Welcome Carter Smith, coastal ecologist and SAFS newest faculty member

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SAFS Assistant Professor, Carter Smith

This September, we’re joined by our newest faculty member, Assistant Professor Carter Smith, an interdisciplinary coastal ecologist whose interests lie at the intersection of multiple disciplines including community ecology, conservation and restoration science, and coupled human natural systems research.

Making the move to SAFS from Duke University Marine Lab, NC, where she was a Lecturing Fellow, Carter describes her journey to becoming a scientist as very circuitous. “My whole childhood I always wanted to be a performer, so I majored in Theater Arts in undergrad, but during that time I also worked a lot in outdoor education and as a mountain guide for NOLS,” Carter shared. “I fell in love with teaching, being outside, and exploring.”

After graduating from college, Carter channeled this passion into an outdoor education job, and worked with the Catalina Island Marine Institute, teaching a week-long marine biology curriculum to 4th–12th graders. “It was during this time that I absolutely fell in love with the ocean and hatched the idea to go back to school and do a PhD, despite knowing nothing about research,” Carter said. “Luckily, my PhD advisor, Charles Peterson, thought it was really cool that I had taken an advanced puppetry class and didn’t seem to mind that I didn’t have a science degree, and he took a chance on me.”

Carter will set up her Coastal Ecology and Restoration Lab at SAFS.

Once joining his lab, Carter recalls a strong desire to do field work and wanting her work to have strong applications. “I was given total freedom to decide what I wanted to study, and I started reading about different novel restoration techniques for coastal protection that were being used in NC and thought it was such an exciting idea that married my interests in community ecology, applied ecology, and social-ecological systems.”

Sharing what excites her most about joining SAFS, Carter said: “I’m really excited about joining such a distinguished faculty group with very diverse research interests, in an area of the world that is very supportive of habitat restoration and that has a track record of working to manage resources with diverse stakeholders.” Setting up her Coastal Ecology and Restoration Lab at SAFS, Carter will be recruiting students who have varied interests related to applied ecology.

Coming from the East Coast to the Pacific Northwest, Carter says one thing she is not looking forward to is the cold water. “I have never worked in Puget Sound, so it’s exciting to use this first year to explore, observe, and chat with coastal managers and restoration practitioners to understand priority research needs. I’m intrigued to see what lessons and observations that I’ve made on the East Coast can be applied to ecosystems in Puget Sound. But the cold water…I’m not excited about that.”

Carter’s research is not system specific, and the opportunity to work along urban shorelines, and in the seagrass, oyster, and saltmarsh ecosystems that make up Puget Sound is a prospect she’s eager to explore.

Now, enough about work – what is Carter’s favorite marine organism? “Abalone, because they are so beautiful and also delicious.” Welcome to SAFS, Carter!

Call for mentors and participants in GRFP workshop

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Call for participants and mentors for the GRFP workshop! The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) offers 3 years of support for graduate students (~$37k salary, ~$16k toward tuition, and some travel/internship opportunities) to be used over a 5-year period. This fellowship is for students who will be applying for graduate school this fall or are first- or second-year graduate students.

If you are applying for the GRFP this year and are interested in being mentored, please fill out this survey by September 1. This grant is open to undergraduates, those who have graduated with their Bachelor’s, and first or second year graduate students.

If you have grant-writing experience (not necessarily with the GRFP) and are interested in mentoring applicants on their essays, please fill out this survey by September 1. We welcome graduate students and post-docs as mentors!

We will be running a workshop designed to help applicants through the process of applying for the GRFP by connecting them with advice, mentorship, and feedback from senior grad students, postdocs, and faculty. The workshop is hybrid and takes place Sept 11, Sept 18, Sept 25, Oct 2, and Oct 9 from 5:30-7pm PT in FSH 203 (zoom details to be shared soon). We pair applicants with mentors (including GRFP fellows, recipients of national fellowship programs, and post-doctoral researchers) for feedback and advice on GRFP applications. We also walk applicants through the components of the application, and have at least one guest-faculty speaker, all under the theme of discussing what makes a successful application.

Reach out to the 2024 GRFP workshop coordinators directly at:

Rapid increase rates in large whale populations continue until they near carrying capacity

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In a new study challenging conventional thinking about how populations of large baleen whales recover from whaling, researchers have revealed that populations continue increasing rapidly for a wide range of recovery levels, only slowing once approaching pre-whaling levels. This could have wide implications for how agencies from across the world manage whale populations, and when we think a population has fully recovered from overexploitation.

