Chris and Ame Hartzell
Chris and Ame Hartzell
November/December 2016
Chris Hartzell, wildlife photographer and conservationist

Thursday, December 1, 2016
7 p.m. Refreshments, 7:30 p.m. Program
Lecture Hall, Monterey Boatworks, Hopkins Marine Station
Pacific Grove (Across from American Tin Cannery Outlet Stores)
Speaker: Chris Hartzell

Chris Hartzell is a Fire Captain, naturalist, and environmental conservationist with over 30 years photographing, and his work can be found internationally in calendars, advertisements, magazines, books, and educational exhibits. He and his wife Ame are international wildlife photographers, having traveled to more than 25 countries and doing field workshops, wildlife tours, educational presentations, photo contest judging, and teaching photography classes. You can see more about them and their work at their site, PhotoStrokes.net.

Please join us for refreshments before the program begins.



October 2016
The California Coastal National Monument: Past, Present, and Future

Thursday, October 27, 2016
7 p.m. Refreshments, 7:30 p.m. Program
Lecture Hall, Monterey Boatworks, Hopkins Marine Station
Pacific Grove (Across from American Tin Cannery Outlet Stores)
Speaker: Bill Standley

Bill Standley is the Natural Resource Specialist for the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) California Coastal National Monument, based in BLM’s Central Coast Field Office in Marina. The California Coastal National Monument is made up of 20,000 rocks and islands and currently one onshore area. Designated in 2000 by President Bill Clinton, the monument is managed by the BLM with cooperation from community groups up and down the state.

Bill grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, but has spent most of his adult life in California. He got a bachelor’s degree in biology from UC Santa Cruz and a master’s degree in wildlife biology from the University of Arizona. Bill has worked with threatened and endangered species throughout the west and spent 10 years working in Hawaii working to, among other things, reduce seabird collisions with power lines, mostly on the island of Kauai. Before moving to Monterey to work for the Coastal Monument just under 3 months ago, Bill was working for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in their Ventura Field Office working with California least tern and western snowy plover.

Please join us for refreshments before the program begins.



Between Pacific Tides first edition
Between Pacific Tides
first edition
September 2016
Edward F. Ricketts and Jack Calvin: The Publishing of Between Pacific Tides, First Edition (1939)

Thursday, September 29, 2016
7 p.m. Refreshments, 7:30 p.m. Program
Lecture Hall, Monterey Boatworks, Hopkins Marine Station
Pacific Grove (Across from American Tin Cannery Outlet Stores)
Speaker: Donald Kohrs, Branch Library Specialist at Hopkins Marine Station

There is a story behind Edward F. Ricketts and Jack Calvin’s effort to have their seminal work, Between Pacific Tides, published. Upon being presented an outline of the manuscript, it took 10 years for Stanford University Press to publish the book. Was the publication slowed by then Director of Hopkins Marine Station Walter K. Fisher’s critical review of the manuscript? Did Stanford University Press dislike the ecological approach that Ricketts and Calvin chose for the book? Was Ed Ricketts completely isolated from the scientific community of Hopkins Marine Station, as has often been suggested?  How much original scientific research was involved with the effort? The discovery of numerous letters of correspondences between Ed Ricketts, Jack Calvin, Stanford University Press, and invertebrate specialists scattered around the world provide answers to these and other unanswered questions.

Doc Ricketts, July 1936, photo by Ralph Buchsbaum
Doc Ricketts, July 1936
photo by Ralph Buchsbaum
Donald Kohrs is Branch Library Specialist at the Miller Library of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove. Don has degrees in biology and library science and his current efforts entail researching the history of the Pacific Grove’s Chautauqua Program (1880-1926), the history of the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory (1892-1917) and the early years of the Hopkins Marine Station (1918-1950), Edward F. Ricketts and Jack Calvin: The Publishing of Between Pacific Tides (1939), and The Hamilton Family: John Steinbeck Maternal Ancestors.

Please join us for refreshments before the program begins.

Related link:

Between Pacific Tides (Wikipedia)


August 2016
What Can Elephant Seals Tell Us about Their Deep Ocean Habitat?

