Featured Scientist

Dr. Andrew Gordus has a unique position, as he is the only staff toxicologist employed by CDFW outside of the department’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response. Based in Fresno, Andy focuses on the detection and effects of poisons as they relate to fish, wildlife and environmental health issues.

Andy was born and raised in rural Wisconsin where he developed a passion for the outdoors, fish and wildlife. He relocated to Southern California with his family at age 14. His passions led him to Humboldt State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Wildlife Management and a master’s degree in Natural Resources Management. He earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Pathology from the UC Davis School of Medicine.

A 17-year CDFW employee, Andy has conducted pioneering research in the area of food safety and whether wildlife could possibly spread dangerous bacteria such as E.coli and Salmonella to farmed crops. He was among the first scientists in California to raise warning flags about dangerous toxicants and serious environmental damage resulting from illegal marijuana grows.

Let’s say you’re at a social event without any work colleagues around. How do you explain what you do for a living?

I tell them I am a toxicologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. My specialty is wildlife diseases and toxicology, and I primarily cover water quality and food safety, but I also have a background in waterfowl and wetland habitat management.

Who or what brought you to CDFW and what inspires you to stay?

Ever since I was a kid, I always had an interest in fish and wildlife so I always wanted to work in some sort of wildlife or natural resources agency. I started with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge and lived at Fish and Game housing at the Wister Unit. Back in those days, most of the biologists and managers were Humboldters so I had a lot in common with them. After I graduated from UC Davis, I worked for a private ecological consulting firm in Fresno and got to know the Fresno Fish and Gamers and they got to know me.

In the late 1990s, the department started to hire people above entry level, so I applied and Dale Mitchell hired me as an environmental scientist. And as they say, the rest is history. I get to do a lot of interesting and diverse projects, plus I’ve gotten to meet interesting people and developed both professional relationships and friendships over the years.

There’s been a lot of media and political attention lately on illegal marijuana grows and the damage they cause to wildlife and the environment. You sounded the alarm more than a decade ago. How did you become involved?

In 2004, some of our Central Valley wildlife areas and managed wetlands were required to join the state program that monitors pollutants in irrigated runoff. After the first annual report was released, I noticed dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) readings at certain locations in the watershed and began to wonder where in the heck that was coming from.

Not too long after that our wildlife area supervisor made a comment to me that our wardens had recently raided an illegal grow in the grasslands region and found DDT containers with labels in Spanish. That’s when it hit me – so that’s where it’s coming from. I went over and talked to then-Captain Nathaniel Arnold and Lt. Specialist Tony Spada and asked if they were finding illegal pesticides in the grows they were raiding. They couldn’t wait to fire up their computers and show me photographs of all the illegal chemicals with labels in Spanish. That was the beginning of my interest about this issue.

In 2012, Dr. Mourad Gabriel published his findings about Pacific fishers being poisoned by rodenticides from illegal grows. This verified what I felt all along – that these grows were causing significant impacts to our watersheds and wildlife. I now give presentations about the impacts to fish, wildlife and water quality and provide a short discussion about the potential harm to human health. I gave this presentation at the 2016 Annual Wildlife Disease Association Conference at Cornell University. During the banquet, a person from Australia approached me and told me that after listening to my talk, he realized he has an illegal grow on his property. This has become an international issue.

What’s the main message in your presentations?

If you are going to smoke pot, make sure it is organic.

Tell us about your food safety and wildlife research.

This all got started in the aftermath of the nationwide E.coli outbreak and scare in 2006 linked to contaminated lettuce and spinach. This was becoming a very serious issue with California produce growers pressured by the public to make sure their produce was safe to eat. The industry was blaming wildlife for contaminating its crops and calling on California growers to eliminate all wildlife and habitat from their farms. Farmers were taking the scorched-earth approach, eliminating riparian habitats and turning their land into moonscapes. This approach was being pushed nationwide, and we feared the country would no longer have any wildlife left if farmers were eliminating wildlife and habitat across the nation.

Working with farmers in the Central Valley and on the Central Coast for many years, I have learned that many of them do enjoy seeing wildlife and having wildlife on their farms. So these produce growers were more than happy to have me answer the question, once and for all, if wildlife was a contamination risk to their crops. Fortunately, we found wildlife is a very low contamination health risk. Our results helped get the Food and Drug Administration to include land stewardship and wildlife and habitat protections in its national food safety rules for growing leafy green vegetables.