Published in July 2024 in the Journal of Applied Ecology, the team used whale abundance data from bowhead, gray and humpback whales, focusing on populations with long-term studies that covered a wide range of abundance levels from low to high. The collaborative research team was comprised of Dr. Yu Kanaji (Fisheries Resources Institute, Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency), Dr. Rob Williams (Oceans Initiative), Dr. Alex Zerbini (Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies (CICOES) at the University of Washington, NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center, and Marine Ecology and Telemetry Research), and Professor Trevor Branch (University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences). They demonstrated that recovery levels are more rapid than previously thought. Before now, the prevailing thought was that population growth slows quickly as populations rebuild. 

Rob Williams
The humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) is a species of baleen whale.

Standard ecological theory, also known as density dependence, holds that as populations increase, they compete more for food, and eventually it gets harder to find food, resulting in slower growth in body size, lower survival, and lower birth rates, all of which result in slower population recovery at higher abundance. This theory has resulted in the International Whaling Commission (IWC) designating 60% as the minimum target for whale recovery, basing this off thinking that whale populations increase in numbers most rapidly at 60% of pre-whaling abundance. The new study shows that, on average, 80% is a more reflective figure for large whales, with recovery rates being high over a wide range of abundance levels.

This study changes global thinking about whale recovery and management, with the research team expecting whale populations to recover at rapid rates over a much wider range of abundance levels, plus a longer time period to reach management targets if the target increases from 60% to 80%.

The study, sixteen years in the making, started off at a Scientific Committee of the IWC in 2008, where scientists Alex Zerbini and Trevor Branch wondered if it was reasonable for the IWC to assume that recovery slows down as populations increase. Rob Williams then tracked down the history of this concept as used by the IWC. Fast forward a few years with key contributions from Felipe Hurtado-Ferro and a visit by lead author Yu Kanaji to the University of Washington in 2019-2020, and the project was completed.

Using estimates of abundance in each year, the team focused on four whale populations that have a long time series of data: bowhead whales in the Arctic Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort Seas, gray whales in the eastern North Pacific, and humpback whales in the eastern North Pacific and eastern Australia.

Trevor Branch
A whale pictured from the E Australian humpback population in Hervey Bay. A whale’s fluke (tail) is commonly used for identification.

They fit sophisticated Bayesian models to these data to estimate not just the rate of recovery, but also how that rate changes with abundance, which is where the difficulty comes in. Little is known about where density dependence operates: does it affect recovery at low, medium, or only high abundance levels? It requires very good data to estimate changes in recovery rates, and these kinds of data are very hard to come by. By fitting the models to the data, they could estimate how much whale recovery rates slow down as the population increases.

The new results have multiple implications for the management of whale populations, beyond the expectation that increase rates remain high across a broad range of population sizes. In particular, the research team suggests that international recovery targets, currently set at 60% of pre-whaling levels, should be increased to a default of 80%, since this is where maximum population increase occurs.

Real-world research as an undergraduate: studying pinnipeds on San Miguel Island with NOAA

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In the most recent cohort of University of Washington (UW) students participating in the NOAA Marine Mammal Lab internship program organized through SAFS, Chris Moon spent the summer of 2024 working with Dr. Tony Orr from NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC), studying northern fur seals and California sea lions on San Miguel Island, California.

“As a native Californian, I have always been interested in the marine ecosystems off its shores and wanted to learn more about what role pinnipeds play in it,” Chris shared. Soon starting his junior year as an Oceanography major at UW, Chris became involved with the SAFS-MML internship program after hearing about it from his academic advisor.

NOAA Fisheries / Sharon Melin
During his internship, Chris Moon searches for marked California sea lions on San Miguel Island.

Conducting research in the remote field location of San Miguel Island, which is a part of the California Channel Islands, the internship experience reaffirmed Chris’ desire to work in the field in the future. “Being in the field for five weeks was a challenge I wanted to take on, and having a mentor like Dr. Tony Orr and learning from him and his decades of experience was very appealing,” Chris said. “Working with the fur seals and sea lions and observing their behaviors up close was the most extraordinary experience I’ve ever had. It was both overwhelming and awe-inspiring, I now know that working with wild animals is something that I hope to do in the future.”

Part of a long-term study undertaken by the Alaska Fisheries Science Center focused on pinnipeds (seals, sea lions and fur seals), the internship allows students to conduct research in real-time and experience what field work is like. For Chris, this involved hiking around the island looking for California sea lions that had been branded or flipper-tagged. This re-sight data provides researchers with information on survivorship, birth rate, and territorial tenure. Another key area of information gathered is mortality surveys California sea lion and northern fur seal pups. Supplemented with counts of live pups, population abundance can then be estimated for the year.

