REMEMBERING LESA MENG

Peter Moyle

It was a shock to hear of the death of Lesa Meng from cancer this fall, because of the strength in mind and body that allowed her to succeed in many areas. She was born in 1951 and once wrote “My love of water began as a small child growing up in New York City. For a nickel I could peer over the railing of the Staten Island Ferry and watch the water roll away from the bow by the hour. My fascination with the briny depths led me to California where I eventually became a scuba diving instructor. World travel found me working in the Virgin Islands as an underwater guide. Finally an increasing appreciation of the underwater environment gave me the impetus to return to school to study fisheries.” What she neglected to mention in this introduction to herself was that she also ran restaurants and studied art for a number of years. She told me once that she was at the San Francisco Art Institute making ceramic fish when she realized that it was the fish more than the art that interested her.

This realization took her to community college and then to Sacramento State University, from which she graduated with a B.S. in Biology in Spring 1988, and was further inspired in the fish direction by Marty Brittan. She came to UC Davis that fall, as a graduate student in Ecology, working in my laboratory. She started out as an M.S. student but we both quickly realized that she should go straight on for a PhD. She did not want to waste any more time! As a graduate student she ran my Suisun Marsh sampling program and was my teaching assistant in fish biology. She was very efficient and both the sampling program and the fish laboratories improved as a result. She really enjoyed interacting with the undergraduate students and motivated the fish students by organizing a “fish baseball” game at the end of labs after students finished their work (don’t ask me what the rules were!).

Her PhD dissertation involved experimental studies of the behavior and energetics of striped bass larvae and their copepod prey, a project she devised with minimal help from me. To do these studies, she had to have an apparatus up and running each spring for the short window of time when the larvae were available. During this period she essentially worked around the clock running her experiments. Once each set of experiments was completed, she analyzed the data, wrote up the results, and submitted a paper for publication. Her dissertation consisted of one published paper, one manuscript accepted for publication, and one submitted for publication. As soon as she finished her last larval paper, she wrote two papers based on her analysis of my Suisun Marsh data. She finished her degree in 1992 and I am fond of pointing to her rapid progress as a good example for other graduate students to follow.

After finishing her degree, she joined the USFWS in Sacramento. At my request, she joined the Delta Native Fishes Recovery Team, of which I was head, because of her expertise on splittail. She proved to be one of the most active team members, participating in the often heated discussions and more than holding her own (as the only female member of the team). She wound up taking responsibility for the final editing of the recovery plan document, a duty she had not signed up for, but did willingly and well. As a USFWS biologist, she was both frustrated and energized by her work on threatened fishes, including the listing package for splittail.

In 1995, she left Sacramento for Narragansett, RI where she worked at the US-EPA Laboratory for the rest of her career. She quickly became well known for her activities in Southern New England Chapter of AFS.  She took over as Program Development Chair in 1997 and was a driving force in maintaining high quality Chapter meetings for almost 10 years.  Lesa earned the chapter’s Special Achievement Award in 1999 and in 2001, was awarded the Chapter’s Irwin Alperin Outstanding Member Award . The Southern New England Chapter will be dedicating its winter meeting this January to Lesa and will be granting her, posthumously, the Award of Excellence. The SNE Chapter has also renamed the Citizen's Aquatic Conservation Award to the Lesa Meng Aquatic Conservation Award, commemorating her dedication to SNEC and the field of aquatic conservation.

Lesa Meng clearly had a strong positive affect on estuarine conservation on both coasts, in no small part because of her energy and many talents, including being an articulate spokesman for things she believed in. We can only regret she is not still around to reap more of the rewards of her labors.