Thursday, August 25, 2016
7 p.m. Refreshments, 7:30 p.m. Program
Lecture Hall, Monterey Boatworks, Hopkins Marine Station
Pacific Grove (Across from American Tin Cannery Outlet Stores)
Speaker: Sarah Peterson, Ph.D.

Sarah is currently a Wildlife Biologist, working at both USGS and as a Research
Fellow at UC Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. in Ecology from UC Santa Cruz,
where she studied northern elephant seals and California sea lions. She also obtained
a Masters in Biology with a focus on Marine Science at Western Washington
University in Bellingham, WA, where she studied harbor seals.

In addition to science research, Sarah has worked as a naturalist and science educator
off and on since 2004, up and down the west coast of the United States. Sarah is
broadly interested in animal movement and foraging behavior and how we can study
animals to learn about environmental contamination.

Related link:

Sarah Peterson biography


Dave Cade
David Cade
June 2016
Insights into cetacean feeding behavior gleaned from new video and accelerometry tags

Thursday, June 30, 2016
7 p.m. Refreshments, 7:30 p.m. Program
Lecture Hall, Monterey Boatworks, Hopkins Marine Station
Pacific Grove (Across from American Tin Cannery Outlet Stores)
Speaker: David Cade, PhD candidate at Hopkins Marine Station

David Cade spent 12 years as an educator (six in the great outdoors and six in a math classroom) before returning to science to pursue his passions. After earning a master’s degree in education at Stanford University in 2005 and a master’s in oceanography at Oregon State University in 2014, Cade is now in the midst of his Ph.D. work in Jeremy Goldbogen’s lab at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station.

Related link:

Goldbogen Lab at Hopkins Marine Station


May 2016
Mauricio Alvarez

Thursday, May 26, 2016
7 p.m. Refreshments, 7:30 p.m. Program
Lecture Hall, Monterey Boatworks, Hopkins Marine Station
Pacific Grove (Across from American Tin Cannery Outlet Stores)
Speaker: Mauricio Alvarez, Expedition Director on the Stella Australis

Mauricio was born in Punta Arenas, Chile in 1968.

He has lived in Washington, USA, where he completed his high school studies and learned English and became familiar with North American culture, traveling through ten states in the country. He studied Engineering and Cinematography in Santiago de Chile. His relationship with traveling, mountaineering, and photography began at an early age in the Torres del Paine National Park where he worked as a guide in the summers of the 1980’s. Continuing with mountaineering and audiovisual production, he went to Europe to form part of an alpinist group doing expeditions to the Pyrenees and Alps from 1995 to 2003. His enjoyment of the study and documentation of sites rich in natural history has brought him back to Patagonia.

In 2005 he joined the expedition team of Australis where he specializes in history and the photography of flora. He is also a musician and loves sports.  He assists scientists from around the world in their studies of near Arctic waters.  He has contributed to many papers regarding marine biology of the Cape Horn region of South America.

He is an A.C.A. level-2 certified kayaker, and speaks both Spanish and English.

Please join us for refreshments before the program begins.

Related link:

Australis



Giancarlo Thomae
Giancarlo Thomae
April 2016
Giancarlo Thomae

Thursday, April 28, 2016
7 p.m. Refreshments, 7:30 p.m. Program
Lecture Hall, Monterey Boatworks, Hopkins Marine Station
Pacific Grove (Across from American Tin Cannery Outlet Stores)
Speaker: Giancarlo Thomae, Photographer, marine biologist, and Captain for Elkhorn Slough Safari

Captain and marine biologist Giancarlo Thomae spent his memorable life growing up on the Monterey Bay. He started going fishing with Ken Stagnaro when he was 6. His parents paid the deckhands 20 bucks a trip (a lot of money back then to make sure he didn’t kill himself on their watch). When he was a sophomore in high school most of the fisheries crashed, and the whale populations started to rebound. He started going out whale watching religiously with Monterey Bay Whale Watch then got his first job with Sanctuary Cruises which lasted 5 years.

When the whale populations sky rocketed and near shore sightings increased in 2012, he started venturing into the deep waters of the Monterey Bay to photograph whales and sharks from his kayak. Giancarlo is a major go to source for the media and academia, and a lot of his work is published world wide.

