Dan Heath: Years ago, Jessica Pate got a phone call from a shark scientist she knew. He'd found something interesting.

Jessica Pate: He was like, "Hey, we just had a dead manta ray wash up." Or someone towed it to shore, actually. He was like, "I thought you should know. We're about to cut it up for samples."

Dan: Jessica is a marine biologist. She studies manta rays off the coast of Florida. She knew this was a very rare find.

Jessica: They're negatively buoyant, so if they stop swimming, they sink. If they're to die offshore, they sink. They're made of cartilage, so they decompose really rapidly.

Dan: Jessica had been looking for an intact dead manta ray. She had a colleague who was trying to prove that the manta rays in the western Atlantic were a new species. Without the body, it would be a lot harder to prove.

Jessica: I was like, "Wait, wait, wait. Please, please don't cut into it." I was like, "Just let me get there." I was on the boat when I got the call, it took me like two hours to get down there of them sitting and watching this dead manta ray. I get there and convince them to like, "Please, let's not cut into it. Let's just take measurements and photos." We do all that, and then we finally find a place that we can keep the dead manta ray, which is basically in a freezer where they store dead whales. My partner was out of the country at the time, so I had my intern go steal his truck. We put this dead manta ray in the back of his pickup truck and drove two hours down I-95.

Dan: To the whale freezer.

Jessica: To the whale freezer. We had to stop and get gas at one point, and we just left this gigantic pool of blood behind us. I was like, "People are going to be wondering what happened at this gas station." Eventually, we got it to the whale freezer at 9:00 PM that night. Me and my intern both had manta blood in our hair. We'd been wet in our bathing suits all day long, but we were so glad to get it there. I was like, "Oh, we'll just keep it there for a couple of weeks. We figure out where it's going to go."

Six months later they call me, and they're like, "Jessica, you've got to move this manta ray out of your freezer." We did, and it now lives in the Smithsonian Museum to be used as site material to describe the new species.

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Dan: I'm Dan Heath and this is What It's Like to Be. In every episode of the show, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, a nurse, a lifeguard, a piano teacher. We want to know about the highs and lows of their work, what makes it meaningful to them. Today we'll ask Jessica Pate what it's like to be a marine biologist. We'll talk about what it's like to swim with manta rays, why people romanticize marine biology, and how using drones changed her work. Stay with us.

Dan: I want to make sure I'm tuned in to what a manta ray is because I think what I'm picturing in my head is actually a stingray. Are stingrays and manta rays connected, related?

Jessica: This is the very first slide of every PowerPoint presentation I give, is the difference between a manta ray and a stingray, because I'll get people being like, "A manta ray is what killed Steve Irwin." I'm like, "No, no, no, they're very different animals. While, yes, they are related, they're both rays. They both have a skeleton that's made of cartilage. That's the same material that's on the tip of your nose if you press it. Stingrays live in the sand. They're living on the bottom. They have a stinging barb that they can use when predators try to attack from above them.

Manta rays, they're swimming all the time. They're out swimming in the water. They have to keep swimming in order to breathe. They also have no stinging barb, they don't have a way that they can hurt you.

Dan: Check this out, manta rays are born measuring 6 feet across.

Jessica: Yes, even the ones that are 8 to 10 feet are still juveniles. The adults are getting over 20 feet across. They can get that big.

Dan: 20 feet across, wow.

Jessica: Think about the room you're in and think about if a manta ray would fit in there.

Dan: Paint us a picture of the manta ray. You told us how enormous they are. What are their other distinctive characteristics?

Jessica: They have a diamond-shaped body and they're all black on top. They'll have some little white pattern on top, but mostly all black. They have two fins coming out of the front of their face, which are called cephalic fins. It's why historically they were called devil rays or devil fish. If you go back-

Dan: Devil rays.

Jessica: -to the newspapers from the 1920s, it would be like devilfish. They're really terrified of them. That's because they look like horns.

Dan: This is probably the right the wrong way to phrase this, but what personalities do they have?

Jessica: No, that's a great question. That's one reason manta rays are very popular with scuba divers, is because they can be quite curious. They're known to come and inspect divers and see what's going on. The very first time I got in the water with a manta ray, I convinced a friend to take me on their boat and try to find one, and we did. What this manta ray did to me was it flipped its body upside down so that it was swimming upside down and just hovered below me for five minutes, just looking me in the eye.

Dan: Wow.

Jessica: I have since had encounters like that many times. I just had no idea that anything like that was possible. It sounds cheesy to say this, but I fell in love there, and I was like, "Whoa, these are the animals I want to be working with."