NOAA Fisheries / Heather Ziel
Tony Orr and Chris Moon in the mobile blind among northern fur seals and California sea lions on Point Bennett of San Miguel Island. NMFS Research Permits #22678 and #23283.

When asked if dead pup counts were higher, lower, or the same compared to last year, Tony Orr shared: “Mortality was pretty low, but this could have been for a couple of reasons. There seemed to be fewer northern fur seals on the rookery this year, and there were also flood ponds on a major rookery site, so carcasses could have washed out to sea. Mortality was low last year too, for possibly the same reasons. We’ll have to wait until we count the number of live pups to get a better understanding of what we saw on the island this year.”

Using his eyesight was not the only way Chris counted pinnipeds on the island. “In the past I’ve flown drones but seeing a drone used in a research setting was really interesting. I got to see how the drone was set up to fly autonomously and collect images that can be grouped to create a large mosaic upon which researchers can count individuals on,” Chris said. “Drones makes places otherwise inaccessible, accessible for the population counts. I can see them being used increasingly especially as they improve technologically.”

NOAA Fisheries / Tony Orr.
Chris Moon powers on a Mavic drone on the launch pad as Heather Ziel prepares to pilot the survey flight.

An important part of the internship for Chris was experiencing how field work translates to work back in the lab. “Spending a week at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center was also an incredible experience. I’ve been able to participate in lab work with teeth, blood, and stable isotope samples,” Chris shared. “I’ve also had the chance to see what it’s like working in a lab like the Marine Mammal Lab; it’s remarkable to be around people that are so passionate about the work that they do and has absolutely inspired me to get to a place like this.”

NOAA Fisheries / Tony Orr
California sea lion pup. UAS under NMFS Research Permits #22678 and #23283

Although located in sunny California, NOAA researchers fondly refer to the island as ‘the island of fog and wind’ due to the unpredictable conditions that scientists must weather. Chris got the chance to experience this firsthand. “Most of the days that we were on the island were foggy and VERY windy. San Miguel Island is the most northwest of the Channel Islands, and half of it is unprotected by the lee created by the California Bight starting at Point Conception, leaving it exposed to the prevailing cool northwest winds. This meant that most of the time we were bundled up in many layers,” Chris said. “The weather also proved to be a challenge to traveling. It took four days for me to return to the mainland because a helicopter or plane couldn’t land on the island due to fog. However, when it was clear and sunny, it was absolutely incredible. Being able to see miles of ocean allowed for opportunities to see whale blows at a distance, incredible sunsets, and stunning coastlines.”

NOAA Fisheries / Tony Orr
An aerial view of northern fur seals and California sea lions on the beach at Point Bennett, San Miguel Island.

Being able to apply his studies so far at UW to this research experience was a useful part of the internship for Chris. “I was able to apply what I’ve learned in classes to my work, from lab protocols and Microsoft Excel, to making observations about seal and sea lion feeding behaviors, social behaviors, and effects of climate change,” Chris shared. “It was inspiring to know that what I’m studying in class is applicable to real world research. I was also able to speak with research biologists, and they shared with me their personal journeys through academia and helped me think about my own.”

Pinnipeds weren’t the only species Chris came across during his five-week trip to San Miguel. “San Miguel Island is host to large gull rookeries, and this year their populations were noticeably low and we only spotted a few chicks,” Chris said. “Our colleague on the island, Jim Tietz from Point Blue Conservation Science, confirmed with colleagues at the Farallon Islands National Wildlife refuge that the gull populations were struggling on the Farallon Islands as well.”

Read more about Tony Orr and Chris Moon’s work with the NOAA Marine Mammal Lab this summer

NOAA Fisheries / Chris Moon
Chris, Tony, and Heather celebrate a beautiful day and Chris’s birthday on the island (July 16).

UW President and College of the Environment Dean visit the Alaska Salmon Program

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In a special update from the field, the Alaska Salmon Program shared their excitement at showing University of Washington President, Ana Mari Cauce, and College of the Environment Dean, Maya Tolstoy, around the field camps in Alaska. The Alaska Salmon Program has been running for more than 75 years, conducting research and providing hands on learning for UW students.

Jackie Carter
The AERA class with UW Leadership in Alaska

“We had a lot of fun showing UW President Ana Mari Cauce and UW College of the Environment Dean Maya Tolstoy why Bristol Bay is such a special place. They got to see the AERA class in action, sitting in on lectures and accompanying students, staff, and faculty to some of our study locations.”

