Encounters with Leviathan
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"Having a baseline set of measurements allows us to see how the whales change over time, for instance how nursing affects a mother's size and weight. We should be able to tell a healthy calf from a sickly one, simply given an average growth rate," he says.

For a month this past August, Potter and researchers made 15 flights out of Bar Harbor, Maine, to photograph the whales. Potter will spend the fall and winter reading the films. He uses special light tables with microscopes connected to booms to review every animal in every frame of a five-inch film format. He will record length, fluke width, and girth for every animal as well as information on baby whales' growth rates. Next summer, the team will renew its air and sea observations. Meanwhile, Potter will be studying the whales' behavior in the water using the sonar. Hopefully answers will turn up along the way.

"We might find, for instance, that the whales --like Churchill-- are only snagging on the top line of fishing buoys. Perhaps there's a way to modify the lines in the heavily trafficked feeding grounds to prevent snags. At this point, we know so little, it's hard to guess what clues we might find."

It's precisely this kind of mystery and problem-solving that has kept Potter enchanted by ocean studies for 27 years with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) at NOAA.

"He was a long-haired hippie, with hip-hugging bell-bottoms," remembers David Potter's wife, Christina "Tina" Hoene '74, about the moment she first met her future husband. He was hitchhiking south on I-93 in New Hampshire, and her mother pulled over to give him a lift. Both were students at Plymouth State College in the mid-'70s, and both transferred to UNH, Tina for nursing, Potter for science. After Tina graduated, they married and moved to Woods Hole.

"My high school career was less than stellar," admits Potter. "But at PSC, I discovered science: biology, zoology, botany. ... I could sit through an invertebrate zoology lecture and listen, while taking very few notes, and retain everything." He ran out of science courses at PSC and headed for Durham where he connected with professor Larry Harris, a lifelong friend and mentor.

As an undergraduate, Potter became a SCUBA diver and collected benthic samples (ocean-bottom-dwelling invertebrates--worms, clams, and the like) for Harris' various research projects.

After graduation, Potter worked for several months in Portsmouth, N.H., for Normandeau Associates, but his sights were set on Woods Hole. The community houses four scientific institutions--the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey--making it the epicenter of marine science in America and the world. "He rode down there on his Yamaha motorcycle and started knocking on doors until they hired him," Tina says.

Since 1974, Potter has been a marine scientist with the NMFS. The federal government passed legislation in 1972 called the Marine Mammal Protection Act designed to protect and manage marine mammals and their products. NMFS was given the responsibility of enforcement. Potter's branch at the NMFS determines the population size of every species of whale, dolphin, porpoise and seal from Hatteras, N.C., to the Canadian border out to the 200-mile limit. Their findings help guide resource management.

"I have done everything from driving research submarines on the bottom of the ocean to flying aircraft in search of whales. ... Tina actually calls this my 'Peter Pan' job because I never had to grow up and get a 'real' job," he says.

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