ANN CLEVELAND

Chair of the Corning School and Associate Professor of Marine Biology BA - Zoology, University of New Hampshire; MS - Biology and Ecology, University of Rhode Island; PhD - Northern Arizona University acleveland@mma.edu

     "I grew up a stone’s throw from the ocean on a tidal estuary in Massachusetts.  From an early age, I spent as much time as I could among the salt marshes and mud flats (much to my mother’s chagrin on laundry days) exploring, collecting creatures to bring home, and generally daydreaming about one day being a scientist.  I couldn’t think of anything more fun than being able to work with and study fish for the rest of my life.  It is now several decades later, and studying fish is even more fun than I thought it would be.

      I will be the first person to say that science has been very good to me.  My research has taken me all over the world – from the cold waters of the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Maine, to the warm and pleasant waters of Baja California, the Caribbean, and the Philippines.  My current research focuses on the nature of the clownfish/sea anemone symbiosis. I, along with Dr. Alan Verde, am investigating how the clownfish provide nutrients to their anemone hosts (and the intracellular algae living in the anemones) and how the algae and anemone might benefit the clownfish.  I have always had students participate in my research and I brought one Marine Science student, Heather Jackson, to the Philippines for my Summer 2004 field season.

      For me, being a research scientist without also being a teacher would be an incomplete occupation.  Instructing, interacting with, and yes, even entertaining, students is as much fun as working with fish…. And if I am teaching students about fish, well, it can’t get any better than that.  Students working in my laboratory have investigated the feeding behavior of clownfish, the effects of salinity stresses on metabolism in estuarine fish, and the metabolic contrasts between fish and invertebrate herbivores.  One student (Jennifer Labrecque) investigated the effects of guided “turtle walks” on the nesting success of endangered loggerhead turtles and had her research presented at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.  Heather Jackson was a co-author on a clownfish/sea anemone paper that I presented at that same meeting.  It is this integration of student research with my own work that makes my job so rewarding."