At Home in the Arctic with Chelsea Kovalcsik ’16
This article was originally published in the Spring 2023 edition of the Chatham Recorder Alumni Magazine by Cara Gillotti. To view more digital Recorder stories, click here.
Chelsea Kovalcsik ’16
“I was in elementary school, and my friends and I had gone to an ice cream shop,” she recalls. “We were sitting on the curb, eating our ice cream, and I saw all these cigarette butts lying all over the ground. I didn’t know anything about biodegradability, but you just knew those didn’t belong there. So I made all my friends pick up the cigarette butts with me. They were like ‘I don’t want to do this!’ and I was like ‘I don’t care.’ I was probably a little bossy, or a leader, whatever.”
In her senior year of high school, Kovalcsik took an AP Environmental Science course. “That class showed me that I’m not some weird little kid with this passion that no one else has,” she says. “It’s not just picking up cigarette butts. I could make a career out of this.”
The Chatham Years
Kovalcsik launched her college search alongside her brother, who was looking for graduate physical therapy programs. “I thought it would be such a huge plus to go to the same school,” she says. Her brother was “pretty sold on Chatham,” Kovalcsik says, and she toured campus, talked to students, and loved it. “I wasn’t at the time looking for an all-women’s college. I was just looking for a safe place as a young woman going off to school; I wanted to play basketball, and I wanted a small school.” Kovalcsik and her brother started their respective programs together.
At Chatham, Kovalcsik played basketball, participated in Chatham traditions like Air Band, worked for the Department of Athletics, and loved her science classes. “Dr. Robert Lettan was just wicked smart. I took an environmental chemistry class with him, and there was this challenge for me of being smart enough to be in his good graces,” she laughs. “He was always very professional and didn’t goof around too much. Then we went to Brazil for Maymester, and he and I raced each other, and I just smoked him in this footrace! It was a fun way to connect with a professor on a different level.”
Alaska Beckons
Anchorage, AK; practicing necropsy skills on a moose
After graduating, Kovalcsik moved to Kansas to be with her then-partner. “I was waitressing and making friends and having fun, but I wanted to do something that was applicable to my degree,” she says. On a lark, she applied for a research technician job with a tribal nonprofit in Alaska, and got it. “I moved up to Alaska in August 2017, and I just fell in love with it. It is truly a whole different world up here. When your friends take you hiking, you’re thinking it’s a stroll through the park—no. We’re scaling mountains. The longer I was here, the more I felt comfortable in this outside environment, navigating moose and bears, and how to look at weather forecasts for avalanche concerns. It’s an environmentalist’s dream.”
Kovalcsik stayed with the tribal nonprofit for four years. “They get money from the federal government to build their capacity in environmental programs,” she says. “Ocean acidification, invasive species, marine mammals, harmful algal blooms, wildfires—I was there helping them with all of those things.” In addition to her work, Kovalcsik was also volunteering with the Beluga Wildlife Alliance and for a local veterinarian. “I was performing necropsies on marine mammals, like sea otters, belugas, gray whales, and porpoises. A dead beluga would come in, and I got to help cut these animals open and try to piece together the story of why they died. I loved that,” she says.
The Nambian Dolphin Project
Walvis Bay, Namibia; performing a necropsy on a recently deceased seal
But Kovalcsik didn’t see much room for growth as a research technician, so she started to think about her next step. She applied and was accepted to intern with the Namibian Dolphin Project, in Southern Africa, for a five-week internship. “I was working with Ph.D. students on bioacoustics of bottlenose dolphins and cape fur seals, performing necropsies, doing all sorts of real science. We were on the boat every day—it was an excellent experience,” she says.
The internship turned into a job with sponsorship to live in Namibia, and Kovalcsik jumped at the chance. She became the educational field researcher and led their marine mammal stranding program. “Marine mammals strand all the time,” she explains. “They beach themselves, essentially. Sometimes they strand because they’ve died out at sea and the current pushes them to land, other times they strand for unknown reasons, they just get disoriented. And that could be because there’s offshore drilling, or exploration, or navy sonar, or an earthquake, or they’re sick.”
“The real big event that happened while I was there was that hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of cape fur seals were dying and stranding,” she continues. “It was like, ‘What is happening?’ I was in charge of leading the effort to sample and photograph and perform full necropsies on hundreds of seals. We would go out there for 12 hours every day, six, seven days per week, count them, take photographs, measure them, and on the freshest ones, cut them open, measure their blubber, take whisker and fur samples, take out their organs. They haven’t decided what caused it, but they think it’s because of a harmful algal bloom.”
Alaska Beckons Again
“While working on that project, I was like, ‘I want to do this for grad school,” Kovalcsik says. She moved back to Alaska and started grad school at the University of Alaska – Fairbanks in August 2022. Kovalcsik is now getting her master’s in marine biology, studying harmful algal blooms in northern fur seals. Stakes are high, she explains, because some Alaska Native populations hunt and eat the seals, which means the toxicity in the algae could transfer to the human population.
Along with her studies, Kovalcsik continues to work on marine debris disentanglement. “These seals get caught up in anything that is circular that a seal could stick their head into,” she says. “Seals are naturally curious animals, and they’re playful, so if they see a thing floating, they’ll go up to it and play with it until one day they get too big, and the thing no longer comes off their neck. And then they start to grow and grow, and this band or net isn’t expanding. It’s terrible. We successfully disentangled 45 seals this summer. I feel confident that our disentanglement efforts are one of the biggest in the United States, if not around the world.”
Could Kovalcsik see herself staying in Alaska permanently? “I really love the Arctic,” she says. “It’s such a unique environment, and it will change completely in my lifetime. Or working around coral reefs, some of these really endangered, vulnerable habitats, getting to see those in my lifetime—I would like to do that. But I think Alaska will be my home base forever.”
“I love higher education, so I very much am considering a Ph.D.,” says Kovalcsik. “Thinking back as a kid who had these passions but had no avenue to pursue them, to being a terrible student in middle school, to then finally finding my way and navigating this process, to all the things I’ve done, then potentially being a Ph.D.? It’s like ‘No way, no way!’”
Walvis Bay, Namibia; collecting samples from a dead beached humpback whale