Today in Water Jobs we
discuss fishing and writing with Dr. James Garvey, who is the director of the Center for Fisheries, Aquaculture,
and Aquatic Sciences, as well as a professor of zoology, at Southern
Illinois University Carbondale. Dr. Garvey is a graduate of Miami University
(Ohio) and completed his MS and PhD at Ohio State University. His interest in
fish was inspired by “spending summer vacations on a houseboat in Kentucky,
sweating, swimming, and fishing” where he said always felt “more comfortable on
a boat or scurrying around underwater than hanging out on land.”
You’re the first professor we’ve featured on Water Jobs. Would you
please tell us what being a professor looks like in the day-to-day?
What I like most about being a professor is that every day
is different. I get to hang out with the
brightest people and learn new things all the time. So, it is a bit tough to map out a typical
day.
My hypothetical day starts with me coming into the office
and feeding the fish, anemones, and corals in our three aquaria. While doing that, a couple of my graduate
students pop in and ask for advice about how to ship off some of our fish
specimens from our ichthyology collection to a researcher at another
university. After chatting with them
about that task and telling them to finish their proposals, I work on a
textbook I am writing and then, when I’m finally getting somewhere with the
text, I have to run off to teach my class.
I miss lunch as usual, finding myself in a meeting talking about
university politics with colleagues. In
the afternoon, I run over to our lab and hitch a ride with one of our research
crews going into the field to collect water samples from a local lake. When I get home, I eat dinner with the
family, and then settle into the evening by reviewing a research proposal,
while watching some episode of Dr. Who.
I might remember to take a shower and wash off the fish smell, if my
family is lucky.
We’ve observed that most professors work a lot more than 40 hours a
week. How much time do you spend on your work, and how do you divide it into
teaching, research, and service?
Being a professor is an honor and a gift. Most of us consider it a lifestyle rather
than a profession. For me, a trip with
the family to the beach is more than sunscreen and straw hats. It’s an opportunity to contemplate the
complex biological processes occurring in the ocean. I can’t turn it off!
So, I guess I work all day, every day, because that’s what I
was made do. The distinctions among
teaching, research, and service are fuzzier than many folks outside of
universities might realize. Teaching is
going on all the time. I may spend only
a few hours a week in the lecture hall, but I interact with students at all
levels throughout each day, whether to talk about class stuff, research
progress, or career goals. My days of
collecting my own research data are largely over, although this is by choice -
many faculty still do lab and field work.
My students conduct most of the research, which I help guide through
conversations and the occasional field trip.
The students cringe when I go into the field with them, because I’m a
disaster (very accident prone).
Something expensive on the boat is going to get broken if Garvey’s in
the field. Service is a weird category
for faculty. Technically, none of us
faculty get hired to “serve” the university or our profession, but heck, yeah
we do a lot of it. An example of service
is sitting on a committee to decide how much service faculty should be doing –
really. I try to avoid doing service,
but we senior faculty seem to end up doing more of this to spare the
newbies. All I can say to that is
“yawn”.
What is your favorite aspect of your job, and does it correspond with
any good stories you’re willing to share?
Traveling to meet with colleagues and talk about research is
probably my favorite job-related activity.
I had the opportunity to visit China a couple of years ago, which was
illuminating in a variety of ways. I
work with Asian carp, an invader here in the US, but a native delicacy in
China. My first night was in
Shanghai. After getting off the plane, I
had a total of an hour to relax before my first dinner meeting. In a blink, the
phone in my room rang and I realized I had passed out. Jet-lagged and exhausted, I shuffled down to
the private room where a lavish feast was laid out before my companions and
me. The very first course was fish-head
soup made from a bighead carp – one of the invaders here in the US. My study organism was floating in broth in
its home country, staring me down. And
it was absolutely delicious.
When did you decide you wanted to go to graduate school?
When I was in fifth grade, I wanted to be an
astronomer. That was Carl Sagan’s
fault. Does that count?
Actually, I had no clue about graduate school until I was a
junior in college. I had an opportunity
to conduct individual research in a lab and met some great graduate students
and post docs. I decided that I liked
what they were doing – conducting research, writing, and talking science. The alternative – a real job – was not
looking as desirable. I worked in a
lumberyard during college and knew what real labor was like. Exercising my mind was more of my style.
