We are pleased to announce that we are now accepting abstract submissions and workshop proposals!
The deadline to submit abstracts and workshop proposals is May 15, 2015.
Submit your abstract here:
https://www.marinemammalscience.org/conference/smm-2015-conference-abstract-submission/
Questions? E-mail: smm2015program@gmail.com
Submit your workshop proposal here:
https://www.marinemammalscience.org/conference/workshops/
Questions? E-mail: workshops@marinemammalscience.org
We will begin accepting abstract submissions for workshops, oral, speed and poster presentations on February 1st, 2015 for the 21st Biennial Society for Marine Mammalogy Conference, to take place in San Francisco from December 13-18, 2015. The submission deadline is May 15th, 2015. Workshops will be held on December 12-13th.
Christmas greetings to you all.
I hope you are able to find time to immerse yourselves with friends and family and take pause before 2015 sweeps us up into another busy year.
Two weeks ago we held the annual meeting of the SMM Board in San Francisco. The organising committee for the 21st Biennial Conference in San Francisco (13-18 December 2015) also attended for one of our two day meeting. I have always loved San Francisco and was reminded yet again what a great venue it is for our next meeting.
Reaching the ‘one year to go’ stage has seen our hard working local organisers move up several notches to prepare for what is highly likely to be our biggest gathering yet. With co-chairs Frances Gulland and Ellen Hines leading the overall team, and Dan Costa and Sarah Allen leading the science team we are in good hands. As with every Biennial we owe a huge debt of thanks to the local organisers who freely give so much of their time to ensure we have a great meeting. Keep an eye out on our website for updates and timelines.
I should note that San Francisco is not a cheap place to host a meeting. We will have full hotel and conference facilities in downtown SF and some spectacular venues in which to meet, mix and learn. We are doing all we can to keep the costs of the meeting down to affordable levels. This is being achieved through a combination of active fund raising and a decision to dip into the Society’s cash reserves to the degree necessary to strike the right balance. Some conferences have added to our cash reserves and some should – quite appropriately – dip into them. The conference co-chairs are working closely with the Board to get this balance right.
While on conferences, we received the very sad news that the organisers of the 22nd Biennial (voted by all of you to be Veracruz, Mexico) have had to withdraw their offer to host the meeting. This very hard decision was made on the basis of political and security issues in Mexico. I take this opportunity to sincerely thank Ibiza Martinez and Eduardo Morteo for all the hard work they and their team had done in preparing for the meeting. It was a tough decision for them to make. We all hope that safety and security issues will be resolved in Mexico, and that hopefully our active Mexican marine mammal community might consider hosting a meeting at some future time.
The Board is working hard to determine an alternate venue for our 2017 meeting.
During the Board meeting we also reviewed the very successful Otago Biennial. This was the first time the meeting had been held in the Oceania region and so was a further important step in representing the international status as a Society. There was some great innovation in the meeting – not only in having to set up a whole new (and wonderful) venue following the catastrophic Christchurch earthquakes – but in areas such as speed talks and a much greater reach through social media. Our sincere thanks to go to Liz Slooten, Steve Dawson and their team for their leadership and delivery of a great event. Thanks also to the University of Otago for providing their facilities.
One of the events from Otago that continues to give rise to correspondence was the panel discussion on captive killer whales. Quite a few people have requested that the transcript from the panel discussion be made public. While this is a perfectly reasonable request, it is not possible in this case. Some panel members agreed to participate on the panel, in good faith, on the basis that there be no public product from the discussion, including publicly available transcripts. As this was the agreed basis for the panel, we must honour it. In discussing this topic the Board agreed that in future we should not give any such undertakings, and that any event held as a formal part of our biennial meetings will be made fully public. Future participants will be made aware of this.
Once again, Merry Christmas to you all. I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in San Francisco in a year.
My best regards,
Nick
The 21st Biennial Society for Marine Mammalogy Conference will open its call for abstracts and workshop proposals on February 1, 2015. Early bird registration begins April 6, 2015.
Just four weeks left to submit your entry to the 2015 Ocean 180 Video Challenge!
Ocean scientists are invited to submit a 3 minute video abstract highlighting the findings of a recent peer-reviewed publication to compete for $9,000 in cash prizes. Scientists submitting entries to Ocean 180 must be US citizens or affiliated with a US institution.
