The master of the minke whale.

Do something decadent.

Today is my birthday. On this day for the last 11 years I have received a message telling me to “go do something decadent”. I would always smile at this particular message, I’d see it sent to other people on their birthdays too. Sometimes I would tell my friends the same thing on their birthdays.

This was one of Jon Stern’s things, when you saw those words you knew he was saying them with a flourish in his softly spoken voice and a twinkle in his eye. This is the one thing that I will miss the most today, but regardless I will go out and do something decadent as he would have instructed me to do.

Last week, on the 16 February 2017, we lost Dr. Jonathan Stern at the grand young age of only 62. It was far too soon and has left a gaping void in the many who knew him, including myself.

Jon was a friend to more than I know, he was a respected scientist, a gifted teacher, an influential mentor, and a talented musician with both an appreciation for good music and beautiful guitars. To some he was all these things and more, to others he was a friend or a teacher. But regardless of what one’s connection to Jon was it will leave a profound mark for many years to come.

Jon was not only a gifted scientist he was also a man of great class, a gentle man with a generosity to share his knowledge, his love of good food, and his love of music. Such traits are rare to come by these days, but they are what attracted so many to him.  I cannot begin to write all that Jon was to those who knew him as everyone has their own memories, stories, and experiences. However, I would like to share a little of my experiences and in so doing share his contributions to the world of marine mammal science, particularly the minke whale.

A champion of the minke whale

Jon was a tremendous champion of this often, underappreciated whale and it is because of him that those of us that continue to study the species have come to think about minkes in a different way. Jon would tell me that minkes are not simply the small cousins of the mighty blue whale, they have much much more going on and we have only just begun to scrape the surface. It is Jon who opened this world to me.

Minke surfacing beneath birds off San Juan Island, 2011.

Into the field with a Lévy flier

I first met Jon in 2005 at the Friday Harbor Labs on San Juan Island, in the northwestern corner of Washington State. He was back to continue his minke whale research around the islands. Jon's minke whale project (begun by Eleanor Dorsey back in 1980) is the longest running longitudinal study of the minke whale, if not all baleen whale species. It was also the first study to apply photo-id techniques to a baleen whale—now a commonly applied research tool.

I soon found myself taken onboard as an enthusiastic volunteer, eager to learn what I could. I am not sure what led to us becoming long-term colleagues and friends. I couldn’t code, I am not mathematically gifted, ecology modeling does not come easily to me, and I couldn’t really drive a boat. But regardless of this he let me stick around. Jon addressed my lack of boat driving skills right away, one of my first memories was being ordered into the drivers’ seat of the labs’ motorboat.

He proceeded to teach me how to maneuver through areas with strong currents, ‘always skirt around the flat areas’ he would tell me; ‘those areas are characteristic of upwelling and we don’t want to run into a deadhead’. He taught me how to navigate through the chop of waves so that the ride was smoother, and importantly he taught me how to maneuver around minke whales.  Anyone who has spent any time with these elusive whales knows that this is no easy task.

It didn’t take long before I was hooked on the project, captivated by the discussions that we would have surrounding minke whale ecology, movement patterns, the concept of random walks and Lévy flights in relation to the foraging behaviour of minke whales. Essentially through our ability to track individual minke whales Jon was able to analyze the movement patterns of the whales in the context of optimal search strategies. Minke whales appeared to maximize the number of sites with potential feeding patches they were able to visit by adopting a Lévy flight search strategy.

Though not always able to wrap my head around the models Jon had a way to explaining these complex theories and models that allowed one to enter into his world. To then witness the whales’ search patterns was all the more special.

Only a full frame will do

Over the next decade, I continued to work with Jon on the minke project, during the summers we would spend hours in the small Friday Harbor Labs research boats searching for, and tracking minke whales out on the banks off San Juan Island. Our project mantra was to come home with ‘full-frames’, this referred to the id-shots of the whales that we took when the whales were at the surface. This was something that Ellie had instilled in Jon and Rus Hoelzel (the member of the minke project) when they were volunteers back in the early 1980s.

How to research in style

Jon knew how to do research in style, if not a somewhat unconventional style. One year our research flag was a skull and cross bones, another year a yellow duster attached to a tiki torch. Clad in his oversized red t-shirt, earing dangling from one year, and red bandana wrapped around an often burned head he certainly fitted the description his friend Doug Chadwick had given him -a cross between a retired rock star and a pirate. He lived up to that description well, never arriving on the island without at least 2 guitars in tow.

