News 2016

December 2016

  • Caspian seal telemetry project featured in CLS’s Argos Forum.
  • Congratulations to Leandro Patino on submitting his PhD thesis on the “Evolution of parasite communities in Galapagos giant tortoises”.

October 2016

  • New PhD position on comparative genomics of seals available in my lab.
  • Our work on Icebreakers and Icebreeding Seals is featured in a special issue of WWF’s Global Arctic Programme “The Circle“, covering shipping in the Arctic.

August 2016

  • Caspian seal migration and foraging behaviour revealed through satellite telemetry.

Our new paper describing the first satellite telemetry study of Caspian seals is out this week. The results give new insights into the migration and foraging behaviour of this species. This short video shows examples of animated telemetry tracks giving a snap shot of annual movement patterns.

July 2016

  • Workshop on the conservation of land-locked seal species – Astrakhan, Russia, 31st October 2016

As part of the 8th International Conference on Marine Mammals of the Holarctic, we are co-organising a round table workshop on setting conservation priorities landlocked seal species. The workshop will take a comparative approach to assess which ecological and environmental factors influence sensitivity to different conservation threats, and how this can inform development of appropriate conservation measures. More details here.

June 2016

  • Next Generation Sequencing Researcher Links Workshop – Almaty, Kazakhstan, September 18th-24th 2016

Together with Kazakh colleagues at the Institute of Microbiology & Virology, Almaty, we have been awarded a British Council Researcher Links  grant to hold a workshop promoting development of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) research in Kazakhstan. The grant will support travel for 13 early career UK researchers to travel to Almaty to share their experience of establishing NGS applications with Kazakh scientists. The topics will span the breadth of NGS applications, from medical diagnostic tools in the NHS, through uses in ecology & evolutionary biology, agriculture and environmental biology. More details here.

March 2016

Welcome to Laura Najera Cortazar and Linas Svolkinas who join the lab as PhD students. Laura begins a project in March looking at the ecological genomics of Myotis bats in Baja California, Mexico. Linas will start in October working on assessing cumulative human impacts on biodiversity in the Caspian and the sociopolitical factors influencing the success of conservation in the region.