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Dr. Mark Erdmann
Dr. Mark Erdmann was born on July 4, 1968 in Schenectady, New York, but soon thereafter moved to Greenville, South Carolina. While growing up in South Carolina (and spending summers in Florida), Mark nurtured what was to become a life-long interest in the ocean. Mark attended high school in Cincinnati, Ohio, swimming and playing water polo for Sycamore High School. As an undergraduate, Mark attended Duke University in North Carolina, majoring in biology and spending a summer studying and working at the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort. After graduating from Duke, Mark spent 5 months in Madagascar and Kenya studying rain forest ecology before entering the Integrative Biology PhD program at University of California, Berkeley in the laboratory of Dr. Roy Caldwell. After a year of classes at Berkeley, Mark traveled to Sulawesi, Indonesia, for 4 years of fieldwork studying the ecology, distribution and bioindicator potential of Indonesian coral reef stomatopod (mantis shrimp) assemblages. During this time he logged over 1500 dives on Indonesian reefs and described 10 new species of stomatopod. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 1997, Dr. Erdmann returned to Indonesia with an NSF International Postdoctoral Fellowship in coral reef ecology and conservation that was interrupted by the "unexpected" discovery by he and his wife of a new species of coelacanth fish, Latimeria menadoensis. For the next two years, Dr. Erdmann's time was divided between studying stomatopod ecology, documenting destructive fishing practices on Indonesian reefs, and working to set up a conservation framework for the newly-discovered Indonesian coelacanth. During this time he was fortunate to be able to join Dr. Hans Fricke's JAGO submersible expedition in search of the Indonesian coelacanths, where he made 5 submersible dives to over 1200 feet depth. The coelacanth conservation work naturally led into Dr. Erdmann's current
position as the marine protected areas advisor for USAID's Natural Resource
Management Project in Bunaken National Marine Park in North Sulawesi.
His current job involves working with government officials and local fishing
communities and watersports operators within the park to foster better
cooperation in marine conservation efforts while strengthening enforcement
against destructive fishing practices such as bomb and cyanide fishing.
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