Drawn to the Ocean

She remembers, vividly, those childhood winter mornings on her 300-acre family farm near the tiny town of Webster, South Dakota: the black and white Holstein dairy cows chewing contentedly on silage in their milking stalls, each of their deep, exhaled breaths transforming into a cloud of ice in the 30-below-zero temperatures.

The seventh of 11 children, including a sister who died in infancy, Joyce Block grew up in the house where her father was born, with one bathroom for everyone. The 45 head of Holsteins needed to be milked twice a day, rain or shine, Christmas or July 4. The 200 chickens needed tending every day, too. 

In the summer, the five acres of vegetables that would help tide the family over through the long winters needed to be planted, weeded, harvested, and put up; and long days of haying in blistering summer temperatures produced food to feed the cows once the cold weather arrived.

“There was never a shortage of work,” Block says with the easy laugh that finishes so many of her sentences. “Maybe that was why I loved school so much.”

The half-mile walk down her driveway and the hour-long bus ride to school (“first on, last off”) were a respite from the farm’s arduous grind, and gave her time to daydream and ponder the single thing that captivated her most – and still does more than 50 years later – the ocean.

School is an oasis for a lot of kids. But for Block school was an island in cerulean water, fringed with a coral reef and teeming with sea life of all kinds.

“I loved the classroom,” she says. “I was just a little sponge. I soaked it all up and just wanted more.” 

Most trips with her mother to the grocery store in town allowed for a stop at the library to drop off a stack of books and pick up the next. And years before the internet or personal computers, further inspiration came by mail each month in the form of National Geographic magazine.

“It was my passport to places so far removed from the farm they seemed like another world,” Block says.

When a story or the incredible imagery from the magazine sparked her interest in a topic, she would curl up with a volume from the family’s set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

“That was my Google,” she laughs. “But it was an incredible source of inspiration.”

After chores, summers were filled with hiking, fishing and birdwatching. The farm was only two miles away from a national wildlife refuge that sat squarely on the central migratory flyway for dozens of species of birds, from white pelicans to cormorants.

“Those birds were always going to, or coming from, the places I wanted to see,” Block says. “I envied their ability to go where they wanted when they felt the time was right. I guess I was traveling vicariously through them in a lot of ways.”

Up to Block’s generation, no one in her family had been to college. Her grandparents wouldn’t even let their five daughters attend high school; Block’s mother had to leave school after the eighth grade. But by her teenage years Block realized her own migratory path would diverge from the one followed by most of her friends and family members: get married, raise a family, stay local, and help on the farm. 

“I have nothing against that. My parents and my family are the salt of the Earth and I couldn’t love them more. But I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do,” she says. “I also knew there was no way my parents could pay for college, so that would fall on me.”

Block graduated from high school and began her undergraduate career at South Dakota State before finishing her degree in biology from the University of Idaho -- perhaps subconsciously edging her way closer to the coast.

But her first job after college working for an agricultural company left her unfulfilled and frankly a little bit bored. When a friend suggested becoming a biology teacher, a light went on. She got her teacher certification and soon landed her first teaching gig at Soldotna High School on the Kenai Peninsula. 

“And I got bit by the ‘Alaska Bug’ bad,” she says. “In the summers I would deck-hand. It was so great.”

Her thirst for learning wasn’t easily sated, however, and in 1990 she finished up a master’s of education degree in natural science at Western. Then she began a 34-year career in Wenatchee teaching high school science, including AP biology, environmental science and marine biology. She racked up several awards, including Washington Science Teacher of the Year in 1993, and picked up short international teaching assignments in Australia and Nepal. 

But the real payoff came with her annual trips to the Salish Sea with a busload of Wenatchee high schoolers, exploring and comparing the aquatic ecosystems at Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and Rosario Beach at Deception Pass State Park. She’d take them out at low tide to see the diversity of life in tidepools, and have them collect samples of seawater – sometimes while wading out up to their chests --  to examine under the microscope and identify types of plankton and other sea life.

“My central message to my students was pretty simple: ‘Folks, there is a big ocean out there, and it is SO cool.’ And it never took very long at Padilla Bay or Rosario Beach to convince any doubters that I was right,” she says.

But something else was also happening to Block: She was developing an appetite for research.

Some of her international teaching opportunities had given her a chance to try out field research in places like Nepal or the Great Barrier Reef. She also took a five-week graduate course through the University of Arizona at a bucket-list destination for any marine scientist, Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands. 

“Oh, it was so amazing,” she says with a sigh, almost willing herself to be back there through the power of positive thought alone. 

Each summer she put another piece into the puzzle of her Next Big Thing as she assisted others on their research, learning a bit more each time.