Would you explain your research to us as you would to say, your
dentist?
If you were a dentist, I’d tell you that the freshwater of
the world is like a giant tooth with a bad cavity. I’m trying to save the tooth before it has to
be extracted. And for me, unlike my
dentist friend, there are no dentures to fill the gap.
After we’ve had a good laugh and I’ve gotten my dose of
painkiller, I’d mumble that I work in water with fishes and invertebrates,
focusing on issues associated with their conservation. There are lots of threats, with novel species
from other continents called invasive organisms being a primary problem. I try to help fish managers devise ways to control
these invasive species, like Asian carp, before they cause native species to go
extinct. One of our best options for
control of carp may be harvest. But
before we, as a society, spend a lot of money trying to fish them out or to
encourage market development, we need to understand how the carp populations
will respond. I help collect data to
predict what these fish will do and whether fishing will be effective.
Since you work with endangered species, do you ever get frustrated by
your findings or discouraged about the future of the animals you study? Have
you found effective ways to address some of the situations you observe?
I do research on the federally endangered pallid
sturgeon. The most frustrating problems
my colleagues and I face with this species include the lack of knowledge the US
public has (1) about pallid sturgeon and large river organisms generally, (2)
the multiple threats assaulting our precious rivers, and (3) the Endangered
Species Act (ESA) as a living, very active piece of legislation. In a large portion of its range, the pallid
sturgeon will never recover by itself unless the US makes a very difficult
decision – remove the massive dams on the Missouri River in the north-central
portion of the country. As you probably
know, this region has experienced an extreme, multi-year drought, which may be
even worse this summer. Those dams
provide water for irrigation and drinking.
How can you ask the residents of those states to give up water for an
endangered species?
Seriously, if taken literally, the ESA demands that the
federal government do whatever it can to keep the species from blinking out,
even if it means removing the dams and letting those states dry up. How can you look someone in the eye and ask
them to give up their homes and jobs for that?
Being a pragmatic soul, I seek compromise as a solution. The federal government has done this with the
pallid sturgeon. In the dammed portion
of the Missouri River, pallid sturgeon cannot reproduce, but the adults survive
and grow. So, the solution has been to
create a large hatchery system that takes adults from the wild, spawns them in
the hatchery, and rears the young sturgeon in captivity. When the pallid sturgeon offspring are old
enough, they are released back into the wild and the population is artificially
supported, with human help. This is a
classic band-aid tactic for meeting the demands of the ESA.
This approach is very costly for society and seems
ridiculous. But it works. I’ve found that most environmental solutions
require similar flexibility and a sense of humor. Digging your heels in and resisting any
progress typically bodes poorly for the species of concern and produces a lot
of unnecessary heartburn for the resource managers.
We really enjoy your blogging at Bad Anemone Press. What got you
interested in blogging and what inspires your posts?
I’m glad you enjoy reading my random thoughts about aquatic
ecology, conservation, and life in academia. I love to write - like some people
enjoy painting, playing music, participating in sports, or cooking. I’ve kept a journal forever and have been
publishing technical articles since I started graduate school. Blogging is a little way for me to share my
personal perspective and experience before my mind starts to go. It is far more relaxing than writing
manuscripts for journals or yelling at my students.
Just about anything I encounter inspires me to write. Ecology and evolution are intertwined with
everything around us. Our biology shapes
our lives in so many ways - from the chairs we sit on to the media we consume.
If you squint hard enough, you can see the connections and they are
fascinating. Metaphors and analogies are
beautiful and serve as great teaching tools for scientists.
We’ve also heard that you’ve written some novels. Would you tell us
about that, please?
I have this weird affection for science fiction and
ecology. This may seem like combining
cotton candy with fish sauce, but somehow I’m determined to make them work
together. Science fiction allows us to
see beyond the limited knowledge available to us right now. I like to use it to explore where ecology as
a science may take us in the future. The two books I’ve written were really
meant for my students to reach beyond the confines of the facts I present in my
lectures and think outside our biosphere.
There are hints of real science sprinkled about in my prose that link
directly back to what I teach. The fun
is sorting out the science from the fiction.
