Michelle Staedler
MICHELLE STAEDLER is the Sea Otter Program Manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where she oversees field research on wild otters. The work is conducted in conjunction with Aquarium partners UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, Cal Fish & Wildlife, and the United States Geological Survey (USGS), among others. The research coalition has done a variety of projects over the years, and Michelle coordinates those projects with the different groups, plus is responsible for getting volunteers and staff to follow along and look at the animals and help collect the data.
Over the last six months her work has expanded to include overseeing the otter animal-care component inside the Aquarium. That includes taking in rehab otters, otters of all ages and caring for them, whether they’re doing surrogacy with pups and raising the pups and returning them to the wild, or helping adults that need a little bit of R&R before they go back out into the wild. Michelle has a team of people that she oversees for both of those components.
Michelle was born in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up outside of Hartford in Wethersfield, Connecticut, the next town south. She went to high school there and lived in Wethersfield for 18 years, until she ended up moving around and traveling. She eventually ended up in California to go to school at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC).
Always interested in tide pools and the ocean as a kid, Michelle applied to UCSC because it was close to the ocean and was kind of different in that courses were taken on a pass/fail basis with no grades. She focused on environmental studies, but was really interested in natural history and liked biology. However she knew she wasn’t going to be one of those people who sits behind a microscope and looks at things through the microscope all day.
Michelle really loved the bigger picture: like going to an area and seeing all the different species that interact in that area. Understanding behavior was her main focus. Initially Michelle did some work on ground squirrels on campus. Then she worked on crab behavior – what they did underwater in tide pools. Michelle was always interested in marine life, but there was a posting on campus looking for volunteers to help with a new sea otter research project, which led her in the direction of her lifelong career.
Michelle was familiar with sea otters from her time in California, but growing up on the East Coast, they were a new species to her. She would see them along the coast here and thought that would be really cool to do some behavioral work on sea otters. So Michelle volunteered with that project, which was conducted by Dr. Jim Estes and Dr. Marianne Riedman.
That was about the time that the Aquarium started up. It opened to the public in 1984. Michelle started working for the Aquarium in 1985 doing a research project studying individual sea otters. It was one of the first studies to look at otters as individuals, as opposed to studying them at a population level, where the researchers put tags on them to tell them apart. One thing led to another, and Michelle has been working with sea otters ever since.