Dan: Yet that curiosity has got to be uncommon for sea creatures. No? To hang around and inspect you for five minutes, that's surprising.

Jessica: One of my favorite facts about manta rays is they have the largest brain of any fish. They don't just have a big brain because they're a giant creature. If you look at their cousin, the whale shark, which is the biggest fish in the sea, they are 10 times the size of manta ray, but they have a third of the brain size. We think manta rays are really intelligent.

Dan: There was another day when Jessica felt that same sense of connection to a manta ray. It was one who had gotten tangled up in a fishing line.

Jessica: She had this fishing line wrapped all around her body, and she just let me dive down multiple times for 30 minutes and cut off all this line around her. It's one of these interactions where it's hard to explain because she just swam in so slow circles below me. She could have easily swam away if she wanted. It did seem like she was choosing to be there. Then when I was done, she swam away. I don't know how to explain that interaction scientifically, but there do seem to be some of these amazing interactions where they seem to facilitate the encounter.

Dan: It's striking what you said about them having the biggest brains of any fish. How do we not know more about this species given that?

Jessica: People ask me this question all the time. I think it's just because they're expensive to study. it requires a lot of boat hours. At least here in Florida, I have to put a lot of time into finding them. I've gotten a lot better at it over time, but when I first started out, the first survey we ever did, I found two manta rays. Then we went a month without seeing one. It was hard to learn about them and figure out how to study them.

Dan: Have you gotten to know individual manta rays, like giving them names and so forth?

Jessica: Yes, for sure. What's sad for me is since we work in this nursery habitat with juveniles, we're starting to see a pattern where we see the same individuals for about two to three years, maybe four years if we're lucky. Then they leave, which is really sad for me because I get really attached to some of these manta rays. Two of our favorites from the past two years are named Lizard and Cricket. Both of these mantas have been hit by boats, both have been entangled in fishing line. Cricket is missing so much of her body. She's missing half of her wingtip on one side.

Dan: Oh my God.

Jessica: I almost cried when I saw them this year. We've only seen them once this year and they were together, but they didn't have any new injuries. I was so happy to see them looking healthy. I don't know if I'll see them again this year. That could be the last time I see them until I figure out where their adult habitats are, and then maybe I'll find them again.

Dan: Give us a slice of life. What did you do at work today?

Jessica: I started my day today in a small single-engine plane. We do aerial surveys looking for manta rays twice a month. We did our aerial survey, and I saw some manta rays, but it was too rough to go out on the boat. Me and my partner took the drone to the beach and he droned for the manta rays while I swam 100 yards offshore in 4-foot seas to go find the manta ray.

Dan: Oh wait, so you saw them from the air and then later you landed, got on the beach, and went back to where you'd seen them?

Jessica: Yes.

Dan: Wow. What were you trying to accomplish once you found them?

Jessica: Each manta ray has a unique spot pattern on its belly. It's just like a fingerprint for humans. If we get a photo of that spot pattern on their belly, we know which individual manta ray it is. That's a big part of our research, is seeing which individuals are in this area.

Dan: You're trying to compile a portrait of the manta ray community.

Jessica: Yes, exactly.

Dan: How many are there in the community that you're studying or do you have a sense of that?

Jessica: We've been doing this project for about eight years and on the southeast coast of Florida, we have about 200 individuals in our database. What's cool about South Florida is that we're seeing only baby manta rays or juvenile manta rays. We think this is a nursery habitat where they can spend some time as babies before they grow up and go off to their adult habitats.

Dan: That's part of what you're going to learn, is do they migrate to these other locations as they age?

Jessica: Yes, exactly, and where are the manta rays giving birth? No one has ever seen a manta ray give birth in the wild. We have-

Dan: Are you serious?

Jessica: -no idea where it happens. Yes.

Dan: Wow. Would that be a holy grail for your research, is if you've managed to find that and study it?

Jessica: Absolutely. I think if I ever figured it out, I might just retire and not tell anyone about it and just keep it my secret.

Dan: Hey, folks, Dan here. I was looking at the download numbers for the show, and I came across something that shocked me a little. The episode with the lowest number of downloads is actually our first episode, The Stadium Beer Vendor. Now, I guess in one way that makes sense, because with each episode, we've picked up more and more listeners. Maybe, of course, the first one would be lower, but here's why that's a problem, because that episode is my all-time favorite. Same for Matt Purdy, the show's producer. It's his, too.

If you like the show, let me beg you to go back and listen to that one. I promise you're going to like it. It will surprise you. In the meantime, let's get back to marine biology. Let me back up a step because I know manta rays are your specialty, of course, but how did you get there? What was the first time you saw a manta ray?

