The People of Birdfish

Julia K Parrish

Lowell A. and Frankie L. Wakefield Professor of Ocean and Fishery Sciences
Associate Director of School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences
Director of Program on the Environment
Executive Director for COASST

jparrish@u.washington.edu
Website: SAFS Faculty Profile

Julia started her academic career as a starving artist, only dimly aware of organismal biology and natural history. However, as art is more difficult than science (!), Julia found herself (while still an undergrad) immersed in marine biology while a visiting student at the Duke University Marine Lab. Since then, it's been science and particularly animal behavior and field biology all the way. After coming to the University of Washington in 1990, Julia discovered conservation in the way that most field biologists do by watching the organisms and habitats she had been working on and in disappear and degrade as a consequence of human action. This epiphanic, and typical, experience led her to create a program with a strong component of marine conservation, a foundation of basic science, and a healthy dose of enthusiastic teaching and outreach. Her current research focuses on physical, biological, and anthropogenic factors affecting coastal seabird population health in the Pacific Northwest, seabird-salmon interactions on the Columbia River, and how and why fish school. At present, Julia splits her time between two campus homes: the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, and the Department of Biology, where she teaches Marine Biology and Sustainable Fisheries. When not teaching or in the field, Julia runs the Bevan Series on Sustainable Fisheries, and serves as the Executive Director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST)—a citizen science program in Washington and Oregon.

Ann Edwards

Visiting Scientist
Postdoctoral Fellow, AFSC
aee@u.washington.edu
Website: Alaska Fisheries Science Center

Ann Edwards is a visiting scholar with the Parrish lab and a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow with the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, NOAA (AFSC). Ann studied gulls and terns for her PhD (Department of Zoology, UW) focusing on the effects of body condition and stress on reproductive behaviors. During her tenure as a grad student she also deciphered complex patterns of flight feather molt in albatrosses, paving the way for her postdoctoral research. Ann has been asked by the AFSC to determine the population-level effects on seabirds of provisioning by the Alaskan groundfish fishery. Towards this end, Ann is producing a map in space and time of fish parts returned to Alaskan waters, a product that will be used by ecosystem modelers as well as seabird biologists. To link diet and demographics, Ann is using stable isotope analysis of feathers in Laysan and Black-footed Albatrosses. If quantifiable relationships are detected between a fisheries diet and demographic change they will be used to inform population models that now incorporate only bycatch mortality as an effect of fisheries on albatrosses.

George Divoky

Visiting Scientist
fngjd@uaf.edu
Website: Friends of Cooper Island

George Divoky graduated obtained a master's degree from Michigan State University and a doctorate from the University of Alaska Fairbanks where he is a Research Associate with the Institute of Arctic Biology. He is also a visiting researcher at the UW. Since 1970, George has conducted seabird research in Alaska where he has monitored a Black Guillemot colony on Cooper Island from 1975 to the present. Last year, George became instantly famous when an article about his work on guillemots and climate change made the cover of the New York Times Magazine. Following that event, George founded the Friends of Cooper Island, a non-profit dedicated to using seabirds, particularly Cooper Island seabirds, as vehicles to study the effects of climate change on ecosystems. When not in the field the resides in Seattle where he has a 13-year-old son.

Peter Hodum

Visiting Scientist
peter@oikonos.org
Website: Juan Ferndanez Island Conservancy

Starting from his days as an aspiring beach bum growing up on the Jersey Shore, Peter has been enamored with the marine environment. He followed this passion in college and graduate school, focusing his studies primarily on the ecology of seabirds. He received his Ph.D. from UC Davis for research on the foraging ecology and energetics of Antarctic fulmarine petrels. His research has provided him with wonderful opportunities to study seabird ecology and island biology in a number of spectacular settings, including Antarctica, New Zealand, the Galápagos, Chile and the Bay of Fundy. Over the years, his interests have shifted more exclusively towards applied conservation research and community-based conservation. He currently directs the Juan Fernández Islands Conservancy (JFIC), a small organization dedicated to conservation and community education programs in the Juan Fernández Islands, Chile. Although the central foci of JFIC’s work to date have been the archipelago’s threatened and endangered avifauna and the development of projects to foster community conservation awareness, it has also facilitated programs addressing waste management, sustainable artisanal fisheries, and environmental education programs for island children. More locally, Peter is also collaborating with Julia to develop a breeding season monitoring program for tufted puffins and rhinoceros auklets on Tatoosh Island, Washington.  

