I owe a special debt to my PhD adviser, Mark Hay, who influenced me more than anyone outside my nuclear family. I arrived at the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Science as a PhD student only three years after Mark started as an assistant professor. The timing was fortuitous— his initial flurry of grant- writing was bearing fruit and there was suddenly a lot to do and few people to do it. Mark was a locomotive of energy and intellect, and it was exhilarating trying to keep up. We traveled all over the world together. Those were great years. I didn’t fully appreciate until much later how fundamentally my worldview was shaped by the immersion, literally and figuratively, in so many regions of the ocean. One of Mark’s many gifts was pushing me through long practice to unlearn the numbing, jargon- laden style so common in scientific writing.