Oceanography professor changes perceptions on marine environments

10/24/08 - Kenneth Sherman's office is bustling with activity on a rare warm October afternoon. He keeps busy teaching, conducting research and serving as the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration New England region.A law school student turned biology major, Sherman has been involved in oceanography research for more than half a century.

"I've been with it since the early days, through the creation of NOAA to today," Sherman said. "I've had a continuous career with the federal government; this is my 50th year. I'm a relic."

Beside his NOAA position, Sherman is a professor at the Graduate School of Oceanography, a director at the Narragansett Laboratory, and the head of the Office of Marine Ecosystems Studies in NOAA's New England Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC).

That might sound like a lot but for Sherman it's just a regular day at the office.

"I'd say a typical day is the opportunity to actually deal with the challenges of finding how things are working in the ocean and how we can improve the management and sustainability of resources," he said. "That's quite an opportunity and a privilege [that] doesn't often make itself available to people. [My] job is to deal with the issues of sustaining the fisheries here off the Northeast Shelf and then taking those lessons and applying them to other parts of the world. I don't think it gets any better than that."

Though a typical day might seem stressful, no planners were present on his desk the day of the interview. One giant calendar posted outside of his office is sufficient enough to take care of the housekeeping, he said.

Although managing money is an essential part of leading such an extensive government operation, Sherman said that it is not so bad, "as long as you can demonstrate that the things you're doing have socio-economic benefits."

In regards to the scientific community at large, Sherman said he believes "we're now in a position where we can share our experiences and lessons learned with other parts of the world. In fact, we encourage our scientists to publish their results, not only in scientific periodicals but also in popular kinds of things."

Sherman always held an interest in the ocean, but it wasn't until later when he dropped out of law school that he followed his passion.

Growing up around the Boston area, Sherman was inspired by the Boston fish piers.

"There was something sort of exotic about those vessels," he said. "All I could see was a dried net and a boat tied to a dock."

Later, as a student at Suffolk University Law School, he was inspired by a professor who "convinced me that studying to be a lawyer was going to be a dull, dry sort of thing and biology was going to be much more interesting and exciting. It was so dynamic that I just dropped the law and took every course they had in biology."

After receiving a degree in biology, he taught at an ecological sanctuary in western Massachusetts and took a job with the Audubon Society.

"Audubon contracted with the various school districts and they provided young innocent people like myself, and sent us around to spread the word about natural resources and ecology in those early days," he said.

During the late 1950s there was "a great scurrying around for anybody that could read, write and think about the oceans, because there wasn't a great big pool of experienced people," Sherman said.

Soon after, Sherman received a telegram offering him a position as a federal fisheries researcher in Woods Hole, Mass. He was responsible for finding out where every fisherman that docked at the Boston Fish pier had caught his catch.

"It took about six months before they would talk to me, because I represented the federal government and they have a great suspicion against the feds," he said. [But] because I was out there in minus 20-degree weather trying to measure fish, they finally decided, well, maybe we can talk to this guy after all."

Sherman left Woods Hole after about 18 months and returned to Rhode Island, where he received his master's degree on a Navy scholarship and specialized in the study of copepods and zooplankton.

"I was fascinated by how little was known by the public of the importance of these copepods and other zooplankton," he said. "You can call them weird, but I would call them wild and wonderful."

Today, Sherman travels the world as part of NOAA's program for the maintenance and preservation of global Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs). LMEs include rivers, estuaries and ocean waters that contain 90 percent of the world's fish catch. All of these areas are polluted or otherwise damaged.

During the past 30 years, Sherman has co-edited 13 volumes about LMEs and published 42 of his own LME articles. He has traveled to Malaysia, France, Iceland, Korea, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, Sweden and Thailand.

All told, NOAA spends approximately $1.8 billion in the 64 LME projects worldwide.

Henry Bigelow was the first to introduce Large Marine Ecosystems to the scientific community in 1900. The Harvard University professor sampled plankton and studied populations of zooplankton in the Gulf of Maine, Georgia's Banks and numerous areas along the Mid-Atlantic Coast. He was the one who "planned how to treat the ocean as a region of the globe; he didn't use the term 'ecosystem' that term didn't come into use until much later . but that's what he was referring to," Sherman said.

Prior to Bigelow's death, he and Sherman would occasionally meet at various overseas scientific meetings. Bigelow's ideas eventually formed the basis of NOAA..

"We took his idea, which was to examine the biology, physics, and chemistry of a piece of ocean and look at the interrelationships," Sherman said. "This later became known as marine ecology."