If you had free reign and unlimited funding, what scientific project would you most like to do?

There are a number of projects I would like to do. I’ve been wanting to collect water samples from the illegal cannabis grows throughout California, as well as from the plants themselves. The general public wants to know if there are any pesticides in their vegetables and fruit, but no one is asking about what poisons they are inhaling into their lungs.

Tell us something about yourself that many people would be surprised to learn.

There are three of us with the title Dr. Andrew Gordus. My oldest son, Andrew, is a professor in the Department of Biology at Johns Hopkins University. A distant cousin Dr. Andrew M. Gordus is a professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia, and, then, of course, there’s myself. My daughter, Margarita, is also a scientist. She works for CDFW here in Fresno as a senior environmental scientist in the Timberland Conservation Program.

Hailey Marie Harrell is an Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR) environmental scientist working as part of the Northern Field Response Team. She graduated from the University of California, Davis, in 2013, with a double major in Plant Biology and English.

Hailey was initially hired as a scientific aid for CDFW’s Habitat Conservation Planning Branch’s Native Plant Program. There, she had the opportunity to do field work with skilled botanists on some of California’s most sensitive plants, conduct census surveys and issue California Endangered Species Act scientific collection permits. She promoted to a permanent role with OSPR in 2016, and has been immersed in the world of oil spill prevention and response ever since.

A relative newcomer to CDFW in terms of job tenure, Hailey has a very fresh perspective on working as an OSPR environmental scientist.

Who or what inspired your love of natural resources?

I’ve spent countless hours in the woods and along waters of this state and I have observed many wonderful and fascinating things within them. I was raised by avid hunters and fishermen who instilled in me an admiration of our truly beautiful natural resources. They hammered home the importance of conservation and taught me to take care to leave places as good as, if not better, than I found them.

How did you come to work for CDFW?

I chose to study plants instead of animals when I got to college because they were a form of life I knew very little about. I was encouraged by a few professors who liked my writing style to take English courses while in college because it is rare to find someone who loves science and also enjoys writing. They saw me as a bridge between technical information and the layperson.

After college, I took a job as a technical writer for a privately contracted aerospace and defense company. After several months, I had learned all the ins and outs of the position and no longer felt challenged. I spent every minute of every 40-hour workweek sitting at a desk in front of a computer screen. In the small bits of time I could manage, I took every opportunity to network with people that were already working in various natural resource agencies. Through these interactions, I got to know some great employees of CDFW who gave me advice and let me do some volunteer work to gain experience for my resume. I eventually landed a scientific aid position with CDFW’s Native Plant Program where I learned my way around the intricacies of state service as I assisted in surveying some of California’s amazing threatened and endangered plant species and issued permits for their protection.

Why did you change your focus from native plants to oil spill response?

I didn’t know if I could love a job as much as the one I had with the Native Plant Program, but knew I couldn’t stay a scientific aid forever so I applied for environmental scientist positions. The OSPR position I have now was the only one of many applications I submitted that gave me a call back. I went into my interview knowing nothing about OSPR except what I had scrambled to learn about it before the interview. I was ecstatic, but at the time had no idea how truly lucky I would be to be offered this position.

Was there a tough learning curve?

The learning curve when joining OSPR was very steep, initially. I think the most challenging aspect was figuring out all the acronyms that are used. In working with the Native Plant Program I scrambled to learn the intricacies of working for a government agency, but the language itself was straightforward because I was exposed to plant terminology throughout college. OSPR was a whole different ball game. For example, it took some time just for me to realize that they were saying “T and E” species (referring to threatened and endangered wildlife) instead of “teeny” species. I would hear the question, “Were any teeny species impacted by the spill?” and would quietly wonder why they were only concerned with little organisms.

In your new position at OSPR, what are your typical duties?

As a first responder to petroleum spills, I work with a wide variety of our state’s natural resources and travel to many beautiful places across California. I get to work closely with our game wardens, the U.S. Coast Guard, private industry and other local, state and federal government agencies. At some spills, I will be the first person on scene and will have to convey my initial findings to my team to determine what level of response we will need to resolve the issue. Sometimes I will be on my own to resolve the issue, sometimes there will be a small group of us working together and sometimes there will be a large contingency of federal, state and local agencies involved to help resolve the incident. Each incident has a unique set of obstacles that need to be overcome. I fill whatever role is necessary to help get the job done as quickly as possible.