Jessica: I got started in marine biology. I graduated from the University of North Carolina with my undergraduate degree, and then I moved down to Florida to work on sea turtle nesting beaches. What working on the nesting beach involves is getting up at sunrise and riding up and down the ATV on the beach, and you're counting tracks from the turtles because the moms crawl up on the beach and lay the eggs in the sand. You're collecting all the data from the nesting turtles that laid their eggs the previous night.

I would be out on the beach all day, every day. I started to notice that every now and then I would look over and I would see a manta ray swimming by in like 3 feet of water. I was just amazed. These are animals that people fly halfway across the world to go scuba diving with, and it seemed they were in the Florida waters, but no one knew anything about them.

Dan: Am I right that manta rays are an endangered species?

Jessica: Yes, they are listed endangered globally. Manta rays have what we consider a very conservative life history. I like to say that they have a reproductive strategy more like us and then they do like a tuna, like a fish that's going to spawn a billion eggs. Manta rays are more like us in that they have a long gestation, they're pregnant for an entire year, and they produce one large offspring. Then they'll take a couple of years off between producing each offspring because it's very energetically expensive for them to do so.

They're putting all their eggs into these really big baby manta rays. What that means, if there's any pressure to their population, they do not recover very quickly. They can be fished out quite quickly from places.

Dan: Is there a conservation angle to your work? Part of what you do it's clear is just the pure science of learning for learning's sake, but it also seems like at a certain point, you would feel some degree of protection or advocacy for the manta rays.

Jessica: Absolutely. I think this is something that has changed in science over time, but as the situation in the world gets worse environmentally, I think scientists have to become conservation advocates just because we're documenting all these things going wrong and you can't just sit by and do nothing about it.

Dan: I asked her if it was hard to keep her spirits up given the threats mantas are facing.

Jessica: It's tough sometimes. I have a tough time maintaining a positive attitude with what we see in the ocean and with climate change. Sometimes it doesn't feel very hopeful at all. What helps me is to look to older mentors and scientists, especially Jane Goodall. I feel like every time I'm having a bad day, I just think about what Jane Goodall is doing. She's out there 80 years old, she travels like 200 days out of the year speaking, to get people interested in conservation and spread the word that she's put her whole life into it. I'm like, "If Jane Goodall can do this, and so can you. Just take it one day at a time and do what you can do."

Dan: Jessica said that the biggest threats to manta rays are getting entangled by nets, being hit by boats, and more than anything, fishing. Sometimes they're killed intentionally. Their gills are prized in traditional Chinese medicine. Other times they're caught accidentally by fishermen catching other things like shrimp. I asked her if there were potential solutions to that last threat.

Jessica: We only really recently identified this problem in the last year or two. We're still working on solutions. One of the thing is we have to collect enough data to figure out where the mantas are to make informed management practices. One of the things the federal government has hired us to do is to go to the mouth of the Mississippi and tag manta rays, which if you ever asked me like where I thought I'd be doing manta research, the mouth of the Mississippi River was not a place I had on my bingo card. It's very murky. We have to stop working because the manta rays will be in the big shipping lanes. It's a crazy place to work.

Dan: How do you tag a manta ray?

Jessica: We use a pole spear and put a little plastic dart into their dorsal musculature.

Dan: The tag, what does it communicate with?

Jessica: There's a couple of different kinds of tags. One satellite tag will give you data in real time, but to give you data in real-time, the tag has to break the surface. We haven't had a lot of luck with those tags on manta rays. The other kinds of tags stay on the manta rays for six months. Then they pop off after six months and then send all their data to the satellites. Those are the tags we typically use.

Dan: Oh, wow. I had no idea such a thing existed. What makes it pop off after six months?

Jessica: There's a corrodible pin on there. The pin is programmed to corrode in six months.

Dan: After six months, it flows to the surface, sends its information, and the information is all of the places the manta ray has been in the intervening half year?

Jessica: Yes. It's the location, the temperature, and depths that they dive.

Dan: That is totally fascinating.

Jessica: Yes. It's great when it works well. It's not without technological issues.

Dan: Speaking of technology, two of the key tools that Jessica uses are a boat and a drone, and both of them are subject to the whims of the weather.

Jessica: My whole life is weather-dependent. I don't make plans a week in advance, or more than a week in advance, because I don't know what the weather is going to be.

Dan: What are the right conditions for study? Is it just obvious stuff like no storms or are there more subtle things you have to watch for?

