Año Nuevo Reserve Director
UC Santa Cruz Lecturer
Ph.D. Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UC Santa Cruz
B.S. Marine Biology, UC Santa Cruz
Email: patrick.robinson@ucsc.edu
Año Nuevo Research Facebook Page, Año
Nuevo Reserve Website
Research Interests
My primary interest is understanding how marine predators make a living in the open ocean. To do this, I work with a variety of researchers to attach biologging instruments (e.g. time-depth recorders and satellite tracking tags) to free-ranging seals and sea lions. Using these data, we can ask some interesting questions:
- How do these animals navigate accurately across thousands of kilometers of feature-less ocean?
- Where do these animals find the best prey resources?
- Can oceanographic features be used to predict where animals will find prey?
I have been fortunate to work on a variety of species to help answer these questions: northern elephant seals,California sea lions, Weddell seals, crabeater seals, and Galapagos sea lions.
Prior to joining the Costa lab, I was involved with two research projects on Catalina Island . (1) Spiny lobster population monitoring, (2) Subtidal algae/invertebrate/fish surveys for the Cooperative Research and Assessment of Nearshore Ecosystems (CRANE) project.