The Molecular Ecologist

Driving up to Monterey from southern California is lovely enough to make me almost enjoy driving. Highway 1, just two lanes of traffic right at the edge of the continent, pays for its clifftop views of the Pacific with frequent closure for landslides. But even the more inland route of the US-101 highway takes in sweeping ocean views from Ventura to Pismo Beach, interspersed with and then replaced by rolling hills of oak savannah. Even when those give way to pasture and a distressingly large roadside oil field, there’s still the jumbled rocky towers of Pinnacles National Park beckoning (if not visible) from the exit at Soledad — and then you cut of the highway and wind through green farmland and increasingly expensive-looking housing tracts and golf courses until you arrive in the town where John Steinbeck partied with bums and dockworkers and a cantankerous marine biologist most of a century ago, looking out over rocky coast to the wide ocean.

That drive is something of a seasonal ritual for me, thanks to the American Society of Naturalists’ biennial meeting. ASN is perpetually trying to find an alternate location, ideally east of the Mississippi, to host their standalone scientific conference in rotation. But so far no one has come up with a better spot than the Asilomar conference center. It’s a former YWCA campground, with gorgeous Arts and Crafts halls surrounded by comfortable hotel-style lodging, built among dunes studded with Monterey pines and within earshot of the beach. Even in January it’s a great place to “go be biologists” between scientific talks, as ASN President Dan Bolnick exhorted everyone in his welcome address the first night. Deer wander through the conference grounds fearlessly, and warblers flit through the trees. Jogging up the beach trail into town I saw harbor seals, sea lions, and a sea otter; one morning I got out early with my camera and snapped photos of shorebirds foraging in the wet sand at the tide line.