How to become a marine biologist

🐙 It’s not just you: No one knows what the correct plural for octopus is. But scientists seem to prefer “octopuses,” so we’ll go with that.
Issue #93: why AI loves the word “delve,” bad news about avocados, and why you should only apologize when you mean it
By Carly Rose Gillis

As a girl growing up in the ‘90s, I often daydreamed about becoming a marine biologist. But I didn’t quite know that this was a universal experience until I happened upon a viral Tiktok video about that very same memory shared by many millennial women.

But why? What fueled this generational aspiration? Was it, as that Tiktoker Madeleine Byrne says, due to the dreamy nautical scenes produced by Lisa Frank that adorned any office supply we could possibly need for our AP Bio classes? Or was it just because we all saw Free Willy?

This was on my mind when a recent story on Medium by Dr. Stacy Jupiter, Executive Director of the Global Marine Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society, caught my eye. “How to Become a Marine Biologist” paints a fascinating portrait of what it actually takes to achieve that profession, which was her childhood dream as well. Her journey involved lots of thankless grunt work, spending many years studying the anatomy of mussel larvae or tilapia aquaculture, and sitting in dark rooms peering through microscopes rather than periscopes.

Dr. Jupiter also writes about the powerful role mentorship and representation played in her career. When a professor in Australia took a chance on sponsoring her for volunteer lab work, she describes her as “sprung from the pages of the classic Madeleine L’Engle novel. Maria was a dynamo, running a lab and large research program, teaching a full course load, while also looking after two small children. I thought, ‘I want to be just like her.’”

This instantly transported me back to childhood, devouring L’Engle’s wistful, fantastical tales of adventure that often featured scientists of the natural world (including marine biologists) as central characters. Growing up, her work was profoundly popular with many other girls my age — could her stories have fueled that shared generational dream?

How delightful it is that this discovery came just in time for World Oceans Day tomorrow! To celebrate, consider following the Wildlife Conservation Society here on Medium.

What else we’re reading

• Last year, Jim the AI Whisperer created a mega-hit resource to help anyone detect AI writing — and he identified the use of the word “delve” as one of the biggest tells. In a recent story, he elaborates on why: because machine learning QA tasks are largely outsourced to other countries. “These nations — with their complex historical interactions with English language due to colonial legacies — may overrepresent formal or literary terms like ‘delve’ within their feedback, which the AI systems then adopt disproportionately.”
• I’ve heard that the modern rate of avocado farming is bad for the environment, but it wasn’t until I read Ricky Lanusse’s deep dive on Medium that I really grasped the gravity of the situation. Along with depleting great swaths of Mexico’s rainforests, avocado production is also linked to thousands of mini-earthquakes in the region due the massive extraction of water necessary for production, which rapidly opens up subsoil caverns.
• WNBA rookie Caitlin Clark’s starting salary has been dominating headlines (which is $76k — compare that to the minimum $1.12 million for first-year NBA players), but writer Kerala Taylor wonders if we should broaden the conversation to talk about the general worth of a sports career compared to other women-led professions. “What if the narrative fixated less on what Caitlin Clark is making (or not making) and more on the fact that a rookie male NBA player is deemed by the market to be 39 times more valuable than the care providers who are helping to raise our next generation of children?”

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on apologizing less

Apologizing when you don’t mean it can do way more harm than good. “Not every conversation about a contentious issue needs to include an apology.”

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Harris Sockel

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com