Field biologist gives talk about career path and marine animal conservation

By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez Associate Editor A presentation by guest speaker Leah Crowe, field biologist, was held by the Honors Program in the Dwight Hall Auditorium on Nov. 10. Crowe is a “protected species person” at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF). In her presentation, she went over her own career path and what she’s now doing in her current position. Crowe said she is based in New Bedford and works for the state. She grew up in Ohio and didn’t see the ocean much until she was 18, she said. She went to Coastal Carolina University for a short while before transferring to Ohio University, where she got her bachelor’s, she said. While studying for her bachelor’s degree, she did an internship in California that involved setting up a recycling program with the United States Forest Service, she said. “That was my first little foray into government work,” Crowe said. After college, she eventually got an internship at the Whale Center of New England, she said. She worked there, in Florida, and in Alaska over the years until she ended up at the Northeast Fisheries of Science Center in Woods Hole on Cape Cod. “I was basically, for a couple years, just saying yes to a lot of different opportunities,” Crowe said. She said federal funding for right whale conservation and monitoring impacted her career path. In 2016, the federal government didn’t believe protection of right whales needed as much funding as they were getting, but according to the evidence she saw in the field, the whales still needed help, she said. The lack of funding for right whale monitoring led her to work part time for the sea turtle ecology program, which ended up being both an unexpected and important part of her career, she said. While in Woods Hole, she spent five years putting together a paper on basking sharks, she said. “We saw one of the largest aggregations of basking sharks that people have ever seen. We saw about 1,400 of them south of Martha’s Vineyard,” Crowe said. She credits this as part of the reason she didn’t get a master’s degree. She wanted to write this paper and didn’t have an advisor. She helped researchers at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary do tagging work with humpback whales, she said. The North Atlantic right whales were not in their usual locations, so they tried looking further than usual, such as in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada, while working with their Department of Fisheries and Oceans, she said. Crowe presented a chart showing the number of births of right whales and the number of deaths. From 2012 to 2014, estimated mortality was above the number of births, she said. But in 2017, an unusual mortality event occurred, she said. Unusual mortality is when a lot of animals die, she explained. “2017 and 2019 were catastrophic years for the population, and this isn’t just a population of right whales. North Atlantic right whales are a specific species,” Crowe said. After finding many dead whales, she decided to take a break and pursue her PhD at the University of Otago, in New Zealand. She has met people who thought it was strange that she didn’t get a master’s degree, but instead went from an undergraduate to a PhD. However, there were 15 years of on-and-off career work in between, she said. “This is a windy journey that maybe in academia you don’t hear about that often, but there are a lot of different ways that your career can take… This really worked well for me. I felt really well prepared for my PhD,” Crowe said. When she returned from New Zealand, a job at the DMF for the state came up, she said. She’s been working there for almost two years. She said Massachusetts is an important habitat for the North Atlantic right whales. About two-thirds of their population are seen off the coast of the state every winter through spring, especially in Cape Cod Bay. Some of the work she does at the DMF includes the implementation of a passive acoustic monitoring program, she said. Using sound to detect and monitor them works well, as whales make a lot of sound, she said. It’s different from active acoustic monitoring, which involves tagging the animals with a device that makes a distinct sound to monitor. She uses natural sounds to find the whales, she said. Visual detection, on the other hand, relies on being able to actually see the whales, so they have to be near the surface, she added. Federal restrictions on waters lifts April 30 annually, but the state keeps the waters closed in reaction to detected right whale presence, she said. Last year, she said, “We kept our state waters closed until May 6. Year before, we kept them closed until May 14.” There is some variability across the years of how long the right whales are present, as well as how many, she added. One particular aspect of her career works well with her personal life, and it’s learning how to drive a boat, she said. “A lot of my friends [and] my partner have boats. We play on water all the time. So that ended up being a really important part where my personal life and my professional life overlapped,” Crowe said.