by Lynne Schafer Gross and Mark McDermott
One day circa 1970, a boy in El Segundo looked up at a telephone pole near his home and saw a hawk perched at the top. The next day, a hawk appeared in a nearby tree. Were they the same bird? He didn’t know. But the question lodged itself in him, and the habit it produced — an obsessive attention to the individual qualities of individual animals — would define the next 50 years of his life.
That boy was Eric Martin. He never received a degree in animal biology. What he developed instead, through decades on the South Bay’s coastal waters and 26 years working for the Roundhouse Aquarium, was something rarer than a credential: a firsthand knowledge of local marine wildlife so deep and so hard-won that working scientists came to regard him as a peer — and the animals themselves seemed to regard him as something closer. Mother dolphins brought their newborns to the side of his boat as if to make introductions. Individual dolphins he had named — Mr. K, Ghost, a scoliotic female he called Scully — sought him out across open water with what looked unmistakably like recognition. He could read a dolphin’s pregnancy from her silhouette, seen through a drone hundreds of feet above the surface.
He got his first SLR camera around age 10, the kind with interchangeable lenses, and began photographing birds throughout El Segundo. As a teenager he drove up to Big Bear to help count bald eagles before most people knew they were up there. The birds were practice. What the ocean would do to him was something else entirely. Martin first saw an orca up close, from a 14-ft. inflatable, off Palos Verdes’ Rocky Point, one October morning in 1985.
“My life took off with them,” he said. “From that moment on, I just wanted to know what was going on in the ocean.”
From the Roundhouse, Eric and his wife, Dawn Eyre Martin, turned that intimacy with the ocean into something transferable. She has been with the Roundhouse for 19 years, working with teacher communications, fundraising, events, and other operations that kept the institution alive.
Many of the students who come through the Roundhouse’s are from disadvantaged neighborhoods, having never seen the ocean or a marine animal up close. Eric’s style of teaching made it not a distant thing but a world alive with personalities, with families, with grief and ingenuity and play.
Now he and Dawn are following their son Cody to Alaska. The Roundhouse is hosting a farewell gathering on March 14 for anyone who wants to say goodbye — eye-to-eye, with two of the most effective ever advocates for local marine wildlife. All their work at the Roundhouse has been about connection — with the community, with the marine environment, and most especially forging a connection between the two.
“I have looked a dolphin in the eye when they’re basically bow riding in front of you,” Martin said, “and that eyeball moves back and forth, watching every single move you do. When they see you smile, when they see you laugh, when they see you excited — they sense that.”
From Marineland to the MB Pier
After graduating from El Segundo High School in 1980, Eric found his way to Marineland of the Pacific in Palos Verdes — the storied marine park still beloved by Southern Californians of a certain age. By 1982, Martin had signed on as a docent, giving tours and helping with animal care.
At Marineland, Eric crossed paths with marine photographer Bob Talbot, who was working with the whale census project and had recently given a slide lecture on his photography at an aquarium in the San Gabriel Valley. Eric had attended that lecture and the images had stayed with him. Talbot was already a significant figure in the world of marine wildlife photography — he would later work on Free Willy, Flipper, Into the Blue, and Dolphin Tale 2, and his killer whale posters, shot in the straits off British Columbia, were well known among the people who cared about such things. But Eric simply knew him as someone who went out on the ocean to find animals, and that was enough.
On the morning of October 28, 1985, Eric drove up to Marineland for an ordinary day of work, camera in hand as usual. He found Talbot running towards the parking lot. A pod of orcas had been spotted offshore. Eric did not ask if he could come. He just said he was going. Minutes later they were out past Rocky Point in Talbot’s 14-foot inflatable dinghy — along with Alisa Schulman-Janiger, a young naturalist who had been tracking the local gray whale census — running down orcas in open water.
Orcas are, technically, the largest species in the dolphin family — apex predators of the oceanic food chain, capable of taking great white sharks. Eric had never seen one in the wild. That changed that morning, and it changed everything else along with it.
“Every single time, when I get upon a group of killer whales, it’s always the first time,” he said years later. “I don’t know what it is. It could be their power, it could be their family network. I think it’s all of the above.”
That morning, off Rocky Point, was the beginning of what came to be called the LA pod — the group of orcas that would become one of the most studied in California waters, present in local waters between 1982 and 1997, and with which Eric would have many encounters across the decades to come.
