by Adam Grybowski
Since 2002, when he joined the faculty of Rider University, Dr. Paul Jivoff has spent many weeks each summer at Barnegat Bay collecting sea life with student interns. Over the years, he has exposed dozens of students to the joys and challenges of conducting scientific research in an unpredictable real-world environment where he and his cohort have to contend with the heat and sun, rollicking waves, and pinching crabs.
Jivoff is an expert on the blue crab, specifically the animal’s reproductive biology, which he has dedicated nearly three decades of his life to studying. His research contributes to policy decisions about how blue crabs are managed in New Jersey and elsewhere. Furthermore, his findings have challenged fundamental beliefs about the animal that have furthered the scientific understanding of how they behave and why. Jivoff’s chapter on their reproductive biology is featured in the gold standard reference work on blue crabs, The Blue Crab: Callinectes Sapidus (Maryland Sea Grant College University of Maryland).
Jivoff has been drawn to nature since he was a boy growing up in Syracuse, N.Y., where he enjoyed spending time outside, especially fishing with his older brothers and sisters and exploring the woods that surrounded his home. He conducted field research for the first time as an undergraduate at Hartwick College while assisting a professor surveying salamanders. Apprehending the vast and ever-growing body of scientific literature as a student had an equally powerful effect on him. More than anything else, discovering that scope of knowledge motivated him to apply to graduate school.
Each of these experiences provided a foundation for his work and career, which began after earning a doctorate in zoology from the University of Maryland.
Q&A
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In what ways does field research benefit students?
In the classroom, you can get a perfectly good description of some marine environment with beautiful pictures or go online and find videos that show those environments, but they still don’t necessarily cover what it’s like to go there. Any one of my students will tell you that one of the big things I try to impress on them is the variation in the environment and that their job as a scientist is to explain that variation. You don’t get a sense of the variation until you’re there.
After 28 years of studying blue crabs, what keeps you interested in them?
First, they’re ecologically and economically important. They’re also really interesting organisms. From a reproductive perspective, in some ways they behave like insects and in other ways like other marine organisms. It provides opportunities for comparative work to help me find out more about their reproductive biology to help properly manage them. The aspect of their biology that I’m interested in is very complex. You have to gather a lot of information. You wouldn’t be able to detect patterns without a lot of data. They’re complicated organisms, and the questions I’ve been asking have changed over time. I like that my research on blue crabs is two-pronged: It’s theoretically relevant and also has the practical application of being incorporated into management plans of places like the Chesapeake Bay. It’s very satisfying.
Do you ever feel limited by focusing so narrowly on one aspect of blue crabs in your research?
What happens in science is that you can get tunneled down into a specific question that you can address instead of taking the perspective of wanting to know everything about a particular animal. I know a lot about one aspect of blue crabs’ biology, but there are other aspects of their biology that I don’t know lots about. For me as a teacher, it’s really fun to have that specific knowledge and it helps me teach, but it can drive students nuts. Even when blue crabs are not the subject, I have a model organism that I can bring into my classroom as a case study and use that information to teach. It’s not just good at parties.
Not all of your students will end up in a marine-science career. Does that affect how you teach?
In the lab and in the field, I have the opportunity to teach students the skills and techniques to help them answer the questions marine scientists are trying to address. I know they are going to use what they learn if they stay in marine science. But part of the job is not knowing if students will end up in research. I could have a student who works with me for four years in my laboratory and after they graduate, they go onto physical therapy. Is that disappointing? No. I know they’re taking those experiences they’ve had with them.
What’s something that might surprise people about blue crabs?
Here are two related things: Female blue crabs have a single opportunity to mate during their lifetime, immediately after they molt (which allows them to grow) for the last time. So, right after they molt for the last time, they mate and will not mate or grow for the rest of their lives. That combination is one of the things that makes blue crab reproductive biology so interesting.