A sharp object protruded from the patient's belly, and the surgeon could only hope to get it out in time. She put him under and reached for her scalpel. A few hours later, the little guy --a three-inch-long sargassum fish who had mistaken plastic seaweed for food--was swimming again.
Ilze Berzins is a rare breed of doctor: an aquatic-animal veterinarian. As curator of animal health and research at the Florida Aquarium in Tampa, she cares for more than 8,000 creatures from all sorts of watery habitats. She also does research--currently on spinal curvatures among sand tiger sharks kept in captivity--and teaches a course through the University of Florida.
With patients ranging from microscopic shrimps to 300-pound turtles, from river otters to great horned owls, no day is like any other, Berzins says. "We're different from single-species doctors. We need to know a little about everything--we get basic training and then try to apply it." Some especially tricky procedures at the aquarium have included feeding seahorses through tiny catheters, removing an ovarian tumor from a snake and implanting antibiotic-infused beads in the shoulder of a sea turtle with a bone infection.
When she joined the aquarium four years ago, her "clinic" was a sink, countertop and cabinet. Now she operates a minihospital complete with a wet lab for dissections and treatments and separate units for surgery and radiology. Aquarium director Jeff Swanagan takes particular pride in Berzins's new inoculation and quarantine system for sick or recently acquired fish. "The life expectancy of many fish is now significantly longer," he says.
Berzins, who grew up in South Dakota and Minnesota, remembers first seeing the ocean at age 10. But television--specifically, Jacques Cousteau's diving adventures--had already hooked her on the underwater world. Later she was drawn to Stanford by the Hopkins Marine Station. Berzins spent a spring quarter and several summers at the Monterey Bay facility, scuba diving and studying species in tide pools. Armed with a master's in biological sciences, she went on to complete a PhD in zoology at UC-Berkeley, a veterinary degree at UC-Davis and a postdoctoral fellowship in comparative pathology at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institution in Baltimore. Although that path was unusual, interest in medicine clearly runs in her family. Berzins's father was a family physician, her mother a medical technologist; her brother (Uldis John Berzins, '73, MD '77) is an ophthalmologist and her sister (Inta Berzins, '79) a radiologist.
Berzins goes back to Minnesota every other winter to serve as a veterinarian for dogsledding teams. The rest of the time, her fun is more Floridian: windsurfing and kayaking. Any marine pets at home to keep her company--a goldfish, perhaps? Nope, just a cat named Charlie. "As a child, I had fish," she says, "but why keep one now when I have thousands at work?"
Poor Charlie. He probably wishes she'd bring her work home.
--Jennie Berry, '01
