Maybe it’s good to not have too much focus

Abstract

I had no idea what I was getting into when I decided to go into marine biology as a graduate student. It has ended up being a wonderful career, with opportunities to work with wonderful people around the world, and to work with many wonderful students at a variety of grade levels. It has also opened up opportunities in completely unexpected directions and allowed me to explore a good variety of research questions, explore a variety of teaching methods at a variety of grade levels, write a few books, and even develop some games for middle-school students. Luck has certainly played a role in some of this, but my main advice is to always keep an eye open for opportunities of interest, within and outside of your normal field…and seize them if possible!

An uncertain start

As a high school student, I had no idea at all about what I would do as an adult. I was a first-generation college student. When I graduated as an undergraduate from Duke University, I had never done any research, perhaps because I graduated in only 3 years instead of the usual 4 years. I had interests in many areas (including French, Russian, and—much to my surprise—religion), and took more than the usual number of courses each semester. In my first year or two at Duke, I really had no idea what I was going to major in. In my Ecology course, and especially in my Animal Diversity course, I sometimes asked a question that the instructor had no answer to, which gave me the idea that perhaps I should go into research; I seemed to have some questions that might have interesting answers! In particular, I had gotten interested in larval biology and metamorphosis while taking the Animal Diversity course. But I had also thought about going into medicine, something my parents had assumed I would pursue; it was indeed a possibility, but I knew that sooner or later I would probably make a mistake as a doctor (e.g. perhaps I would remove the wrong piece of anatomy from a patient during surgery), and I wasn’t sure I could live with that; I feel badly enough if I accidentally hurt any of my snails! As it turned out, the graduate school admissions exam (the GRE) and the medical school admissions exam (the MCAT) were both scheduled to be given on the same day that year…so I flipped a coin and it came up heads: take the GRE. With the flip of a coin, medical school was out.

I believe I only applied to two graduate programmes: one at Cornell University and one that had been recently created at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). I applied to the programme at WHOI because I had just read a research paper written by a researcher there about the long-distance larval dispersal of tropical gastropod larvae across the Atlantic Ocean, and thought that perhaps I’d have a chance to chat with him sometime after I arrived. I also got into the graduate programme at Cornell University, and if I had gone there I would have worked on the development and metamorphosis of frog tadpole larvae. I ended up going to the graduate programme at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod; I loved the scenic surroundings, and the fact that I wouldn’t have to be a teaching assistant since there were no undergraduate students there. I could spend all of my time learning about and doing research.

Some interesting consequences of not getting any advice or positive feedback as a graduate student

I was appointed as a summer fellow to the lab run by the researcher that I had been interested in talking with about his larval work. I found out later that he had no interest in taking on graduate students; he thought I was only going to be in his lab for the summer. He showed me where I could easily collect some mudsnails—a species named Nassarius obsoletus at the time and now known as Ilyanassa obsoleta—at low tide, and also showed me the clusters of egg capsules that they had deposited on some macroalgae at that field site. Then he said that if he didn’t hear from me about what I was doing that summer he would assume that all was well. This actually worked out pretty nicely for me over the next several years, since I was free to choose my own research projects and was completely responsible for designing my own experiments. I learned a lot in the process.

I was fascinated by the tiny (∼1 mm tall) but beautifully sculpted egg capsules produced by the mudsnails that I started working with. The capsules had an opaque cork at the top, and I wondered how the encapsulated larvae managed to remove the cork to exit the capsule at hatching. I decided to investigate this and related issues and mentioned this to my sponsor. He told me that he had tried those studies a long time ago, and that the experiments wouldn’t work. I decided to try some experiments anyway, and came up with some simple, low-tech ways of doing the study, which involved choosing egg capsules containing early embryonic stages and slicing those capsules in half parallel to the long axis; one half of each egg capsule—including half of the capsule plug at the top—was then placed into a tiny glass container that I constructed along with some advanced larvae, while the other half of the same capsule went into another tiny glass container of seawater as a control. I soon started getting what seemed to be very clear and interesting results: in the presence of the advanced larvae, the egg capsule plugs degraded and became detached from the capsule walls, usually within 24 h, whereas the plugs in the control containers—those without larvae—remained completely intact for weeks. Indeed, even capsules containing advanced, osmotically killed larvae remained intact in the lab for my 2-month observation period. When I proudly showed my “advisor” some of the data I had collected, his response was, “Well, nobody is going to care about that”. As noted below, I did in fact publish a paper on this work, and it has been cited about 55 times so far—not spectacular, but satisfactory (many of my subsequent papers have been cited hundreds of times). I wonder if ocean acidification might eventually affect the ability of these larvae to hatch…

