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| Andrew Whiteley |
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No wonder biologist Andrew Whiteley is hooked on science. The IPY postdoctoral researcher’s first field experience was working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service along the King Salmon River in southwest Alaska, studying his favorite subject: fish.
“They flew us into a remote field camp, two of us sleeping in tents. They dropped our food and mail every two weeks, while we worked on a fish weir. We saw bears every day, it was incredible; a very defining moment for my life—my life in general and my scientific directions.”
Those directions have generally led north and west for this Massachusetts–born and –raised kid, though he did spend summers growing up in Maine, fishing all day, where he acquired, he says, “an irrational love of fish.” Whiteley started his college career in Chicago studying economics before biology won out. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in Montana, and eventually made his way back to Alaska, landing in Juneau.
At the University of Alaska Southeast, he’s found a perfect convergence of landscape, fish species and his areas of expertise in population genetics and evolutionary ecology. “Here in Southeast Alaska, many tidewater glaciers are receding, quite rapidly, and new rivers are forming. My work focuses on Glacier Bay, where there is a very detailed chronology of how ice has receded over the last 200 years. The whole bay that is now a national park formed since then. I’m studying how natural populations evolve and adapt to their landscapes, using a fish called a freshwater sculpin.”
These fish colonize quickly, are easy to capture and are small enough to bring into a lab for closer observation and experimental manipulations, making them ideal candidates for study, says Whiteley. “And they have really cool color patterns,” he adds.
As climate change continues to rearrange the landscape and glaciers continue to shrink, Whiteley notes, “This will have major effects on human populations, and on the lives of animals that depend on that landscape. So one major open question is, can animals adapt to new conditions quickly enough to avoid extinction?”
Whiteley says he couldn’t be in a better time or place for this research. “Here I have everything I need to do this research—glaciers are 20 minutes away by plane, and I can catch fish out my doorstep, literally. I look out the window and see a stream I’ll be studying this summer.”
“It’s scary for me to think 50 years into the future, because it’s difficult to predict how the planet will respond to all the pressures humans are placing on it. But at the same time it’s an exciting time to be a biologist. In biology the trend is to integrate knowledge from multiple subdisciplines, from genes to ecological communities. This increased knowledge will give us increased ability to predict how animals and plants will respond to increasing human pressures on the planet, including factors like global climate change. My research won’t directly get at ecosystem level effects, but it’s one piece of the huge puzzle that we need to start to understand quickly.”
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