If you are considering submitting a video abstract, we encourage you to view our information session, available here: http://ocean180.org/for-scientist/faq.html
To submit your entry, please visit http://ocean180.org/for-scientist/video-abstract-submission.html
Submission will close on Monday, December 1 at 11:59pm (PST).
While all videos will be evaluated by a team of science and communication experts, the top 10 finalists will be screened by over 30,000 middle school students in 20 countries. These student judges will evaluate the finalists and ultimately select the winning entries. This is an excellent opportunity to share your work with a broad audience and to practice communicating your research to the public.
Please contact info@ocean180.org with questions.
About Ocean 180
Sponsored by the Florida Center for Ocean Science Education Excellence (COSEE Florida) and funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation, the Ocean 180 Video Challenge is designed to encourage ocean scientists to share their discoveries and excitement for research with teachers, students, and the public.
For full contest guidelines and to view previous winners, please visit http://ocean180.org
Mallory Watson
COSEE Florida Scientist
Florida Institute of Technology
150 West University Boulevard
Melbourne, Florida 32901
Email: mwatson@fit.edu
Twitter: @Ocean180Video
Well here we go – my first blog in my new role as President of this very fine Society.
Like all of us privileged enough to serve in the variety of roles that keep our Society vibrant, relevant, informative, influential and above all, attractive to be a part of, we do so in a voluntary capacity. We have to learn to balance our usually busy day jobs with the varied and (mostly) interesting roles we play for the society. The fact that my first blog has appeared a couple of months into my new role is a sign that I’ve yet to get that balance quite right! I promise to lift my game (particularly to my patient friends and colleagues on the Board)!
The first and most important task is to thank – most sincerely – out past President, Helene Marsh. Helene is quite simply a force of nature. Her drive, passion and depth of knowledge are a potent combination and have delivered measurable, positive impacts in marine mammal science and conservation. Thanks so much Helene for all you have done for marine mammals, and in this case, for the Society. It’s an overused metaphor, but you really have left very large shoes to fill!
So…the Australocene continues – two Australian Presidents (no – that’s not an oxymoron!) in a row. Its a great sign of our growing internationalisation; surely a healthy trend for our Society.
There are some very real – and in my view quite healthy – tensions emerging among our membership. Some of these were manifest in Dunedin where there were ‘robust’ views in the lead up, during and post our special events on issues of marine mammal killing techniques and killer whales in captivity – both complex and value-laden issues. While there were very few members who suggested that we had got it dead right for those sessions, there were almost equal numbers of people I heard from who said that we either went much too far, or not nearly far enough! So perhaps we did as well as was possible in steering our path on how our science should influence conservation and welfare issues.
I believe almost all in the Society would agree that we have an important role in issues like these – and many other marine mammal conservation issues where science intersects with disparate values, motivations and politics.
The tensions emerge primarily in resolving just what our role is and how we should enact it. None of us should be apologetic about having views on these issues that may not accord with some of our colleagues, but nor should we be intolerant or dismissive of those alternate views. This is a complex issue and there are many valid viewpoints.
Let’s start with the Society’s Mission: ‘… to promote the global advancement of marine mammal science and contribute to its relevance and impact in education, conservation and management’. We are unambiguously a global community focused on conducting and improving the quality and impact of our science (the growing impact factor of our Journal suggests we are making great progress on that front!).
I won’t try, in this blog, to outline a clear path for how we maximise the relevance and impact of our science, while avoiding the slippery slope to the role of advocate – a place where the well earned science credential of our Society would be devalued.
I, of course, have my views, and indeed I have spent almost my entire career in the challenging and interesting space where science interacts with the development of public good policy. But my role as President is not to promote my particular views, but rather, to ensure that I help facilitate, and indeed encourage, a respectful dialogue that takes accord of the divergent views and finds that acceptable pathway that ensures our science continues to make a difference.
In a couple of months I will meet with the Board and conference organising committee to further plan towards what is likely to be our largest ever gathering; San Francisco; 13-18 December 2015 (if you have not already done so – block it out in your diary and start saving your travel money!). The theme; ‘Bridging the past towards the future’ will ensure the conversation on influence and impact from our science will continue there, along with all the great diversity of the work and issues the conference will cover.
