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Dr. Linda Walters I grew up in Easton, PA and although I loved trips to the beach, I never considered marine biology as a career until my first year at Bates College in Lewiston, ME. Through my biology classes and through the Outing Club, I participated in many field trips to Maine's spectacular coastline and I decided very quickly that studying the ecology of marine organisms was what I really wanted to do. So, I learned to dive my freshman year, took a 6-week course in tropical marine biology on the island of San Salvador, Bahamas my sophomore year and spent my junior year abroad in the marine science program at the University College of North Wales in Bangor, Wales. All strengthened my interests in the marine sciences. After graduation from Bates, I completed both my M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC. My research focused on various aspects of why sessile invertebrate communities (barnacles, sponges, bryozoans, etc.) look the way they do (i.e. is it due to larval settlement patterns, competition, predation, water flow, etc.). Dr. David Wethey was my major professor for both degrees and he taught me how to design manipulative, underwater experiments to tease apart all these variables to answer specific hypotheses. After completing this research and acting as a volunteer marine biologist for a British youth expedition called Operation Raleigh in Chile, Australia, Alaska and New Zealand, I went to University of Hawaii in Manoa for a post-doctoral fellowship with Drs. Mike Hadfield and Dr. Celia Smith. In Hawaii, my goal was to help understand why so many tropical seaweeds remain free from fouling by sessile invertebrates (a logical extension from my graduate research). In running assays with 50+ species of algae, I found that even the smallest fragments that I placed in petri dishes were frequently able to survive long periods in the laboratory under less-than-optimal conditions. In fact, one group of green algae, the Caulerpales, rapidly put out new attachment structures and continued to grow clonally under these conditions. This observation led to our first Florida NURC dayboat mission in 1994. With Dr. Smith as the principal investigator, we were fortunate to receive additional funding to better understand the biology of tropical green algae from 1997-2000. In 1999-2000, Dr. Kevin Beach and I received money for a complimentary proposal to examine the physiology and ecology of Dictyota, a tropical brown alga genus that now dominates the Florida Keys and overgrows many sponges, corals and algae, including the green alga Halimeda. We are grateful and very excited to have the opportunity to be able to continue this research with the use of saturation and Nitrox diving. When not at NURC, I am now on the Biology faculty at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, FL. I teach introductory biology to freshman majors and a suite of upper-division marine biology classes. My other research at present involves understanding the demise of oyster reefs in the Indian River Lagoon, exploration behaviors of invertebrate larvae when competent to settle, and exotic species invasions. I'm been married to Dr. Paul Sacks for 9 years and our 4.5-year-old son Joshua is our proudest accomplishment.
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