About Dave Delaney, the organizer of the Network

I grew up in Duxbury, Marshfield, Norwood, and Quincy Massachusetts, USA. So I spent most of my summer days on the beach: searching the tidepools, scuba diving since the age of 12, or just lounging in the sand and sun.

For high school, I went to Boston University Academy (and Boston University during junior and senior year). Then I moved to Canada to attended McGill University and obtained a B. Sc. in Water Environments and Ecosystems – Biological Focus from the School of the Environment.

Each summer while attending McGill, I worked as an educator at the Harbor Discoveries summer camp of the New England Aquarium. The combination of science and traditional camp activities provided a unique opportunity to teach in the natural environment and hopefully raise environmental awareness in the youth, which are our future. The program fosters appreciation of the importance of habitats for all life, and helps prepare campers to become advocates for the planet. I went from an assistant to a lead educator. I led day trips to the sandy and rocky coasts of New England with 1 or 4 night camping trips. One of the longest trips was on a schooner that allowed us to do science at sea, around Martha Vineyard.
I jumped off the 18th step of the ladder on the schooner. Good times!

Last winter, I worked and then traveled in South America because I was a field technician for Dr. Jeff Podos at the Charles Darwin Research Center (la Estación Científica Charles Darwin) on the island of Santa Cruz in the Galapagos archipelago.
	The research was on understanding the mechanisms for speciation by studying the medium size ground finch, one of Darwin’s finches.

After the two months of field work, I took a cruise around the archipelago, where I trained a Galapagos sea lion to give me a kiss. I always wanted to be a marine mammals trainer!!! Then I worked at a scuba diving shop, Scuba Iguana, on Santa Cruz. After this I went to the mainland of Ecuador and up the Andes and biked and camped into the Amazon rainforests near Columbia.

Now I have begun my PhD work in marine invasive species. I am trying to get a monitoring network up and running for many reasons. Researchers, managers, and environmental protection groups need this information but do not have the personnal or adequate funds. The public needs to learn more about this important but not well-known problem, so humans are the main drivers for the increased rate of invasive species.

There is some structure already set such as the great database of New England Aquarium Massachusetts Coastal Management and MIT Sea Grant but this is passive. In Maine, Bowdoin and College of the Atlantic are holding teaching conferences to train teachers on how to bring invasion biology into the classroom even with the stringent and narrow-minded education standards. Governments of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and others are finally come to the realization this problem is not only not going away but will get worse with time. So we must do something!

My goal is to merge and build upon these great initiatives and bring the public into this area of research. The atmosphere is right for this new and monumental idea.

It can only happen if everyone helps out! Science is not something only people with PhDs can do, anyone can do it, if it is important to you. You can do this, you can make a difference! Please join this citizen science initiative and help us learn and protect our environment!

Thanks!