Profile

I am quite fortunate that I have always wanted to be a marine biologist, ever since I watched Free Willy when I was 7. I know I am so lucky to finally be living my dream in Shetland.

Living on Shetland is a lot of fun, there is amazing scenery, we get to see the northern lights and there’s lots of wildlife, especially whales and dolphins! In the last month I have seen Killer Whales and Humpback Whales, which was amazing.

We can regularly go several days without any food deliveries (by boat) from the mainland in the winter and the shelves in Tesco’s can go empty quickly. We also only have 2 super markets on the island, a Tesco’s and a Co-op and no other shops you would find on the mainland.

My work involves various aspects. I can go out on boats to survey the seafloor using sound equipment and underwater cameras. I also do shore watches to spot whales and dolphins. Back at my desk, I codes models, write up findings, attend meetings, and present at conferences.

Here I go through what a shore watch ‘field’ day can look like.

I would get up like usually except instead of heading to work I would head to one of our predefined ‘sites’. Here we get out the binoculars and start scanning the area. We do a dedicated 10minute survey every 30minutes and record any whales or dolphins that are sighted. For the remaining 20minutes we just watch with our eyes.

We can also get the drone out and over the water to record the behaviour of the whales and dolphins that we can see.

Depending on what we find sometimes we might stay at one site all day, especially if there is lots of activity. Or we will move onto another site and repeat the observations.

All records are submitted into a big database (usually during a ‘desk’ day) and these help inform others peoples research.