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. […]
“We show that the potential spatial overlap of global human populations and 22,374 terrestrial vertebrate species will increase across ~56.6% and decrease across only ~11.8% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface by 2070 […] The strong spatial heterogeneity of future human-wildlife overlap found in our study makes it clear that local context is imperative to consider, and more targeted area-based land-use
“Using a multidecadal dataset on Magellanic penguins, we show that despite strong selection on body size, some environmental conditions favored larger bodies, and others favored smaller bodies, thus preventing consistent evolution in one direction or the other […] Such findings highlight that fluctuating selection can be driven by environmental variability, and these processes could eliminate the possibility of evolutionary rescue
Published over 10 years ago, Penguins: Natural History and Conservation is still considered the publication about penguins. UW PressBookshop.comAmazon.com Penguins, among the most delightful creatures in the world, are also among the most vulnerable. The fragile status of most penguin populations today mirrors the troubled condition of the southern oceans, as well as larger marine conservation problems: climate change, pollution,
As you might’ve guessed – we like our seabirds here. Check out all the ways we celebrate World Seabird Day 2024 at the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels: Student YouTube Videos We bring to you a new video: Taken from the Skies, by Samanth-Lynn Martinez. This video does not mince words about the damage we are doing to our seabird populations.
“Social information is predicted to enhance the quality of animals’ migratory decisions in dynamic ecosystems, but the relative benefits of social information in the long-range movements of marine megafauna are unknown. In particular, whether and how migrants use nonlocal information gained through social communication at the large spatial scale of oceanic ecosystems remains unclear. […]” Authors: Stephanie Dodson, William K.
Authors: Gemma Carroll, Briana Abrahms, Stephanie Brodie & Megan A. Cimino Journal: Nature Ecology and Evolution DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02454-0 “Climate change is driving a rapid redistribution of life on Earth. Variability in the rates, magnitudes and directions of species’ shifts can alter spatial overlap between predators and prey, with the potential to decouple trophic interactions. Although phenological mismatches between predator requirements
Authors: Elliott L. Hazen, Matthew S. Savoca T.J. Clark-Wolf, Max Czapanskiy, Peter M. Rabinowitz, and Briana AbrahmsJournal: Annual Review of Environment and ResourcesDOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-111522-102317 “Sentinel species, from birds to invertebrates, have been used to provide insights into ecosystem function, as leading indicators of risk to human health and as harbingers of future change, with implications for ecosystem structure and function.
Don’t know how to celebrate World Ocean Day this year? We have a few ideas: This year’s World Ocean Day theme this year is “One Ocean. One Climate. One Future.” One of Dee’s BIOL 305 students, Giovanna Esquivel, created this powerful PSA reminding us how our actions impact our world. Whether you’ve never been to the ocean or you go
Dr. Kasim Rafiq recently presented his work on using animal-worn sensors to understand the impacts of environmental change on African wild dogs and lions at the Washington Research Foundation Symposium, who fund his position at the university. As part of this work, over the past two years, Kasim, Leigh West, and Dr. Briana Abrahms developed and deployed fitness trackers for
Thanks to the generous support of Zoo Augsburg in Germany, Dr. Eric Wagner and Katie Holt were able to return to Punta Tombo for a couple of weeks in April. There, they put twenty satellite tags on penguins—ten females and ten males—that were about to start their post-breeding migration. As of today 18 satellite tags are still transmitting to our
The Abrahms Lab is growing! This fall we will have two new grad students join us in the Center: Meredith HonigPenguin Camp Meredith is interested in how species interactions shape ecological communities and wildlife population dynamics, especially in the implications of global climate change on these processes. She received a BS in Wildlife and Conservation Biology from the University of
Authors: Kasim Rafiq, Neil R. Jordan, J. Weldon McNutt, John Neelo, Nina Attias, Dee Boersma, Meredith S. Palmer, Jennifer Ruesink, and Briana AbrahmsJournal: ScienceDOI: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado6937 “By refining the academic system to recognize and support different forms of scientific inquiry equally, we can build the diverse research community necessary to empower discovery across disciplines.”
Since 2015, we have deployed automatic weighbridges to track the foraging success of Magellanic penguins at one of their largest breeding colonies – Punta Tombo, Argentina. These weighbridges weigh penguins noninvasively as they leave the nesting area to forage and when they return to feed their chicks. This helps us track whether these penguins are finding enough food for themselves
We continued our Punta Tombo field season this winter with graduate student Erik Johansson, former undergrad lab member Chloe Rabinowitz, and program coordinator Kalyna Durbak staying on site from January 12 through February 21. Our goal for this trip was to attach GTA* and GPS tags on adult penguins who were actively feeding chicks in order to log their foraging
