Roman Dial is professor of biology at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage. He studied mathematics at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and biology at Stanford University, California. He skis, pack-rafts, kayaks, hikes and cycles. In science, he says his greatest achievement lies in mathematical modelling to capture patterns of diversity. Others know him best for his canopy research. He hopes his work with arthropods and ice worms will fill niches in the world’s ecological knowledge map.
Does anything make you afraid?
Here’s the list! I don’t like it when it gets dark. I’m a little afraid of heights. I’m afraid of falling. I’m afraid of big animals like moose and grizzly bears – they scare me. I’m afraid of white water, really big white water. I’m afraid of drowning, spiders, snakes, biting insects.
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Given your work and your love of extreme sports, doesn’t that make you a bit of a masochist?
I get such a pay-off from it. I get a lot of satisfaction out of knowing, for example, if I’m close to a big grizzly bear, how I need to behave even though I am terrified. I get satisfaction out of showing the bear: “Hey, I’m not afraid of you.” Maybe in these extreme situations where you push yourself so much in one direction that you feel very small, very inconsequential, extremely vulnerable, you feel so much better when you get through.
So how did your two passions come to get mixed up?
It started with my PhD in Stanford. We lived by the ocean and my research site was up in the mountains. We didn’t have a car, so I had to bicycle uphill, 10 kilometres every day. I’d then hike along a trail for about 20 minutes to my study site, and I’d have to climb ropes into the trees to do my experiments. Most of us have a fear of heights and a fear of a lot of empty space, but I have now had so much experience with ropes and knots and being in exposed places, I can use those skills – and the comfort having them brings – to do real science.
Have you done science that couldn’t have been done without your sports skills?
My extreme sport techniques allow me to get to places most people think are difficult or inaccessible. And because I can get to them, I find things that other people haven’t. In some ways I really feel I am doing 19th-century explorer science! For instance, to do glacier biology I learned to travel across glaciers and take care of myself in bad weather. The Harding Ice Field in Alaska is now my favourite place, but I only became familiar with it while I was skiing across it during a race 20 years ago. On the surface of the snow I saw literally millions of ice worms. Now I ski around on the ice field and collect samples of ice worms, snow algae and snow fleas. But I don’t think I would have seen the worms if I hadn’t been glacier skiing, mostly because I wouldn’t have gone up there.
Are you going back to the ice worms soon?
Yes, we’ve a new glacier project to study the distribution of ice worms. Nobody knows much about them – some people don’t even believe they exist! But they are 2 to 3 centimetres long, sometimes much smaller, and they look like tiny earthworms. They burrow and come up to the surface of the glaciers in Alaska at night. They are important because I think they will make a good model organism for habitat loss. The glaciers in Alaska are shrinking very rapidly and the ice worms could help us understand what happens to populations as their habitat shrinks – much as large animals like orang-utans or elephants do in their ever-shrinking habitat patches.
And have those extreme sports skills been paying off in your fieldwork in Borneo too?
Oh yes, with the canopy arthropod abundance data that I collected there. I had to move about 350 metres up and down the ropes each day. My rope skills and my experience high above the ground allow me to concentrate on the science. I fogged the canopy in a way that, as far as I know, hasn’t been done before. I strung a rope over the top of very tall tropical rainforest trees. The rope was about 55 to 70 metres up and about 130 metres along. Every 20 metres or so, I dropped a rope down to the ground off the main rope and set sampling trays every five metres from the top. I had to climb up and then drop down each of those ropes with a 15-kilogram fogging machine in the high humidity and heat of Borneo. I collected about 20,000 arthropods, microclimate data and, almost as interesting, canopy structure data. For every site where I collected these bugs, I have information on how many leaves, stems, tree trunks and so on there are. So I am able to correlate insect distribution and abundance with canopy structure and microclimate.
Do you sometimes do extreme sports just for kicks?
Sure. Most recently I’ve really been interested in pack rafting. The beauty of the pack raft is that you carry the 2-kilogram raft on your back on a trip, walk for a few days, come to a river, raft down the river, hike over the mountains to another river then float down it for a few days. In Alaska I’ve run rivers that have never been run before. And for about 20 years I’ve also been doing adventure races, long endurance races which make you use multiple sports in one race. So you might start on horseback, switch to hiking over a mountain, rafting down a river, hiking over more mountains, and then riding mountain bikes. These races can be 500 kilometres long and last a week nonstop.
What is the most hair-raising experience you’ve had with sports?
