Chris Berglund

Pelican sticking its head straight up in the air while surrounded by other pelicans and cormorants.

Pelican sticking its head straight up in the air while surrounded by other pelicans and cormorants.

When pelicans yawn, they tilt their head all the way back.

There's an additional level of weirdness because online sports betting is still illegal in like 17 states

You sure you weren’t accidentally watching a cricket match? Those can last days

With seven years since the last large leptospirosis outbreak compared the the more typical 3-5, I do wonder how much of it is driven by a greater proportion of the population that is immunologically naive. Will be curious to see what comes of it

I’m now contractually obligated to think gray seals are the coolest species of seal, but I definitely have a soft spot for Weddell seals even though I never got to see them in person

Maybe it’s one of them erasable engravings

Nutria

Kind of weird of them to go with a sea otter for the image instead of the actual river otter species

Is it mostly argos that’s used for shark tags?

Somehow managed to be more delusional than the English monarchs who kept including King of France in their list of titles all the way until 1802

Very opposite feelings watching this game vs watching the Lynx earlier today

Fluffy Weddell seal pup looks straight into the camera

We are seeking a motivated PhD student to investigate how multiple mesopredators share space and resources in the Southern Ross Sea. The project will address questions about niche partitioning (both spatial and temporal) and foraging ecology in the Southern Ocean using three years of animal tracking data deployed on penguins (n = 60) and seals (n = 30). Specifically, we wish to uncover aspects of three-dimensional space use in Adélie penguins, emperor penguins, and Weddell seals at Cape Crozier, in the southern Ross Sea. There exists one of the largest colonies of Adélie penguins, a small colony of emperor penguins, and a small group of Weddell seals. We ask: How are these animals using the same space at the same time? How can that part of the ocean support hundreds of thousands of central-place foragers in a relatively small foraging halo, during the short summer window of time? Answers to these questions will provide fine-scale insights as part of the larger project which seeks to understand the metacommunity structure of marine mesopredators in the Southern Ocean and will inform conservation in the Ross Sea Marine Protected Area (one of the largest in the world). With the first 10-year evaluation of the MPA coming up, this project will have immediate real-world impact. We cannot guarantee Antarctic field work as part of the PhD project. Funding: Rutherford Discovery Fellowship ($27,000 NZD/year for three years + fees), plus potential school-supported (School of Earth and Environment) conference travel opportunities. Requirements: Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Ecology, Marine Biology, Geography, Zoology or Statistics required; good communication skills (written and verbal), with previous publication experience a bonus; strong work ethic, strong initiative, and team attitude; previous experience handling biologging data (in any system), large datasets, and data wrangling a plus.

Join Mia Wege and me to study niche partitioning among three Antarctic mesopredators!

Fully-funded PhD opportunity at U Canterbury, please email michelle.larue@canterbury.ac.nz if you're interested!

Applications will be reviewed until filled.

Splines, B-splines, P-splines, and a disapproving kitten – Notes from a data witch No, I do not care about splines. But I am trying to learn about GAMLSS regression, and yes, it is to this dark place that this topic has taken me

At the risk of stretching the imagination beyond the limits of human endurance, the reader is asked to pretend that the author is interested in splines #rstats

“What the heck even is salinity” feels like a more appropriate name for an intro to physical oceanography class.

I feel like AMOC/Gulf Stream thing is one of the pet peeves that always got brought up in every physical oceanography class I took. Also that practical salinity is unitless

Oh that brings me back. In 2015, we had a severe marine heat wave (‘the blob’) which resulted in an insane number of strandings of sea lions in California along with just about every sort of sea creature. So many people asked about Fukushima even though it was 4 years before and 9000 miles way.

I had a similar moment when I was working in marine mammal stranding and someone on a beach asked me if chemtrails were why sea lions strand. He said he had been watching the skies diligently since 1992. Who am I to argue with that?

Getting the Seal of Approval: Marine Animals as Ocean Scientists - Dundee Heritage Trust From weather forecasting to understanding climate change, Dr Lars Boehme from the Sea Mammal Research Unit will discuss how seals can help us.

🚀 Upcoming Talk! 🚀

Dr Lars Boehme from SMRU (@seamammalresearch.bsky.social) will share how SMRU Instrumentation tags and seals can help advance marine science. 🦭

📍 Discovery Point, Dundee.
📆 Sat 13 & Sun 14 September
🕧 12:30 pm both days

More info: www.dundeeheritagetrust.co.uk/event/how-se...

Any claims about caring about the wellbeing of whales is so transparently bad faith when they’re cutting funding for research that actually helps inform conservation

The article is from a couple months ago. The DA wave is more or less over at this point. Now it’s a bacterial infection called leptospirosis that’s driving a lot of strandings.

We named him Ersa. We were going through a real moons of Jupiter phase with our names

A photo of a Steller sea lion pup with its mouth open.

Probably not as effective of a bully as your guy

Most people I know that have been bitten by seals/sea lions: otters haven’t been too bad. They mostly just want you to back off. Still not particularly fun.

This was back when I was working in rescue/rehab. Getting to work with them was such a treat. I only ever got one Steller sea lion though

It wasn’t too bad. She was only a 70ish kg California sea lion. I had to poke her with a needle and for some reason she found that objectionable and got my hand a little as I was pulling back. Honestly, the antibiotics I had to take afterwards were probably more unpleasant than the bite itself.

I really liked your illustrations. Those of us in the sea lion biz call it spy hopping. Even though I'm working on seals now, sea lions are always going to be my favorites and that's even having been bitten by one. There is that combination of intelligence, cuteness, and terrifyingness.

YouTube video by James MacDiarmid a Sea Lion roar

Probably the second best sea lion in terms of sound. I think first place has to go to New Zealand sea lions.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDPc...

YouTube video by Weddell Seal Science Eerie Vocals of Weddell Seal Pup & Adult

Plus, Weddell seal vocalizations just sound so much cooler (I am very biased)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CRB...

One complication is that decibels is referenced to a pressure. Sounds in air are referenced to 20 µPa while sounds in water (like leopard seal vocalizations) are referenced to 1 µPa, so it's not really as loud as it might seem at first. That's the only thing I remember from bioacoustics classes

SDMs are powerful tools, but only if feed them with the right variables (be biologists, not blind programmers!). We show how data dredging approaches relying on the 19 bioclimatic variables can lead to misleading predictions & interpretation. Led by @giordanomancini.bsky.social
shorturl.at/Y2BpC

Yeah, we’ve got them in shallow waters in California. They’re a pretty common prey item for otters in this one tidal estuary, and otters always look at least a little silly while eating them.