Conversations with Maya: Kelly Benoit-Bird

Maya Ajmera, President & CEO of Society for Science and Executive Publisher of Science News, chatted with Kelly Benoit-Bird, Senior Scientist and Science Chair at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Benoit-Bird is an alumna of the 1994 International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), a program of Society for Science.

What are your favorite memories from ISEF? I believe your project title was “Sounds Created by Captive Female Bottlenose Dolphins.”

My favorite memories were about meeting different people from around the country and the world. Up to that point, I really hadn’t had the opportunity to travel. ISEF exposed me to different cultures and opportunities that I hadn’t thought about previously. It was really exciting. Before attending ISEF, I had been accepted to Brown University, and I was excited to meet other finalists who would be studying there as well.

I won a special award from the Acoustical Society of America, and one of the judges I met went on to be a mentor during my undergraduate career. Today, I am on the board of the Acoustical Society of America.

ISEF provided me with opportunities that I didn’t know at the time were going to be opportunities. As I look back, I see how much of a foundation ISEF helped me to build. As a first generation college student, I didn’t have connections that I could rely on. ISEF really helped.

What inspired you to pursue a career in marine biology?

When I was in fourth grade, I visited a marine park where I learned about echolocation, which is when animals locate objects through reflected sound. The idea that some animals perceive their worlds in completely different ways than we do was fascinating. That is what inspired my ISEF project and has been an important part of my career.

You have been at MBARI since 2016. What makes it unique?

MBARI’s mission is to advance marine science and technology to understand our changing ocean. Our founder, Silicon Valley innovator and philanthropist David Packard, created MBARI as a new kind of research institute, one that brought together science, engineering and marine operations and access to the ocean. We work in collaborative teams to bring together different perspectives, technologies and approaches to understanding the ocean.

Many might say, “I have this tool, what can I do with it?” Instead, we can say, “I have this question, how do I address it?” Even if the tools to answer the questions aren’t available yet, we work together to come up with the ways to get us there. A lot of my work involves developing new technologies and new approaches to getting sonars, cameras and other sensors into the ocean.

In your research, you’ve developed innovative acoustic techniques to study the behavior of deep-sea organisms. How do these methods work, and what are their advantages over traditional observation methods?

Most of my work involves using sonar — we transmit a very short pulse of sound and then listen to how it reflects off things in the environment. Because fish don’t reflect sonar well, it is a difficult technology to use to figure out what is happening in the ocean. I develop tools and figure out how to get them into the ocean so that we can use sound to map life. We want to understand where food is, where predators are and how organisms interact with each other in areas that we can’t see.

That’s the advantage. Even with a lot of light, a camera can only see about 10 feet in the ocean. By using sound, we can “see” hundreds or maybe even thousands of meters.

What is one of the most surprising findings from your work in the deep ocean?

One of the very first behavior-focused topics I studied was diel vertical migration, which is the daily movement of marine animals between the ocean’s surface and its deeper layers. Ocean animals hide in deep, dark waters during the day and then go up to the surface at night where there’s enough food to survive. As the sun starts to rise, they migrate back down.

We tended to think about this as a totally light-driven process, where animals just move up at night and move down during the day. End of story. But we’ve learned that the animals aren’t preprogrammed to do this. They are very sensitive to benefits and risks. If there aren’t any predators around, they feed at the surface and don’t go deep. If predators are present, we can see that they respond very quickly. And if there is no food at the surface, they stay deep because it’s not worth taking the risk of going to the surface.

What do you feel is the most misunderstood aspect of climate change as it relates to the ocean?

I think most people don’t understand how much work the ocean has already done for us, in terms of protecting the planet from the worst consequences of climate change.

The planet would be much warmer and atmospheric carbon dioxide would be twice as high today if it wasn’t for the ocean.

It takes up about a quarter of the carbon emissions we put in the atmosphere each and every year.

From competing at ISEF to being a first-generation college student to becoming an expert and leader in your field, you are a trailblazer. What advice do you have for young people just beginning their STEM journey?

Always stay focused on what’s exciting to you. It’s easy to get distracted by what other people say is important, but you do better if you come back to your own curiosity. That is how I have focused my career.

A lot of folks think about STEM as a stuffy, white lab coat kind of science, right? I don’t. Science is a creative pursuit, and I don’t know any scientist who doesn’t have a creative outlet in their life that they have incorporated into their science. I recommend that today’s students bring their whole selves to their science — all of the skills and strengths that they have will be valuable to working in STEM.

You received the MacArthur Fellowship in 2010. How did that impact your life?

It was life-altering. The freedom it afforded me was transformative. For five years, they provided me with funding that was the equivalent of my salary. Instead of saying, “I have to take this project because I need the funding,” I was able to follow my passion. I could decide what questions were the most interesting without the stress of failure hanging over me.

I ended up realizing how important that was for the way that I wanted to do science. I wanted to take risks. That was part of the reason that I moved to MBARI — risk-taking is part of our DNA here.

What books are you reading, and what books inspired you when you were young?

When I was young, I read absolutely everything I could get my hands on. I loved to be exposed to things I didn’t even know I could be interested in. I also really loved Nancy Drew books. I still enjoy reading books in series and mysteries. At the moment, I am reading An Immense World by Ed Yong, which is all about the different ways that animals perceive their environments. It’s always fun to be a consumer of science communication.

There are many challenges facing the world today. What’s keeping you up at night?

I think what’s keeping me up at night is inertia. Can we come up with the willpower and the desire to move forward on issues that are really threatening all of us, like climate change? Are we going to move fast enough to keep us from experiencing the absolute worst possible impacts?

It’s an interesting problem because it’s not something that I feel like I can do much about, and maybe that’s why it keeps me up, right? This isn’t a science question. The science has been answered. This is a political question. Our goal as scientists is to provide information and to share it in a way that can be understood. MBARI shares our research, technology and data outside our walls so policy makers and resource managers can make informed decisions about the ocean and our big blue planet.