CASBS helped shape my research and career in so many ways, that I cannot imagine what would have happened had I not spent my early years as an Assistant Professor at CASBS (1994-1995). The resulting volume, Cetacean Societies, was the first of its kind for marine mammals and helped solidify a burgeoning new field. But this work had deeper roots that extend half a century before. Although I am a marine mammalogist, I am also the academic offspring and grand-offspring of primatologists. Barbara Smuts, who led the well-known publication Primate Societies (published in 1987, University of Chicago Press) – conducted this work at CASBS in 1982. She was my mentor at The University of Michigan when I began, with her, the bottlenose dolphin research I continue today. Her undergraduate advisor, Irven DeVore (Harvard University), became renowned for his many volumes of work but also as a dynamic, caustic and extraordinarily influential anthropologist, who resided at CASBS in 1962-1963. From that, he produced the ‘founding volume’ of primatology, Primate Behavior: Field Studies of Monkeys and Apes, published in 1965. Irven DeVore also helped establish the Dolphins of Shark Bay Research Project, which continues to this day. Other books, such as Rodent Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2007) have similarly created collaborative syntheses. So here I sit, more than 50 years later, the beneficiary of scholars who came before me, and set trajectories that enabled the kinds of scholarship that have helped change our views of ourselves, our nearest kin, and our ‘cognitive cousins’ in the sea.
Janet Mann, senior editor of Cetacean Societies: Field studies of dolphins and whales (2000, University of Chicago Press).
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