My Strange Sabbatical

 

As Hurricane Ida passes over my home, lab, and collections, I feel inclined to write about my past year, mostly spent in Ottawa, Canada. Like Baton Rouge, Ottawa is another capital city; Canada’s fourth largest city (but with only 800,000 people). It is perhaps more similar to Washington, D.C. than to any other city I can think of, and probably for obvious reasons – they both have lots of government buildings and lots of green space. My family and I spent part of 2016-2017 in D.C. when I was on leave from LSU working for the National Science Foundation. That was such a fun and illuminating year that I jumped at the chance to take my first real sabbatical when I was awarded a Fulbright in 2020 to go to Canada. It didn’t hurt that my wife has family near-by; she and I were both born in Montreal (about a two-hour drive from Ottawa). Despite my Canadian roots, Ottawa is a city I was largely unfamiliar with until last year.

            The Fulbright award was a Distinguished Chair position at Carleton University. Carleton is right on the Rideau Canal (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). Unfortunately, I never ended up working on that beautiful campus as Carleton was one of the first schools in North America to declare that they would close campus and go remote due to COVID-19. I only met my host, Steven J. Cooke (#16 on a recent ranking of the Top Living Biologists by the way) one time in person; his lab is bigger than that of the entire LSU Museum of Natural Science’s work force put together but he somehow manages to be an amazing father as well as being a friend and mentor to many (including me). I spent most of my year in a make shift home office in our rented apartment near campus, by “office” I mean a 10’  X 10’ basement space (yes they have real basements for you Louisiana folks) that had hanging sheets for two of the “walls”. It wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t all that horrible either. From that little space I did most of my Zoom meetings and writing. I did a lot of writing both for scientific papers and for pleasure including a couple of books I hope to tell you more about soon.

            I spent way more time with my family this past year than I did in anytime in my academic past, and I honestly enjoyed that time way more than I expected (I love my family obviously but I always hated working from home). My kids went to a French public school near-by (Quebec was only a few miles away but unlike in that province, the vast majority of folks spoke English in Ontario) and I would walk with them for pick-up and drop-off. Those walks propelled me to enter a walking/running competition with the Cooke lab where I would walk about 50km each week. Even in the snowiest months (Winter is half the year up there, just like Summer is half the year down here) Ottawa has a lot of walkable and bike-able paths that remain clear. The COVID-19 pandemic did mean that we had to quarantine at home upon arriving in Ottawa and by the time our two-week sentence was over it was already getting chilly (this past September was one of the coldest on record for the area), and by the time it started getting warm this past Spring the province went into another lock down to try to tamper down the spread of the disease that has plagued us (pun intended) for over a year. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to enjoy the ‘real’ Ottawa or travel as much as we had planned within Canada (although we did get to Toronto, Montreal and the Maritimes region before leaving). With the border being closed for the last year I also wasn’t able to make any return trips to Louisiana or to see my family a relatively short distance away in New York City.  

            Instead of doing the traveling I love, I gave a lot of virtual seminars; including at my alma mater, McGill University (I also hosted a virtual reunion for my graduating year, the Class of 2000) and the University of Winnipeg, among other spots that I would have loved to have gone to in person. I also frequently checked in on my lab at LSU, but they are all so self-sufficient that they didn’t need much of my help. Pam Hart (now Dr. Pam) successfully graduated this past Spring and I made it back to Baton Rouge in time to hood her at graduation this Summer; Diego Elias (currently doing fieldwork in Guatemala) is used to me being away (I was at NSF his first year) and Sheila Rodriguez Machado, my newest student, like me and many others, had to get used to virtual lab meetings – but she is a trooper, and a brilliant one at that. I also was involved in the hiring of our new collections manager, David Boyd who joined LSU from the University of Florida at the start of 2021. It was great knowing the lab was doing well in my absence, despite all the pandemic gloom. As for my learning experience, I got to watch the Cooke Lab work like a giant well-oiled machine cranking out publications at a nearly weekly basis. I was able to work with his lab and several collaborators on a large review of the conservation statuses of Canada’s freshwater organisms (Desforges et al. 2021 in press at the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences). I’m still in awe of how quickly the students put together a publishable document reviewing thousands of species in a few months. My only regret is that I wasn’t able to collaborate and connect with more folks in that lab, and it was only the pandemic that prevented more interactions from happening – not any lack of effort.

            That paper was an important part of my goal for my Fulbright – which was to learn how to study evolutionary biology “in action” as it is happening today and in terms of challenges created by humans e.g., climate change, damning, overfishing. Also as part of my Fulbright goals was making new fish collections in Canada to compare species and populations from that area with those in Louisiana and other parts of the U.S. With the pandemic I wasn’t sure how I would do any collecting, but I lucked out by having the Canadian Museum of Nature (which is like the Canadian Smithsonian) allow me to join their ranks as a Research Associate and by having friends who are experienced commercial fishers in the area. With their help I was able to get scientific permits to collect Lake Sturgeon (one of the few spots where you are allowed to do so in the world, as most sturgeon populations are critically endangered), and other freshwater fishes in Ontario and Quebec. I went ice fishing and seining and also collected fish with giant hoop nets. My fisher friends, Fabienne Côté, Roch Quesnel and Michel La Haye taught me more about fishing and the fish from the region than I could have learned from any course. These were wonderful trips and although I didn’t get to do my usual tropical fish collecting trips, I can at least say that I did a bit of international fieldwork this past year. These fishes (representing about 40 species from the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers) will be shipped to LSU soon to be part of our collections at the LSU MNS. Some material was also left behind for the CMN and I hope to have many future exchanges between our museums.

            Like Hurricane Ida, my sabbatical wasn’t exactly what I expected. I wanted to meet and chat with lots of new folks and travel and talk around Canada, and although I did have some great interactions the virtual space isn’t the same as seeing people in real life. In the end I think of my sabbatical as having been “frustratingly relaxing” – working on-line in a new country without being able to really interact with people was frustrating, but spending a lot of time with my wife and kids while working from home was also quite nice. I know a lot of people had a much tougher year than I did, and I’m grateful that I was even able to have a sabbatical and for the time that the people I did get to interact with gave to me. Cheers to them, and here’s to a brighter pandemic- and hurricane-free future for all of us.

Many thanks to LSU, the Fulbright Program and my new friends and colleagues in Canada, especially in the Cooke lab and Canadian Museum of Nature, for making my sabbatical a memorable one.