Anela Choy
Anela Choy (anela@ucsd.edu) is Associate Professor,
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of
California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA.
My family and ancestors are from lands and islands spread
across and within the largest, deepest ocean on Earth. I am
a fifth-generation person of Hawai‘i, who grew up in a way
that felt half in and half out of the ocean. I have always been
surrounded by a community of ocean protectors, explorers,
naturalists, and scientists. However, these individuals are not
the practicing Western types of scientists who I now work alongside in the oceanographic
community. They are swimmers and divers who would take us out into the reefs and ocean
beyond, surfers and water people who intimately know individual waves and how they
bend differently when the wind or swell direction shifts. From a young age, this commu-
nity has nurtured in me a deep love and respect for the ocean and for its inhabitants, and I
now work as a biological oceanographer and deep-sea biologist, striving to share this same
regard for the sea with others.
I work to understand the highly diverse and poorly known animal assemblages that live
in deep open ocean waters offshore of our continental shelves, finding the connections and
processes that bridge these varied inhabitants and their habitats. My colleagues and I study
the composition of deep-sea food webs, asking which species live at different depth hori-
zons and how they move vertically and interact with other species. We look into the stom-
achs of fishes and apply a targeted combination of biochemical tracers, such as isotopes
and trace metals, as we try to understand the key feeding relationships that impact ocean
biogeochemistry and connect directly to human societies through fishing, climate change,
and pollution. We are a seagoing group and have the tremendous privilege of traveling far
offshore on research vessels, working in large science teams of diverse participants where
all jobs, big and small, are purposeful and important. Sampling the full food web at depth
requires specialized instrumentation and long days together on the back deck and in the
labs. We are working to broaden the participation of who can sail for science, as well as
making our spaces at sea safer and more welcoming in order to allow for students from
more walks of life to thrive.
In Hawai‘i, I attended public schools where the curriculum required learning how to get
along, have fun, and succeed with people from a rainbow of different backgrounds and cul-
tures. My high school was down the street from one of the most prestigious private schools
in the state, where great diplomats like President Obama were educated. Our crowd, how-
ever, was a rowdy mix of daughters and sons of first- and second-generation immigrants
from Korea, Micronesia, Vietnam, American Samoa, and the Philippines, among other
places, as well as Native Hawaiians who live every day with American colonialism and the
illegal overthrow of their nation. I liken navigating diverse social landscapes such as this to
navigating the multi-faceted landscape of academia, especially as we all strive to be more
inclusive and welcoming of diverse perspectives and people. I am deeply motivated by the
great privilege and challenge of trying to build new spaces within this academic ecosystem,
especially in seagoing oceanography where our ocean voyages are deeply enriched by those
who perhaps couldn’t or didn’t envision themselves as sailors and scientists before.
Participants from RR2104, a deep-
sea food web and education cruise,
gather in front of R/V Roger Revelle
in June 2021.