Question: what type of scientist are you

Jon Copley answered on 20 Jun 2010:

I’m a biologist. And within biology, technically I’m an “ecologist”. That means I’m interested in the patterns of life in the world around us (rather than how bodies or cells work, which is the subject for “physiologists”). My research is really trying to answer a simple question: why do we get some species living in particular numbers in one place, but find different species living in other numbers in other places?

That’s an easy question to ask, but a very difficult question to answer, because there are so many factors that combine to produce the patterns of life in the world around us. But we need to understand those patterns of life if we are going to live sustainably and responsibly, without wrecking the world around us and sending lots of species extinct – some of which may actually be useful to us, for example by giving us clues to new medical treatments.

I’m trying to figure out the patterns of life specifically in the oceans, because the oceans cover most of our planet (and we haven’t really wrecked them yet – though we seem to be trying hard, with disasters like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill…). And to figure out the patterns life if in the oceans, I’m investigating colonies of marine life around deep-sea volcanoes, because they make it easier to see what is going on.

Rather than one population of a species gradually fading into another population, where you can’t see the change between them very clearly, the colonies of marine life at the undersea volcanoes where I work are like “islands” on the ocean floor. And just as biologists like Darwin compared life on different islands above the waves to start to figure out the patterns of life on land, we can use these “islands” of life on the seafloor to do the same thing beneath the waves.

But when someone, for example at a party, asks me “what do you do?”, I tend not to say “I’m a marine biologist”, because then most people think you work with whales and dolphins, which I don’t. So I tend to say “I’m a marine scientist”. And one of the things I like most about being a marine scientist is that you need to understand a lot of things other than just biology.

For example, to understand the patterns of life at my undersea volcanoes, I need to also understand the geology of those volcanoes, and the ocean currents between them. So I spend most of my time talking and working with other scientists who are not biologists – for example geologists, and ocean physicists. We all work together as a team to figure out what is going on, and so it can be really exciting when you finally put all the pieces together to solve the puzzle at the particular place where you’re exploring.