In the footsteps of James Clark Ross: initiator of science in the Ross Sea, Antarctica

Herein, I recount an incredible period of multidisciplinary, multifaceted, multinational, cutting-edge marine research that persisted in McMurdo Sound, Ross Sea, Antarctica, from the 1960s to about the early 2000s. It was inspiring and got me started. A cadre of researchers and their students and colleagues achieved what today is known as a “Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program,” but without the formal structure demanded for LTERs. In a way, it progressed from the scientific efforts that had been accomplished during the “Heroic age” of Antarctic exploration, in which McMurdo Sound played a huge part. That initial effort began with James Clark Ross, searching for the magnetic pole in the 1840s, through to E. Shakleton, searching for the geographic pole in the 1910s. Covered more recently by a succession of researchers was oceanography and glaciology, primary and secondary production, and food web dynamics at all levels from the benthos to midwater processes, including top predators—both bottom-up and top-down community processes. The effort persisted for decades somewhat by chance, or perhaps mutual admiration, with more than me being inspired. Sad to say, this provisional LTER is now gone, as funding and resources have been directed elsewhere. I am hugely thankful that I could take part in and be inspired by the earlier biophysical McMurdo Sound effort. This “LTER” that got me started led to my involvement in long-term, interdisciplinary research in the central California Current, centered around the Farallon Islands, and then to multidisciplinary investigations of the Southern Ocean marginal ice zone (AMERIEZ), and of the California Current food web through North Pacific GLOBEC. Current emphasis in marine bird and mammal research is returning to autecology studies of single species, especially in the use of micro-electronic devices applied to sea creatures. Thus, it is the study of marine species without the wet ocean involved. Lots learned, but without much in the way of ecological context, e.g. prey dynamics, competitors, and facilitators.