About Me

My name is Jianna Wankel and I am the middle of seven children. When I was seven, my mom died. Seven years later, my dad got remarried. Seven years after that, I got saved. Another seven years passed, and my dream of researching wild orcas became a reality. My life moves in septenniums.

Something significant happens every seven years. It may be “good”; it may be “bad.” But I’ve learned that life-changing events are all about perspective. Good versus bad is up to me. So I try to flip the bad into good.

If my mom hadn’t died maybe I wouldn’t be where I am today and that means that I have to say now that my life is pretty good. If she hadn’t died, my dad wouldn’t have gotten remarried. If he did not remarry, I wouldn’t believe that I could actually go to college to be a marine biologist. If I wasn’t so depressed, I wouldn’t have been so keen to leave Illinois in search of the sea and its beauty and freedom.

When my mom died, I found beauty in nature—climbing trees and roaming the fields surrounding my childhood home. The freedom I found was in the form of neglect from my father, which led to abuse from my brother. Freedom came with a cost. But the freedom the ocean represented to me was different. It was without bounds. Its deepest depths could not be reached. It was filled with creatures you could barely believe were from this planet—creatures with supreme emotions, forms of communication, and an intelligence that even a lifetime of studying, humans may not have the capacity to understand. This place with no limits was what I wanted to be a part of.

When you are young, everyone asks you what you want to be when you grow up. I think I picked the most far-out thing just because I didn’t think I could do it. I told everyone I was going to be a marine biologist. What did that even mean to a seven-year-old?

I’m not sure if I thought I was going to grow up. I couldn’t even imagine going to high school, and college was not really an option for me or my six siblings. I couldn’t imagine my future, so I just dreamed. I dreamed as I sat in the library, picking through every book about the ocean I could find. I remember looking at pictures of coral reefs and wanting to escape to this alien world that I just could not comprehend.

I wanted to leave Illinois at whatever cost. But I was scared. I hit all of these benchmarks, but I didn’t know what I really wanted to do, even up until I graduated with a BS in Marine Biology four years later. Graduating was just another benchmark I had hit without knowing what to do next.

I thought that living near the ocean would be enough, but nothing was enough until I opened my eyes to the idea that I could really do what I wanted to do. I had to dig deep—into the dreams I had before they became just benchmarks. That was when I realized nothing filled my soul like being outdoors in raw, deep nature, studying an animal in a place full of history, knowledge, and whales.

After I watched Free Willy, I realized the intelligence of orcas. I partially comprehended the fact that they should be free and later fully agreed—even before I saw them in the wild. Alexandra Morton, in her book Not on My Watch, talked about how scientists who want to study wild animals and do fieldwork often come back with a different mission: to protect those animals and their habitats. Studying them in their habitats exposes their threats.

Those scientists don’t end up living out their dream to its full extent; to simply study the creatures. They become forced to try to protect them from their inevitable demise caused by humans. These scientists are the link, though. We need those people in deep nature doing that work.

I realized my purpose: to be one of those people—out in the depths of nature, doing the work to understand and protect what we cannot afford to lose. Spending two months on Hanson Island solidified that for me.