I used to be a mountain climber. I quit when I was 24 – ironically the same year I got an award as the most promising American alpinist under the age of 25. I was on a big mountain in the Alaska Range with my climbing partner Chuck Comstock. It was a four-day climb, and it was -30 to -40 °C. We were coming down a ridge that had only been climbed once, no one had ever come down it. It was getting late and we still didn’t have a place to camp. It wasn’t his fault, but I took it out on Chuck. He got mad at me and he untied my rope. We were 1000 metres up on an ice edge ridge and he’s untying the rope. I said: “I’m wrong, you’re right, it was my fault, I’m sorry Chuck, please tie back into the rope.” So he tied back into it. Then as Chuck was leaning over poking the snow with his ice axe, the cornice, a frozen wave of snow, collapsed and he started falling down the mountainside. I had no choice but to jump off the mountain on the other side to save us both, so that the 50 metres of rope did a big inverted U over the ridge. I was tumbling and cart-wheeling through space. Luckily I was OK. I climbed back up to the top of the ridge and I looked down and there was Chuck half a rope-length below. He had broken his hand when the cornice had fallen on him but he was otherwise OK. I decided then that I didn’t really want to climb mountains any more.
Lucky escape! But are you really at home in these isolated, extreme environments?
I am very comfortable with that now. I couldn’t live anywhere else because I’m used to having this big wilderness so nearby. I look out of my window and about 3 kilometres away I can see the valleys where I’ve shot and killed moose during the short hunting season and each moose can feed my family for a year. When I go into the wilderness in Alaska, I feel at home.
How did you end up in Alaska?
When I was 9, my parents were having marital problems and so they sent me to my three uncles in Alaska. It was a very impressionable time for me. I had a motorcycle to ride, and a dog that was part-wolf but followed me round. I had all the freedom to do whatever I wanted – hike up mountains, cross rivers. I hunted and did taxidermy. Quite frankly I don’t remember my life before that first trip. It was so boring back in the suburbs of Washington DC. Every chance I got I’d save my money and I’d go back to Alaska in the summer.
Oil exploration had started then. What do you think of the threat to Alaskan wildlife?
I’ve been to Prudhoe Bay and I’ve been to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, two contrasting examples of Arctic Alaska. I’ve taken my students and my family to the refuge where the caribou come and calf. I’ve ridden a bicycle following caribou trails and river bars. It’s a really magical and marvellous place. So if they developed a pipeline in the refuge it would spoil the magic of the place more in an aesthetic way than in an environmental way. In Alaska, development hasn’t really driven species extinct because most of the kinds of animals and plants here are all pretty widespread. But what we do have that very few places have are really undisturbed, vast ecosystems and they would ruin it if they were to drill for oil. In many ways that is a far greater loss for the human spirit.
Have you worked with indigenous groups?
Yes. And some of them are like extreme sportsmen – only they don’t know that they are! I was in South America visiting the Mapuche Indians because they climb trees. A particular group of the Mapuche called the Pehuenche worship the araucaria tree because it provides them with nuts and seeds. They had come up with a new and clever way of moving their ropes through the trees that I had never seen before. I think that is why extreme sports are so big right now. All humans have these abilities. We can all overcome fears, but when you live in an urban environment you don’t get the chance to find out what you have inside you as a human animal. People who live close to nature don’t have to practise extreme sports because they get the same pleasure and satisfaction out of living their everyday life.
What’s best, the sport or the science?
That’s a tough question. I go in cycles. Right now I’m very excited about the arthropods. I’m so excited I have to tell myself not to work on it, because if I had my chance that’s all I would do. But last year I was really into pack rafting, I wanted to go out every day. When I was into adventure racing that was all I wanted to do. So I don’t really like either science or sports more. I like solving problems and experiencing nature in a physical way, so when I can blend the two I am happiest.
Do they understand at the university?
I’m really lucky I’m at a school that lets me do both. There are a lot of students who want to learn how to analyse and collect data, but on the other hand they want physical excitement, they want to feel alive and know that they have a body for a purpose.
What about your family?
My happiest moments have been when I do adventure science with my family. My son helped me to do the fogging and canopy structure work in Borneo when he was 15. And at 14, he and his 12-year-old sister skied 75 miles around the Harding Ice Field with me and recorded data on the ice worms and snow fleas. These were priceless experiences.
What happens when you can’t do the extreme stuff any more?
I do a lot of mathematical modelling so I can just use pencil, paper and a computer and write equations for nature. I get a lot of satisfaction out of that. But I’m 43 and have been active my whole life and there is a very high chance I’ll continue to do it for the rest of my life because it becomes such a part of us that we absolutely have to do it. I’ve had bad accidents, dislocating my ankle and shoulder, shattering my heel bone, but I get so much pleasure I don’t really notice the pain. I have friends who are 10, 20 even 30 years older and they’re still pack rafting, glacier skiing, hiking in mountains. Those people are an inspiration.