This job is also full of surprises. Few days are the same as a first responder to petroleum spills. One minute you think you’ll be in the office all day and the next minute you’re in the car driving to the coast to walk the shorelines and look for oil, or responding to a sunken vessel, or getting to the scene of a truck crash, etc. Weird reports sometimes come in that challenge your knowledge and your strategies for managing problems. It is hard to get bored, and that is one of the many things I love about it.

What has been the most exciting or enjoyable aspect of working at OSPR for you so far?

I think that the most exciting part of the job has to be emergency response. When you go on call you never really know what kind of spills you are going to get. When you get a report of a spill that warrants a response you generally know where you need to go, but there’s almost always some ambiguity regarding what you are going to find. I love working in a position where there’s so much variety.

The networking, training and interagency collaboration are equally enjoyable aspects of the job. For example, one of my first oil spill drills played out a scenario at an oil refinery in San Pablo Bay. It was a large drill with key representatives from the refinery, government agencies, county hazmat, etc. No more than a month later, there was a response to that very same refinery and almost all of those key players I met at the drill were in the command post during a real event. It felt like déjà vu being there and seeing everyone again. It helped put into perspective just how important it is to practice with drills and meet the key players that will be involved during real spills. It builds trust and understanding between those parties involved and helps to demonstrate that we are all working towards a common goal.

You’re still early in your career. Where do you think you will be, professionally speaking, in five years, or 20 years?

I can really see myself sticking with OSPR for the long hall through to retirement. From discussions with friends and family, this really is a unique and amazing position I am in that is unlike any they have heard of before. I need variety to keep myself content and OSPR certainly has that.

Any advice for people considering careers in science or natural resources?

Having a job where I could contribute to prolonging our natural resources and get out in the outdoors to enjoy them as much as possible has been a dream I did not know I would achieve, but that was my goal and I fought for it. You may have to scrape by and do things that you don’t want to for a while (maybe even a long while), but if you have enthusiasm, determination and a true love of conserving our natural resources, keep working towards your goals. Talk to people, volunteer your time and keep climbing the ladder. Eventually, if you remain persistent, you will find yourself somewhere you never thought you’d be, with a job that you can’t imagine being without.

Colleen Young is an Environmental Scientist for CDFW’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR) Marine Wildlife Veterinary Care and Research Center in Santa Cruz. Her primary job duties include oil spill contingency planning for sea otters and other marine wildlife, maintaining response equipment and working as part of the Wildlife Recovery team during spills.

During non-spill times, Colleen’s responsibilities shift to sea otter research and conservation projects. This work includes ground and aerial sea otter census surveys, sea otter stranding response, performing postmortem examinations on sea otters and occasionally other species, tagging and monitoring wild sea otters and working on sea otter disturbance issues. She is on the CDFW SCUBA diving team and is one of two CDFW divers trained to use re-breathers to capture sea otters. These projects are done in close collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, UC Santa Cruz, Sea Otter Savvy and other partner organizations.

Colleen earned a B.S. in Animal Biology from UC Davis in 2006 and an M.S. in Marine Science with an emphasis in Vertebrate Ecology from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories/San Jose State University in 2009. She began working as a scientific aide for CDFW in 2010 and was hired for her current position in 2011. Colleen is grateful to have a job that involves working with such an ecologically important, threatened species, and that allows her to work outside and live along California’s beautiful Central Coast.

Who or what inspired you to become a scientist?

I had some really amazing science teachers in high school that showed me that science was really fun and interesting. When I started volunteering to help with research projects when I was an undergraduate in college, I knew that doing scientific research was something that I wanted to pursue further. When I got certified to SCUBA dive and started doing research in and around the ocean, I knew I wanted to do that for a career.

What got you interested in working with wildlife?

Growing up we had lots of pets, so I’ve always had a deep connection with and respect for animals. I considered pursuing a career involving companion animals, but I really enjoy working outside, in nature, and wild animals absolutely fascinate and amaze me. I was hooked on wildlife after doing an internship studying wild bottlenose dolphins.