Laura X. Payne

Associate Research Scientist
lxp@u.washington.edu
Website: http://fish.washington.edu/people/lxp

Laura’s interests are rooted at the intersection between ecology and conservation, inspired in part by a childhood in remote, coastal Patagonia. She recently completed her Ph.D. on the spatial ecology and conservation of shorebirds—spectacular globetrotters whose migrations span from Arctic breeding grounds to South American wintering areas (University of Wisconsin-Madison; 2005). Her doctoral research quantified the degree to which 36 shorebird species aggregate/disperse during spring and fall migrations through the U.S., and how their patterns of space-use have varied over time. Understanding space-use by long-distance migrants is critical to conservation and management, because it dictates the geographic template (how many & which sites to protect) upon which planning must be based. Other research interests include how birds drive/alter landscape-scale patterns of productivity—with current projects examining the link between bird communities and salmon-derived nutrients in south-central Alaska. She is also collaborating on a long-term book project on the paths that women take, once trained as academic scientists. She enjoys balancing work with play, and especially, spending time with her partner and wonderful 2-year-old daughter.

Martin Renner

Post-doctoral Research Associate
rennerm@u.washington.edu

Martin's interested in the ecology of pelagic seabirds communities and hotspots and their response to climate change in Alaska. Alaska is home to the largest seabird concentrations in North America and is predicted to experience particularly pronounced changes in climate. Predicting the impact of climate change on the top marine predators like seabirds will depend on an understanding of the factors driving their distribution. This work is undertaken in close collaboration with George Hunt, Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge and USGS. After undergraduate studies in Germany, Martin did a Master at the University of Otago, New Zealand, studying the behavioral ecology of Little Penguins. He went on to even smaller diving seabirds for his PhD at Memorial University of Newfoundland, working on sexual selection and evolution of Least Auklets in the Aleutian Islands. Martin joined the birdfish lab in 2006, but is usually off campus, living in Homer, Alaska, with his wife Heather and their kids Frida and Lukas.

Michael Schrimpf

MS Student
schrimpf@u.washington.edu

Michael came to the lab in 2007 after receiving a B.A. in biology and German from Lawrence University, Wisconsin, where he studied freshwater food-web interactions. His MS research at UW focuses on seabird foraging ecology, in particular common murres breeding on Tatoosh Island, WA. Michael’s work aims to explore the nuances behind prey choice in nesting murres, especially how changes in prey distribution and the physical environment influence their diet. In his spare time, he can be found sailing, fencing, or playing the concertina.

Sarah Stienessen

PhD Student, SAFS
stieness@u.washington.edu

Sarah Stienessen is a new student to the lab. She is currently working for NOAA where she is part of a team that conducts acoustic surveys on walleye pollock found in Alaskan waters, specifically the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea. She has also focused some of her time at work looking at schooling characteristics of juvenile pollock off Kodiak Island. Her PhD work will be on the "Traffic Rules for Fish Schools" project, where she hopes to explore some of the rules for schooling behavior in fish and how these rules apply to pollock.

Annie Woods

COASST Project Coordinator
amwoods@uw.edu

Fledged

Kim Dietrich

MS, SAFS—2003
Washington SeaGrant
http://www.wsg.washington.edu/bios/dietrich.html

Nathalie Hamel

PhD, SAFS—2009
nhamel@u.washington.edu

If you overhear French in the hallways of the School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences, it's likely to be Nathalie, fully engaged in a conversation about the virtues of maple syrup. After landing in Seattle from "La Belle Province" of Québec, Nathalie was completely taken by the fascinating world of fisheries. At the same time, she discovered marine ornithology, particularly by spending time doing observations at seabird colonies in the Pacific Northwest and being surrounded by seabird biologists! Her graduate studies meld those two interests by focusing on seabird-fisheries interactions in the Washington and British Columbia gillnet fisheries. For more information, check out Nathalie's webpage.

Publication

Hamel, N. J., J. K. Parrish, and L. L. Conquest. 2004. Effects of tagging on behavior, provisioning, and reproduction in the common murre (Uria aalge), a diving seabird. The Auk 121:1161-1171.

Kate Litle

MS Student, School of Marine Affairs
kalitle@u.washington.edu

Joanna L. Smith

PhD, SAFS—2008

Jo joined the lab in 2002 after eight years with her own consulting company (Birdsmith Ecological Research). Raised in East Coast Canada, she has interests in both terrestrial and marine ecosystems as a result of many years of hiking the backwoods and sailing offshore with her family. She has an M.Sc. in insect ecology, a diploma in Traditional Wooden Boatbuilding and a research resume that, appropriately, spans both the land and sea. For her PhD thesis, she is studying the habitat use and foraging ecology of common mergansers breeding on an hydroelectric reservoir (Columbia River, Washington), and Juan Fernández petrels breeding in the south Pacific (Robinson Crusoe Islands, Chile). Her dissertation aims to tease apart the mechanisms that explain habitat selection patterns with respect to foraging and provisioning during reproduction.

Suzann Speckman

PhD, SAFS—Oct 2004
US Fish and Wildlife Service, Alaska

Stephani Zador

PhD, SAFS—September 2007
szador@u.washington.edu