Douglas Fenner

Douglas Fenner

B.A. Reed College, USA, 1971 Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, USA, 1976

Born in Michigan, USA, the author lived in a variety of places in the states, including Florida during his high school years, which stimulated an interest in tropical marine life. During his years at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, he was introduced to biology, including invertebrate biology, studied sea urchin tube feet and respiration for his thesis and spent two summers in Hawaii studying fish behavior with his professors. Once he graduated, he attended the summer invertebrate zoology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts and then another summer was a course assistant for that course. Snorkeling trips to the Caribbean (including to Jamaica just before Hurricane Allen) during graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania were followed by scuba trips to the Caribbean. His coral reef research and publications began with surveys and descriptions of reefs in the Caribbean, including Cozumel, Roatan, Cayman Brac, Little Cayman, and St. Lucia. It became clear that to do transects you need to know your corals, and existing guides were inadequate, so Caribbean coral identification and taxonomy were next to be studied. By this time the author lived in Seattle, Washington. Then the author began to study corals in Hawaii, which led to his identification book for Hawaiian corals. He then worked in the Philippines for two years, learning many coral species in that area of high diversity. This was followed by six years of working with Dr. “Charlie” J.E.N. Veron at the Australian Institute of Marine Science on the “Coral ID” electronic key to corals of the world. At that time, the author began to be invited to study and record corals during Rapid Assessment Programs in a variety of places around the Indo-Pacific. In November 2003, the author began work at the Dept. Marine & Wildlife Resources, in American Samoa. He began working on coral reef monitoring there a year later and continued with that and continued to make trips to study corals around the Indo-Pacific. Currently, the author has studied coral at 14 islands in the Caribbean and 14 areas of the Indo-Pacific, plus southern Italy in the Mediterranean. He is the author of 17 book chapters and 56 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, and a second edition of his Corals of Hawaii book. He has worked as a contractor for NOAA NMFS Protected Species on the threatened coral species since 2013. That work has taken him around the Pacific each year to study corals and teach people how to identify corals. That effort includes photographing corals, writing field guides, and building “practice modules” for teaching coral ID and people to practice with. He currently works on describing new coral species and diseases and a variety of other coral reef topics. He continues to be based in American Samoa.