Indianapolis Prize finalist Carl Safina: awe is awesome
The list of accolades for Carl Safina is long. The founder of the Blue Ocean Institute, a nonprofit devoted to marine conservation, has won Guggenheim and Pew fellowships. He's also received a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant.
And no wonder. The man holds a Ph.D. in ecology from Rutgers University and is an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University. He has written more than 150 scientific papers and six popular books about conservation, many of which have won prizes. Now, he is one of the six finalists for the Indianapolis Prize, a $250,000 award that the Indianapolis Zoo gives every other year to an outstanding animal scientist and conservationist.
The winner of the prize will be announced May 13. The Star has been profiling the finalists every Sunday. You can also learn more about Safina on the 5 p.m. newscast Monday on WTHR-13.
Quiz:What endangered animal are you?
Question: What is the most perilous thing you've ever done, and why did you do it?
Answer: Dangling from a rope 300 feet from the top of a 600-foot cliff in Greenland, then realizing the falcon nest was 100 feet to the left, and unclipping myself from the rope to crawl along a ledge so we could place numbered rings on the legs of the falcon chicks. I did it because my partner was over there and could not finish the job without the equipment I was carrying. He violated the first rule of safety, and at his insistence I felt a lot of pressure to follow. I was young. I survived, but this was also the stupidest thing I ever did.
Q. What's the most awe-inspiring thing you've done?
A: Everything from waking up to looking into my dogs' eyes to swimming with giant tuna to watching the sun set to reading about brain cells is awe inspiring. If you're not awe-inspired several times a day, you're not paying attention.
Joel Berger:Man of the muskoxen protects large mammals
Q: Strangest food you ever ate?
A: Meatloaf. I much prefer ground-nesting bees.
Q: How long have you gone without bathing/showering?
A: About three weeks in the Himalayas and maybe a couple of weeks in Africa. Is that enough? Deepest bath: in about 1,000 feet of water a hundred miles from land in the Gulf of Mexico
Carl Jones:Saving species on the brink his specialty
Q: What's the most interesting fact about the animals you study?
A: That all animals are nearly identical in the most important ways, and that we are animals.
Q: What extinct animal do you wish were still alive and why?
A: Passenger pigeons. In 1810 in Kentucky, Alexander Wilson described one "almost inconceivable multitude," of pigeons that rolled overhead all during an afternoon while he was traveling. Based on a pigeon's flight speed and the time they took to pass, he estimated the flock at 240 miles long, containing 2.2 billion birds. Others described flocks taking days to pass, darkening the sun "as by an eclipse," as "abundant as the fish" on the coast, and elsewhere "beyond number or imagination," "in innumerable hordes," and, often simply, "incredible." So — we killed them all.
Russ Mittermeier:Tigers, poisonous frogs no match for donors
Q: What part of the world have you visited that everyone should see?
The Northwest Hawaiian Islands and their vast seabird colonies.
Q: What part of the world have you not visited that you would most like to visit?
A: Central Alaska.
Q: Who should the winner of the next Indianapolis Prize be (yourself excluded)?
A: Pat Wright or Russ Mittermeier.
Q: What's the one thing that people can do to help with animal conservation, particularly for the animals you study?
A: They should imagine all the animals depicted on the walls and toys in their child's nursery, and imagine those animals all vanishing by the time their children decorate the nursery for their own children. Because — that's pretty much what's at stake.
Call Star reporter Shari Rudavsky at (317) 444-6354. Follow her on Twitter: @srudavsky.