Jessica: Storms are a problem, but it's more about the wind and the sea state, and it being too rough out there to fly the drone and operate the boat. Storms usually, they'll fly past or we can avoid them. It's more about the sea state and being able to get out there. This time of year, we can have a hurricane come through and that can keep us off the water for a month or so.

Dan: I'm interested in the drone aspect of the work. I imagine that's relatively new to the field. How do you use drones in the work?

Jessica: We did not use drones in the beginning of our project, and now we use them almost exclusively to locate manta rays. We fly them from the boat, we catch them in our hands on the boat. We use them for everything. I wrote a whole scientific paper just about behavior observed from a drone of manta rays.

Dan: I bet that helps so much just to turn it less into a needle in a haystack thing.

Jessica: Oh, absolutely. It's also less invasive because to get footage in the water, you're having to get close enough to where that manta can see you to get footage of it. From the drone, you're able to film natural behavior like what happens when no one is in the water. The things I've been able to see from it are absolutely amazing. I'm obsessed with it.

Dan: Do most marine biologists pick a particular organism to specialize with the way you've delved into manta rays? Is that how it works?

Jessica: You absolutely don't have to. Some people definitely do because people will ask me what I study, and I'm like, "I'm studying everything about the manta rays," just because we're trying to learn as much as we can. Say someone could be like a reproductive biologist and study the reproductive biology of sharks. It doesn't matter which species of shark, but they'll just look at how different sharks reproduce and compare those. You definitely don't have to study just one taxa. I've already spread out to studying another ray species called guitarfish, which I've become a little obsessed with as well.

Dan: What's a guitarfish?

Dan: Oh, they're these adorable little ray species. They look like sharks because they have two fins on their back, but they have these little triangle spade heads. The ones that we see are about a foot and a half long. I got interested in them because I was snorkeling on the little reef by my house just for exercise. I started seeing guitarfish and I just started collecting data. Now we have 400 guitarfish encounters in our database. I have three grad students working on projects. These little things where I'm like, "I'm just going to see what's going on," and then they explode into something else.

Dan: Something like that where you have this lucky encounter, and then you start formulating research questions, what happens after that? What's the process of forming those questions into a study that's staffed and funded and so forth?

Jessica: To start a project on something new is you're going to formulate scientific questions. Before you do that, you also need to see what research is already out there. For example, with these guitarfish, I saw that there was literally only two papers published on this species and they were from 15 years ago. Then I find that we have a species that we know very little about, but we know that it's in danger of extinction. You go and apply for grants to study that and you show like, "Hey, there's this species that we don't really know anything about. I know how to find them and study them and can answer some of these questions that'll keep these species from being data deficient."

Dan: Part of your job is to raise the money needed to address these questions, huh?

Jessica: Absolutely. It's my least favorite part of the job. I don't like it. [chuckles]

Dan: What is involved with that? Is it writing grants laboriously? Are you making presentations? How does it work?

Jessica: Grants is the way we fund most of our research activities. Our larger nonprofit, a lot of the grants, you have to use those monies for very specific purposes. I use this money to buy these tags and this boat fuel. It's helpful if you can get money from private donors or from the corporate arena that give you more money to be like, "Hey, you can use this money how fit to run your organization."

Dan: You identify a question of interest, you raise some money, and then what's the next step after that? Do you form a project team and staff it?

Jessica: Staff it, that's funny. My team here in Florida is so small.

Dan: You turn to the two people next to you and say, "Hey, will you help me with this guitarfish thing?"

Jessica: Yes. One of my major problems is that I have more ideas than I can physically accomplish myself. With the guitarfish, I turned to a collaborator at the University of Miami. She had some very qualified grad students who are now working on some of these projects, which is a great way to get some shorter-term research projects done because grad students have to do something for their thesis in order to graduate and these make great projects for them to get done.

Dan: They work cheap.

Jessica: Yes.

[laughter]

Dan: Their best qualification.

Jessica: [laughs] I was once a grad student myself.

Dan: You put your time in. Yes, it's fair. Cycle of life. I wanted to run this one thing by you. I feel like marine biology as a profession just has this halo of romanticism around it that I don't totally understand. My theory is that if you went to high school students and had them reel off all the professions they could name, I think they would probably name about 20. One of them would be marine biology, even though it's probably like point 0.002% of the world's jobs or something. Do you agree with that? If so, how did marine biology come to have this reverence attached to it?

Jessica: That's an interesting question. I do agree that that's what most people would say, because every time I tell someone I'm a marine biologist, I would say 50% of people say, "That's what I wanted to do when I was a kid," or, "That's what I wanted to do in college."

Dan: No kidding.

Jessica: Yes, you always hear that. I don't know if it's maybe pop culture or movies romanticizing the marine biologist, which is funny because I wasn't one of those people. I had no idea what I wanted to do.

