Spending the day with Megan Owen, behavioral ecologist, at the SBC Giant Panda Research Station, gave me a new-found respect for the math savvy intellects out there. Though she does spend some time out in the field collecting behavioral data on pandas, much of her day is spent crunching numbers. Her job is to take data collected by technicians and organize, analyze, and present it to her colleagues. Not only is it her job to analyze this data but it is also her duty to look through previously collected data from other bears, whether they be pandas, polar bears, or sun bears, and look for patterns, similarities or areas of confusion which need to be further researched. She gets to think up the questions that technicians ask and analyze the results from the data they collect.

Though Ms. Owen loves her job she did not always want to work with pandas, let alone animals. When she was in high school she knew that she would attend college to become a writer. After taking a trip to Bangladesh, during her time at City University of New York, she decided she would change fields and become a doctor. After taking the MCAT’s and getting very close to becoming a doctor, Ms. Owen got the chance of a lifetime to study birds in the Arctic as a sort of extra-credit project. Unable to pass up this chance she traveled to the Arctic and at once fell in love with animal ecology. Finally, in the field she knew she wanted to pursue, Ms. Owen got her degree in ecology and, with her bachelors degree in biology in tow, moved from the snowy Arctic birds to the giant pandas of China. Apart from the exciting time she gets to spend with amazing animals, Ms. Owen gets to fulfill her desire to travel. As an ecologist, traveling to the habitat of the animal you are studying is essential. By gaining a thorough understanding of the animal’s background and having the opportunity to see the animal’s behaviors in the wild helps scientists expand their knowledge and compare results collected from similar animals in captivity.

As we arrived at the SBC Giant Panda Research Station, Ms. Owen showed us what a day in her field is like. Though she normally does not collect much field data, she did give us a hands-on idea of what it is like. First a question needs to be asked. In our experiment we asked, how important is a panda’s sense of smell to its investigation of the world around it? Next, Ms. Owen found a way to test the question, covering one toy ball with pepper and the other with nothing. We then watched the panda, Mei Sheng, for fifteen minutes and jotted down our observations. Though we had some technical errors in our experiment we were able to set up a chart and graph displaying our findings. We were able to calculate the frequency of olfactory sense use when investigating the balls and discover that a panda’s sense of smell is a fundamental tool used to investigate the mysteries of the world around it.

Ms. Owen assures us that in her job being extremely inquisitive is a prerequisite. She must be able to be shown some data or be presented with a problem, be able to ask a question and work together with others in her field to find a way to solve it. Her next project is going to be on the hearing ability of polar bears. Due to excessive drilling in their native environment of Alaska, she and her colleagues, who include Dr. Tom Spady of the Reproductive Physiology Division of the San Diego Zoo’s CRES, have decided to venture to Alaska and collect data and see how drastically the drilling has effected the bears. Ms. Owen, who recently traveled to China’s Wolong to study mother/cub relations among pandas in their natural habitat, is eager to start this new project and travel to Alaska to study and better understand the amazing polar bears.

As a suggestion to all young academics out there looking for an early leg up in the business world, Ms. Owen recommends studying as many of the extra math classes as possible. She never knew, during her phase as a writer, that she wanted to be a behavioral ecologist, a field in which math skills are extremely important, yet she took those classes that many of her peers were opting out of and see where it got her. Now she is in a job where she gets to do everything she loves: working with animals, traveling the globe, and thinking up questions and constantly searching for answers.

Contributed by Lindsey - Zoo InternQuest Careers Team

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