Why Paid Internships?

Paid internships are important to us at the Wildlife Research Alliance. So important, in fact, that it's mentioned in our mission statement. Everyone likes to get paid, but you may not realize how important paid internships are to leveling the playing field for everyone who wants a career in conservation behavior.

You'd never guess there was a manatee trapped under this tree!

As a stranding biologist, responding to live and dead stranded sea turtles, manatees, dolphins, and whales on Florida's Gulf Coast, I got to experience the highest highs (releasing a manatee that I had helped rescue after he had been entangled in a floating Christmas tree for weeks, unable to eat and nearly losing his tail), and the lowest lows (watching a sea turtle take its last breath after being struck by a boat propeller). It was rewarding and exhausting, challenging and fun.

It was also REALLY white.

The only entry point into stranding work is to intern with a stranding response or marine animal research organization, and most of those internships are unpaid. I got my start with an unpaid Rescue Team internship at Clearwater Marine Aquarium in 2017. If you're lucky, you get accepted to an internship that allows you to have a job on the side (mine didn't). If you're really unlucky, you end up having to take an internship that actually charges their interns a fee. Often, the fee includes accommodation, and sometimes food, but many organizations list things like "tuition" and transportation to and from field sites, as if free labor wasn't enough. One two-week program in Mozambique offers a dormitory or tented accommodations with a shared bathroom facility and meals for $1900. Ouch.

Yours Truly, on my way to recover a deceased sea turtle on Christmas Day 2017

The tide is beginning to shift on this issue, but we are still a long way from fair pay for all internships in the stranding and marine animal research fields. You may find yourself thinking "why do interns need to be paid if they're gaining valuable experience?" That's a great question, and I would love to tell you.

Imagine you're a Black college student in the U.S. Perhaps you're lucky enough not to be one of the 21% of Black students who feels "frequently or occasionally" discriminated against in your program, so you're not up against that every day (though there is little chance you haven't faced some form of discrimination). You're twice as likely to be a caregiver for at least one family member, which means you probably need a job. In fact, you're also twice as likely to have a full-time job while completing your bachelor's degree courses.

Figure from the Lumina Foundation

Maybe you live in Ohio, and the full-time internship you desperately want to complete is in Florida. Your current job pays you $15/hr, and you work 35 hours per week while going to school. In order to continue supporting your family, you now need to figure out how to get a job that will pay you $525 per week while enabling you to devote 40 hours to your unpaid internship, and you have to pay for travel to Florida and find a place to live. Even an internship that paid a stipend of, let's say, $2,000 for the season wouldn't be enough to make this a realistic opportunity. The reality of the internship quickly slips through your fingers, and you're left trying to figure out how to get the necessary experience in your chosen field to be competitive when you graduate while still taking care of your family.

Even if you managed to make an unpaid internship work, the road ahead may be far from easy. Hopefully you are paired with a great mentor who teaches you what you need to learn while being sensitive to your needs. But what if you end up with a mentor who has never examined their own biases, and the effects of their microaggressions leads you to seek out help from human resources? Imagine your surprise when HR informs you that unpaid interns are not employees, therefore you are not protected by workplace discrimination laws.

This is not just a hypothetical. One study found that 60% of college students who wanted an internship but did not take one cited needing to work as their primary obstacle, and 33% cited insufficient internship pay. I have personally witnessed the fallout of the workplace discrimination issue, and it was heartbreaking.

Figure from Hora, Wolfgram, & Chen, 2019

Paid internships are not the only solution necessary to the racial disparity in conservation science. There are myriad systemic issues at play that keep this and other fields out of reach for marginalized communities. It is a piece of a larger puzzle, but it is an important one. Thankfully, the movement to do away with unpaid internships is gaining momentum.

In July of 2020, a petition was sent to the Society for Marine Mammalogy (SMM) requesting that the Society take a stance on the role of unpaid internships in perpetuating a lack of diversity in marine mammal science. While the SMM, unfortunately, has yet to make meaningful changes to their policies on this issue, many research organizations around the world signed the petition and started working toward ending unpaid internships. One exciting step forward in this fight came via the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Notice of Funding Opportunity for the 2025 John H. Prescott Marine Mammal Rescue Assistance Grant. This federal grant is a staple of the marine mammal stranding community, providing over $75 million in grant funding since its inception in 2001. Each year, NOAA releases a set of priorities for the Prescott grant, encouraging applicants to apply for funding to address things like emerging diseases, critically endangered species, inter-agency collaboration, etc. For the first time, one such priority is paid internships, with the goal of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. Finding funding is the biggest challenge in the fight for paid internships, so the 2025 Prescott grant presents a HUGE opportunity for a number of marine mammal rescue and research institutions!

We are a long way from true equity in wildlife conservation, but the Wildlife Research Alliance is working hard to make strides in the right direction. We aim to be a leader in this fight, and I appreciate the opportunity to tell you more about this issue!

What is conservation behavior and why does it matter?

Conservation behavior takes the study of animal behavior (which is a very broad area of study, encompassing everything from socializing and feeding to disease processes and evolution) and applies it to wildlife conservation. At its core, conservation behavior allows us to learn from animals what they need to survive at the individual, population, and species levels.

As you know, we are in a period of unprecedented climate change. Yes, the climate has changed before, but never this rapidly, and never at the hands of humans. Many of us feel that humans have a responsibility to combat climate change and try to save the earth and the animals with whom we share it. This effort is being undertaken by countless scientists from dozens of different disciplines, each contributing to the greater pool of knowledge and informing potential solutions. Some of us are lucky enough to have chosen animal behavior.

I have a master’s degree in Animal Behavior and Conservation from Hunter College, where I did my master’s thesis on training weakly electric fish.

