- Dr. Pamela Hallock Muller
- College of Marine Science, University of South Florida
I grew up on the South Dakota prairie, about as far from the ocean as one can get. My family lived on a small ranch so I was surrounded by “natural history”, which is still my passion. We observed the seasonal changes in the night sky, the prairie vegetation, wildlife, and livestock. I still love wide-open spaces, whether prairie or ocean.
In the one-room country school that I attended through eighth grade, our only connection with the outside world was My Weekly Reader, a children’s newspaper. That was where I learned about Sputnik (1957), the International Geophysical Year (1957-58) and Project Mohole (1961), an effort to drill through the Earth’s crust in the eastern Pacific. The prairies were not where I wanted to stay – I originally wanted to be an astronaut, as did thousands of boys and probably a few hundred girls of my generation. While it was an impossible dream for the girls, that didn’t keep me out of every science and math class I could take in high school.
I was a pre-Title IX college student, so I was definitely “the first, the only, or one of the few” women in my science classes at the University of Montana. The invertebrate zoology professor offered a field trip to Puget Sound during a spring tide. My first trip to the ocean was love at first sight. Graduate school in Oceanography was a must to pursue my new interest, but finding one that would accept, let alone provide an assistantship, to a female student from Montana was not easy. The University of Hawaii fortunately did. Speaking of love, I also found my soul mate my senior year at UM, and he too was accepted for graduate school at UH. He studied fish, while I studied foraminifers (forams) that live on reefs and have algal symbionts similar to zooxanthellae in corals.
I have been a professor at the University of South Florida since 1983 (my husband is a researcher at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute). By studying both the geologic record and modern coral reefs and limestones, my graduate students and I gain insight not only into environments of the past and present, but also the effects of human activities on future tropical benthic ecosystems. Our work has implications for cell biology, coral-reef ecology, environmental management, global environmental change, evolution, paleoceanography, sedimentology, and hydrocarbon exploration. I have often used day-boat operations at the NURC-UNCW Key Largo facility since it was established in 1991, participating in an Aquarius Mission as an aquanaut in 1994. My first NURC project began my exploration of decadal-scale changes in reef communities of the Florida Keys using forams as bioindicators. Like corals, forams are very sensitive to effects of pollution, sunlight and ocean acidification; some species are more sensitive than corals, some less. So forams offer a range of responses that aid understanding the responses of corals and reef ecosystems.
