MIAMI—We were beginning to run out of bait, and the sharks weren’t cooperating.
Everybody aboard the Research Vessel Garvin had come to Miami for the sharks—to catch them, sample them, and tag them, all in the name of science. People who once wanted to be marine biologists, actual marine biologists, shark enthusiasts, the man who literally wrote the book Why Sharks Matter, and various friends and family had spent much of the day sending fish heads set with hooks over the side of the Garvin. But each time the line was hauled back in, it came in slack, with nothing but half-eaten bait or an empty hook at the end.
And everyone was getting nervous.
I: “No assholes”
The Garvin didn’t start out as a research vessel. Initially, it was a dive boat that took people to wrecks on the East Coast. Later, owner Hank Garvin used it to take low-income students from New York City and teach them how to dive, getting them scuba certified. But when Garvin died, his family put the boat, no longer in prime condition, on the market.
A thousand miles away in Florida, Catherine MacDonald was writing “no assholes” on a Post-it note.
At the time, MacDonald was the coordinator of a summer internship program at the University of Miami, where she was a PhD student. And even at that stage in her career, she and her colleagues had figured out that scientific field work had a problem.
“Science in general does not have a great reputation of being welcoming and supportive and inclusive and kind,” said David Shiffman, author of the aforementioned book and a grad school friend of MacDonald’s. “Field science is perhaps more of a problem than that. And field science involving what are called charismatic megafauna, the big animals that everyone loves, is perhaps worse than that. It’s probably because a lot of people want to do this, which means if we treat someone poorly and they quit, it’s not going to be long before someone else wants to fill the spot.”
