William Gilly

Dr. William Gilly is a Professor of Biology at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, CA. He has been carrying out research in the Sea of Cortez since 2001 and visiting the region for nearly 25 years. In 2004 he led a group that retraced the 1940 Sea of Cortez expedition of John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts in an effort to document long-term changes. That effort stimulated development of Holistic Biology, a Stanford course that takes undergraduates into the field in Baja California Sur for a month.

William Gilly is a professor of Biology at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California.  He has been carrying out research on the Humboldt squid in the Sea of Cortez since 2001.  His group was the first (and only) to deploy pop-up satellite tags and video-monitoring devices (National Geographic Crittercam) on Humboldt squid to record their second-to-second vertical movements and color-changing behaviors.  This work unexpectedly showed that this active predator spends a great deal of its time at depths of 1,000 feet or more where the oxygen concentration is extremely low – less than 10% of that at the surface.  This ‘oxygen minimum zone’ (OMZ) is found throughout the southern half of the Sea of Cortez and much of the eastern Pacific Ocean.  This feature has been changing over the last few decades, and such changes in ocean oxygen will lead to important ecological impacts. 

Gilly has been working with Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic for the last four years on the project, “Variations in dissolved oxygen in the Sea of Cortez and associated ecological impact.” Profiles of oxygen concentration from the surface to 600 meters in depth are recorded during the National Geographic Sea Bird’s voyages in the Sea of Cortez. This is the beginning of a long-term monitoring project which will track changes in ocean oxygen in the Sea of Cortez and relate these to ecological changes that ultimately impact organisms from plankton to squid to marine mammals.

Gilly’s work has been featured in popular media, including the Ultimate Explorer episode, “Devils of the Deep”, on National Geographic TV (NGTV), “Cannibal Squid” on NGTV’s Dangerous Encounters with Brady Barr, in popular magazines (Discover, Outside, BioScience) and on several National Geographic News online posts.  He is married to Dr. Susan Shillinglaw, a Steinbeck scholar at San Jose State University, and together they direct a summer institute on John Steinbeck funded by the National Endowment for Humanities.  The goal of this program for high-school teachers is to bridge science and humanities in a way that today’s complex world demands.