In a small office at the Dr. Angel C. Alcala Environment and Marine Science Laboratories at Silliman University in Dumaguete City, the man for whom the facility is named after goes to work like he had been doing for the last 62 years.
Now 84, Alcala remembers the day the president of Silliman University “fired” him in 1988, after teaching for 37 years. “He said I was too old to teach, but I was still very young!” he recalled with a laugh.
As Chairman of the SU-Angelo King Center for Research and Environmental Management, Alcala and his team of scientists are currently working on the interrelationships of marine protected areas, a subject close to his heart which won him two major awards–the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service in 1992 and the National Scientist Award in 2014.
Alcala is one person who believes that scientists are made, not born. In fact, as a young boy in barangay Caliling, Cauayan town in Negros Occidental, Alcala didn’t think of becoming a scientist. “I was just playing like all the other boys,” he recalled. Apart from living next to a reef, his interest in the marine environment was sparked by a picture of a reef in a magazine which to him represents the ideal reef. “I was looking at all these ecosystems and began to wonder why they are there and how they are interacting.”
After graduating from Kabankalan Academy, Alcala went to Silliman University and started to study reefs. His determination to learn about the reefs grew when he found out that he could not get any data from government offices. He devoted his time to research and in creating new knowledge, finishing his BS Biology degree, magna cum laude.
His years of data gathering also paid off when, after traveling for three weeks on a steamship to San Francisco under a Fulbright/Smith Mundt Graduate Scholarship at Stanford University in 1959, he was able to finish his Master’s degree in just one year. “I had all my data with me and all I did when I got to Stanford was just to write up my thesis,” he said.
He returned to his teaching job at Silliman but had to leave his wife Naomi and their six children again for two years to be back at Stanford four years later for his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences.
Apart from his work on marine protected areas, Alcala is also one of only two herpetologists in the Philippines. Explaining the scarcity of scientists who study reptiles and amphibians, Alcala said perhaps it’s because people are scared of reptiles. “They find them ugly and dangerous creatures, but I’d say this is just a bias because these creatures also do something good,” he said. The house guekos, for instance, have been found to eat rats. Crocodiles, on the other hand, apart from being harvested them for their skin, are also proving to be a delicacy in many parts of the Philippines. At present, Alcala chairs the Crocodilus Porosus Group, composed of six serious crocodile growers in the country.
Alcala founded the SU Marine Laboratory in 1974, where he began studies on the productivity of marine sanctuaries out of a grant from the National Research Council of the Philippines. Their experiments with American scientist Alan White over a ten-year period in Sumilon island, off the southern tip of Cebu, showed that Marine Protected Areas do work. The paper was published in a journal and it moved an Australian scientist named Gary Russ to come over to do further collaborative research work.
