I may have been slacking on a new post but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been checking up on our tagged sea lions any less than normal. It’s kinda a fun ritual to come in to the office in the morning (I have no internet at my house) and see where everyone is…and then again when I need a work break….You get the point – my behavior would be concerning if these sea …
The start of this week did not look promising as the weather kicked up over the weekend and we had some large swells come in. The waves don’t look like much, but they are much larger when you are on the water trying to navigate in a small zodiac. If the swells are too big it is not safe for us to cross and we have to call off field work for the day. …
We just finished our second week, and it was another successful one! We are over halfway to our target sample size and we managed to put out 2 of the remaining three satellite tags. We also managed to opportunistically disentangle a juvenile elephant seal who had rope wrapped around his neck. All in all….another great week on the island! We now have have good locations from 5 juvenile sea lions. Our 6th tag …
I am rolling out our first ever field blog for the Costa Lab with some sea lion field work we just started at Año Nuevo Island yesterday! The field effort is being led by researchers from UCLA to understand the dynamics of Leptospirosis outbreaks in California sea lions. Leptospirosis is caused by a bacteria and is a zoonotic disease, meaning it can be transferred from animals to people, that infects not only marine but also terrestrial species. Our role …
The day started out early, as most field days do! Año Nuevo State Park is only about a 20 minute drive from our lab at UCSC, but I had some last minute checks to do on the satellite tags to make sure they were ready to be deployed. Año Nuevo Island, which unlike the mainland is not open to the public, is a pretty amazing place in terms of wildlife. There are California …