Hello.

My name is Helen Scales. I’m a freelance writer, broadcaster & marine biologist based in Cambridge, UK, which I admit is a long way from the sea.

I have around about 10 years of wide-ranging science-media experience, starting in the days of reporting on the Cambridge University student paper leading all the way up to my current mix of appearing on BBC radio, writing books as well as magazine & web articles.

I also spend some of my time as a consultant for conservation organizations, working mostly on issues of international wildlife trading & marine habitat protection.

And I guess you might say I have an inordinate fondness for the oceans.

Why? I’m not quite sure but the fact is I find myself preoccupied with hunting down ideas, facts and info about the oceans and the natural world.

And now I just can’t stop myself from passing it all on

Where did it all begin? Maybe it was the family holidays I spent romping around the beaches & wild moors of Cornwall (England’s most beautiful southwesterly big toe) & the wild Atlantic coasts of France.

And because in my family a love & respect for the natural world was just part of everyday life.

And quite possibly the deal was sealed & I was transformed into a marine biologist-in-the-making the day, aged 16, I leapt into a freezing flooded gravel pit somewhere in the British Midlands & dived alongside my very first fish.

Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to dive beneath the waves in various corners of the world’s oceans.

During a gap year before university, I witnessed the reefs of Belize bleaching, I met the breathtaking whale sharks of Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia & trained as a dive master on the Great Barrier Reef; in summer vacations between terms at Cambridge University (where I studied for a BA in Natural Sciences) I surveyed coral reefs in the Philippines & tagged pelagic sharks in Monterey Bay.

While studying for a masters in tropical coastal management at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, I went to Malaysia for the first time & investigated the management of the marine park at Tioman Island; I went back and worked for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) for a year, surveying the marine biodiversity of the Langkawi archipelago.

After that, I returned to Cambridge and studied for a PhD specializing in the lives and loves of a fish called the Napoleon wrasse or humphead wrasse, a rare & endangered giant on coral reefs of the Indian & Pacific Oceans. Among many adventures were an expedition to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea & island-hopping between remote fishing communities in the far north of Sabah.

It was while I was doing my PhD that I began to feel the urge not only to study the natural world & how it is  changing but to tell other people about it. And so a new door appeared in front of me with a jumble of exciting possibilities lying behind it.

Photo by Ria Mishaal Cooke

To say that I changed path would assume that I knew where I was going & what I would do along the way, which isn’t strictly true. But then the not-knowing is half the fun (but also a source of much brain ache).

But it isn’t just about the oceans & the natural world, writing & talking for me. I do other things too. I like to dance Argentine Tango, ride my bike (last year for fun I cycled across part of the Himalayas in northern India), sing in the shower, I play piano & saxophone & I’m learning to be a printmaker.

For details of my research, employment etc see my CV.