Anyway, despite my “mentor’s” opinions, for some reason (probably because I really enjoyed what I was doing!) I kept going; more about that below. If you’re really driven to do something, try to do it!

For most of my time at Woods Hole, I worked on aspects of larval development. My advisor had published some information about larval growth, and concluded that gastropod larvae stopped growing once they became competent to metamorphose. And so I decided that for my Ph.D. thesis I would explore the energetic basis for that cessation of growth. For the larvae of three different gastropod species, I measured changes in larval shell length over time, rates of respiration, rates of phytoplankton ingestion, and assimilation efficiency. One of my favourite animals to work with was the sedentary gastropod Crepidula fornicata. I was able to rear the larvae of this species in the lab with negligible mortality, and they grew very quickly, typically at least 50 microns in shell length each day. Interestingly, they never stopped growing; their shells were initially coiled, but as the larvae got older, the shells started growing linearly, and the larval shells got longer and longer every day. It then occurred to me that perhaps the larvae of the other species I was working with (e.g. the mudsnail Nassarius obsoletus) also continued to grow; it just wasn’t obvious by measuring changes in shell length, since their shells remained coiled throughout development. I then started taking larval tissue weight measurements, and found that, yes indeed, biomass was increasing at a constant rate for those larvae, just as it was doing for the larvae of Crepidula fornicata; the larval shells weren’t getting longer very fast as the larvae aged, but they were getting wider to accommodate the increasing amounts of tissue.

Sometimes it can be good not to give up

All this while, it turns out that my “advisor” was making trouble for me behind my back. Apparently, I had no focus. I did have a focus, but it wasn’t just on one question! In addition to my thesis research, in my free time I always had at least one other project going on a different topic. To do all of this, I was in the lab 7 days a week, until about 10 p.m. every night; I didn’t come in on Sundays until after lunch. I was very excited by the research I was doing and the various questions I was addressing.

In my fourth year at Woods Hole, I was thrown out of the Ph.D. programme and given the opportunity to submit a Master’s thesis instead, without having any opportunity to speak to the people on the committee that voted me out. If I hadn’t been so shy, I might have pressed for a review, but that wasn’t in the cards. Every time I had driven back to New York to visit my parents, a good number of people at WHOI asked me to bring back at least a dozen bagels for them, and so I thought about opening up a bagel shop somewhere along the Falmouth coast, with a small room at the back that would allow me to continue the weekly plankton sampling that I was doing to monitor the seasonal comings and goings of the larval stages of various gastropod species.

Luckily for me, some other faculty at Woods Hole were very supportive. Two of them (John Teal and Frank Carey) offered me space in their labs for continuing my experiments; another one (Nick Fisher) collaborated with me on studies looking at the assimilation efficiencies of larvae feeding on different phytoplankton species; and a Harvard University researcher (Dr. Ruth Turner) hired me part-time to help with the Navy-sponsored research that she was doing on shipworms down the street at the Marine Biological Laboratory.

About 1 month after I was told about my coming eviction from the graduate programme, I submitted a Master’s thesis about my Nassarius obsoletus egg capsule hatching studies. I then produced a manuscript on that research as well, and submitted it to Biological Bulletin. The thesis went through the process very quickly (the outside committee member from MIT told me that he found it surprisingly impressive) and the manuscript that I had submitted to Biological Bulletin was immediately accepted (Pechenik, 1975), with excellent reviews. So maybe I wasn’t an idiot after all! In the following years, a paper about the growth and energetics of mud-snail larvae was accepted for publication (Pechenik and Fisher, 1979), along with a few other papers on a variety of topics (Pechenik, 1979, 1980; Pechenik et al., 1979), all based on my work at Woods Hole. I have also continued doing studies on gastropod egg capsules from time to time (e.g. Pechenik, 1983, 1986; Pechenik et al., 2017a, 2020a; Salas-Yanquin et al., 2021; Paredes-Molina et al., 2023).

While I was finishing up at Woods Hole, another WHOI faculty member, Fred Grassle, put me in touch with a colleague of his (Professor A. N. Sastry) at the University of Rhode Island (URI) to finish my Ph.D. Dr. Sastry found my larval work very interesting, and put me in contact with a colleague of his at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lab, which was right across the street from the URI marine centre in Narragansett, RI, USA, and—remarkably—not only did Professor Sastry take me on as his Ph.D. student, but the EPA hired me for their 1040 programme, in which Ph.D. students worked at the EPA for 1040 h per year and got paid for their work.

I defended my Ph.D. thesis at URI after being there for two years. Everything went very smoothly.

Good luck plays an important role sometimes

During that time, I gave a talk at an American Society of Zoology meeting (now the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology) and was offered a post-doctoral position by Professor Dale Bonar at the University of Maryland, to work with oyster larvae. One of the first things he told me after I accepted his offer was that since the job market was very tight, he thought that if I received a job offer I should accept it; the more I think about it, the kinder and more remarkable that suggestion seems. Well, Tufts University had just advertised a 1-year temporary position to teach an invertebrate zoology course. As I had no teaching experience, I decided to apply for that position to beef up my résumé, since I thought that eventually I would probably be applying for an Assistant Professor position somewhere; this teaching experience would keep my options open. I received the offer from Tufts after working for 3 weeks at the University of Maryland; I accepted the position, intending to return to Professor Bonar’s lab in Maryland the following year.

It turned out that Professor Bonar left the University of Maryland the following year and went to California to start an environmental consulting company. Where would that have left me? I have no idea! A lot of my success in life seems to reflect just having had good luck!

Doing marine research without having any marine facilities

Unknown to me at the time, a number of the Tufts biology faculty members thought the invertebrate biology course was antiquated and should be removed from the curriculum, and apparently that discussion was still going on during the semester I was there teaching it. By a narrow margin, they decided to keep the course in the Biology curriculum and to set up a tenure-track position to support it. I applied for the position…and got it.

The Tufts Biology Department had no marine resources (and still has none), but I was able to set things up to work with various species of the sedentary marine gastropod Crepidula fornicata and two related species pretty easily. The adults don’t move—they just filter food from the water, pretty much like clams and oysters do, and spend all their time eating and mating. So all I had to do was collect seawater from local marine labs, filter it, store it, and culture my own phytoplankton. After a few years, I also obtained cultures of a small deposit-feeding marine polychaete species, Capitella teleta, from Dr. Judith Grassle. This species was also easy to maintain in my lab. Those worms ingest soft mud, have a generation time of less than a month, and have short-lived, non-feeding larvae. I have also researched the behaviour of marine hermit crabs, something my son got me started on when he was about 8 years old. We were at a beach in Rhode Island for a while and decided to walk a good ways along the beach to an inlet into an estuary, where we encountered many hermit crabs scrambling about in their periwinkle shells. Oliver found them fascinating, and begged me to take some home with us, which I agreed to do. Once we got home, of course, I was the one taking care of them every day! Around this time, the Biology Department at Tufts decided to create a course for Biology majors that would satisfy the laboratory requirement without also including a lecture component; most lecture courses would no longer have a laboratory component. Instructors would only have to teach their part of this new course for 3 or 4 weeks, freeing up time for them to write more grant proposals and do more of their own research. My colleague Sara Lewis and I decided to develop a laboratory exercise for this course together, and she was intrigued by my stories about the hermit crabs I was tending to back home, and so we started doing field surveys of marine hermit crab shell quality at a nearby field site, and also examining the impact of changes in temperature and salinity on the ability of hermit crabs to avoid occupying shells that had been drilled by predatory moonsnails. Our students found the work to be quite engaging! And I even worked several times with third and fourth graders in having them do a short in-class experiment on hermit crab shell selection. That was an amazing experience! Especially when one of the students came up to me at the end of the class and said, “This was the best day of my life”. I’ll never forget that. I’ve continued working on aspects of hermit crab shell selection behaviour from time to time ever since then, including field studies looking at yearly shifts in hermit crab shell quality at our local field site (Pechenik et al., 2015), and the impact of red-tide algae on the ability of hermit crabs to assess shell quality effectively in deciding which shells to occupy (Ball and Pechenik, 2023). But most of my work has still involved aspects of larval development.

Stumbling onto some pretty interesting research

The first research question I came up with at Tufts was whether sublethal stresses experienced during early development could have any influence on the performance of juveniles after metamorphosis. I had always thought of metamorphosis as a fresh start, since it typically involved not only morphological changes but also changes—often major changes—in lifestyles. But, after all, these animals have the same genome before and after metamorphosis. So the first question I asked was whether delaying metamorphosis might affect the growth rates or survival of newly metamorphosed juveniles (Pechenik, 1985). This was pretty easy to do, and I got funding from the National Science Foundation to do it. Also, I had developed techniques that allowed me to rear the animals I worked with (the marine gastropod Crepidula fornicata) through metamorphosis with very little mortality (typically <5%) along the way, so that if I did see differences in juvenile growth or survival, it couldn’t be a reflection of differential mortality of particular genotypes. As it turned out, delaying metamorphosis had no measurable impact on the post-metamorphic growth or survival of Crepidula fornicata (Pechenik and Eyster, 1989). However, one of my colleagues at nearby Harvard University found the study interesting and suggested that we try the same sort of study with a species of bryozoan (Bugula stolonifera), as he had a graduate student who was working with the larvae of that local species. So we basically repeated the experiment with B. stolonifera and got very different results: delaying metamorphosis by even just 8–10 h resulted in substantially slower post-metamorphic growth rates for at least the first week after metamorphosis (Woollacott et al., 1989). I have continued to do such studies on what I’ve called “latent effects” with a number of different species in a variety of taxonomic groups, and with a good variety of sublethal larval stresses being tested (Pechenik et al., 1990, 1993, 2002; Pechenik and Cerulli, 1991; Pechenik et al., 1998; Marshall et al., 2003; Pechenik, 2006, 2018; Pechenik and Tyrell, 2015; Thiyagarajan et al., 2007; Salas-Yanquin et al., 2021), including exposure to sublethal levels of ocean acidification (Diederich et al., 2011; Kriefall et al., 2018; Pechenik et al., 2019; Reyes-Giler et al., 2021). It turns out that metamorphosis is not always a new beginning! My most recent NSF grant (in collaboration with Tony Pires at Dickinson College) concerned the impact of mild levels of ocean acidification on the development of Crepidula fornicata: impact on larval growth rates, gene expression patterns during larval development, time for larvae to become competent to metamorphose, ability of the larvae to metamorphose in response to external cues, and juvenile performance. We did most of this work at the Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories, University of Washington. I’ve also been involved with work on the onset of metamorphic competence (e.g. Burns and Pechenik, 2017) and cues for metamorphosis (Burns et al., 2014).

It turns out that I’m pretty good at asking interesting questions that other people hadn’t thought to ask, and I’ve been able to work on a variety of questions with researchers around the world, a truly wonderful experience. I met John Pearse at a meeting in Hong Kong some years ago. We both arrived about a week before the meeting began, and I noticed that a good number of tube-dwelling polychaetes (Hydroides elegans) had been recently brought into the lab from local waters. I had read that fertilization success for that species was substantially lower at lower salinities, and decided to run a small study to determine who was to blame: were the sperm unable to fertilize the eggs? Or were the fertilized eggs unable to cleave? I came up with a simple experimental design, as usual, and ran the experiment in collaboration with John Pearse and the director of the lab, Pei-Quan Qian. It turns out that it wasn’t the sperm’s fault: the sperm did fertilize the eggs at low salinities! The fertilized eggs just weren’t able to cleave at those salinities (Pechenik et al., 2007). I fondly remember John Pearse’s comment: “Now I understand why so many people want to work with you”. Working with Pei-Quan was also a great pleasure for me…and I got to see what running a large lab and doing a great deal of administrative work was like. I decided to make sure that I always had time to be doing at least some laboratory research myself! And I’m sure that I could never have been so successful at all that he was doing anyway. In general, I’m not a big fan of administrative meetings!

I have subsequently had more wonderful collaborations with colleagues from Hong Kong, Norway, Wales, Chile, France, England, Australia, New Zealand, and the west coast of the U.S., and on a large variety of topics, working with a large variety of animals—including how multiple paternity can influence variation in larval growth rates (Le Cam et al., 2009), the ability of certain chemicals to influence metamorphosis (Pechenik et al., 2002a, 2007b, 2015a; Taris et al., 2010), how experiences during intertidal encapsulated development can influence juvenile fitness (Salas-Yanquin et al., 2022), the impact of salinity changes on the ability of female gastropods to protect their brooded embryos (Chaparro et al., 2009), how intertidal early pre-hatching development in the intertidal zone can affect juvenile survival (Chaparro et al., 2018), how fecundity varies for particular species across a wide latitudinal range (Pechenik et al., 2017b), how age at metamorphosis can impact the transition from larva to adult in Crepidula fornicata (Pechenik and Strathmann, 2017), and how attachment to a substrate plays an important role in the feeding of Crepidula fornicata (Jiang and Pechenik, 2021). With climate change producing warmer New England weather on some days in the winter, I’ve also started looking at the impact of short-term elevated temperatures on winter-acclimated individuals of Crepidula fornicata (Pechenik et al., 2020b).

One of my lifetime goals has been to publish one paper on every major animal group, and I’ve managed to complete research on members of most of the major animal groups (e.g. Pechenik, 1984a, 1984b; 1990; Pechenik et al., 1990, 2001a, 2001b, 2003, 2007a, 2012, 2015b; Pechenik and Cerulli, 1991; Pechenik and Fried, 1995; Qian and Pechenik, 1998; Pechenik and Lewis, 2000; Marshall et al., 2003; Li and Pechenik, 2004, 2007; Allen and Pechenik, 2010; Biggers et al., 2012; Burns et al., 2014; Pechenik et al., 2019a; Gilliand et al., 2021). The only remaining animals on my list are sponges and cnidarians. I had a sponge project planned with a colleague from Denmark, but he took an early retirement offer about a year before I was going to visit there. Over the past 45 years or so, I’ve published about 150 research papers on a variety of topics, with the assistance of a good number of excellent undergraduate and graduate students; there was no competition for those students at Tufts, as I was the only marine biologist there. In a more remote location, this might not have been a good situation for me, but being near Boston I had marine colleagues to talk and work with nearby, and, as noted above, I also had a good number of marine collaborators in other parts of the USA and in other countries.

Teaching and committee work turned out to be a lot more interesting than I had expected it to be, and led in unexpected directions

When I wasn’t doing research or committee work at Tufts, I taught undergraduates and graduate students. I started teaching the Invertebrate Biology course at Tufts using the textbook I had used as an undergraduate, written by Robert Barnes. Students didn’t like that textbook—perhaps simply because there was too much terminology and information for them to try to memorize—so after a few years I switched to the book written by W. D. Russell-Hunter, which had an interesting biomechanical perspective. Students didn’t like that textbook either, although I’m still not sure why. Neither of those textbooks taught students much about the sorts of research that was being conducted on the various animal groups. So I started writing handouts for each animal group emphasizing the things that would provide students with the background that would let me emphasize the interesting research that was being done on the various organisms we were talking about. I ended up putting these “chapters” together into a paper-bound handout. Then I was contacted by the editor at a local publishing house, Prindle, Webber & Schmidt; he apparently made it a habit of prowling through college and university bookstores looking for the sorts of things that I had put together for my students. He stopped by to see me, and encouraged me to turn these handouts into a real textbook. He had a wonderful French accent, which won me over. Much to my surprise, I found myself preparing to publish a real book, focusing on issues that made the various invertebrate groups sound interesting, and worth studying (Pechenik, 2015). What kept me going was the thought that at least I would never have to revise that book. Ha! As it turns out, molecular studies were changing our understanding of how the various groups were interrelated considerably. I also decided to add “Research Focus Boxes” to each chapter, to give students an idea about the kinds of research being conducted on members of the various invertebrate groups they were reading about, and helping them learn how to read figures and tables from published research in a productive way. Each Focus Box was centred on one or two figures or tables from a recently published research paper. Indeed, with each new edition, the book became more and more focused on giving students the background needed to understand the research literature. A good number of faculty apparently now have their own students write Research Focus Boxes in their own courses; it’s such a good way to prepare students for reading the research literature, and for writing about their own research results. The book is currently in its seventh edition. I must say, I learned a lot about effective writing from the editorial suggestions that I received from the editors of the first few editions of that textbook. Back in those days, it seems that the editors were typically working on just one or two books at a time; editorial assistance, in my experience, is not nearly as helpful as it used to be, to a large extent probably due to the editorial staff members having to work with manuscripts from many authors at once.

I also included a few riddles in my draft of the first edition of the Invertebrate Biology textbook, and received a scathing comment from one of the reviewers of the manuscript: “There is no place for humor in an invertebrate biology textbook!!!” the reviewer wrote. What a horrible idea, that students should actually enjoy reading their textbooks! I have added at least one new joke or riddle in each of the subsequent editions of the book.

Enrollment in the Invertebrate Biology course was typically low in my first few years at Tufts (10 or 12 students per semester at the most), largely because the course did not satisfy one of the requirements for the Biology Major. Biology majors were required to take at least one course from Group A (Cellular Biology), one course from Group B (Physiology), and one course from Group C (Population Biology), but they weren’t required to take any Group D courses (Invertebrate Zoology, Comparative Anatomy, and Embryology). Since it was not needed for graduation, the enrollments in my invertebrate course were quite low for those first few years that I was teaching there; having the letter D associated with the course did not help. I was worried about getting tenure, and tried getting the graduation requirements for the Biology major altered, to no avail. Then I came up with a great idea: I added some material about marine fishes and marine mammals and ended the course talking about how humans were altering the selective forces acting on marine organisms all over the world’s oceans. I renamed the course Marine Biology. Although the course still focused on invertebrates, it was moved to Group C and, in consequence, met graduation requirements for the Biology major! Course enrollment tripled the following year, and was as high as 84 students a few years later! If you are not tenured and are teaching a course that does not satisfy important graduation requirements for the major, modifying the course so that it does meet those requirements turns out to be a very good decision. I think that retitling the course also made it seem more interesting and more relevant to students.

In my seminar courses, I always asked students to write short articles about relevant research papers. The students’ papers were typically not very well organized or well written, and I spent many hours giving students written feedback. That didn’t seem to help at all: the subsequent papers were no better. After a few years, I got the idea to have the students write fewer papers and just revise the ones they wrote after getting feedback from me. But mostly, they just made the changes I suggested. I was doing all of the editorial work, and they were just doing the secretarial work. How could I get the students to think more carefully about what they were reading and what they were writing about? I finally came up with the idea of having students write one-sentence summaries of individual paragraphs. That was eye-opening! It usually took students at least two revisions to get a summary sentence that included all of the key information, and in a way that would make sense to readers who had not read the original paragraph. Unfortunately, students can now use ChatGPT to do this…but perhaps not in class!

