A Glimmer of Hope for Antarctic Blue Whales: the Largest of Them All
Trevor Branch is an associate professor of the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the sustainable management of fisheries, and the conservation of whales, largely through computer modeling, data synthesis, meta-analysis, and reviews. This includes abundance estimates, trends, status evaluations, historical catch allocation among populations, distribution, ageing, analysis of sex ratios, length at maturity, acoustic calls, migration, subspecies separation, and stock assessment. Key papers include assessing the current status of Antarctic blue whales, Chilean blue whales, North-east Pacific blue whales; and a large-scale synthesis of the distribution, movements, and subspecies separation of blue whales in the Southern Hemisphere and northern Indian Ocean. His blue whale research includes 15 peer-reviewed papers on blue whales, 10 minor papers, and 29 unpublished papers presented to the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission.
His graduate students and postdocs are currently working on modeling oceanographic factors and herring status in Prince William Sound, modeling how to improve management of California market squid, predicting which species are most likely to be threatened by extinction because of opportunistic exploitation, and (soon) estimating and modeling sex ratios in whale populations.
Animal Cultures: A Conversation with Carl Safina
Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action. His writing has won a MacArthur “genius” prize; Pew, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundation Fellowships; book awards from Lannan, Orion, and the National Academies; and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals.
Carl Safina grew up raising pigeons, training hawks and owls, and spending as many days and nights in the woods and on the water as he could. Safina is now the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the PBS series Saving the Ocean, which can be viewed free at PBS.org. His writing appears in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, Audubon, Yale e360, and National Geographic, and on the Web at Huffington Post, CNN.com, Medium, and elsewhere. Safina is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times Bestseller Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent book is Becoming Wild; How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. He lives on Long Island, New York, with his wife Patricia and their dogs and feathered friends.
Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna
The naturalist Sir David Attenborough calls Atlantic bluefin tuna the “superfish.” No wonder: she is, among other things, a fetish, a memory, an ambition, a mystery, a career, a vocation, and a rush. In this book, Dr. Telesca explains that she is also a beating muscle, a world traveler, an agenda setter, an elusive data point, a legend among anglers, a status-bearing token, and, most fatally, a piece of “red gold.” The cultural biography of this boundless thing of Nature is at once a tragedy, a farce, and an awe-inspired test of the modern capacity to value life itself. The Atlantic bluefin tuna fishery is one of the first in recorded human history. Today there is anxiety about hunting the very last members of her kin.
Jennifer E. Telesca is assistant professor of environmental justice in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute. Her research takes a critical approach to ocean studies, spanning the interests of the human–animal relationship, science and technology in policymaking, political economy, environmental diplomacy, and ethnographies of international law in society. She does fieldwork at the United Nations and in treaty bodies, diplomatic missions, and other sites scaled supranationally.
Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures
Whales are among the largest, most intelligent, deepest diving species to have ever lived on our planet. They evolved from land-roaming, dog-sized creatures into animals that move like fish, breathe like us, can grow to 300,000 pounds, live 200 years and travel entire ocean basins. Whales fill us with terror, awe, and affection–yet there is still so much we don’t know about them. Why did it take whales over 50 million years to evolve to such big sizes, and how do they eat enough to stay that big? How did their ancestors return from land to the sea–and what can their lives tell us about evolution as a whole? Importantly, in the sweepstakes of human-driven habitat and climate change, will whales survive?
Dr. Nick Pyenson is the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. His expeditions have taken him to every continent studying the evolution and ecology of marine mammals. Along with his collaborators, he has named over a dozen new fossil species, discovered the richest fossil whale graveyard on the planet, and described an entirely new sensory organ in living whales.
Along with cover articles in the journals Science and Nature, his research has received the highest awards from the Smithsonian, and he has also received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the White House. His popular book describing his work, “Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures,” was featured on national television and radio, and included in many best science book compilations and shortlisted for several awards. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia and received his doctoral degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Pyenson is also a member of the Young Scientists community at the World Economic Forum.