A school of elephantnose fish (Gnathonemus petersii), the species of weakly electric fish I studied. Photo courtesy of my advisor, Dr. Peter Moller.

Yes, fish that are electric, but just weakly. In other words, they won’t zap you, but they do this really cool thing where they use self-generated electricity to sense their surroundings and communicate with each other. Fascinating! 

Here I am (left) helping transport a rescued loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta). Photo courtesy of the Anna Maria Islander.

My thesis work did not directly contribute to wildlife conservation, but it set the stage for my understanding of scientific research. After grad school, I spent five years working in marine animal stranding and rescue in Florida. I worked directly with dolphins, whales, manatees, and sea turtles; many of these species are threatened or endangered and face numerous conservation challenges.

Here are some examples of how understanding these animals’ behavior influences conservation measures:

In 2020, manatees on the east coast of Florida began dying in unprecedented numbers. Many of them were found to have starved to death, and some had inappropriate food, such as acorns, in their stomachs. The change in their feeding behavior pointed to a disastrous loss of seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon, and it told us that the manatees were not capable of adapting to such a rapid and dramatic change. Conservation efforts to address this included a feeding station where manatees were provisioned with food like lettuce, as well as addressing the bigger problem of water conditions that led to the seagrass die-off.

Sea turtle hatchlings use the light of the moon to guide them out to oceans once they emerge from their nests. Understanding this critical aspect of their behavior has saved countless members of these endangered species by way of reducing artificial light sources

(street lamps, hotel lighting, etc.) near the beach during nesting season.

These are just two examples of how animal behavior plays a vital role in conservation. Each year, hundreds of studies involving conservation behavior are conducted by scientists around the world. Like with many other scientific fields, results of these studies are published in academic journals and presented at conferences, and news outlets often highlight specific findings for the general public.

While there are plenty of animal behaviorists who don’t focus on conservation, I personally feel pulled to help the earth in every way possible, and I think those of us in conservation behavior hit the jackpot when we found a field that lets us spend our time observing animals while making meaningful contributions to their survival. Conservation behaviorists are a tenacious group of scientists who refuse to give up in the face of climate change and other conservation challenges. It is really exciting to be in a room with other scientists who are all working to make life better for various species of animals and have perpetual hope that we can make meaningful change. We are just one piece of the puzzle, but how lucky are we to get to be that piece? We are also so lucky to have you here. Yes, you! Just by reading this blog, you are supporting our work and learning valuable information that will no doubt come up at a party, meeting, or family gathering in your future. You’ll tell your Aunt Sue, or Steve from Legal, or a friend of a friend, about how sea turtles need darkness so they can follow the moon to the ocean, or how there are thousands of scientists learning how to save the world by studying animals. Maybe you have children who love animals, and you can talk to them about how we are learning what animals need so we can help them. Whatever you do with the information you’ve learned here, it makes a difference, and for that, I thank you.

Please share in the comments any questions you have or ways in which you think you might make use of what you’ve learned here today!

--Amber Lea Kincaid, Executive Director

Conservation Behavior in Action: Save Split Oak Forest

On Wednesday, May 1, 2024, our founder and executive director Amber Lea Kincaid spoke during the public comment period at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) Meeting. The issue on the agenda was whether to accept FWC staff recommendations regarding a proposed toll road through the southern portion of Split Oak Forest Wildlife and Environmental Area. Split Oak is a 1,689-acre conservation area co-owned by Orange and Osceola Counties. The FWC manages Split Oak under a perpetual conservation easement on the area, designed to protect wildlife like the endangered gopher tortoise. This area was designated as gopher tortoise and wetlands mitigation land to offset damage to nearby areas from development.

Now the Central Florida Expressway (CFX) has proposed the Osceola Parkway Extension, a toll road through Split Oak to support infrastructure demands from planned development around the area. This would require the release of 160 acres of the Split Oak easement, and it would directly impact 60 acres of habitat. The CFX is offering 1,550 acres of mitigation land and $43 million for restoration and management. As several of the FWC commissioners (all of whom were appointed and not elected, none of whom have any environmental or science background, and most of whom have financial interests in development companies) said, on paper, this looks like a great deal. Unfortunately, it is almost certainly not as good a deal as it seems. There are several problems with this proposal, including the poor quality of the proposed mitigation land, which has a 300-foot wide canal running through it, and the changes in how Split Oak would be managed (e.g., instead of using controlled burns on the southern portion, they would have to use mechanical and possibly chemical means of plant management).

Photo: FWC

Here's where animal behavior comes into play: Amber Lea spoke about habitat fragmentation, which has been studied in part with animal behavior. Habitat fragmentation is just what it sounds like: habitat is split up into fragments. In the case of Split Oak, the forest would be bisected into a northern and southern portion, with the southern portion being relatively small at only about 100 acres. This essentially creates two separate habitats, and adds new edge habitat on either side of the road. Edge habitat is more dangerous for prey species, causes roadkill, and even changes the microclimate of the area. Habitat fragmentation causes a decrease in biodiversity, and the negative effects may not be seen for a decade or more - far too late to undo the damage. Studies on the endangered Florida scrub-jay have found that they have to fly farther to find mates and territories when their habitat is fragmented, and they have a lower chance of successful breeding.

Even though 39 of the 40 people who spoke during the public comment period were opposed to releasing the conservation easement, the FWC commissioners vote 6-1 to accept staff recommendations for direction from the board to move forward. The fight is long from over, and we hope we can contribute more to the understanding of how the habitat fragmentation caused by this toll road is not worth the donated land and money.

To learn more about this issue, go to www.savesplitoak.org.