The volunteer.
Olga Shpak made headlines around the world in 2017, when she captured the first footage of a pod of orcas using teamwork to hunt a young bowhead whale in the Sea of Okhotsk. The drone video was a sensational moment in her 2 decades of methodical fieldwork investigating bowheads, belugas, and other whale species—studies that had thrust the Ukrainian marine mammologist into the upper echelon of cetacean researchers and earned her a position at the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution in Moscow. “I loved my work. I could not imagine doing anything else,” she says. Then the Russians stormed her homeland. Click here to read full story.