Who or what brought you to CDFW? What inspires you to stay?

Just after finishing graduate school I was hired to work at the CDFW office in Santa Cruz to work on some grant-funded seabird projects. I really enjoyed the work that I was doing and saw great value in the sea otter work that my CDFW colleagues were doing, so when a permanent job became available, applying was a no-brainer. I don’t plan on going anywhere anytime soon, since I love my job and I get to live in this beautiful place.

What is a typical day like for you at work?

There is no such thing as a typical day for me, which is just the way I like it. It is very unusual for me to spend a whole day working at my desk. You can usually find me working in our necropsy lab, on the beach responding to a stranded sea otter call, working on oil spill preparedness (testing equipment, working on protocols, etc.) or doing a proficiency dive with my dive buddy so we’re ready for our next round of sea otter captures. At the end of the day, I always try to read and respond to emails, but I often get interrupted by a stranding call, so I can’t always answer emails as quickly as I’d like.

What is the most rewarding project that you’ve worked on for CDFW?

I think probably the Santa Barbara oil spill near Refugio State Beach in 2015. This was my first major spill since starting at the Department and I worked as part of the Wildlife Recovery team. It was really rewarding to collect all those oiled animals, which likely would’ve died without our help.

Over the course of your career, was there a discovery or an incident that surprised you?

I am surprised all the time! A big part of my job is performing necropsies (animal autopsies) on sea otters, and sometimes other species as well. Often it looks like the cause of death will be obvious, but when we get inside we see all sorts of weird, unexpected things. That’s one of the things that keeps my job fun and interesting … we never know what we’re going to find!

If you had free reign and unlimited funding, what scientific project would you most like to do?

I would love to work more on one of my ongoing projects, which is looking into the mechanism by which some sea otters acquire purple staining on their teeth and bones. This phenomenon, known as echinochrome staining, has been documented for decades, and is extremely common in sea otters. It almost certainly occurs when sea otters consume copious amounts of echinochrome-containing prey items like sea urchins and other echinoderms, but the mechanism and physiology of the process has not been described. I would love to have time (and funding) to really understand how and when staining occurs, and whether there are any individual health implications, or broader ecological implications, of this process. Until I have unlimited time and funding though, I’ll just keep working on this project a little at a time.

What is the best thing about being a wildlife scientist?

I get to spend so much time outside being active. I spend a lot of time on the beach, on the ocean and in the ocean (diving), and most of it is pretty physical, so I get to exercise and spend time in nature as part of my job. Oh, and working with animals is pretty cool too. Doesn’t get any better than that!

The world of science and managing natural resources is often confusing or mysterious for the average person. What is it about the work you do that you’d most like us to know that will take away the mystery?

Effective management of natural resources should be based on good scientific data. It takes time to develop protocols, to collect and analyze data, and to summarize and disseminate findings. So sometimes when it looks like no action is being taken on an issue there are probably people working hard behind the scenes on it. Furthermore, it can be difficult for one program or even one agency to collect all the adequate scientific data that is needed to make good management decisions. Therefore, collaboration is key. Agencies and organizations often work together to collect data and implement management decisions. In the case of sea otters, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has management authority, but CDFW and other agencies and organizations work collaboratively with USFWS to collect and share data that help inform management decisions. Having multiple partners can sometimes slow things down, but in the end usually yields better results.

Is there a preconception about scientists you would like to dispel?

I can speak most to marine biologists. When most people think of marine biologists, they picture someone training and hugging dolphins, or getting up close and personal with cute, charismatic animals all the time. In reality though, marine biology is not very glamorous or easy work. It often requires working long hours, sometimes very early or late, depending on the tides. You are often wet, cold, dirty and stinky. Many biologists never even lay hands on the animals they are studying … they collect and/or study scat (poop), tracks and photographs, and make observations from afar. Some biologists, like me, mainly study their species by examining dead animals, which can be stinky and gross, but also extremely interesting and informative.

Any advice for people considering careers in science or natural resources?

Get as much hands-on field experience as possible. Not only does that allow you to figure out what types of work you do and do not like, but having field experience is a huge advantage when applying for jobs. Also, attend conferences and events that will allow you to network with people who have careers you are interested in. Ask them questions about what they do and don’t like about their jobs, and what kind of experience and education you need to get that type of job.