It was also the beginning of one of the great partnerships in local ocean science. Schulman-Janiger went on to found the Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project at Point Vicente, becoming one of Southern California’s leading marine biologists — and one of the closest collaborators of Eric’s life on the water. Together they ranged across Southern California waters, from Santa Monica Bay to the Catalina Channel and beyond, chasing sperm whales, killer whales, pilot whales, false killer whales, and the coastal bottlenose dolphins that would become Eric’s life’s work.
“I can’t even count how many boat trips we’ve been on together,” she said. “Dozens and dozens, if not hundreds….So many adventures, so many smiles.”
It takes thousands of hours to accumulate the kind of knowledge Eric built — days on the water that yield nothing, null trips that make the good days matter. “You have to have the null days to appreciate the wonderful days,” Schulman-Janiger said. “And then you get rewarded tenfold.”
In the late 1980s and through the 1990s he volunteered with the Santa Barbara Marine Mammal Rescue Center, working with sea lions, elephant seals, and on one occasion helping release a humpback whale back into the open ocean. He built his own underwater hydrophone to capture whale sounds beneath the surface.
When Marineland closed in 1987, Eric turned to his other passion — photography — operating a film processing shop. On his own time, he photographed birds and, whenever he could get on someone else’s boat, marine life offshore. What he didn’t anticipate was meeting Jim Babbitt, the board president of Oceanographic Teaching Stations (OTS), the nonprofit that manages the Roundhouse Aquarium. Babbitt came in to have film processed and noticed Eric’s fish tank — immaculate, its fish thriving. The Roundhouse’s tanks, at the time, were murky and struggling. Babbitt asked Eric to consult.
“The Board was impressed with Eric’s report and wanted to hire him,” recalls Dick Fruin, one of the Roundhouse’s founders and a longtime board member. “But he owned a photo shop that was doing OK financially, and he didn’t want to leave that job.”
The digital camera made the decision for him. By the late 1990s, film processing had become obsolete and Eric’s business declined along with every other photo shop in America. In March 2000 he accepted a position at the Roundhouse. He brought his camera and never really stopped being a photographer.
Meanwhile, Dawn had been working at a travel agency in El Segundo. She’d been born in Inglewood, spent a brief stretch of childhood in Pennsylvania, and returned with her family to settle in El Segundo. She and Eric had met in high school but weren’t particularly close then; they reconnected later through a shared attraction to the ocean, married, and moved into an apartment in El Segundo near family. In 1995 they had a son, Cody, who inherited their feel for the water. The internet soon did to travel agencies what digital photography had done to film processing. Dawn began volunteering at the Roundhouse, and eventually told the board she wanted to work there.
The board was reluctant. Hiring a husband and wife was a recipe for complications. Dawn’s answer was direct: she wanted to raise money for the Aquarium because its success would be her husband’s success. The board gave in. Her first grant application brought in $25,000, and with that she won their confidence.
Pier Life
The camaraderie of the small staff at the Roundhouse Aquarium made it feel less like a workplace than a community. For many years, Eric and Valerie Hill worked alongside each other — Eric’s primary responsibilities were covering the facility, the animals, and life support systems, while Val oversaw the business operations. Dawn focused on teacher outreach, fundraising, and events, working closely alongside Lauren Holman and later Brittney Olaes. The operation was small enough that everyone pitched in on everything, and a great deal of it was teaching.
It was the kind of place, said longtime OTS board member John Roberts, where the connections between staff and community ran deep. The Roundhouse’s educational mission bound everyone together.
“Some kids who visit live 10 or 15 miles away and have never before seen the ocean,” he said. “How can you protect what you don’t know?”
Eric had a special gift for storytelling. He made learning fun. He would dress as a sea animal, babble at a puppet, or demonstrate kissing a sea cucumber, anything that would make a lesson come to life. He was particularly good with special-needs children, and with getting disruptive boys to pay attention. In 2011, he received the Outstanding Non-Formal Educator award from the American Meteorological Society, nominated by his colleague Lauren Holman.
“Watching Eric with a group of young children is a true pleasure,” current OTS Board President Hal Cohn said. “For two generations, he has been a beloved guide to the ocean and its mysteries.”
“He’s a natural educator,” Schulman-Janiger said. “He’s always retained the inner child, and he really relates to kids. He talks at their level. His enthusiasm just bubbles out of him — it’s like happy sparkles on everyone around him.”
When the Los Angeles County Office of Education cut the program that had been scheduling school field trips to the Roundhouse since 1980, Dawn rebuilt it herself. She visited local schools — and some not so local — talking to principals, teachers, and PTAs until she had a healthy roster of classes signed up again. Most of the teachers she recruited are still sending students to the Roundhouse today.
