Marine Science Careers: Meet Marine Mammal Veterinarian Dr. Cara Field

Dr. Cara Field is so much more than The Marine Mammal Center’s medical director. She is also one of the many teachers who makes the Center a world-class teaching hospital.

As a critical first responder for marine mammals, The Marine Mammal Center provides a unique opportunity to learn from sick and injured animals, in order to better protect their ocean home.

We also host hundreds of students and professionals every year who come to study with our experts. Our scientists and veterinarians teach these visitors the skills needed to respond to and care for the increasing number of distressed marine mammals around the world.

Cara is one of those rare people who knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life at a very young age. As a small child, she could be found turning disrupted sea stars right side up and saving other tide-pool dwellers near her home in Santa Cruz, California. For as long as she can remember, Cara wanted to help animals.

As a young adult, Cara joined her science- and animal-loving peers in both graduate and veterinary school. It was during her graduate studies of deep-diving elephant seals that she discovered the Center and started volunteering every Sunday to help feed and care for the animals.

Throughout her seemingly endless years of higher education, Cara interned at several aquariums and stranding organizations around the country, but she always made her way back to the Center. Why? Because her dream was to make the Center’s unique combination of medicine, research and teaching a central part of her life.

When Cara first began volunteering, the Center was limited to fewer pens and smaller pools, and buildings were primarily portable storage units. But even then, she recalls her experience as incredible. Seeing just how many people, from all sorts of backgrounds, could be trained on-site and perform the hands-on work simply blew her away.

What I love about The Marine Mammal Center is that you can see the science, the medicine and the teaching all rolled up into this incredible effort driven by all these people.

Those seven years Cara spent volunteering at the Center shaped her background in marine mammal medicine. The experience helped her develop a much deeper understanding of the importance of veterinary science and its role in the health of our ocean and the ecosystem as a whole.

The Center rescues and rehabilitates hundreds of marine mammals each year, which puts Cara in the perfect position to use what she learns from our patients to better inform solutions that will help protect the ocean environment. Marine mammals are ecosystem indicators meaning that by understanding the challenges they are facing out in the ocean, we can better understand the threats facing the marine environment as a whole.

In veterinary school, the bigger picture isn’t always fully addressed as most programs are heavily focused on medicine. Cara believes that a key factor in conservation is studying animals as they interact with their environment.

If we don’t look at the bigger picture, we miss what contributes to an animal’s suffering in the first place.

As the world’s largest marine mammal hospital, the Center cares for a wide variety of animal species with differing ailments, giving visiting students a rich environment for learning about ocean health issues and conservation on a broad scale. This growing network of marine science professionals can in turn use and share their newfound knowledge to protect the ocean for the future.

Cara encourages her students to cater their experience at the Center to fit their interests and needs so that when they return home, they are prepared to tackle the challenges that lay ahead.

For example, María Soledad “Sole” Sarzosa Moreta, one of our recent International Veterinary Fellows, is a veterinarian from Ecuador. There she investigates the health of Galápagos sea lions. During her time at the Center, Sole gained valuable experience in medicine, microbiology, patient care, research and more under the expert guidance of Cara and other staff. Sole returned to Ecuador with new skills to further develop response and health evaluation protocols for the endangered Galápagos sea lion.

Many of our other program alumni have used what they’ve learned here as a platform for their own careers. They’ve gone on to manage large marine mammal response networks, conduct research in Antarctica and coordinate marine mammal disentanglement projects. Veterinarians in many countries have few opportunities to work with stranded marine mammals, and our unique International Veterinary Fellowship Program helps equip these veterinarians with the knowledge and skills to build rescue and rehabilitation programs from the ground up. 

Watching the ripple effect as our alumni shared their newfound knowledge across the world helped Cara realize that teaching future generations is the foundation of advancing global ocean conservation. With that in mind, Cara recently pursued an additional certification to bolster her own teaching efforts.

The American College of Zoological Medicine is the highest authority in the field of veterinary medicine for wildlife and zoological species. After years of arduous preparation, Cara passed a multi-day exam that earned her the status of Diplomate with specialization in Aquatic Animal Medicine – a highly respected certification that only a few dozen other people in the nation have acquired

When asked what a typical day is like for her, Cara just tips her head back and laughs. Yes, in any given day she may perform patient exams, teach a group of enthusiastic students and review data collected for a research project. But there is no “typical,” and that’s what she loves about it. She takes pride in the stories she’s helped shape as her alumni share their knowledge and skills saving marine mammals and advancing ocean conservation around the world.