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WATER IS LIFE

Alumnus and preservationist Wallace J. Nichols E
makes it easy to care about our Earth

by Margaret Regan Erich Schlegel photos

s surely as the sun sets every day over the Pacific Ocean, marine biologist Wallace J.
ANichols ’03 gets asked the same question whenever he gives a public talk.

“Why in the world did you go to the Arizona desert to study sea turtles?”

Nichols — an unconventional author and wild water advocate who calls himself a “silo-
busting, entrepreneurial scientist” — has a humorous reply at the ready.

“Well, I learned to scuba dive in quarries in Indiana,” he says. “So, of course, I went to
study sea turtles in Arizona.”

It’s all true. An East Coast boy who always evolutionary biology in 2003. He studied
loved the water, Nichols first strapped on a scuba under a powerhouse trio of experts in the
tank and mask in the deep limestone quarries of ecology of the Southwest U.S. and Baja
the Hoosier State, where he was studying biology California: Donald Thomson, a specialist
and Spanish at DePauw University. in the reef fish of the Sea of Cortez; Cecil
And he went to the University of Arizona to Schwalbe, a world expert on desert tortoises;
study sea turtles for two very good reasons. and global tortoise authority John Erickson.
“There’s pretty good access to the ocean and Nichols had loved turtles of all kinds from
sea turtles from Tucson,” Nichols says by phone an early age.
from his home in Monterey, on California’s “I grew up near the water,” he says. “I was
central Pacific Coast. In a mere four hours, an always in the water,” in rivers, lakes and the
enterprising grad student in the desert city can open sea.
reach the northern point of the turtles’ feeding Born in New York, he was raised in the
grounds in the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. far northeast corner of New Jersey, near the
“If you want,” he adds, “you can drive every mighty Hudson River, flowing south to the
weekend to scuba dive.” Atlantic. Nichols spent his childhood summer
And the university “has a long history of vacations with his family along the Atlantic
graduating students in sea turtles,” says Nichols, Coast, from Cape Cod to the Jersey shore to
who got his doctorate in wildlife ecology and the Chesapeake Bay.

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