Dan: You would think it would be zoologist or something, with people just liking cheetahs and giraffes and lions. It's just interesting to me that it's marine biologists that seems to have this special hold on us.

Jessica: For me, what got me interested in it was seeing Free Willy, was the movie that captivated me as a child. I wanted to be an orca trainer when I was younger because I saw Free Willy and really, just wanted to like interact with a whale every day would be amazing.

Dan: I wonder if that's what's underneath. I wonder if when people think marine biology, they think, "I'm going to be swimming with dolphins and whales."

Jessica: I think that's probably a big part of it. It's illegal to swim with dolphins and whales in the United States.

Dan: Is it?

Jessica: You're not going to be able to do that. Yes.

Dan: Oh, I thought there were theme parks where they would charge you to do that.

Jessica: There are some that were grandfathered in. The Marine Mammal Protection Act is from the '70s. Some of those parks got grandfathered in, but in the wild, you're not allowed to have tours where you can go swim with them.

Dan: Jessica, we end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here we go. What is the most insulting thing you could say about a marine biologist's work?

Jessica: I don't know. One of the things in conservation scientists that you can say that's pretty insulting is to accuse someone of being a parachute scientist, which is a term that's come around fairly recently, which refers to typically someone from the developed world who pops into a developing country, say, "I'm just going to study this shark species for a week, but not include any local scientists or talk to the community or do anything like that." Which has become more and more frowned upon in science, which is a good thing so that people aren't just going into other communities and being like, "This is what you should be doing," without consulting the people who live there.

Dan: What's a tool specific to your profession that you really like using?

Jessica: The drone is the first thing I would say because I use it every day. I feel like it's probably my most useful tool. The other thing could possibly be my free diving fins, which are these really long fins that help me swim fast. They are always in my car because you never know when I might need to go straight to the ocean.

Dan: I love that. I just love the image. You've always got your fins in the car.

Jessica: I've definitely gone swimming for mantas in jean shorts and a normal shirt with my fins mask on before. [laughs]

Dan: You had to have an emergency swim.

Jessica: Yes.

Dan: What's a sound specific to your profession that you're likely to hear?

Jessica: I think one of my favorites is just the sound of the reefs. Jacques Cousteau, one of his first books was called The Silent World about the ocean being silent, but it's actually quite like a noisy environment of all the fish eating algae off the coral or shrimps popping their little claws. You hear all these just little background noises and when we're doing our guitarfish circles, it's just a very relaxing sound to me.

Dan: What is an aspect of your job that you consistently savor?

Jessica: Oh man, just being in the water. I was thinking about it today while I was waiting for the manta ray to swim by. I was out in really rough seas, but just being in the water, it's scientifically shown to lower your blood pressure, calm you, and you feel so much better being out in the ocean.

Dan: Who is the best-known marine biologist would you say?

Jessica: Best-known marine biologist, it's probably, at least in our community, Sylvia Earle. She was the first woman that headed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She's known as Her Deepness because she has gone in submarines down to the depths of the oceans, and she's just an overall badass.

Dan: That is the best nickname I've ever heard, Her Deepness.

Jessica: She's still 80 years old and out there pounding the pavement all the time to make conservation efforts keep going. I look at women like them and they really just show me the path forward. You just got to keep trying.

Dan: Jessica Pate is a marine biologist who studies manta rays in Florida. I was struck by her story about how early in her career she's combing the beaches for turtle tracks and she happens to notice manta rays in the ocean. She gets interested, has that experience where one of them seems to swim with her, and boom, she's in it. For other people, that day swimming with the manta ray might have been a fun story to tell at a cocktail party. For Jessica, it's different. She organizes research, she raises the funds, she makes stuff happen.

There can be a big gap between inspiration and action. We've probably all got friends who are dreamers, full of new inspirations, but never able to translate them into action. Jessica is great at closing that gap. Somebody calls and says, "We got a dead manta ray," boom, she's on it. Drops everything, gets it to the whale freezer. She's diving one day and spots a guitarfish, pokes around in the research, discovers it's understudied and boom, activates some studies. Inspiration to action.

A few episodes back I was commenting on the life insurance salesman's secret weapon, his discipline. How would we talk about what Jessica is doing here? Some kind of scrappiness, activation energy? Some jobs are so structured that you don't need much of that quality, but for Jessica, it's foundational. Turning curiosity into scientific research, learning to drive a boat and fly a drone, applying for grants, and forming a bond with an endangered species. Folks, that's what it's like to be a marine biologist. This show was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. Take care.