A stretch of exceptionally calm seas off of the North Carolina coast made for two very productive field days for some of the Read Lab researchers and students. On Friday morning, 4 October, we deployed five marine autonomous recording units (MARU), or pop-up buoys, across the continental shelf off of the Outer Banks as part …
Research conducted by Ph.D. student Kristina Cammen and Master’s student Brianne Soulen, a previous member of the Johnston lab, was recently featured on the Smithsonian’s Ocean Portal blog (http://ocean.si.edu/blog/ice-loving-seals-and-loss-sea-ice). Brianne and Kristina worked with Duke Marine Lab faculty Tom Schultz and Dave Johnston to investigate environmental and genetic factors that may affect harp seal stranding …
Joy is coordinating a new passive acoustic monitoring project to detect North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) migrating past Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, during their seasonal movements to and from breeding grounds in Florida. This is a collaborative effort between research partners at Duke University, NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/psb/acoustics/), and Cornell’s Bioacoustics Research …
Danielle and Andy are working with fishermen in the North Carolina pelagic longline fishery to trial a new acoustic deterrent, the Dolphin Interactive Dissuasive (DiD) device. Pilot whales are believed to mainly eat squid, but some short-finned pilot whales interact with pelagic longline fishing gear and remove bait and hooked tuna, a behavior known as …
We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to work on analysis of data obtained from multi-sensor Digital Acoustic Tags that sample acoustics, accelerometers and depth collected from short-term (ca. 12-24 h) deployments on a variety of cetacean species, including pilot whales, Risso’s dolphins and North Atlantic right whales. Some of these data sets will contribute …
Kristina Cammen was recently awarded a Special Event Award from the American Genetic Association to support her organization of an upcoming workshop entitled “Marine Mammal Genomics: Applications to evolution, ecology, and conservation.” The workshop will be held December 8, immediately prior to the Society for Marine Mammalogy conference at the University of Otago in New …
Meagan is currently on the Kona Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) cruise with NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center. The goal of this cruise is to further our understanding of the unique marine ecosystem along the Kona Coast of the Big Island. Meagan is helping with active acoustics to study cetacean prey distribution. You can follow along …
Andy recently published a review of measures used to reduce by-catches of harbor porpoises in gill net fisheries of the Gulf of Maine in the journal Endangered Species Research. The paper is part of a Special Theme Issue on reducing marine mammal by-catch in gill net fisheries. The Open Access article is available here.
Meagan Dunphy-Daly is a coauthor on a new paper in Marine Ecology Progress Series describing some of her previous research in Shark Bay, Western Australia. The paper focuses on the trophic interactions between dolphins and sharks. You can download the paper here.
Joy is the first author on a new paper in PLoS One describing her work tracking singing humpback whales on Stellwagen Bank. Her co-authors are Denise Risch and Sofie Van Parijs from NOAA Fisheries, which released a nice press release describing the work.