Thorne Lab Happenings

New York is not typically thought of as a whale watching hotspot, but there are many favorable conditions for marine mammals just off the coast of NYC. Together with the labs of Drs. Janet Nye and Joe Warren from SoMAS, the Thorne Lab began the first of a multi-year...

Matt Fuirst presented his thesis on herring gull foraging ecology and microbiome characteristics along an urban gradient, and successfully defended his MS at SoMAS in July. Matt's thesis represents the culmination of three intense field seasons at three different...

By Julia Stepanuk, PhD student I spent this past week with the Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna (GEMM) Lab at Oregon State University learning their protocol for drone flights and gaining experience flying over whales. I saw my first gray whales just...

Matt represented the Thorne Lab at the 45th annual Pacific Seabird Group conference this February in La Paz, Mexico. Matt presented his work in the Foraging Ecology session where he discussed his results from his Master's thesis on differences in herring...

Congratulations to Julia Donaton, who successfully defended her Master’s thesis, “Diet analysis of loggerhead sea turtle diet in New York waters”, on November 6! Julia’s presentation discussed her findings on changes to loggerhead diet over a 25-year period, and how...

Lesley and Hyemi Kim, an atmospheric scientist also at SoMAS, were both recently awarded prestigious NSF CAREER awards for their research: https://www.somas.stonybrook.edu/2017/11/10/two-somas-faculty-recipients-of-nsf-career-awards/

Matt presented preliminary data from his M.S. thesis on herring gull foraging ecology at the 6th Biannual Nantucket Biodiversity Initiative (NBI) Conference on Nantucket, Massachussets on November 4. The NBI conference brings together biologists and naturalists...

The Thorne Lab is starting a collaborative project with Janet Nye and Hyemi Kim's labs using climate models to generate seasonal predictions of fish and marine mammals. Check out the SBU press release about this work here:...

Lesley, Julia S, and Stephanie represented the Thorne Lab at the 22nd Biennial Conference of the Society for Marine Mammalogy in Halifax, Nova Scotia from October 22-27th. Lesley and Julia both presented work focused on pilot whale bycatch in the pelagic longline...

This year I spent the months of April-July tagging herring gulls at several colonies for my M.S. thesis research. My fieldwork this season primarily involved capturing the gulls using noose carpets and deploying/recovering GPS tags to track foraging movements.