Carolina Alumni Review - July/August 2007

mer graduate students who is now a research scientist at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. “He is pretty well-known [in the field] for pointing out flaws in how we do things.”

Peterson’s work also resounds well outside the borders of the scientific community. He recently grabbed national attention for research, published in the journal Science, on the link between big sharks and North Carolina’s bay scallop fishery. Peterson and his scientific collaborators in the U.S. and Canada found that the loss of great whites, hammerheads and other sharks — as many as 73 million are killed every year through commercial fishing — caused a population explosion among skates, rays and other creatures they preyed on. More skates and rays in the sea were, in turn, bad news for the creatures upon which they dined, including scallops, oysters and clams. North Carolina’s century-old bay scallop fishery, a favorite meal of the cownose ray, has been wiped out as a result.

Peterson and his colleagues now are looking for ways to protect scallops from the marauding rays. In the short term, they will gather adult bay scallops from local sounds and concentrate them into several sanctuaries protected from the cownose rays’ fall migration. After the migration run and scallop spawning are complete, they will take down the poles to allow a winter scallop fishing season, if enough adults survived.

They also are looking for funds to install cages around one set of oyster reef sanctuaries and leave another set open to cownose rays — a test of whether oysters, too, have been harmed by ray predation. If it works, caging during the warm months could make restoration of native oysters much more successful.

“If native oysters can be more efficiently restored, this will be a tremendous shot in the arm to fishermen and improve water quality at the same time,” Peterson says.

Though tied together by questions about how the natural environment changes naturally and due to human influ-

ence, Peterson’s work also takes him far away from the N.C. coast. Another article of his, also published in Science, described how the ecological impacts of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska lasted far longer than many had predicted. Although Peterson says he initially was reluctant to take on work so far from home, he went on to visit Alaska some 50 times and fell in love with the Prince William Sound ecosystem.

The Valdez work led back to his rule of engagement: in this case, 1993 testimony on oil spill recovery to Congress’ Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee. He also has served on a state panel on oyster restoration, a county panel on seafood processing, and state commissions on marine fisheries and coastal resources, among many other commitments. Right now, he is working with the Environmental Protection Agency to examine how to make policies that are adaptive and flexible enough to deal with global climate change and its effects on estuarine goods and services.

When it comes time to take his field and lab work into the often politically charged realm of resource management, Peterson says he doesn’t worry that he might be putting his reputation for scientific objectivity on the line, or that he might be accused of choosing sides. He avoids such criticism, he says, by being very transparent about the data and science that he is employing to make a case.

“You take what you know and build scenarios. You show the values and weighting you give to different outcomes. It can be useful to all sides in an argument.”

And, back in the classroom, to close the loop, he tries to make sure that the next generation of scientists sees the value of his approach.

“I like to blur the lines, so my students hear about how work is applied to real-world problems. I like to talk to them about engaging and not sitting outside the real world in an academic ivory tower.”