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 …
