Bending Light: About Me

[at home with some of my works]

David J. Evans

I am a Marine Biologist.

I got my degree at Texas A&M University, Galveston, an excellent marine-associated school located on a quaint mud-fill island in Galveston Bay just north of Galveston and south of Houston on the Gulf of Mexico.

As a Marine Biologist, I worked on environmental projects around the world. My fieldwork experiences included: transplanting seagrasses in the Caribbean; assessing the "health" of coral reefs and fish populations at various sites like Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba; recording the status of fish and endangered species in the sometimes murky waters of Pearl Harbor; and counting one fish two fish red fish blue fish at the spectacular reefs of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in our very own northern Gulf of Mexico.

My work also heavily involved producing reports on marine fishes and fisheries. I assembled comprehensive fishery data and summaries on all fishing activities from the Gulf of Maine to the Gulf of Mexico, the US Caribbean, California, Alaska, Hawaii, and Japan. I also analyzed and assessed the fish populations of the Flower Garden Banks for the reports covering 2002 through 2005. In 2006, I had a research paper accepted and published in the Proceedings of the 10th International Coral Reef Symposium on the fish populations of the shallow reefs of Vieques and Culebra Islands, Puerto Rico.

Among the more interesting, in 2004, I produced a report for the US Navy describing the true nature of a shipwreck located at one of their bombing ranges in the Caribbean. It turned out that what the Navy had been saying for years was a sunken barge was in fact the aft section of the USS Killen DD593, Honorable Fletcher Class Destroyer that earned several Battle Stars for brave service in the Pacific Theater during World War II. It had become a test subject at the Pacific Nuclear Proving Grounds in the 1950's before being towed to Vieques, Puerto Rico for further tests and bombing practice.

I believe that the most important job in protecting and understanding coral reefs (as well as all marine environments) is to try to break that barrier that separates our physical world at the ocean's surface - that thin boundary layer at the very surface of the sea that also separates our everyday consciousness from the other very real realms of life existing below the waves. The trick is finding the tools to help us connect the seemingly abstract with the real.

In working for clients, I also believe that delivering and reporting the facts on the ground for their use in long term planning is far more important than just making them happy with "what they want to hear". I feel that just providing them with support for their own preferred narratives is nothing more than being a hired sycophant and to me is just not acceptable as a professional and a human.

I first became interested in Photography when my sister gave me an old set of 35mm SLR cameras and lenses and I first became enchanted with all things sunken when I sank my little plastic toy boat in a backyard pond in Haarlem, the Netherlands.

~DJem

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