Thorne Lab Happenings
The Thorne Lab Congratulates Master Dallas Jordan!
The Thorne lab congratulates Dallas Jordan on successfully defending his MS thesis, “Divergent Post-breeding Spatial Characteristics of Sympatric Albatross Species in the North Pacific”!!! Dallas’ thesis investigates the post-breeding movements of Black-footed and...
That’s a wrap! 2021 gull season comes to a close
Our 2021 field season for gull work has wrapped up! The Thorne Lab has been collecting data on herring gull foraging movements and ecology in relation to urban areas since 2016 and great black-backed gulls since 2019. This season we continued to study gulls at Young’s...
New Publication: Age-specific behavior and habitat use in humpback whales: implications for vessel strike
We're excited to announce a new publication from the Thorne Lab in Marine Ecology Progress Series and have summarized the research we did here! Vessel strikes are a major threat to large whale species around the world, and there have been some reports that juvenile...
New Publication: Microplastic abundance in gull nests in relation to urbanization
We are excited to announce a new publication in Marine Pollution Bulletin! Entitled: Microplastic abundance in gull nests in relation to urbanization: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X21000928 Plastic pollution is an increasingly recognized...
Welcome Tziporah Feldman!
The Thorne Lab warmly welcomes its newest student member, Tziporah Feldman! Tziporah is joining us from University of Cincinnati, where she earned a B.S. in Biology in addition to a certificate in GIS and a minor in Math. Her current research interests include...
An epic start to our 2020 humpback whale field season!
The Thorne lab has been diligently searching the New York Bight for humpback whales since mid-May. After a few days of wishfully scanning the horizon, we finally had three epic survey days filled with humpback whales! We found our first whales very close to shore...
A deep dive into movement data from Southern Ocean albatross
We're very excited to have completed the first season of albatross research at Bird Island, a remote seabird and seal colony in the sub-Antarctic. Research scientist and seabirder extraordinaire Dr. Rachael Orben set out in late November 2019 for the British Antarctic...
New York Bight Monitoring Project: A Year in Review
It has been a busy year for our ocean monitoring project in the New York Bight! The project, funded by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, is an interdisciplinary multi-trophic level project that provides key information on the status of the...
2020 Gull Season Wraps Up!
We have recently wrapped up our 2020 gull field season, led by MS student Kim Lato. Kim began studying herring gulls (HERG) and great black-backed gulls (GBBG) at nesting colony in Stony Brook in 2019 as part of the lab’s ongoing gull project investigating gull...
Albatross research on South Georgia- first field season at Bird Island!
Dr. Rachael Orben set sail for South Georgia earlier this week to conduct field studies on black-browed (Thalassarche melanophris) and grey-headed albatrosses (T. chrysostoma) at the British Antarctic Survey’s Bird Island Research Station. Rachael will be deploying...