ENHS Nature Trails February 2001 Article 1

This month's speaker: Dana Africa

I (Dave Wagner) interviewed Dana by telephone while she was in Newport doing some work at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. A couple of hours underwater before we spoke.... The standard practice of Nature Trails is to have our speakers answer questions sent to them by email. When returned by email it means the editor doesn't have to do any typing. This month's circumstance demanded novel methods. I asked our usual questions but, since I was trying to take notes directly and I don't do shorthand, I did not get truly accurate, verbatim answers. Therefore these are not actual quotes but the best I can relate from what I typed down while talking with a headset telephone-a new exercise for your editor.

How did you get interested in natural history? Well, Dana says she has been diving since she was 19. She has always loved the ocean and diving has been her main way to enjoy it.

Is this something that started when you were young? Dana always lived close to the ocean, raised in Marin County, California. There was something really interesting that happened as a child, when she was only five years old. When the actor Sterling Hayden was going through a messy divorce, he grabbed his children and sailed to Tahiti. He took along as first mate Dana's father, who brought the whole family including Dana's brother and sister. What an adventure! What a story!

Did you have any high school teachers or early mentors who inspired you? Dana says she'll pass on that one. Maybe high school wasn't one of her favorite time travels? The critical experience that she says makes her diving meaningful today was her schooling at the University of Oregon, from where she graduated in 1994. It was a class in invertebrate zoology from Nora Terwilliger that really changed her life.

Dana says she wasn't a particularly favorite student of Nora Terwilliger, they didn't become the closest of friends. It was just that Dr. Terwilliger opened Dana's eyes. "Hey, I was an adult..I was 40! I'd been diving for years and suddenly I discovered inverts in the water... that class opened my eyes!!"

Well, what about memorable travels that are significant? "Ohhh," says Dana, "I do so much traveling." We have to understand that this is her business, her way of life. She has been to the Galapagos Islands six times and is going again in June of this year. Three times to New Guinea and she's going there again in May of this year.

Doesn't this mean that she has two big diving trips one month after another coming up late this spring? So maybe relax and plan nothing out too unusual for a while?? No anxious thoughts, we guess, since she is going next month (April) to dive in the Andaman Sea out of Phuket along the southwest Thailand coast.

What are you going to talk about? Dana has lots of pictures of one of her most favorite places to dive. She confesses to us that she has little of the land in New Guinea to show us, since she was on a boat in the Bismarck Sea and had little chance to photograph on land. We won't mind. There's lots inverts, lots of underwater stuff; probably 90% of the photos are underwater; ...and on the smallest animals we will celebrate: sea horses, pipefishs, nudibranchs ...this is going to be a good one!!!

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