Contest Winners and Publications

Thank you to the organizations and volunteers who keep these programs going! Your efforts to recognize individuals for their creative work is extremely rewarding, and has helped me connect with countless other people. 

Above: The North Pacific Research Board's 2025 Photo Story winners, a collection of images documenting the fin whale necropsy (NOAA Permit #2024279). The images went along with a short story, below. 

It feels like forever ago, when the 47-foot fin whale washed up on the Anchorage mudflats. Unlike the work I've done in Kachemak Bay or the Gulf on a small boat collecting oceanographic data, this expedition landed me in the limelight of hundreds of onlookers, squinting through the bright March light at the city skyline. My colleagues from the Semester by the Bay program, University of Alaska Anchorage, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, and Alaska Veterinary Pathology Services had prepared with me for months. To be on these still-frozen flats, Xtra tuffs on with field gear and scrubs, working armpit-deep in the frozen and thawing tissues of an incredible marine mammal... this day was a feat of grit. 

Our goal was to learn how the fin whale had died, and remove the bones to be cleaned, articulated, and preserved as a skeleton artifact for the Museum of Alaska. In my 21 years, I've dissected many things for classes, but this whale was entirely unique. This creature was enormous, and took four days of work (eleven hours each) to extract the bones. All of her tissues were perfectly preserved from the odd winter weather conditions, resulting in what I called a wagyu-like structure and firmness. The cold made it difficult to cut, requiring a constant cycle of sharpening and re-sharpening our tools, but it also meant a near-stink-free day. As the photographer on site, I was both terrified to miss something important-- I had to dart in and out of onlookers, doctors, students, and kids playing around with chunks of discarded whale blubber-- to get shots of tears or areas of interest. Tags with the whale's identifying information allows us to both measure lesions and determine which part of the school-bus sized mammal the sample came from. I was kneeling in the pools of blood and snow and mud, but I didn't mind it one bit. 

When all of my camera batteries were depleted from capturing footage and stills of the site (a full eight hours), I was so thrilled to jump in, literally. Standing between the ribs of this massive mammal, this filter feeder who consumed hundreds of tons of plankton to build up every layer of muscle and skin. This tissue and dense blubber, which was carted away in plastic sleds and returned to the Cook Inlet, would decompose and feed plankton and other organisms, furthering the lives within the ecosystem. Cleaning the bones, working beside strangers and some of my closest friends to accomplish this insane goal, to put a whale in a museum. I felt simultaneously like a little kid, eager to capture the awesomeness of the moment through my lens and learn more about the science behind what I saw, and so much like this very grown-up version of who I had always wanted to become, the person on the other side of the science, sharing with the world my view. These images still make me emotional, thinking about how far the world has come with respecting natural science as a profession or with understanding how complex marine ecosystems function. A hundred years ago we might've speculated about what caused this whale's death, but we got to pocket tissue samples in tubes and baggies, send them off to a lab to analyze pathogens and matter to learn about where she ate, how she swam, what she encountered over her great lifetime. By researching fractions of marine ecosystems, sometimes a microscopic growth on a slide is all it takes for us to unlock a deeper understanding of how our interactions with marine environments impact their sustainability. 

When I see these photos and remember the community asking us questions as we worked, giddy to tell their loved ones what they got to experience, I have overwhelming hope for our future. Alaska's marine ecosystems and their integration into the lives of our people are strong, and this project is living proof.

Above: UAA's Understory: An Annual Anthology of Achievement is published each year from a collection of works-- including essays, poems, screenplays, photo stories, and more. The poem I submitted was written for ENGL/WRTG A290, Climate Change Writing. I was inspired by my observations of Northwestern Fjord and its ecosystems, by my dad's reminiscent tales of seeing the same glaciers with his own father, and the massive changes that altered land and seascapes in the past two hundred years. I was encouraged by Professor Douglass Bourne to send the poem out for publication, and was shocked to receive notice from the Understory team just a few weeks later saying they would publish my work. 

Consider purchasing a paperback edition of Understory 2024 to support the English department and student scholarships!