Endangered Orcas – The Story of the Southern Residents
Monika Wieland Shields is the author of Endangered Orcas: The Story of the Southern Residents, a book about the beloved population of orcas that are considered the most-watched whales in the world. Despite decades of research and focused conservation efforts, they are on the brink of extinction. From the capture era and the beginning of killer whale research to the whale-watching boom and endangered listing, the whole story of the Southern Residents is told here. Our relationship to these whales, complicated by both the positive attachments and negative politics we have created around them, has changed dramatically over the last 50 years. With more challenges on the horizon, one question looms: can we still create a sustainable future for humans and orcas in the Salish Sea.
Monika Wieland Shields is the co-founder and president of the non-profit Orca Behavior Institute, which conducts non-invasive behavioral and acoustic research on the orcas of the Salish Sea. She has been studying and sharing stories about the Southern Resident killer whales since 2000. She is also a wildlife photographer and has been keeping a blog, Orca Watcher, since 2009. She lives on San Juan Island, Washington.
North America’s Galapagos: The Historic Channel Islands Biological Survey
North America’s Galapagos: The Historic Channel Islands Biological Survey by Corinne Heyning Laverty is a narrative nonfiction book that recounts the never before told adventures and ambitions of a group of researchers, naturalists and explorers who came together in the late 1930s to embark upon a series of unprecedented expeditions. Their mission: to piece together the human history and biological evolution of California’s eight Channel Islands. Ninety years later, Heyning Laverty breathes new life into the expedition and will share with us their discoveries, a lasting impression of the raw beauty and uniqueness of these islands, the challenges of scientific research nearly 100 years ago, and the remarkable modern discoveries that are changing the ways we believe North America was populated. Her book and presentation help us recognize the larger story of how the scientific process continues long after individual efforts cease.
Corinne Heyning Laverty is a research associate and fellow at the Natural History Museum, Los Angeles County, an associate of the Santa Cruz Island Foundation and a member of the All Eight Club, a geographic organization that tracks the people who have ever set foot on all eight Channel Islands (of which there have only been 223). Her work has appeared in Lonely Planet, Western North American Naturalist, Eco Traveler, WhaleWatcher, Pacific Currents and Hippocampus Magazine, among other publications.
Cetacean Soundscape Deep Within the Monterey Bay
In July 2015, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) researchers installed a broadband hydrophone on Smooth Ridge in Monterey Bay, about 30 kilometers (18 miles) from shore and 900 meters (3,000 feet) below the sea surface. Since that time, signals from the hydrophone have been relayed back to shore in real time, 24 hours a day.
Dr. John Ryan, MBARI Senior Research Specialist, is part of the ocean soundscape team that is analyzing the acoustical data collected from the hydrophone and correlating the sounds and songs of humpback, blue whale and other Monterey Bay cetaceans to their feeding and migratory behavior.
John Ryan received the B.S. degree in biology from the University of Massachusetts in 1988. He worked in ocean science and terrestrial wildlife biology before pursuing graduate studies. John received the Ph.D. degree in biological oceanography from the University of Rhode Island in 1998. His graduate research focused on phytoplankton ecology in the northwestern Atlantic and was supported by fellowships from the Office of Naval Research and NASA. John began a postdoctoral fellowship at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in fall 1998, working across biological and chemical oceanography research labs. He was awarded a NASA New Investigator grant during his postdoctoral research. Appreciating the science / engineering collaborations at MBARI, John has since remained there and is now Senior Research Specialist. His research focuses on the ecology of oceanic life, from microscopic plankton to great whales.
Understanding Blue Whale Behavior via Acoustic & Tag Technology
Blue whales, the largest animal to ever inhabit the earth, are regular visitors to Monterey Bay. Little is known about how these rare and elusive titans interact with each other, or how changes in ocean properties and conditions affect blue whale behavior.
Will Oestreich is a PhD Candidate at Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University, where he is the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Stanford Graduate Fellow and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. He explores the connections between oceanography and blue whale behaviors, including feeding, migration, and communication. Will conducts this highly-collaborative work using a combination of continuously recorded acoustic data from Monterey Bay and tag-based methods which provide behavioral and social context for blue whale call production. He also explores the potential of using real-time data sources like these to manage multiple uses of marine ecosystems dynamically in space and time. Before his PhD studies at Stanford, will received both his BS and MS degrees in environmental engineering from Northwestern University and held positions at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). He is advised by Dr. Jeremy Goldbogen and Dr. Larry Crowder at Hopkins Marine Station, and also works closely with Dr. John Ryan and Danelle Cline at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI).