Date: June 16, 2017
Contact: Yvonne Menard, 805-658-5725
Cascadia Research senior biologist John Calambokidis will discuss his work examining the trends of populations of blue, fin, humpback, and gray whales in southern California during the July From Shore to Sea lecture.
Calambokidis has used new research methods, including video from tags deployed on blue whales, to better understand their underwater behavior. He has discovered that blue whales spend almost twice as much time on the ocean surface at night than during the day and that they take little evasive action to avoid oncoming ships.
His research is focused on identifying threats to whales from human activities such as ship strikes, underwater noise, and entanglements, in order to provide new information on ways to mitigate these impacts.
Calambokidis’s research, including a large multi-year photo-identification catalog, is used to estimate abundance of blue, humpback, and gray whales along the west coast. He has found abundance of blue whales to be fairly stable while humpback whale populations have recently stabilized after increasing at a rate of over seven percent per year during the past two decades.
Calambokidis, the co-founder of Cascadia Research, has served as the project director of more than 200 studies on marine mammals, seabirds, and pollution. He has authored two books and over 200 publications in scientific journals and technical reports. In 2012, he received the American Cetacean Society’s John Heyning Award for Lifetime Achievement in Marine Mammal Science. Calambokidis is an adjunct faculty member of The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
The talk will be held on Thursday, July 13, 2017. The From Shore to Sea lecture series is sponsored by Channel Islands National Park to further the understanding of current research on the Channel Islands and surrounding marine waters. The 2017 lectures take place at 7:00 pm on the second Thursday of each month, January through December, at the Channel Islands National Park Robert J. Lagomarsino Visitor Center, 1901 Spinnaker Drive in Ventura Harbor. The programs are free and open to the public.
This lecture can also be viewed live online at: Shore to Sea lecture series.
Lectures are recorded and posted at: http://www.nps.gov/chis/learn/photosmultimedia/from-shore-to-sea-lecture-videos.htm