Finally, the time was right. She retired from teaching in Wenatchee in 2022, moved to Bellingham and went back to Western for her second master’s degree, this time in marine and estuarine science, before embarking on the final stage of her career.

To help offset the cost of her degree and build essential collaboration and outreach connections, Block says she was fortunate to land a prestigious Margaret A. Davidson Graduate Fellowship from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which provides the opportunity for graduate students to conduct collaborative research at one of the 30 national estuarine research reserves. Block is working with scientists from Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Skagit County.

Block was ready to meet her next project, which would turn out to be a foe as voracious as she is.

The European green crab is an invasive species that has launched just that, an invasion of Western Washington, from the outer beaches of the Pacific Coast to the inlets and bays of the Salish Sea and Puget Sound.

The crab was first recorded on the West Coast in San Francisco in 1989 and since then has made its way north all the way to Alaska; it was first found in Washington state waters near the Lummi Nation in 2019 and became an immediate priority for state and federal scientists.

“It’s an omnivore, and it will eat anything it can get its claws on,” Block says. “The superpower of this crab is its wide range of temperature tolerance and ability to displace and outcompete local species, including the Dungeness, and due to its voracious nature, destroy coastal habitats.” 

Block will work with Washington Fish & Wildlife and the Padilla Bay scientists to test how larval green crabs respond to different water temperatures, an important variable to understanding how it spreads so quickly. 

The study builds on Block’s recent experience researching larval gene expression during a summer graduate course with Professor Emeritus Billie Swalla at University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories.

“The loss of habitat – specifically vital eelgrass habitat that is the nursery for our young fish, shellfish, and native crabs – would be devastating, and the correlation between the loss of this habitat and its impact on our commercial seafood industry is easy to see,” she says. “It’s important work, and I am invested in it. Can’t ask for much more than that.”

Given that each female green crab releases up to 185,000 eggs once or twice a year, and the population in Washington waters has reached high enough levels that eradication is no longer an option, the state is heavily invested in controlling the population as best as it can.

Brian Turner, a research scientist with the Aquatic Invasive Species unit of Washington Fish & Wildlife, says Block’s research will help paint a more complete picture of the crab, helping scientists better track the green crab and predict where the invasive predator will spread next.

“Green crabs have a wide range of temperature tolerances, showing variation among populations and the capacity for rapid adaptation, and research performed outside the Pacific Northwest may not accurately reflect the tolerance of our local populations,” Turner says. “Joyce’s work will fill in this gap and provide valuable insight into how larvae will likely respond to increased temperatures resulting from climate change.”

Brian Bingham, director of Shannon Point and head of the Marine and Coastal Science program at Western, said that he wasn’t surprised to see Block back on local beaches in a more official capacity than chaperoning Wenatchee high schoolers.

“Stepping from a lengthy and successful career as an award-winning K-12 teacher to a new role as a beginning graduate student is a significant transition,” Bingham says, “but Joyce is very teachable, eager to learn, and willing to put in the hard work necessary to do top-notch work.”

Block’s extensive classroom expertise will be invaluable in developing a new invasive species curriculum for the Padilla Bay National Estuarine Reserve, Bingham says.

“My impression is that the NOAA folks are excited about the potential impact of her work,” he says. “There is a big multiplier effect here that is a perfect marriage of her past career and her present direction. She is definitely unique.”  

Once she finishes her master’s degree and research thesis at Shannon Point, Block will once again look for her next and hopefully final job. As she has for each step of the way, she already has a plan.

“This is how I want to end my work life, to put the final bookend on it. I want to do something that combines all I’ve done so far – research and teaching and ocean literacy,” she says.

When pressed, Block admits to a dream job, one that she will push hard to make happen: working at NOAA’s Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, which covers 580,000 square miles of ocean and 10 atolls and islets in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands chain. The marine monument is the nation’s largest, about the size of Germany.

The pictures of the coral-ringed white-sand islets of the monument pull Block back to her kitchen table in South Dakota, gazing with rapt attention at the photography in each month’s National Geographic. Elementary-school-aged Joyce has completely caught up to adult Joyce a half-century later, and she is thrilled.

“I saw that the marine monument’s new director is a native of Minnesota, so I figure he and I will speak the same language,” she laughs.

As she ponders what working at Papahānaumokuākea would be like, she gets that same far-off look that lets you know she is visualizing those reefs and white sand beaches in her mind, accompanied by the calls of circling frigatebirds, the splashing of diving pelicans and the dry rustling of sea grape and palm fronds.

“Yup, my mind is made up. Now I just need to make it happen,” she says.

Don't count her out.