This August, I had the joy of spending 2 weeks at my favorite place in the world, Friday Harbor Marine Lab. I stayed as a Whiteley Scholar, and used a good amount of my time to make progress on some of my writing projects before the crazy start of the fall semester. Our lab's MEERM student, Allie Peterson, was there at the same time taking the marine mammals and seabird course and getting inspiration for her thesis project on killer whales and vessel noise. I gave a talk at the Whale Museum in town, visited my PhD advisor Chuck Greene, and took my family to my favorite places and hikes in the San Juans. I can't wait to come back!! Our lab is now beginning a newly funded project from the National Science Foundation's Organismal Response to Climate Change program. The PIs Erin Meyer-Gutbrod, Nick Record (Bigelow Lab for Ocean Sciences) and Dan Pendleton (NOAA) will be leading the project "Climate and adaptation deficits: Mechanisms of response to climate change by the endangered North Atlantic right whale". This work will support the remainder of Abby Kreuser's PhD work, and will also involve hiring a 3-year postdoc out of Bigelow. We will be building a series of models, including right whale individual movement models, copepod patch models and right whale species distribution models, to better understand the right whale response to climate change and the costs of adapting to a new prey environment. The project also includes some fecal analysis to assess what copepod taxa are present in right whale diets across space and time.
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AuthorErin Meyer-Gutbrod is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina. Her lab researches human impacts to marine ecosysems. Archives
April 2024
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