MONTHLY MEETING
– PLEASE NOTE NEW TEMPORARY LOCATION –
SALLY GRIFFIN ACTIVE LEARNING CENTER
(700 JEWELL AVE IN PACIFIC GROVE)
MEETING IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Time: 7:30 PM
PLEASE JOIN US AT 7:00 PM FOR REFRESHMENTS
Speaker: Dr. Dan Costa
Title: Elephant Seals in the North Pacific to Leopard Seals in Antarctica:
Movement Patterns of Marine Mammals, an Important Conservation Tool
Daniel Costa is a Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the
University of California at Santa Cruz. He completed a B.A. at UCLA, a Ph.D. at U.C. Santa
Cruz and a post doc at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He has served on the editorial
board of a number of journals and is currently an Editor for Proceedings of the Royal Society
B. His research focuses on the ecology and physiology of marine mammals and seabirds,
taking him to every continent and almost every habitat from the Galapagos to Antarctica. He
has worked with a broad range of animals including turtles, penguins, albatross, seals, sea
lions, sirenians, whales and dolphins and has published over 500 scientific papers. His current
work is aimed at recording the movement and distribution patterns of marine mammals and
seabirds in an effort to understand their habitat needs. This work is helping to identify
biodiversity hotspots and the factors that create them. He has been developing tools to identify
and create viable Marine Protected Areas for the conservation of highly migratory species. In
addition his research is studying the response of marine mammals to underwater sounds and
developing ways to assess whether the potential disturbance may result in a population
consequence. With Barbara Block he co-founded the Tagging of Pacific Predators program, a
multidisciplinary effort to study the movement patterns of 23 species of marine vertebrate
predators in the North Pacific Ocean. He is an internationally recognized authority on tracking
of marine mammals and birds.