been revealed by bio-logging of individual species! And neither would diving off the inflatable boat, in a sense a fish-aggregating device, to catch by hand a juvenile tuna beneath, which Larry Spear managed to do!

Now what?

Through these various avenues of research, I began to lean heavily toward concentrating on what the “top down” influences were in community structure and processing. Inspirational was the work of Paul Dayton (2020), as well as the likes of Prugh et al. (2009) and Estes et al. (2011).

These days, this perspective has become lost, as I have alluded to, as most seabird and marine mammal researchers stay on land, or make short visits to the ocean, where they apply satellite trackers and diving loggers on any species that will take them. The biologgers do reveal a lot, providing information we would not have learned, but they provide no ecological context, i.e. no information on the other creatures with whom they compete or who facilitate them in obtaining food, nor proximity to creatures who might want to prey on them, nor what these mesopredators are targeting in the way of prey. The contrast between south polar and equatorial upper food webs illustrates this (see above). Back when I started, the avian research emphasis was on long-term, single-species [see summaries by Lack (1954, 1966), which for sure were inspirational]. However, now with all the biologging, it is been back to “autecology” rather than the community ecology, once so rampant in the field of ecology in general. There is so much more in why creatures do what they do at sea than just what their excursions and diving capabilities can reveal [as recently summarized for penguins (Ainley and Wilson 2023), and earlier to some degree for seals (Kooyman 1981, and recently Goetz 2015)]. The constant, repeated reference in modern marine bird and mammal ecology to sea ice patterns, chlorophyll prevalence, sea surface temperature, or the like, i.e. habitat features available on websites thanks to satellites, is getting “old.”

Conclusions/summary

During the last 10 years or so, McMurdo Station has become almost purely a logistical hub supporting, not just the South Pole Station (which it has done since the 1950s) but also the US Antarctic Program priority has moved to figure out what is to become of the Thwaits/Pine Island glaciers—the so-called “Doomsday Glaciers” that drain the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), just to the east of McMurdo and Ross Island, at the edge of McMurdo logistic capabilities (see Grunes 2023). In this age of rapid climate change, that shift in priority is understandable—the rise in water levels of the world’s populated coastal area, certainly must/should be frightening at least to a few people, and certainly those involved in the direction of US science—well, yes, some politicians, including the US Polar Research Board and the US Congress that supplies the funding. Losing McMurdo Sound ecological research is somewhat trivial to them, but with logistics and resources directed elsewhere, such reduced action is consistent with the US Antarctic Program, which no longer is capable of doing much multidisciplinary, biophysical marine research in the Ross Sea. No longer do USCG icebreakers conduct any science, which they once did extensively (e.g. Anderson 1999), and US Antarctic research vessels have become way over-booked. The USAP research icebreaker, the Nathaniel B Palmer, is required for effective work in the Ross Sea because there is so much sea ice, but now bides its limited time, divided among several branches of science, to cover a third of the Southern Ocean—that stretch lying along the coast of the WAIS between the Ross Sea and the Antarctic Peninsula.

Given several decades of intensive, multidisciplinary biophysical work in McMurdo Sound and the adjacent southern Ross Sea, restarting the effort, even if just to evaluate, in a concerted and coordinated program, the efficacy of the Ross Sea Region MPA, would well serve society (e.g. Brooks and Ainley 2022, Brooks et al. 2024). It was the decades of intensive, multifaceted research in McMurdo Sound and vicinity that formed the basis and eventually led to designation of the RSRMPA. But now we just have biologging?

Acknowledgments

Indeed, sad to report that the days of cutting edge, collaborative, ecological research in the McMurdo Sound “LTER” are over, a true scientific tragedy. Gone is the water column, benthic and fish work, leaving only demographic and related studies of seals and penguins with little ecological context, i.e. these becoming autecology studies. The latter are the Antarctic studies in which I've been involved over the past ∼27 years with collaborators, especially G. Ballard, K. Dugger, A. Lescroel, V. Morandini but also others (D. Anderson, L. Ballance, K. Barton, M. Beigel, C. Brooks, G. Ford, D. Jongsomjit, M. LaRue, P. Lyver, M. Massaro, J. Pennycook, N. Polish, V. Ruoppolo, B. Saenz, J. Santora, W. Smith, A. Schmidt, A. Varsani, P. Wilson, and R. Wilson). Yes, it required all these persons to keep it going, simultaneously comparing population dynamics and ecology of four penguin colonies within one meta-population (an ornithological first)—along with the seal group (led now/recently by J. Rotella and J. Burns), plus the NSF Program Managers and USAP logistics—thanking you all for the part I have been allowed to play. In the mid-1980s, I suffered a concussion and brain injury that required more than a year of therapy in order to re-establish my verbal acuity—it was a year of taking weekly spelling tests, as I had done in grade school! With each test, synapses were reconnected. However, not being re-established was my mathematical capabilities, which before the accident (my head bashed in during a soccer match), I was proficient enough. Many of these collaborators were my “crutch,” supplying the statistical aspects required of presenting research results these days, in particular L. Spear, C. Ribic, G. Ballard, K. Dugger, A. Lescroel, V. Morandini, and a few others. I also have to thank my employers, first PRBO and then H.T. Harvey and Associates, for bearing with me during this episode. Richard Mewalt, famed ornithologist and co-founder of both PRBO and H.T. Harvey, visited me multiple times during my recovery; and Ron Duke and Scott Terrill supported me through the subsequent, long recovery as well. What happens next is now a matter of what the limits may be among research resources, and the vision of the research community. For me it is been an incredible journey. There is a mountain in Antarctica named after me (Ainley Peak), as is a seabird species (Ainley’s Storm-Petrel, Hydrobates cheimomnestes). And, there is the Ross Sea Region MPA, imperfect that it may be but hard won on the basis of science. In 2015, I was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Pacific Seabird Group (to Larry Spear in 2016), and the 2022 Ralph W. Schrieber Conservation Award by the American Ornithological Societies. The recognition is humbling, though it also seems that it is all just a start. Last but not least, thanks to Howard Browman for the several reads of this paper, leading me onward; to Paul Dayton for putting me up to writing this; and to reviewers who helped me to hone the presentation.

Funding

I prepared this article using funding from NSF OPP grant 2040199.

Notes

Food for Thought articles are essays in which the author provides their perspective on a research area, topic, or issue. They are intended to provide contributors with a forum through which to air their own views and experiences, with few of the constraints that govern standard research articles. This Food for Thought article is one in a series solicited from leading figures in the fisheries and aquatic sciences community. The objective is to offer lessons and insights from their careers in an accessible and pedagogical form from which the community, and particularly early career scientists, will benefit. The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and Oxford University Press are pleased to be able to waive the article processing charge for these Food for Thought articles.

References