At night he would set our minds to questioning the evolution of cetaceans, the nature of dolphin communication, and a hundred other things about the natural world. Ken was truly a naturalist. He lived with, breathed, and consulted nature on a regular basis to make sense of the human world. I often have described Ken as an old world naturalist. There are few of his kind left.
Naturalists take their students on field trips.
They balance book learning with the real world, statistics with nature's patterns, something that is often left out of modern day biology courses. When I signed up for graduate school in San Francisco in 1983 I had Ken as an off-campus advisor from Santa Cruz. These two locations were the existing centers of marine mammal work. Randy Wells, a long-term researcher of bottlenose dolphins, Rachael Smolker and Richard Connor from Monkey Mia work, Jan Ostman studying spinners in Hawaii, Michael Poole study spinner dolphins in Tahiti, myself and many others, were all fall outs of these days with Ken and other professors in the Bay area. Many of us choose to commit to long-term field work based on our mentor Dr. Ken, who, after studying dolphins in captivity realized that so much is unknown about wild species and there was only one way to find out.