I will let you know how our meetings go in a later blog – but keep an eye out for the many conference updates in the meantime.
Best wishes to you all,
Nick
The report of the fifth meeting of the Comité Internacional para la Recuperación de la Vaquita (CIRVA V) put forth strong recommendations that, if heeded, will give the greatest chance of recovery for the critically endangered vaquita. The CIRVA V report makes clear that with fewer than 100 individuals remaining, declining at 18.5%/year, time is indeed running out. The recent dramatic decline was exacerbated by the rapid resurgence of the illegal fishery for another Mexican endangered fish species, the totoaba. Saving vaquita is not Mexico’s responsibility alone, in fact coordinated work on the part of the Mexican government with the governments of China and the United States will be required if the recommendations are to be fully and successfully implemented.
The cause of the decline of the vaquita is clear: accidental drowning in gillnet fisheries. While conservation plans substituting gillnet fisheries with vaquita-safe gear are underway, time for gradual replacement has been stolen by resurgence of an illegal fishery for the endangered totoaba. Totoaba swim bladders are sold in Asia, involving points in the United States as part of the distribution chain.
Key recommendations from the CIRVA V report:
Further information including the full CIRVA report can be found on the IUCN Cetacean Specialist Group website (http://www.iucn-csg.org/). Several NGOs have sent letters to the Presidents of Mexico and the U.S. urging that the Government of Mexico follows the recommendations above.
For Society members within the U.S. there is a petition you can sign urging this action:
https://secure.oceanconservancy.org/site/Advocacy;jsessionid=8399D1166361249BAC174C8F19764608.app260b?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=846&s_src=14WAXAXXXX&s_subsrc=14AVQE
Vaquita photo taken by Thomas A. Jefferson under permit (Oficio No. DR/488/08) from the Secretaria de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (SEMARNAT), within a natural protected area subject to special management and decreed as such by the Mexican Government.
The following is an update on Mekong and Ayeyarwady Irrawaddy dolphin conservation, including a summary of a workshop held on June 1, 2014 in Phnom Penh to assess progress on implementation of the recommendations from the Kratie Declaration and to update Cambodia’s river dolphin conservation strategy.
Two years ago, the majority of Society members voted during the annual April ballot in favor of switching to an electronic-only journal and eliminating the printed version. There was an announcement of this on the Society’s website for several months, but it is possible you missed it if you do not periodically check the site and did not attend the annual member’s meeting at the biennial conference. It took some time to plan for the transition, and now it has become a reality.
At present, you will not automatically receive e-mail notices when a new issue of the journal is out, although we are looking into whether we might get this changed. Regardless, Marine Mammal Science will continue to be published quarterly (January, April, July and October), and if you sign up for e-mail alerts, Wiley will automatically e-mail you when a new issue is released.
If you used the online version of the journal in the past, you will already know that you must go to Marine Mammal Science through the Society’s website while logged in as a member. This will give you full access to the journal as part of your Society of Marine Mammalogy membership benefits. If you try to log in to Marine Mammal Science directly through wileyonline.com, you will not succeed in obtaining access to articles by using your SMM member ID and password. Of course many of you can also gain access to the journal through an institutional membership if your institution has paid to have access.
Having more pages available to publish does not diminish the need to keep Marine Mammal Science as a high quality journal. Indeed, we still cannot possibly publish all papers submitted, so we must also select papers to consider based on their relative importance and likely degree of interest to the readership of the journal.
1) We now publish a greater number of pages without a change in membership fees (now 1600 pages per year, up from 1000)
3) Eliminates charges for mailing copies of issues to members
4) Eliminates issues getting lost in the mail (as was a common occurrence in the past)
5) Contributes to conservation by saving trees and eliminating the carbon cost of shipping print copies all over the world
If you have not already done so, we invite you to read our first two electronic-only journal issues published January and April 2014.
If you have questions about this change or about Marine Mammal Science in general, you can e-mail me at mmsci@megalink.net.
Daryl J. Boness
Editor-in-Chief
Marine Mammal Science
The 2013 Grants in Aid of Research program has selected for funding 13 projects out of 44 proposals submitted. Applications were received from 16 countries. A total of $15,055 was awarded.
Congratulations to our winners. Their names are posted on our website.