World Ocean Day 2025 is year two in a multi-year action theme: Catalyzing Action for Our Ocean & Climate. Many students from Dee’s Video Storytelling class have been inspired by the ocean and featured them in their videos. Favorite ocean-themed videos 🌊Our global mean sea level has been rising as far back as the 19th century. Sea level rise impacts […]
World Ocean Day 2025 Read More »
Excerpt from the abstract: Here, we examined the spatial behaviour of two sympatric large carnivore species exhibiting intense intraguild competition—lions and African wild dogs—to investigate whether intraguild competition mediates large carnivore responses to human disturbance in support of the anthropogenic refuge hypothesis. We found that lions consistently avoided human-dominated areas. Similarly, we found that wild dogs generally avoided human-dominated areas,
From the abstract: Here, as part of the UNEP CMS Expert Group on Animal Culture and Social Complexity, we first evaluate key evidence for social learning and culture in baleen whales through several case studies. We then suggest key indicators by behavioural context to assist in identifying potential cases of social learning in more elusive species generating a practical guide
Culture and conservation in baleen whales Read More »
In honor of our favorite type of bird, we’ve released some of our favorite videos from Dee’s Spring 2025 Video Storytelling class! Be sure to browse our Youtube channel for even more penguin goodness 🙂 World Penguin Day is April 25. What better way to celebrate by visiting your local zoo, like the Humboldt penguin exhibit at the Woodland Park
Happy World Penguin Day! Read More »
The UW Department of Biology is hosting a day of science and you’re invited! Families and science enthusiasts of all ages are welcome. Our department is a large, collaborative, and integrative department – meaning our research and teaching spans from cellular and molecular biology to global climate change to paleontology to plant biology. UW Biology is among the largest undergraduate
Biology Open House 2025 Read More »
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
Dr. Dee Boersma featured in latest National Geographic! Read More »
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
Field updates: Argentina, March 2025 Read More »
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.
Dr. Tennessen attends SRKW workshop Read More »
Article originally published 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 for krill in the Santa Barbara Channel, a zone that teems with fish, kelp forests, seagrass beds and other undersea
From the abstract:“Here we estimate local cumulative environmental impacts from current and future (2050) mariculture production on marine biodiversity (20,013 marine fauna), while accounting for species range shifts under climate change. […] Our results reveal where and how much mariculture impacts could change in the coming decades and identify pathways for countries to minimize risks under expansion of mariculture and
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,
Katie Holt attends PSG/Waterbird Society Conference 2025 Read More »
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.
New essay by Eric Wagner: Behavioral Observation Read More »
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 paper summarizes the potential generative artificial intelligence (AI) has to aid ecological research. With access to more and more data, like genetic information and animal movement data, generative AI could augment data-scarce datasets, extend observations of ecological patterns, and increase the accessibility of ecological data. The paper also covers the challenges to using generative AI such as privacy concerns,
Generative AI as a tool to accelerate the field of ecology Read More »
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
Field update: Argentina, December 2024 – January 2025 Read More »