“For many years,” Cohn said, “Dawn has been a rock of stability for the Roundhouse, taking care of a million essential tasks, often behind the scenes.”
The Aquarium was also a place of genuine fun. The annual Halloween haunted house was so popular that children lined up the length of the pier, the inside transformed with spooky tank lighting, fog, fake cobwebs, and blasts of condensed air — gently unnerving or genuinely terrifying, depending on which colored wristband you wore. Summer camps took children to Catalina for kayaking, scuba diving, and campfires. On overnight events at the Roundhouse, someone would bury a watermelon in the sand and tell the children that a giant sea turtle had laid a mysterious egg — a “hydromeloness” — that the lifeguards couldn’t find. The kids would dig it up, crack the wordplay, and eat the watermelon.
On the water, Eric navigated by pure familiarity — bare feet on the helm in January, toes working the wheel as naturally as another skipper’s hands. He was plugged into a network of whale watchers up and down the coast, trading GPS coordinates by cell phone with fellow observers and sometimes with Cody, who was often out on the water on his own boat. He used a GoPro torpedo to trail behind the hull and capture dolphins riding the bow wave from underwater. In 2018, he bought a drone and taught himself to fly it, standing at the edge of the pier and fascinating visitors as he captured video footage of sea life — primarily dolphins — from above.
Roberts got his own introduction to Eric’s particular way of operating.
“When I first met Eric, he was standing waist-deep in the deep-water tank cleaning out a fouled drain,” he recalled. “I introduced myself, he asked me to hand him a wrench, and he then went into an extensive description of the life support system and its problems. His knowledge of the system and his ability to solve problems in innovative ways was worthy of MacGyver.”
The bottlenose dolphins that had arrived with the 1982–83 El Niño became the animals Eric came to know best. Schulman-Janiger had rarely seen a local bottlenose dolphin before that shift. “Definitely, with the El Niño of ’82–83, bottlenose dolphins shifted up the coast,” she said. “And then, when El Niño hooked over to La Niña, they didn’t go back down. They found food.” The South Bay became a permanent seasonal home for the animals. Marine biologists estimate the coastal bottlenose population, ranging from Baja to as far north as Puget Sound, numbers around 460 individuals. Eric identified three distinct groups that spend part of each year in the South Bay, each consisting of six to eight animals, ranging from the El Porto jetty south to Rat Beach in Torrance, using the waters between the Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach piers as what Eric calls “a socialization zone and a playground.” The three groups intermix, swap members, and sometimes merge into a larger gathering — scientists call this kind of fluid social arrangement a “fission-fusion” society. It is unusual in the animal kingdom, requiring each member to recognize others individually, recall past relationships, and navigate shifting alliances.
Eric came to know many of these animals by name. One male he called Mr. K — named for a scar shaped like the Circle K gas station logo — frequently traveled with a juvenile named Ghost. Whenever Eric’s boat appeared, Mr. K and Ghost would make a mad rush for it.
“Mr. K would turn on his side, and do a barrel roll,” Eric said. “I would turn my engine off and they would just circle and circle, until they got called away.” He watched groups cooperate to herd bait balls — tightly packed schools of sardines or mackerel — working typically in threes: two flanking, one using a tail slap to confuse the school, then all three driving through at once. “They never consume all of the fish,” Eric noted. “It seems like they want to make sure when they come back there are still fish hanging around.”
One dolphin he tracked for years he calls Scully — short for scoliosis — because of a pronounced sideways curvature in her spine. In many species such a deformity might mean a shortened life, particularly if an animal struggled to keep up with its group. But Scully is never alone. There is always another female beside her, close enough to help if needed. Eric was surprised when Scully turned up with a calf.
“That dolphin just got my heart,” he said. “Because sometimes, when people are different one way or another, we tend to shun them, maybe make fun of them. It’s just what human society does. And it seems in the marine mammal world, they bring them in. They’ll nurture them, and help feed them, if they have a hard time nursing themselves.”
Schulman-Janiger said his knowledge of individual animals transforms the experience of being near them. “When you recognize the individual, it’s much more than, ‘Oh, it’s a coastal bottlenose dolphin,'” she said. “It puts it on a much more personal basis. I don’t think of them as lower animals, or separate, but equal in a way. They are intelligent beings living their lives.”
