114 – COSMOS Issue 86
IT’S FUNNY HOWoften childhood informs life choices.
“I grew up fishing, snorkelling, bird watching,” says marine biologist
Cayne Layton. “I was that kid that used to collect the crab shells and
fish skeletons from the beach and bring them home to my parents – we
used to have a table in the house with all the weird stuff that I’d collected
that probably stank to high heaven.”
Layton reckons he did “really poorly” in high school and went to uni to
study science only after friends encouraged his interest in the natural
environment. After a year in Cairns he’d scored good enough marks to
transfer back to ANU in Canberra to be closer to family and friends.
While at ANU he regularly travelled to the Great Barrier Reef for
fieldwork, but his heart always led south.
“Working on the Great Barrier Reef is fun – it’s warm and there’s
tropical islands – but growing up on the NSW south coast my passion had
always been for cold water reefs,” he says. “I wasn’t initially attracted so
much to seaweed as to everything else that lived in it... the more you learn
about something the more you come to appreciate it and I’ve certainly
done that with seaweed.”
Layton moved to Tasmania to complete a PhD on kelp forests in
2013, and he’s been in Hobart ever since. “All science is about answering
questions, right?” he says. “That’s what I find really interesting – that
idea that you’re treading into new ground and answering things that we
just don’t know.”
CAYNE APPEARS IN OUR PICTURE ESSAY ABOUT KELP, PAGE 48.
Cayne Layton
Seaweed whisperer
PORTRAIT
CAYNE LAYTON