Turning the tide

On a windy June afternoon, Chris Mantegna, ’21, encourages a half-dozen undergraduates to flip over barnacle-studded rocks and sift through seaweed. Equipped with clipboards to record their findings, they’re creating a snapshot of the organisms in the island’s intertidal zone — from orange sea cucumbers to the camouflaged armored mollusks called chitons.

Mantegna, a third-year graduate student in aquatic and fishery sciences, has spent the past three summers in Washington’s San Juan Islands, mentoring undergrads here on Yellow Island — a pristine 11-acre nature preserve owned by the Nature Conservancy. She created this eight-week program for students to get their hands dirty in the field and learn cutting-edge lab techniques at the UW Friday Harbor Laboratories — where she had a transformational research experience herself as a Husky undergrad.

This mentorship program reflects Mantegna’s passion both for advancing the science and for making it more inclusive and accessible to others. Her face lights up when she spots a small chiton (her favorite) clinging to the bottom of a rock, and she invites others to feel the mollusk’s tough plated back. Even Mantegna’s doctoral work — examining the genetic response of shellfish to contaminants in Puget Sound waterways — has a focus on community outreach and environmental literacy.

Mantegna says we have a better chance at fighting climate change when everyone — scientists and community members — feels connected to their environment and each other. “I can tell you that the ocean is dying or that we have too much acidification,” says Mantegna, a U.S. Navy veteran who is the first in her family to graduate from college. “But it doesn’t matter if you’ve never had the chance to feel the joy that comes from this place.”

Diving in

That joy was cultivated in her from an early age. Wearing knee-high waders, Mantegna jokes about feeling most at home in the water because she comes from a family of crabbers and longshoremen. As a child in Baltimore, she saw water all around her — and summers spent by the Atlantic Ocean deepened her affinity for it.

“My grandparents are the reason I know anything about boats, the ocean and marine conservation,” says Mantegna, describing how her grandfather taught her how to swim by throwing her off a pier and diving in after her. She notes how unusual it was at that time for a Black child like her to know how to safely swim. Because of racial segregation and discrimination, many cities did not build pools in predominantly African American neighborhoods.

But Mantegna wasn’t sure how to translate her love of water into a career. After high school she joined the Navy, serving seven years as a shipboard firefighter and chemical warfare technician. Post-Navy, she worked as a medical assistant, and by 2015 she was ready for a change, for herself and her middle-school-age daughter.

The two sold all their possessions, packing up just the important things in a few boxes, and headed west to start a new life in Seattle. Two years later, Mantegna began taking night classes at Green River College — a decision that would eventually bring her to the University of Washington.

Overcoming obstacles

Although purple is her favorite color, Mantegna refused to buy any Husky gear until she knew she’d officially gotten into the UW’s marine biology program as a transfer student. Her dream of attending the UW — a top-tier research institution with a highly ranked marine sciences program — became a reality thanks to financial support from the Husky Promise and Washington College Grant, which cover tuition and fees for eligible Washington state students.

But it wasn’t easy being an undergraduate in her 30s and with a child at home, Mantegna says. She quit her full-time job and started cleaning houses because of the flexible schedule. She and her daughter, now in high school, did their homework together — often the only quality time they had as a duo. She faced the additional burden of entering a field with very few Black women like her. (According to the Oceanography Society, less than 2% of graduate students in atmospheric, Earth and ocean sciences are Black or African American, because of barriers including racial discrimination and fewer financial resources like intergenerational wealth.)

During this challenging first year, Mantegna found support from her UW professors and academic advisers. They helped her push through the tough times, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Then in fall 2020, she arrived at Friday Harbor Labs to conduct field research on sea urchin behavior. That experience sparked the same joy Mantegna had felt as a child dipping her toes into the ocean — and she knew she’d found her calling.

With encouragement from professors and advisers, Mantegna applied to graduate school and was awarded funding from the National Science Foundation. At the core of her doctoral research is a simple question: How do we keep our ecosystem healthy for both marine life and humans? To answer that question, she is often in the field — where she gets to “touch stuff in real life” — but spends just as much time in the lab, to better understand how shellfish either acclimate or adapt to their environment.

Specifically, Mantegna is interested in how chemical contaminants like PCBs and PFAS (that’s polychlorinated biphenyls and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), released into the environment in industrial waste, change how shellfish express their genes. “If they’re putting so much effort into surviving in these waterways, especially with heat waves and drought seasons, they can’t put effort into making quality tissue we’re eating,” Mantegna says. That impact travels up the food web to humans — and to the overall health of our ecosystem and communities.

Changing the field

That’s where Mantegna’s clipboard-wielding students come in. By noting what they see in tidal pools and collecting water samples for eDNA (environmental DNA) sequencing, the undergrads help Mantegna and other scientists get a more complete picture of the ecosystem — and evaluate how much has changed since 1980, when the last assessment was done.

But this mentorship program, which Mantegna created in partnership with Black in Marine Science and the Nature Conservancy, is also about creating “an inclusive environment where students feel part of the community,” she says. Most of the student scholars come from communities underrepresented in marine sciences. Working in a field where she’s often the only Black woman, Mantegna understands their need for a space where they can learn without fear — and express themselves freely.

She adds that more diversity in the field also leads to better science and new solutions. “In marine science, there has to be more than one way to do fieldwork,” Mantegna says. “We need to provide an opportunity for differing perspectives to show up and see how we do it together.”

Yellow Island is a chance to create that kind of open, inclusive space where students can learn, bring their experiences and just get to be who they are. “Every time the boats get close to Yellow, I just smile,” says Mantegna, nodding to the island’s seaweed-covered rocks and tidal pools where she spends much of her time. “I’m so happy to see it — and happy to see them invited into a space that has brought so much joy.”