California Sea Lion Tracking, 2023

The Costa Lab, in partnership with the Block Lab at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station and the Garza Lab at the University of Washington, has begun studying how the distribution of white sharks relates to California sea lion distributions and behavior. In October, 2023 we outfitted 10 sea lions with biotelemetry instruments that transmit information on location, diving behavior, and ocean temperature. These maps show the last 30 days of GPS and high-quality Argos location estimates…

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Cetacean Field Work Update, Summer 2023

This summer 2023, Costa Lab graduate students Haley Robb, Theresa Tatom-Naecker, and Florencia Vilches received UC Santa Cruz EEB Department summer funds to support their field research efforts. Read more about their adventures below! Sampling humpback whale blubber and hormones in Juneau, Alaska – Haley Robb This summer, I traveled to Juneau, Alaska, to collect data for my dissertation. My fieldwork primarily takes place in Maui, where I study the reproductive physiology and behavior of…

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Citizen Scientists Find my Seal!

Back in August, we started the story of Toby and Xena (link), two juvenile elephant seals that are part of my graduate research investigating how marine mammals thermoregulate while diving. I don’t know if researchers are allowed to have favorites, but Toby definitely had me and my team feeling grateful for such a cooperative seal, which made the translocation part of our fieldwork a breeze. The only thing I can say that was slightly more…

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Déjà Vu

Translocations Season 1 Recap Last season, Obedient Juvie (a.k.a. O.J.) and Curious Juvie (a.k.a. C.J.) helped me out with my first pilot study to test heat flux biologgers (what are these?) on freely swimming juvenile elephant seals. Not only did we learn what worked and what didn’t work in terms of sensor attachment and configuration, we also found out that translocations can take some unexpected plot turns, like having to drive 3 hours south to another elephant…

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