Conservation Physiology And The Southern Resident Killer Whale Population
Dr. Dawn Noren is a Research Fishery Biologist for the Marine Mammal Ecology Team in the Conservation Biology Division of the NOAA NMFS Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, WA. She has over 25 years of experience conducting research on the physiology and behavior of marine mammals.
Dawn joined the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in May of 2003. There she primarily conducts research that is used for the conservation of endangered Southern Resident killer whales. She has investigated energetics and prey requirements, body condition indices, diving physiology, contaminants, and the impacts of vessel disturbance. Previously, Dawn was a National Research Council (NRC) Postdoctoral Research Associate at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory at the NOAA Fisheries Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, WA where she conducted research on Steller sea lion juvenile body condition and fasting physiology.
Dawn earned a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her dissertation focused on northern elephant seal body condition, thermoregulation, and fasting physiology. She also earned an M.S. in Marine Sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz. For her master’s thesis, she investigated the physiology of diving and thermoregulation in bottlenose dolphins. Dawn earned her B.S. in Biological Sciences with an emphasis in Marine Sciences from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Gray Whales In A Changing Environment
Steven L. Swartz is a 1986 graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz and has researched and published widely on gray whales and their breeding lagoons in Baja California.
From 1977 to 1982 Steven and Mary Lou Jones conducted the first systematic research of gray whales in Laguna San Ignacio in Baja California Sur, Mexico. In 2006, along with Jorge Urban R., Steven founded the Laguna San Ignacio Ecosystem Science Program (LSIESP) to support and encourage science-based research and monitoring of gray whales and their breeding/aggregation lagoon areas in Baja California Sur, Mexico.
He has served as a consultant to the Mexican government’s Ministry for the Environment, Natural Resources, and Fisheries (SEMARNAP), and worked for the Ocean Conservancy (previously the Center for Environmental Education), the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the International Whaling Commission. Steven retired from federal service in 2011 and now works as a consultant and senior scientist for non-government environmental and marine conservation organizations.
Dawn of Cetology: The Scientific Pursuit of Whales From The Antiquities to The Twentieth Century
In 1787, the famous Scottish surgeon and anatomist, John Hunter, lamented that it was “…our unfitness to pursue our researches in the unfathomable waters” regarding our scientific inquiry of whales. From the ancient classical times through the early twentieth century, this challenge continued to plague naturalists and zoologists.
How did we get to know the whales? The history of the science of whales, or ‘cetology’, is immensely fascinating and richly layered. While it is impossible to fully detail this story in a single presentation, I will attempt to give a succinct overview and highlight some of the most important protagonists who shaped this unique branch of zoology. A field made up of philosophers, compilers, naturalists, ship-surgeons, systemizers, museum-curators, anatomists, acousticians, molecular biologists, ethologists, and many more. A science dominated by men until the twentieth century, when women made their entry after World War II. I hope you will come away with a fuller appreciation of the history of cetology.
Born in Arnhem, Holland, Uko Gorter ended a seventeen-year career as a professional ballet dancer in 1997. Following in his father’s footsteps, he subsequently pursued his lifelong dream of becoming an illustrator. Uko enrolled in the School of Visual Concepts and the School of Realist Art, both in Seattle, WA. His interest in nature led him to become a natural history illustrator. Specializing in marine mammal illustration, Uko Gorter has traveled extensively to observe whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals in their natural environment. Uko’s work has appeared in scientific journals, museums, interpretive signs, and many books. The culmination of this work was illustrating all marine mammal species for the second edition of “Marine Mammals of the World: A Comprehensive Guide to Their Identification”, authored by Thomas Jefferson, Marc Webber, and Robert Pitman (Elsevier Press, 2015). More recently his work was featured in the “Anatomy of Dolphins; Insights into Body Structure and Function (Cozzi et al., 2017), and the Encyclopedia of Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises (Erich Hoyt. 2017). Uko joined the American Cetacean Society in 2002, and is the current president of the American Cetacean Society. Uko lives with his wife in Kirkland, Washington.
