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Happy World Penguin Day!

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 […]

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Biology Open House 2025

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

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Dr. Dee Boersma featured in latest National Geographic!

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

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Photo of Dr. Jennifer Tennessen

Dr. Tennessen attends SRKW workshop

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.

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Humpback whale breaching

New maps show high-risk zones for whale-ship collisions − vessel speed limits and rerouting can reduce the toll

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

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Strategic planning could reduce farm-scale mariculture impacts on marine biodiversity while expanding seafood production

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

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Katie Holt attends PSG/Waterbird Society Conference 2025

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,

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Meet Marie-Pier

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

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Generative AI as a tool to accelerate the field of ecology

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,

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Field update: Argentina, December 2024 – January 2025

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

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Plasticity syndromes in wild vertebrates: Patterns and consequences of individual variation in plasticity across multiple behaviours

From abstract:“Using a 40-year dataset on free-ranging Magellanic penguins, we find evidence of both positively and negatively correlated behavioural plasticities. Plasticity did not strongly affect lifetime reproductive success, but its effect on interannual performance varied significantly by environmental context: plasticity reduced success in average oceanic conditions, increased success in anomalously productive conditions and, contrary to expectation, did not buffer against

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Ship collision risk threatens whales across the world’s oceans

Excerpt from UW News: “Thousands of whales are injured or killed each year after being struck by ships, particularly the large container vessels that ferry 80% of the world’s traded goods across the oceans. Collisions are the leading cause of death worldwide for large whale species. Yet global data on ship strikes of whales are hard to come by —

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