It was a super busy week for our lab at the annual North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This is a fantastic opportunity to spend time with colleagues and collaborators that are hyper-focused on right whale efforts, and to learn about new projects in the field. We had a really fun and productive meeting. Abby presented a poster on her movement model, which excited several of the seasoned researchers because it provides an opportunity to model whale presence when detection efforts are unavailable. Amadi presented a poster about her news project, which will be a completely new way of thinking about public perception of this species and the motivation behind policy implementation. Emily presented a poster looking at the co-occurrence of right whale sightings and AIS vessel detections across the full right whale habitat, which gives a valuable, broad overview of vessel strike risk. Erin gave a talk summarizing the National Academy of Sciences report on potential impacts of wind turbines on the right whale prey environment. There were so many other great presentations and conversations, including a showing of the play "Between Breaths" at Neptune Theater. Can't wait for next year's meeting! This year Erin served on a National Academy of Sciences committee to address the "Evaluation of Hydrodynamic Modeling and Implications for Offshore Wind Development: Nantucket Shoals". After hosting workshops, inviting expert speakers and having several meetings in Washington DC, the committee has completed the report, entitled: "Potential Hydrodynamic Impacts of Offshore Wind Energy on Nantucket Shoals Regional Ecology: An Evaluation from Wind to Whales". Our report indicates that we lack both the observations around turbines and the modeling work needed to determine how turbines might impact the productivity, distribution and aggregation of copepods that right whales feed on. We provide recommendations to enable scientists to determine what impacts might occur, if any, on the prey field. We hosted a number of webinars and presentations to disseminate our results to federal agencies, scientific communities and the general public, including this presentation that is available online. This week, we brought the students from my undergraduate class "Biology of Marine Organisms" out to our Baruch Marine Field Laboratory to conduct a series of experiments. The class is big enough (almost 80 students) that we split the class into 3 groups and bring them down on 3 consecutive days. At Baruch, the students run transects through the salt marsh to count fiddler crab burrows, use a scope to measure marsh elevation changes, and collect sediment samples that they bring back to the lab to determine how much microalgae (chlorophyll) is in the sediment. Students also go out on the boardwalk to conduct a secretive marshbird playback experiment. We play bird calls on a loud speaker, then listen quietly to see if any real marsh birds, like the least bittern or the clapper rail, respond to the calls. The last day of the trip was rainy, but the students were in high spirits! |
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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