Albion experience prepared graduate for marine-life study
August 6, 2024
Duke University isn’t often compared to Albion College, but it’s nice to know the two institutions are similar in at least one regard.
“The Duke Marine Lab was like Albion, on an island. It is such a small-knit community and it was super easy to make connections with the faculty and other students,” said Alyvia Martinez ’24.
“That sort of community impacts students’ lives.”
Martinez spent the Fall 2023 semester at the Duke Marine Lab as one of two visiting student scholarship recipients. While there, Martinez focused on another community–short-finned pilot whales. Using sound recordings and spectrogram data gathered near Cape Hatteras, Martinez collated and charted the whales’ use of nonlinear phenomena vocalizations, which are a mystery to researchers.
Alyvia Martinez ’24 working with the Duke Marine Lab.
“This was a short project, so I could not draw any definite conclusions, but we were able to predict that they use these calls to socialize,” Martinez said.
Her work, she hopes, adds to the marine lab’s mission to understand and protect the ocean and its inhabitants. “Many whales migrate from Nova Scotia down to Florida. It’s important to track their behavior (where they feed and breed) so we do not disturb them,” she said. “With this knowledge, boats will know where and when to avoid collisions with whales, especially with cargo ships or military vessels.”
At Duke, Martinez also took courses in oceanography, invertebrate marine biology, and marine animal behavior and physiology, with class activities that included whale watching, shark tagging, and catching horseshoe crabs and flounders. She discovered another academic similarity between Duke and Albion.
“I took the marine biology course at Albion with Dr. Abigail Cahill, and she had us write a mock research proposal,” Martinez said. “That project helped me with creative and analytical thinking and those skills transferred. In three of my four courses at Duke, we had to come up with a research project. Already knowing how to write a research proposal helped a lot.”
This fall, Martinez heads back to Duke University, where she will be a doctoral student in deep sea biology.
“The support Albion provided me throughout the past four years has instilled confidence, and I am looking forward to this next chapter of my academic endeavors,” she said.