The 2024 Ed Ricketts Memorial Award recipient Dr. Daniel P. Costa, University of California Santa Cruz, will provide a lecture on how technology has provided insights into the behavior and physiology of marine mammals in nature.
September 25th, 2024 (in-person and virtual)
Like most studies of animal behavior, marine mammal research started as a purely observational discipline. Animals were observed on beaches or swimming near shore, followed by boats or airplanes. While informative, these observations provided only a restricted view of where the animals spent most of their time: underwater.
Gaining a window into their deep, dark world, often thousands of miles at sea, required developing devices to record, archive, and transmit information on their otherwise mysterious lives. We’ve come a long way from the simple capillary gauges that recorded the depth of the single deepest dive to tags that tell us how deep, how long, how fast, when, and where they sleep, along with information on the physical and biological characteristics of the ocean.
This talk will examine how technology has provided insights into the behavior and physiology of marine mammals in nature.
