Ethology and Behavioral Ecology of Phocids

Evolution - Analisa Berta.- Sensory and cognition - Tentative Colleen Reichmuth and others.- Communication - Isabelle Charrier.- Physiology - Dan Crocker.- Movement - Luis Huckstadt and Ryan Reisinger.- Navigation - Patrick Robinson.- Foraging ecology and behavior - Don Bowen.- Reproductive behavior and lactation strategies - Dan Costa and Jen Maresh.- Breeding behavior - Paddy Pomeroy and Kelly Robinson.- Conservation - Samantha Simmons and others.

Dr. Daniel Costa Ph.D. is a Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz and is the Director of the Institute of Marine Sciences.  He has a B.A. from UCLA and a Ph.D. from U.C. Santa Cruz and did postdoctoral research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He works at the interface between ecology and physiology with marine mammals and seabirds, taking him to every continent and almost every habitat from the Galapagos to Antarctica. While he has worked with sea otters, sea lions, and cetaceans; his research on phocid seals started with northern elephant seals in 1975 and expanded to Antarctic seals in 1978. He has published over 500 scientific papers. Currently, he is examining the movement patterns of marine mammals and seabirds to understand the factors that determine their habitat requirements.  He has pioneered using bioenergetics to predict when acoustic or other disturbance impacts marine mammalpopulations. Collectively, this work is essential for the conservation of highly migratory species. He co-founded the Tagging of Pacific Predators program, a multidisciplinary effort to study the movement patterns of 23 species of marine vertebrate predators in the North Pacific Ocean. He has been quite fortunate to supervise a highly talented cohort of 35 doctoral students, 22 masters, and 15 postdoctoral scholars. With his background in marine mammal biology, he has served as a member of international steering committees for the Integrated Climate and Ecosystem Dynamics program, The Census of Marine Life, Southern Ocean GLOBEC, CLIOTOP, the Southern Ocean Observing System IMBER, and the USA Ocean Studies Board. He is a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and an Inaugural Fellow of the Society of Marine Mammalogy, of which he served as Secretary.

Dr Elizabeth McHuron is a research scientist with the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies