Spring students at SFS Mexico have the opportunity to engage in research on the gray whale during its annual migration from the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska to the western coast of Mexico. The first SFS programs focusing on whales, however, were conducted much closer to our headquarters in Massachusetts. Throughout the 1980’s, SFS students set sail into the Gulf of Maine to study humpback whale ecology. Doug Fudge was a student on one of these early voyages. He boarded the schooner Appledore in the summer of 1987 to investigate the apparent decreasing numbers of these endangered whales sighted at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary during that time. He is now an assistant professor in the integrative biology department at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

Name: Douglas Fudge
SFS Program: North Atlantic (Gulf of Maine) '97, Humpback Whale Ecology
Education: B.A., Cornell University, Biological Sciences; M.A.T., Cornell University, Science and Math Education; M.SC., University of Guelph, Animal Physiology; Ph.D., University of British Columbia, Animal Biomechanics

Why did you choose to study with SFS?
As a child, I was fascinated by the behavior of humpback whales that I had observed in the Gulf of Maine while fishing for bluefin tuna with my father. When I saw the humpback whale ecology course offered by SFS, I jumped at the opportunity.

Reflecting back on your time in the program, what did you gain from your SFS experience?
I spent a lot of time on the water as a kid, but spending three straight weeks at sea on a schooner watching whales was a transformative experience for me. It's not easy to sum up the lessons I learned on that boat, but I can tell you that the most important lessons had nothing to do with biology. The most important thing I learned was how little I actually needed to live and be happy.

What is your most profound or lasting memory from your SFS program?
I was on night watch and was down below recording data in the log book when I heard an unfamiliar, low creaking noise. When I told our professor, Steve Schwartz, he immediately sprang into action, grabbed his hydrophone, and started lowering it into the water. The strange noises we were hearing were fragments of songs sung by humpback whales. The reason Steve was so excited was that Atlantic humpbacks were only thought to sing during the breeding season in the Caribbean, and this was the middle of the feeding season in the Gulf of Maine. This is a profound memory for me for a couple of reasons -- the sound of the songs coming through the ship’s hull was haunting and unforgettable, and the experience was also my first real taste of the excitement of scientific discovery.

What do you do for work?
I'm an assistant professor in the department of integrative biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

I spend most of my time teaching and doing research. I teach two different invertebrate zoology courses and my research area is biomechanics and biomaterials. When I am teaching, I am preparing and giving lectures, helping with labs, grading papers and exams, and meeting with students. For my research, I spend most of my time writing papers, writing grants, and meeting with the students and postdocs in my lab who carry out most of the experiments. I get to attend a couple of conferences every year and I also teach a marine biology field course at the Shoals Marine Laboratory. This course is taught on a remote island six miles off the Maine coast and has a similar flavor to an SFS course, which is one of the things that keeps me coming back every year.

Did your SFS experience contribute to where you ended up?
The SFS course I took definitely contributed to my interest in marine biology as a field, and much of my knowledge of whales came from that course. A few years ago, I started a project on the biomechanics of filter feeding in baleen whales, including humpbacks, and I find that I draw on my SFS experience when thinking about the behavior of these animals.

What are the two most essential skills that got you to your position?
Although they are not skills, I would say that curiosity and hard work were two essential things that carried me to where I am. I was very fortunate to get excellent instruction in writing both in high school and college, and I don’t think I could have gotten where I am without the opportunities I had early on to develop my writing skills.

What advice do you have for other SFS alumni looking to get into your field? 
Find a graduate supervisor who is asking questions in their research that interest you. Then make sure you can get along with this person for several years-- talk to them on the phone, go and visit them in person, and talk to other graduate students and postdocs in their lab.

If it seems like a good match and the subject interests you, don’t listen to the people who think you are crazy. I did my Ph.D. research on the defensive slime of hagfishes. Most people at the time thought I was crazy to spend five years on such a bizarre and esoteric project, but I was fortunate that my supervisor, lab mates, and wife were equally crazy and supported me throughout. In retrospect, working on hagfish slime was a real gift of a project, because relatively little was known about it, and I was in a lab that provided all sorts of useful skills and tools that I could use to try and figure out how the whole thing worked. I was fortunate to stumble upon several interesting discoveries, and my students continue doing novel research in this area.