Make sure to pick up the latest copy of National Geographic and read about Dr. Dee Boersma‘s work on Galápagos penguins! Reporter Rene Ebersole traveled with Dee and recent grad Caroline Cappello last summer as they checked up on the human-built Galápagos penguin nests they built in 2010. Included in the article is a sweet photo of Dee and Caroline […]
Written by Dr. Eric Wagner Thanks once again to generous support from Zoo Augsburg, research scientist Dr. Eric Wagner and computer specialist Pearl Wellington traveled to Punta Tombo in early March for a couple of weeks to mark the end of the breeding season. Eric and Pearl went to deploy twenty geolocating time-depth recorder (GLD) tags to female and male
Written by Dr. Jennifer Tennessen In early March, Dr. Jennifer Tennessen participated in a 3-day expert workshop on Southern Resident killer whale biology and conservation in Vancouver, British Columbia. The workshop was motivated by the increasingly dire situation facing this endangered population of orcas, which spends a large part of the year in the inland waters around Seattle and Vancouver.
Article originally published under the title “New maps show high-risk zones for whale-ship collisions − vessel speed limits and rerouting can reduce the toll” by The Conversation and republished through the Creative Commons — Attribution/No Derivatives license. Written by Dr. Anna Nisi. Imagine you are a blue whale swimming up the California coast, as you do every spring. You are searching
Written by Katie Holt I kicked off the year by heading the joint meeting of the Pacific Seabird Group and the Waterbird Society in San José, Costa Rica! At the conference, I presented my research on how commercial fishing reduces the rate at which adult seabirds acquire food while foraging. As the only member of the Boersma Lab in attendance,
Read Eric Wagner’s newest post for The Last Word called Behavioral Observation, where Eric tries to ground-truth accelerometry data to determine how often incubating penguins go down to the ocean to drink water, move, and possibly admire their interior decorating skills.
Welcome to Meet CES, where we get to meet the people behind the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels. In this first post we are meeting one of the newest members of the team, Marie-Pier Poulin. She received her BS in Biology from the Université du Québec in Rimouski in 2019, where she tracked arctic foxes in the Canadian tundra for her
This field season is the first time we’ve been at Punta Tombo, Argentina persistently from October to March since before the pandemic! We’ve seen chicks hatch and watched them grow into chubby fledglings. Unfortunately many died in December with their bellies full; we suspect it was due to toxic algae, which could also be the cause of the 71 southern
Here’s a digest of what we’ve published from December 2024 – February 2024. This post will auto update whenever we publish something new, so check back often! Keep up with all of our research following us on Instagram, Facebook, X/Twitter, and Bluesky!
Be sure to check out Eric Wagner’s newest essay for The Last Word On Nothing, called “Snapshot: The Penguins at Twilight” ! Featured image photo credit: Eric Wagner
Written by Dr. Kasim Rafiq In June 2024, postdoctoral researcher Dr. Kasim Rafiq and PhD candidate Leigh West from Dr. Briana Abrahms‘ lab returned to Wild Dog Camp in the Okavango Delta and were joined by Briana’s new PhD student Marie-Pier Poulin. The team successfully deployed six new tracking collars on African wild dogs, including in two brand new packs,
Congratulations to Leigh West, Dr. Abrahms’s graduate student, who just recently published her first article as lead author. Her research article, “Droughts reshape apex predator space use and intraguild overlap,” was published in the Journal of Animal Ecology on October 4th, and also serves as the second chapter of her dissertation. This is an exciting milestone for Leigh as she
In July 2024, Dr. Dee Boersma and Dr. Caroline Cappello traveled to the Galápagos Islands for a penguin expedition unlike any they’d experienced before. Since 2010, CES has collaborated with Galápagos National Park and conservationist Godfrey Merlen to visit penguin breeding areas and conduct research. After Godfrey’s passing in 2023, CES—with heavy hearts but optimism for the future—sought a new
We’ve been publishing a lot these days! Here’s a digest of what we’ve published from September 2024 – November 2024: Keep up with all of our research following us on Instagram, Facebook, or X/Twitter!
Happy World African Wild Dog Day! While most people know the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels for our work on penguins, we also research African Wild Dogs. In fact, Dr. Kasim Rafiq and graduate students Leigh West and Marie-Pier Poulin are just returning from Botswana right now! As usual, they worked alongside our collaborators from Botswana Predator Conservation over the summer.
