A Summer With DDCSP and The Whale Museum
- afsatcornell
- Aug 24, 2022
- 2 min read
Hello AFS Folks! My name is Henry and I’m the aquarium coordinator for AFS. I wanted to share a little about my summer, the program I was involved in, and how it shaped my interests and career goals.
I interned with the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program (DDCSP), which spans for 2 summers. The first summer is an orientation to Washington state full of camping, meeting professionals in their field, community building, and learning about what it means to work in conservation. I can confidently say that my cohort members and I will be lifelong friends given our commitment to conservation and mutual experiences.
The second summer I was matched with an internship at the Whale Museum on San Juan Island in Washington, which is a nonprofit organization working in the conservation, research, and education of marine mammals. My work was with the sightings network, inputting citizen sightings reports into their 46 year old database. I learned some basic data organization and analysis but also about the geography of the Salish Sea and patterns in marine mammal behavior. I also helped with many stranding operations, mainly with seal pups. We would take health assessments and tag them, but remain hands off unless they experienced a negative human interaction. Their population is theorized to be at carrying capacity so there wasn’t a great conservation effort behind these operations. I helped do this for a juvenile elephant seal as well and struggled to keep it from throwing us all off. I got to go out and monitor boaters that would travel near orcas and experienced them quite close up. We got to take a boaters education course and practice driving to different islands while on strandings calls. I also ran an experiment comparing the knowledge of visitors vs residents and found that both groups held common misconceptions in marine mammal protocols and safety procedures.
At the conclusion of this summer, I find myself more oriented to home in NYC than ever before. Although San Juan Island was beautiful, I more so enjoy working in an urban environment and uplifting the resilient human and nonhuman organisms within it. Although orcas are absolutely incredible, I find myself drawn to work involving organisms that are relied upon by others, like seagrass or oysters. Although nonprofit work is underfunded and overworked, it attracts the most spectacular people who do the most amazing work.
Feel free to reach out about anything (hh544), especially regarding DDCSP, which I highly recommend to those in any field of conservation.
Whale I see you at the next AFS event?
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