Marine mammals are good barometers of our environment. The status of these species and current efforts at their conservation are very timely due to climate change, shortages of salmon, increases in boats and humans, and high levels of contaminants off of the West Coast of the United States.
On February 28th, 2019, there will be a marine mammal special session consisting of 18 speakers. The talks will cover cetaceans, pinnipeds, and mustelids. We plan on having speakers from Cascadia, NOAA-NMFS, OSU, WDFW, UBC, UW, Seattle Aquarium, Sealife Response Rehabilitation Research (SR3), and U.S. Army Corp of Engineers. Including John Calambokidis, Dr. Scott Baker, Steven Jefferies, Dr. Alex Zerbini, Dr. Robyn Angliss, and others. Talks will cover porpoise and sea otter recovery in Washington, comparing manned to unmanned aerial surveys, eDNA, the southern resident pod of killer whales, increased entanglement of whales off of the Washington Coast, and other interesting and timely topics.
This special session will take place on February 28th, 2019, during the annual meeting of the Washington chapter of the Wildlife Society (TWS) and the Society for NW Vertebrate Biologists and will go from 9am till 5pm with a couple of breaks and a hour for lunch. The meeting will take place in between Olympia and Centralia, WA (Great Wolf Lodge). These meetings are wonderful venues for disseminating information and sharing research results. TWS is very interested in increasing its focus on marine wildlife, especially marine mammals.
For further details, you can reach out to me by email at pavale03@evergreen.edu or read more about the meeting in the second call for papers at
http://thesnvb.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2019-2nd-Call-for-Papers.pdf.