Blue and Fin Whales of the Gulf of California
Diane Gendron</> was born on March 30th 1963 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. After graduating in Biology with a specialty in limnology at University of Quebec in 1985, she directed her focus to blue whales, first through a voluntary internship and then as a research assistant at the Mingan Island Cetacean Study along the North shore of the St Lawrence River. During the following three years she was also introduced to the blue whales in the Gulf of California, a wintering/feeding area that captivated her and became the topic of her M.S. Thesis in 1988 at the Centro Interdisciplinario de Ciencias Marina from Instituto Politecnico Nacional (CICIMAR-IPN) based in La Paz, southern Baja California. Her thesis got the 1992 Best Thesis Award in Biology from the IPN and she was subsequently hired specifically to develop a cetacean ecology lab at CICIMAR in 1992.
Since then she has conducted research on cetaceans, in particular monitoring blue whales in the Gulf of California and west coast of Baja California which was the basis of her Phd Thesis at CICESE, Ensenada, where she graduated in 2003. During this period and along with over 50 postgraduate students, she studied different biological aspects of blue whales at an individual level through a photo-identification method that produced a unique blue whale sighting history of over 700 blue whales linked to a detailed database of individual information such as sex, maternal lineage, age class and female reproductive state, along with a variety of biological samples. This data set has been instrumental in estimating population parameters and validating new health parameters. Other aspects include abundance and survival estimates, distribution patterns, genetic variability, health assessments and physiological plasticity, endocrine physiology, feeding habits, acoustic studies and human-related whale watching impacts.
Parallel to her research she has shared her knowledge with the general public through participation in several documentaries (BBC Natural History unit, National Geographic, Thalassa and Ushuaia), interviews, and podcasts
Marine Mammal Fossils from Santa Cruz and Halfmoon Bay
Robert W. Boessenecker is a Ph.D. student in the doctoral program in the Department of Geology at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, working with Dr. R. Ewan Fordyce. Much of his research has focused on pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, and walruses) and cetaceans (whales and dolphins). His dissertation research (University of Otago, August 2015) is concerned with describing the morphology and analyzing the phylogenetic relationships of a large collection of anatomically informative eomysticetid fossils from the late Oligocene of New Zealand. Eomysticetids are a relatively recently recognized group of archaic toothless, baleen-bearing mysticete whales with long, narrow skulls, and have previously been reported from the east coast of the United States and Japan.
He is a Californian and has anticipated a fulfilling career in paleontology for most of his life. Amateur collecting in the San Francisco Bay Area during high school got him hooked on Miocene and Pliocene marine vertebrates. His master’s thesis research at Montana State University (2008-2011) focused on the taphonomy (preservation) of marine vertebrate bones and teeth in different depositional environments on the continental shelf, as preserved in the Mio-Pliocene Purisima Formation of Central California.
Exploring Sound Production and Reception In Secret Lives of Marine Mammals
Dr. Caroline Casey is a post-doctoral researcher at Southall Environmental Associates and the Director of Education for the California Ocean Alliance. Caroline received her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz where her research focused on understanding the acoustic behavior of male elephant seals. As an ethologist, Caroline is interested the acoustic behavior of marine animals and how signals are used to communicate information about individual identity and fitness.
She has worked as a marine mammal trainer in the pinniped lab at UCSC for 14 years where she has helped conduct numerous experiments on the hearing abilities of seals and sea lions. Caroline has also been part of a long-term behavioral response study to determine the impacts of navy sonar on a suite of cetacean species in California waters. As an educator, Caroline developed the marine mammal scientist in training program, an in person and online educational experience aimed at providing opportunities for underserved and underrepresented high school students in STEM fields. Caroline’s research has been highlighted broadly in a number of documentary films and popular media outlets including the New York Times, National Geographic, and BBC.
Dr. Casey’s research with the northern elephant seal population has showed that animal communication doesn’t remain static but shifts over time in response to changing environmental and social conditions.