Science Features ::
A Mammalogist’s Retrospective: It’s a Small World After All
By Juliette Wilson1,2
Dr. Tom O’Shea’s 32-year career followed a progression of change and growth. An interview with the good doctor revealed behind-the-scenes stories about serendipity and commitment, and between the lines, a laudable reputation as a scientist. From his graduate school days through the present, Tom O’Shea has been contributing to the current state of knowledge on the orders Chiroptera (bats) and Sirenia (manatees and dugongs)...
As a result of his 2-year volunteer field stint on a bighorn sheep project and a junior-year mammalogy class, young Tom O’Shea graduated in zoology at Colorado State University. He then went on to Northern Arizona University (NAU) because he was interested in studying bats.
"My graduate advisor, Terry Vaughan, was the mammalogy professor down there [at NAU in Flagstaff, Ariz.] and an expert on bats, and he accepted me into his graduate program. As I was finishing up my Master’s degree project on Arizona bats with Terry, he was preparing to take a sabbatical to Africa. He asked me to come along and to propose a research topic for a dissertation. I was most interested in animal behavior and natural history. Once we arrived in the bush in Kenya, I noticed a little species of bat that was common around the camp, so I started marking it with unique bands and studying its social organization, basic ecology, and natural history. At that time almost nothing was known about social organization in bats. So I came back and wrote a [Ph.D.] dissertation on this topic."
Now Dr. O’Shea, Tom began his career as a Research Zoologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in September 1977. There he evaluated the effects of environmental contaminants on birds and mammals, and he developed his first projects involving marine mammals.
"It was kind of a fluke, really. I had been applying for jobs wherever I could, because there were few jobs and many qualified people. A grad student a year ahead of me, Bob Szaro, was hired at Patuxent [now the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center] working on environmental contaminants and wildlife. Patuxent was hiring 3-5 biologists in the coming year. When the Director asked Bob if he knew of anyone who might be interested, he contacted me and a couple others. But in those days you could not be hired into Federal service unless you were already on the Federal Civil Service Register. About 9 months earlier I had gotten on “just in case,” so it happened that I was hireable, in addition to meeting other requirements, and I had also published a few articles as a graduate student and this was looked on favorably. So I interviewed with the Director, Dr. Lucille Stickel, and was hired. Interestingly, as time went on Bob Szaro ended up as the Chief Scientist for Biology at USGS headquarters. This emphasizes the small-world nature of our work.
"While I was in the contaminants research program at Patuxent, my interest in working with mammals led to development of 2 projects related to contaminants in mammals. One focused on contaminants in porpoises and dolphins; another was on contaminants in manatees. Patuxent allowed a real jump start for me and other young biologists, because Dr. Stickel provided strong support to research scientists and promoted well-designed experimental approaches that fostered high productivity."
In November 1979, Tom moved to the Gainesville Field Station of the National Fish and Wildlife Laboratory, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (now part of the USGS Florida Integrated Science Center). As a Research Wildlife Biologist, he was now part of a team designing and conducting studies on endangered manatees and other marine mammals.
"This was yet another example of how small a world we work in. When a position opened up in Florida working on manatees, in the Marine Mammal Section of the National Fish and Wildlife Laboratory, I applied for it. The Sirenia Project [Sirenia is the taxonomic order that includes manatees and dugongs] was just starting up and organizing a lot of new research. The Section Chief was the marine mammalogist I’d been working with on the porpoise and dolphin contaminant study. The project leader was a mammalogist I’d worked with in Africa. So I was a known quantity, which probably helped. I was hired, and stayed 13 years. While there I developed various projects, including investigating why many manatees were dying and washing ashore without an obvious cause of death (other than strikes by boats, which was a big management issue). So the idea was for our group to improve necropsies and make them as thorough as possible to determine cause of death, and to salvage as much biological material as possible for other researchers.
"There was a lot of confusion and controversy over the status of the Florida manatee population in those days, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. I tried to get the research and conservation community on the same page concerning the relevant scientific evidence necessary for understanding the manatee’s population status. What grew out of that was our ability to use data we already had a good start on, using life histories of individual manatees known from scar patterns, to get an idea of their reproductive biology. We were then able to use the scar-pattern sight-resight information to get survival and fecundity estimates and model whether the population was declining, growing, or stable. That approach has led to some very sophisticated contemporary modeling that now forms a solid piece of the basis for assessing the status of Florida manatees today; it has been used to understand and manage manatees throughout Florida. And the news has been mostly good, with positive population growth of manatees in many areas of Florida in recent decades."
The time came when the West called Tom, his wife Sherry (a native of Fort Collins, Colo.), and their daughters Mary and Jackie back home. His "ticket home” was in 1992, when he took a research management position as Assistant Director of the National Ecology Research Center (FORT’s predecessor). The Center was shortly thereafter transferred to the new National Biological Survey, where it became the largest center in the agency in terms of budget and staffing. In 1996, with further organizational changes, Dr. O’Shea and his biological research colleagues ultimately were absorbed into the U.S. Geological Survey’s then-new Biological Resources Division (now Discipline).
"I really like the West and wanted to live there again; I had cut my teeth on biology in western sites. Although there is decidedly no marine mammal research in places like Arizona, Colorado, or Montana, all Department of the Interior marine mammal research programs in the lower 48 states were then administered under the Center in Fort Collins, including the Sirenia Project in Florida. So I was somewhat of a known quantity when a position opened up for an Assistant Director at the Center. I applied and was selected. However, in my heart I really longed to go back to being a field biologist. In 1996 I transferred to an open position as Section Chief of the Southwestern Ecosystems Section (I had worn a hat as Acting Chief of that section while Assistant Center Director), with the idea that I could carve out some of my time for research on mammals. Around that time, the NBS and USGS started programs of national competition for funding, so I wrote a few proposals to do some bat work, mostly in collaboration with Center bat biologist Mike Bogan [now retired]. The proposals were successful, and I eventually worked my way back into full-time biology in 2001, when we started our extensive project on the ecology of the bat-rabies system."
As Tom looks toward retirement, I asked him what he would say about his life and career:
"It goes way too fast! I believe that’s a sign that you’re having a really good time."
…and what lies ahead: Will he continue to work with manatees and bats?
"I think so, but I think I’d do some of it in the context of using my knowledge and experience in an advisory capacity. I would still like to participate in some field research projects at neat locations but not as a chief… or even act as an advisor to some of the management authorities and organizations emphasizing marine mammals or bats, as things came up. But, being retired, I would like to be selective in how I spend my time and concentrate on what comes closest to the purest fun in our line of work!"
Any last words of wisdom?
"Never burn any bridges, and keep your unkind remarks to yourself because you never know how that might come back on you and hurt you at pivotal points later on in your career. Over the years I crossed paths with different people in seemingly unpredictable ways. For example, when I was hired to be a biologist in the Sirenia Project I was interviewed by the Chief of the Marine Mammal Section and the Acting Director of the National Fish and Wildlife Laboratory; about 15 years later, I was privileged to become their supervisor (at least on paper!). It’s a small world in our fields and you really need to get along with everybody the best that you can."