We never left the dock without a packet of Mint Milanos. At the first sight of a white-cap he would announce that it was time for crab cakes and fluffy ducks and we were beetling back to the dock. Other times, if it was too rough out on the banks we would head off for a tour of the islands ‘on the search for minkes’ though often debating the best and worst of the houses that dotted the west side of San Juan Island.

We seemed to only suffer boat breakdowns on the last day of field work, finding ourselves stuck in the shipping lanes between Salmon Bank and Hein Bank was perhaps the most memorable, and occasionally we would find ourselves having to come to the rescue of others. Jon had a deep respect for the ocean and knew when, and when not to push his luck (I suspect, based on the stories of his days chasing minkes off the California coast, that he had experienced his share of lucky escapes), so he was not impressed by those who did not hold the same respect for boating and the seas.

Over the years, we were stopped by almost every form of enforcement on the water. He always complimented the size of their engines, and never once asked why we had been stopped -a good lesson for anyone that spends any time on the water here!

There were hectic times in the boat as we raced to keep up with a whale, and there were slow times when all the whales seemed to just disappear. During these times, bobbing about out on Hein Bank we dreamed up stories of Bristles (the killer minke), another time it would be something like this:

We would be laughing so hard the tears the streaming.

After a day on the water he would jest with local establishments often providing the name 'Mick Jagger' for reservations, or orders at the Crab Shack. He even assigned his favorite local restaurants as ‘official project restaurants’ -this currently stands as the Backdoor Kitchen here in Friday Harbor (in San Francisco it was Fish in Sausalito). The take home of all this was that research, while serious, should also be fun. This philosophy will follow me as I embark on my future field studies.

Further afield

On occasion I would visit Jon in his home state of California. He drove north to Bodega Bay and Point Reyes (always stopping for the best pie in Sonoma County on the way). He drove me south to Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay. Here, he once sent me out whale watching with hope that I might see fin or blue whales. I saw only killer whales while Jon enjoyed a couple of humpbacks lunge feeding near shore. Typical!

He made me come out to Hawaii one time to see the humpbacks off Maui. He did these things because he believed that I needed to see and experience these places to better understand the creatures that we studied.

Jon always made sure to introduce me to other scientists and friends, people who were also important in his life. I will be forever grateful for this opportunity to expand my networks and sometimes also lasting friendships with individuals who I would never otherwise have had the fortune to meet.

Jon and Christopher Moore hanging out at the SMM conference in San Francisco, December 2015. Jon would have been entertained to hear that I ended up hanging out at the same table with Chris & Flip Nicklin later that day (I don't think either had moved) discussing why people marry.

My times in the field, back at the labs and visiting with Jon in San Francisco taught me just how special both the waters around the San Juans are, and also how special these little whales are. One of things that captivated me (and to this day still does) was that despite the minke being the most common baleen whale in the world and still most hunted, in the Northeast Pacific minkes appeared to be rare. This fascinated me, why were they so rare here? Why didn’t anyone else appear to realize this? Why didn’t this excite people here? One of things that Jon suspected was these animals had always been rare here, this is something that I am also convinced of -especially after my recent research into the historical use of, and hunting of whales by the First Nations of the Washington outer coast and Vancouver Island.

The last days of data

Last summer Jon and I spent hours trawling through the projects photo-id data. We were able to pull out ~30 individual whales (though we have yet to double check the data so expect the number to be somewhere between 25-30 whales). While he was, in his own words ‘dictatorial’ in the naming process, a few of my suggestions were finally accepted. In my eyes, I had made it—a fully-fledged project co-investigator, though in Jon’s eyes I already was.

I only hope I can live up to Jon’s standards in naming future whales. I hope to continue Jon’s work here in the San Juans. My first goals are to publish the papers that we had planned together along with a photo-id guide. Jon’s long-time minke co-investigator here Dr. Rus Hoelzel also plans to publish the papers that he Jon had been working on. In this way we can ensure Jon’s legacy as the world’s leading minke whale expert. Our continuation of Jon’s life’s work is the best tribute that we can give to this gifted, generous, and incredible scientist and friend that we are going to truly miss.

My last photo of Jon. Taken in July 2016 at the Friday Harbor Labs as we worked through a decade of minke whale photo-id data. The FHL were a special place for him and he often regaled me with stories from the early days.

Thank you, Jonny.
I only hope that I can remember all that you taught me, both in science & in life.