Ask biology professor Robert Mauck why he studies storm-petrels and he'll tell you the long-lived seabirds offer a unique opportunity to study why some animals are better survivors than others, a peek at natural selection in action. And they smell good.

Mauck has spent years examining these small cousins to the albatross, which make their homes off the northeast Atlantic Coast. The musky smell he refers to comes from an oil their bodies secrete, which the birds rub on their feathers to keep them waterproof.

Mauck enjoys a good challenge, and over the course of his 50 years, he has faced quite a few. He was a smoke jumper in Fairbanks, Alaska; a sports reporter in Anchorage; and a football coach in Italy. But he's always been a closet scientist. Science, he says, combines much of what he loved about his previous professions into one, delightfully complex package. When Mauck enrolled as a doctoral student in biology at Ohio State University in the 1990s, everything seemed to fall into place.

"The real switch for me happened when I learned that science was about questions, not answers," says Mauck, who recently was named the Harvey F. Lodish Professor in the Natural Sciences.

He has shared his scientific curiosity with dozens of Kenyon students in the classroom and in the field. He does much of his work at the Bowdoin Scientific Station at Kent Island in New Brunswick, Canada, where he serves as director, and has taken a number of Kenyon students along to take part in the field studies.