Advisor: Dr. Andrew Trites

Education: Queen’s University B.A.H. Environmental Science and Political Studies

Research Interests: foraging ecology, bioenergetics, patch dynamics and conservation biology

Proposed research: Broadly, I am interested in the ecology of the endangered North Atlantic right whale and the manner in which fluctuations in food resource availability and capture-ability affect population viability. For my proposed research I will apply results from an experiment I conducted to evaluate prey-taxa specific filtration of right whale baleen and quantify the caloric availability of prey patches in Cape Cod Bay from 1999-2009. Additionally, I will evaluate caloric variability with environmental changes in temperature and stratification.

Biography
Since 2007 I have worked for the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies (PCCS), a small non-profit scientific research and rescue institution. I had the opportunity to work for various programs at PCCS including the humpback whale program, the coastal ecology program and the right whale habitat studies program. I have also enjoyed participating in marine education programs, such as the Dolphin Fleet Whale Watch naturalist program and volunteering for the Cape Cod Stranding Network (a project of International Fund for Animal Welfare). The majority of my time with PCCS was spent working as a research assistant for the right whale habitat program where I gained extensive experience in cetacean and zooplankton data collection, data analysis and experimental design. My primary responsibility was to conduct an experiment that refined the techniques previously established by Mayo et al. (2001) to estimate the efficiency of right whale baleen at catching different taxa, sexes and stages of calanoid copepods. The goal of the study was to quantify North Atlantic right whale caloric consumption in Cape Cod Bay, a critical feeding habitat. The results of this study have several management implications, as current recovery strategies are dependent upon researchers ability to predict whale distribution, which is dependent upon resource abundance and distribution.