Angie Díaz: “I never thought of Antarctica as a goal, although I wanted to study marine biology since I was a child”

It was in the year 2006 that Angie Diaz Lorca marked a milestone for national science, without looking for it. That summer, she dived in Antarctica, becoming the first Chilean woman to do so. It was a milestone, had it not been for the question that her teacher, Dr. Elie Poulin, asked when he saw the strangeness with which the other crew members looked at Angie when they found out that she was a diver.

“At that time I was the only woman on board. As I was going to enter the master’s degree and had been diving since 2003, my teachers (Elie Poulin and Álvaro Palma) invited me. Elie Poulin realized that everyone was struck by the fact that a woman was diving. It wasn’t a direct comment, but there was amazement. He asked how many women had dived in Antarctica, and the days after They answered us that I was the first Chilean woman in doing it. That’s where the milestone comes from. It was very anecdotal, it was not that we planned it knowing this. In addition, we are talking about 2006, so we were surprised that it had not happened before.

Since then, 17 years have passed and the trips of the academic of the Department of Zoology to Antarctica occur almost every summer, to collect samples of animals and study their genetic evolution. “I have not gone every year, I was at least three without traveling due to my maternity (she has been a mother since 2015). Today there are more facilities to make it compatible, for example, to measure productivity in a longer period of time to equate in the case of maternity”. For her, the progress has been important. She says that in her case, she postponed being a mother until she achieved greater economic stability. “The scholarships allow you to stay, but they are for two or four years, you must have exclusive dedication and not just 40 hours a week like a normal job.”

During the month of January of this year, he made his last dive in Antarctica, together with the BASE Millennium Institute, which qualifies as one of the most successful to date: around 22 descents in different parts of the east and west of the peninsula. , with the consequent collection of a large number of samples.

In addition to the experience gained, the PhD in Sciences with a major in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology points out that many things have changed in the expeditions: “today we are almost at parity between men and women and there are many women diving, either on the ship or in the bases. It has been a profound change, at a scientific level and in the work carried out by the Chilean Antarctic Institute. Even for the weighting of the projects, the gender variable is considered. Perhaps what is missing is to advance in the branches of the Armed Forces, with facts beyond the speech”.

dream and reality

The researcher, who began her career entering Marine Biology at the Catholic University of the Most Holy ConceptionAfter her master’s and doctorate at the University of Chile and her postdoc at the University of Magallanes, she always wanted to work with animals. First, as a veterinarian and then with marine fauna. “I never thought of Antarctica as a goal, although she wanted to study marine biology since she was a child. I’m from Santiago, but since I was a little girl I remember the fascination with documentaries about jacques cousteau and I always wanted to know what lives in the sea. Also with the Cosmos series, by Carl Saganwhere it was shown how life arises and how it diversifies, and I think that there I united those two things”.

Today, those ideas are expressed in his research. His first Antarctic dive was to study, through the Antarctic urchins and the coast of South America, how and when the species separated, once the continents were divided. This investigation showed that, although the continents separated 20 million years ago, the species did so only 5 million years ago. “We see that the Antarctic continent is actually not that isolated and we wonder what happened in those 15 million years.” Later, he developed an investigation with snails, “to contribute to the same question, at what moment is the marine fauna of Antarctica isolated, depending on the characteristics of the different animals.”

In this study, which sought to clarify the speciation process of the snail Neobuccinum eatoni, endemic to the continent, the species was found to be represented by more than one lineage, casting doubt on established taxonomy and its evolutionary history. This is known as a cryptic species complex, that is, the existence of genetic groups indicating unknown species. “There is a diversity that we don’t know about and although this work has already finished, we want to obtain more samples to find out how many species there are. We already know that it is not just one, we want to know how many and what moves the evolutionary history of the group”.

Currently, she is working on two research projects: a Millennium Institute on biodiversity in Antarctic and sub-Antarctic ecosystems, in which she is the principal investigator, and in research on Antarctic phylogeography in Chitones with different reproductive strategies, where she works as a co-investigator.

Climate change and marine species

“The Millennium Institute project has a lot to do with the effects of climate change. The Antarctic continent is the only place on earth where we can remove the direct human effect, to study the impact of climate change. We want to know biodiversity and know how organisms evolved, how long it took for them to adapt, and then project how they might react to climate change.”