Meghan Piercy is a native New Englander whose awe of the sea sprouted on the jetty at Hampton Beach State Park in the 1960s. Her love of marine ecology bloomed in California where she volunteered for three seasons on the Farallon Islands in the mid-1980s. She saw her first sea otter there. She banded her first seabird there.  She also witnessed for the first time a marine mammal entangled with marine debris there. The story of Rudy and the Sea Urchin Special emerged in part from that experience.

Meghan earned a bachelor’s degree in Human Ecology at the College of the Atlantic and a master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Montana. She has worked at sea on ships as a Protected Species Observer in several of the world’s oceans for nearly three decades.