I took a whale picture once on Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. It was a pretty cool picture. It’s a forever stamp now!
Read more about the story behind the picture at NOAA Fisheries, from when I was a young researcher.
Category Archives: People
New research by Matt Savoca in Nature
Infographic (c) Stephanie Brodie
From 1910 to 1970, humans killed an estimated 1.5 million baleen whales in the frigid water encircling Antarctica. They were hunted for their blubber, baleen – the filtering fringe they have in place of teeth – and meat. One might assume that from the perspective of krill – the tiny shrimp-like creatures the whales feast on – this would be a boon. Yet the krill are at a fraction of their historical biomass.
With these new consumption estimates, the researchers calculated that the early 20th- century abundance of krill in the Southern Ocean was about five times what it is now in order to feed the pre-whaling whale population. This implies a complex role for whales in their ecosystems where the decline or recovery of their populations is strongly tied to overall ecosystem productivity and functioning.
Figure 1. Fieldwork needed to measure whale size, behavior, and the density of the prey they eat. The vertical difference in foraging and feces may redistribute nutrients to keep marine ecosystems flowing.
New paper from alumni Dr. Carroll on Bluefin Tuna in Proceedings of the Royal Society B!
Where do animals go is not always where animals find food. Using heat increment of feeding, which is the integrated energy from a gulp of food, we can look at not just where animals go but also where they have success in feeding. Shifting distributions in anomalous years may both optimize the physiology and the feeding of these iconic and threatened species.
Climate resiliency in fisheries management in ICES J of Marine Science
Following on The effects of climate change on the world’s oceans conference, Kirstin Holsman led an effort to discuss the role of old and new, tried and true, dynamic and static in fisheries management. Given how ecological response often varies based on the scale of species-environment interactions and even our scale of measurement, alignment between data and management can be misaligned. The paper uses the Bering Sea as one of the case studies to explore the advantages of dynamic vs. adaptive vs. fixed approaches in managing variable ocean resources. Read more in the recent NOAA Fisheries article here!
K.K. Holsman, E.L. Hazen, A. Haynie, S. Gourguet, A. Hollowed, S.J. Bograd, J. Samhouri, and K. Aydin, 2019. Toward climate resiliency in fisheries management. ICES J Marine Science,doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsz031 PDF
Welcome Dr. Stefan Koenigstein to Monterey!
We are excited to have Stefan join the team, moving from his position in Bremen to our cooperative institute at UC Santa Cruz. During his PhD, Stefan used interdisciplinary methods to investigate the impacts of ongoing ocean warming and acidification on the marine ecosystem and human user groups in the sub-arctic Barents Sea. He developed and applied integrative ecological models that incorporate experimental and observational data on biological processes as well as the input of local stakeholder groups. The models allow to assess future shifts in marine fish stocks, food web-mediated impacts on marine mammals and seabirds, and changes in ecosystem functioning. They are used to develop feasible and fair strategies for ecosystem-based governance of climate change impacts in the marine realm. We are excited to have Stefan join the team and help develop similar models for the California Current!
Welcome Dr. Megan Cimino to Monterey!
We are excited to have Megan join the team, moving from her position in UC San Diego to our cooperative institute at UC Santa Cruz. Her Ph.D. research investigated the effects of climate change on Pygoscelid penguins in the Southern Ocean by using underwater robots, animal-borne tags, habitat modeling approaches, IPCC global climate models, and multi-decadal satellite, weather and penguins observations. This research addressed multidisciplinary questions (climate change effects, changes in demography, predator-prey dynamics, interspecific competition) across multiple trophic levels and scales. As a post-doc at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the Coastal Observing Research and Development Center, she used autonomous robots in novel ways to study jellyfish distribution in a marine lake, a snapper spawning aggregation, and detect tagged and vocalizing animals. She is excited to join NOAA ERD where her work will continue to understand the bio-physical factors that drive species distributions and movements on multiple spatiotemporal scales with the ultimate goal of aiding in conservation and management.