On Friday November 6, the Kachemak Bay Campus held Semester by the Bay’s Marine Mammal Biology Student Symposium.
Semester by the Bay offers a marine mammals concentration in the Fall and an environmental conservation concentration in the spring. Students can choose the semester that best meets their goals or choose both and stay for the academic year.
The Friday event included student-led scientific presentations from the fall cohort as well as one talk from Teresa Becher, the Kenai and Kasilof Beluga Monitoring Coordinator for Alaska Wildlife Alliance and a Natural Sciences major at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. Students also shared a poster session on Kenai Peninsula Marine Life in the evening which offered students the opportunity to share their preliminary work related to endangered Belugas, Kachemak Bay harbor porpoises, Steller sea lions and other marine life in the Outer Bay, Lower Cook Inlet, Kenai Fjords National Park and Resurrection Bay.
Program director Debbie Tobin provided this review of the event:
“The Semester By the Bay students early in the term have they were assigned individual oral presentations or platform presentations, and as a group poster presentations, and so they get to select topic they're interested in for their individual presentations, which they have to collect at least 20 scientific articles for, and then summarize or synthesize to review those articles and present them to the community,” Tobin said.
Three students, Monica Potter, Kaitlyn Dorand and Cat Spangler, shared details from each of their presentations with the radio:
- “My name is Monica Potter, and I presented on highly pathogenic avian influenza in marine mammals and certain outbreaks that have happened over the past few years. And it was a really great experience to be able to do this type of presentation in front of an audience and get some good feedback from our professors. And that way, when we go into future presentations in school and in our careers, we have a better grasp on how it all works and how to present on scientific topics.”
- “I'm Caitlin Duran, and then during our symposium on Friday, I presented on cold stress syndrome in the Florida manatees. Overall, it was pretty good. We also had group presentations, and I was part of the Beluga Group. So we went out to the Kenai River and we kind of documented three different sessions with them, and then we kind of presented our findings and everything. And it was, like Monica was saying, it was a really good experience being able to present in front of the public and also like our teachers and get good feedback. So like when we progress in our careers, we have a better understanding of how all that works.”
- “My name is Kat Spangler, and this week I gave my symposium talk on the beluga whale microbiome. So my presentation essentially just explored how we can study the beluga whale microbiome from the types of sampling that are utilized, and then to some of the first findings, because all of this is work that is being done for the first time. So there are actually only two like solid peer-reviewed publications right now, and so it's kind of reviewing what they're finding, what types of bacteria are important to the whale, and also it was highlighting the importance of pathogen detection and how that has connections to not just whale health but human health and whole ecosystems.”
Tobin concluded with these remarks:
“Basically, we do all of this to prepare the students for eventual symposium or conference participation, say at the Alaska Marine Science Symposium in January, or at other conferences that they may choose to attend in the future, either as graduate students or potentially as interns or in their job capacities down the road. So it's kind of for most of them their first attempt at preparing and presenting both in an individual and a poster, a group poster format at a much smaller, more friendly community,” Tobin said.
Reporting from Homer, this is Emilie Springer.