Around that time, I was asked to join a Tufts committee that was set up to review the introductory English course, and to figure out why it wasn’t helping students write very well in other disciplines. One of the members of that committee, Professor Sylvan Barnet from the English Department, joined the committee for a very different reason: he had co-authored a successful freshman writing guide with a colleague from Wellesley College, and had recently started a new Short Guide series: A Short Guide to Writing about Literature, and A Short Guide to Writing About Art (Professor Barnet was quite an active art collector). He had apparently joined the committee I was on to find colleagues from other disciplines to add books to his series, and I fell into the trap! Writing The Short Guide To Writing About Biology took a lot of work in my “free time”, but I figured that at least I would never have to revise the book once it was published. The book is currently in its ninth edition (Pechenik, 2016).

As part of my committee work at Tufts, I directed the Writing Across the Curriculum programme for two disconnected 3-year terms. This was probably my favourite committee work at Tufts, in part because of the impact it had on how courses were taught in practically all departments, and in part for how much I learned by being such an active member of this committee. At every meeting every semester, we would spend a good part of our time talking about problems that were coming up with students’ writing, and talking about ways of dealing with those problems. From time to time, someone from a very different department (e.g. Political Science or History) would talk about a particular issue that he or she had to deal with, and the solutions that they came up with to address those issues. I would typically think something like this: “Well, that’s a very interesting idea, but I don’t see how that could work in a biology course”. But over the following weeks, a similar issue would inevitably arise for some of my students, and I thought of a way to modify my colleague’s approach and make it work in my course as well. I learned so much about effective teaching practices by being on this committee, largely because I got to work with and hear from faculty from so many different disciplines about student writing issues! And so, it turns out that you can learn some very useful things about effective teaching practices by talking about these issues with people in very different fields.

About 14 years ago, I decided to read Darwin’s Origin of Species. After all, I was an ecologist with an interest in selection and evolutionary change. Darwin’s book was not easy to read. I found myself re-reading sentences and paragraphs, and I started rewriting sentences as I went along. I couldn’t stop doing that! After I had gotten through a few chapters, I thought I would just post those Word files on a website for others to read, but my son argued that nobody would take those postings seriously: “You need to find a publisher”, he said. And so I did. Sinauer published the first 8 chapters of The Readable Darwin in 2014, and the complete book was published this year by Oxford University Press (Pechenik, 2023). Along the way, I got to know Charles Darwin very well; he was an amazing person, and such an amazing and honest thinker.

I’ve also run numerous workshops about science writing, some with my colleague Howard Browman, and have also given talks about designing effective PowerPoint presentations. Oddly enough, I have also developed a number of science-related games and activities in my spare time over the years [e.g. Food Web Collapse (Nasco), Introduction to Experimental Design and Data Presentation (Wards Science), and It’s All About Volume (VWR)]. By playing the Food Web Collapse game, children learn a lot about how food webs work by controlling the initial number of animals at different levels of the food web, with the goal of avoiding local extinctions. For the second game, students work with commercially available sponge animals that come enclosed in gelatin capsules to learn about the scientific method and how best to graph data. And for the All About Volume activity, grade-school students learn about the displacement of liquids by solids and about making volume calculations. I’ve also co-authored several papers about what turn out to be interesting teaching strategies (e.g. Pechenik and Tashiro, 1991, 1992; McVey and Pechenik, 2020).

Final thoughts

In summary, I had no idea what I was getting into when I decided to go into marine biology as a graduate student, but it has ended up being a very satisfying career, with opportunities to work on a good variety of topics with wonderful people around the world, and to work with many wonderful students at a variety of grade levels. I have no regrets! While I never focused on any one thing in my time at Tufts, I’ve definitely had a completely satisfying and enjoyable career. And one of the things I’ve really appreciated about my life as a tenured professor is that once you’re tenured you have a lot of control over how you spend your time! Luck has certainly played a role in some of this, but my main advice is to always keep an eye open for opportunities of interest, within and outside of your normal field.

Conflict of interest

None declared.

Funding

Some of my research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF): GA-38895, OCE-8500857, DEB-9208149, OCE-1416846.

Data availability

No new data were generated or analysed in support of this research.

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