Giancarlo earned his degree from UCSC in Marine Biology and is the captain for Elkhorn Slough Safari.

Please join us for refreshments before the program begins.

Related link:

Giancarlo Thomae Photography



Harbor seals
Harbor seals
March 2016
The harbor seals of Hopkins Marine Station

Thursday, March 31, 2016
7 p.m. Refreshments, 7:30 p.m. Program
Lecture Hall, Monterey Boatworks, Hopkins Marine Station
Pacific Grove (Across from American Tin Cannery Outlet Stores)
Speakers: Kim and Thom Akeman

We enter their habitat 10 times a year for our programs at the Monterey Bay Chapter of the American Cetacean Society meetings, but it’s usually dark outside so we may not notice the harbor seals that have lived around Hopkins Marine Station for the past 49 years. Now we’re going to focus on them in this month’s program.

Thom Akeman and Kim (Worrell) Akeman, Bay Net docents for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, have been observing this group of harbor seals for several years and will talk to us about what they’ve seen and learned. Kim, who helps the seals produce their Facebook page, “Harbor seals of Pacific Grove,” will bring a ton of pictures and videos along.

Hopkins has become the principal rookery for the harbor seals that live along the Monterey Peninsula and they are right now in the early stages of their annual pupping season. So if you arrive early, walk out to the recreation trail in front of the campus and over to West Beach to take a live look at tonight’s subject.

Please join us for refreshments before the program begins.

Related links:

Bay Net
Harbor seals at Hopkins Marine Station


February 2016
Happywhale — Getting to Know our Whales Through Citizen Science and Modern Ocean Exploration

Thursday, February 25, 2016
7 p.m. Refreshments, 7:30 p.m. Program
Lecture Hall, Monterey Boatworks, Hopkins Marine Station
Pacific Grove (Across from American Tin Cannery Outlet Stores)
Speaker: Ted Cheeseman

Ted Cheeseman grew up in California, whale watching and getting seasick in Monterey Bay from the age of a toddler. He was fortunate to join his parents leading wildlife safaris beginning in 1983, and on polar expeditions beginning in 1994. After earning a graduate degree in tropical conservation biology from Duke University, Ted was seduced by the glory of polar extremes and returned to California to work with Cheesemans’ Ecology Safaris, the company his parents founded in 1980.

Ted now leads Antarctic expeditions for Cheesemans’ Ecology and is developing Happywhale.com, a platform to promote marine mammal photo identification studies through citizen science. Ted’s presentation will focus mostly on Happywhale, but will likely touch on his Antarctic trips as well.

Please join us for refreshments before the program begins.

Related link:

Cheesemans’ Ecology Safaris



Of Orcas and Men - What Killer Whales Can Teach Us, by David Neiwert
Of Orcas and Men by David Neiwert
January 2016
What Killer Whales Can Teach Us

Thursday, January 28, 2016
7 p.m. Refreshments, 7:30 p.m. Program
Lecture Hall, Monterey Boatworks, Hopkins Marine Station
Pacific Grove (Across from American Tin Cannery Outlet Stores)
Speaker: David Neiwert

The orca is one of earth’s most intelligent animals. Remarkably sophisticated, orcas have languages and cultures and even long term memories, and their capacity for echolocation is nothing short of a sixth sense. They are also benign and gentle, which makes the story of the captive orca industry and the endangerment of their population in Puget Sound that much more damning.

David Neiwert will speak about his recent book, Of Orcas and Men, a marvellously compelling mix of cultural history, environmental reporting, and scientific research. In the tradition of Barry Lopez’s classic Of Wolves and Men, David Neiwert’s book is a triumph of reporting, observation, and research, and a powerful tribute to one of the animal kingdom’s most remarkable members.

David Neiwert is a Seattle-based freelance journalist and blogger. He produces
an award-winning blog, Orcinus, and has written several books, including And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border and Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community. His reportage for MSNBC.com on domestic terrorism won the National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2000. Neiwert is also the senior editor of Crooks and Liars.

Please join us for refreshments before the program begins.

Related link:

David Neiwert bio (Wikipedia)

Of Orcas and Men at Amazon.com