Featured Staff: Shannon Fow...

Shannon Fowler: Biologist, Baffin Expedition
Growing up in a small inland town in northern California, Shannon easily became fascinated by the ocean. She spent summers in San Diego with her grandfather, who was an oceanographer. Together, they watched migrating grey whales, explored tidepools, and shuffled their feet in the sand to avoid stingrays. She to studied biology at the University of California at San Diego. After graduating, Shannon wanted to explore the world outside California. She was a SCUBA instructor in Ireland, Panama, Galapagos, and the Caribbean. She taught marine ecology to teenagers in the Bahamas and Ecuador. And in between, Shannon travelled—singing songs with Berbers in the Zagora Desert, eating lemon ants in the Amazon, making a wish at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and hiking among proboscis monkeys in Borneo. Eventually, Shannon returned to the world of academia and completed a Ph.D. in Biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. For her thesis research, she examined the development of diving in the threatened Australian sea lion.

Since completing her Ph.D., Shannon has worked as the Marine Mammal Biologist in Antarctica, as a science writer at National Public Radio in Washington D.C., and has taught killer whale biology to college students in the San Juan Islands. She spends the rest of her time based in London writing scientific manuscripts and nonfiction.

Shannon joins the Adventure Canada team on our Baffin Expedition Sept 2-12, 2008. When she is not out on deck helping spot and identify marine mammals or driving a zodiac we can expect to hear lectures on the adaptations of warm-blooded animals that allow them to live in Polar seas and the inside line on diving physiology & behaviour at the edge.


Click here for more info on this adventure