She also said Eric’s documentation fills a genuine scientific gap. Only a small number of researchers anywhere are conducting the kind of long-term, individual-level studies of coastal bottlenose dolphins that Eric has been building in the South Bay. “That body of work and that documentation is invaluable,” Schulman-Janiger said, “and it’s something that others will be able to look at and build on.”
Former colleague Val Hill put their complementary work more simply: “I’m a plankton person,” she said. “Eric is a whale person. We respect each other’s choices. You can’t have one without the other.”
Eric’s advocacy for wildlife has not been limited to the ocean. When raccoons found their way into the federal American Community Survey (ACS) Census building, it was Eric who came to relocate them without harm. He went on to become one of the area’s recognized wildlife rehabbers, the person neighbors and colleagues knew to call when an animal needed help getting safely out of a harmful situation and back into the wild.
“He loves animals,” Schulman-Janiger said. “He has a huge heart for them, wanting to do anything that he can.”
When Eric began using a drone to observe marine life from above, his footage opened up dimensions that a boat and a camera never could. He was able to see dolphin family structures, calving behavior, babysitting arrangements. He learned to tell which females were pregnant and looked forward to the arrival of their calves. He knows individually named whales by sight: Uno, the blue whale missing half a tail fluke; Fluky, a documented hybrid of a fin whale and a blue whale who has had calves of her own. In 2016, he was out when some 40 sperm whales — a rare sighting in local waters — appeared in the Catalina Channel. He has worked with underwater hydrophones recording dolphin vocalizations. His YouTube footage of local marine wildlife draws viewers from around the world.
Eric has spoken often about how people who live near the ocean sometimes stop seeing it.
“A sea lion is so precious to someone who’s never seen one before in the wild,” he said. “They can live in New Mexico, they can live in Oklahoma, and never see a sea lion. And we see a sea lion, we go, ‘Oh, great. Go away.'”
The Dolphin Project was, in part, an attempt to break that habit — to make the familiar astonishing again.
In May 2022, just after Mother’s Day, Eric got a call from Schulman-Janiger: whale watchers had spotted a bottlenose dolphin off Palos Verdes carrying her dead calf on her head. It was rare behavior — in 2018, an orca named Tahlequah had drawn international attention by carrying her dead calf for seventeen days and a thousand miles up the West Coast, but such mourning had rarely been documented among bottlenose dolphins. Eric launched his drone and found her, moving slowly through cathedral-tall kelp, two or three other dolphins alongside her, never leaving her side. He filmed for three days as the mother picked up the calf and set it down, the others holding their slow formation around her.
“It was like a dolphin mourning at church,” Eric said. “The mom would pick it up and drop it, pick it up and drop it, and they would have this weird lineup right outside the kelp bed. It reminded me of a funeral ceremony.” He hesitated before posting the footage, because it felt almost private. When he did, it went viral. “I want to make sure people know these animals are not just fish that swim around in the ocean,” he told a reporter. “They are highly intelligent marine animals that live in family societies.”
Alaska, Here They Come
Cody Martin lives in Alaska now, and that, more than anything, is why his parents are leaving. The same pull toward family that kept Eric and Dawn anchored to El Segundo for their entire lives is drawing them north.
For Eric, the pull of Alaska has deeper roots. He first traveled there after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, staying for weeks to document the disaster’s effects on killer whales and the wider ecosystem. He fell in love with the state — its wilderness, its waters, the animals that lived in both. He has been returning ever since, including to visit Cody after his son settled there. When Cody got married, Eric and Dawn went up and found a place nearby. Now they are headed north.
“We will miss our Southern California friends,” Dawn said, “but we are super happy to be moving to Alaska.”
What they leave behind is harder to measure. There is the story Eric tells of a shy girl from the inner city who came to Catalina summer camp not knowing how to swim, who puzzled the staff a little by being there at all. She came back to the Aquarium years later as a poised young woman — an environmental lawyer — to tell Eric that how the staff had treated her that summer had changed the arc of her life. There are countless versions of that story.
The farewell gathering is Saturday, March 14, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Roundhouse Aquarium at the end of the Manhattan Beach Pier, a last chance to share Martin’s contagious love for the creatures of the wild blue.
“You could be the grumpiest person, you could be going through something in your life, you could be depressed — a dolphin will always make your frown a smile,” Martin said in 2024, when the Dolphin Project was launched. “No matter what, no matter how low you are, it’ll somehow put that little bit of sunlight into your heart. I can’t explain it. It’s just what it is.” ER