“We observed spawning sockeye, extracted adult sockeye otoliths, and sampled juvenile coho together. Many great conversations were had about our research – why it’s important and why we love what we do – and our parallel goal of providing hands on experiential learning opportunities to UW undergrads and grad students.” – Alaska Salmon Program

Find out more about the Alaska Salmon Program

Jackie Carter
In the field

Answering global seafood trade questions during hackathon-style event

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During a multi-day workshop held at the University of Washington and organized by SAFS Assistant Professor Jessica Gephart, nine researchers working on projects related to the seafood trade got together for a hackathon-style research event.

Jessica Gephart
Researchers working on projects related to the seafood trade got together for a hackathon-style research event held at SAFS.

Made up of individuals and teams of early career scientists, the participants came armed with their own pressing questions about the global aquatic food trade its interaction with the environment and/or nutrition security. Questions ranged from conservation and sustainable fishmeal sourcing to food security.

Held at the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences from 31 July to 2 August, the overarching goal of the program was to facilitate use of the ARTIS (Aquatic Resource Trade in Species) database by providing support and answering questions about the data for the researchers who attended. The event was funded by NSF (#2121238) as part of a project to develop the ARTIS database, and the participants also helped identify ways that the presentation of the database and its associated resources could be improved.

“The goal is for ARTIS to be usable and useful to a wide range of users. ARTIS Exchange allowed us to start building a userbase for ARTIS and to better understand users’ needs” said Jessica Gephart. 

Read more about the ARTIS Exchange 2024.

Individuals and teams of early career scientists came to the event armed with their own pressing questions about the global aquatic food trade its interaction with the environment and/or nutrition security.

Where do people fish and why? Exploring human behavior in Alaska fisheries

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How do people make the decision on where they fish? What factors influence human behavior in fisheries? Terrance Wang is exploring the answers to these questions during his PhD research at SAFS. Fisheries management is an important process across the world, informing international and regional decisions on fishing locations, type of catch, methods used, and more.

Terrance Wang
Terrance stands on shore, far away from the boats, where he’s not a liability to the fishers.

Bringing global fishery management down to a smaller-scale level, Terrance shared that one of the drivers of his work is remembering the reasons why we manage fisheries in the first place. “A fishery exists because it’s serving people: their identity, their culture, the economy, by feeding people,” Terrance said. “And remembering that those are some of the reasons why we manage fisheries is interesting, but also fun because it involves talking to individuals and communities about why they fish and where.”

By looking at these fishing strategies involving the where and why people fish, the diversity of fishers comes into crystal clear view. “It’s important to understand that it’s not a huge monolith of people who fish. There is huge diversity in both people and their reasons for fishing, and this information should inform fishery managers because it has far-reaching impacts on the environment and the communities tied to fishing,” Terrance said.

Beginning his work studying human behavior in fisheries at the time of the Alaska snow crab fishery collapse in 2022, Terrance realized this work would be of use to people. “Despite all the sub-groups of people within this fishery that differed from one another in where they liked to fish, how risky they were willing to fish, how weather tolerant they were, one thing that really stood out as a commonality was how adaptive they were,” Terrance shared. “Yes, each person had preferences, but they responded very quickly to a changing ocean.”

One of the things that Terrance likes about his research is getting to speak with people. “Is it bad to say I got bored of fish?” Terrance joked during the conversation. “On a serious note, I do love speaking with people and then relating that to fishery science. A big part of my study was interviewing and casually speaking with people about the snow crab fishing industry in Alaska, and what adaptation to the closure looked like.” Almost all crab boats in the region can also handle salmon tending for the sockeye runs, which is what they usually do during the off-season for crab, and in the event of a closure of the fishery, many people move into alternative industries altogether, such as construction.

A member of the both the Hilborn and Punt Labs at SAFS, Terrance hopes to continue working with the crabbers to explore another aspect of human behavior: learning through social networks. He hopes to see if the social networks of the crabbers have impacts on the economic efficiency of fishing. Information on the whereabouts of crab is a hot commodity, and fishers may only want to share this information with their partners.

Wikimedia Commons
Male Alaska snow crab can reach 6 inches in shell width but females seldom grow larger than 3 inches.

The second area of Terrance’s research switches gears to focus on global biodiversity trends. Starting small with just one marine mammal taxonomic group – seals – the plan is to scale up the methods used to count species and identify trends on a global scale. “We hear many stories about species, such as seals, doing well and recovering after the introduction of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. But this doesn’t mean to say that in other areas of the world, the trend is the same,” Terrance said.

When asked why the focus is on seals, Terrance shared a few reasons. “Seals are just step one in this project, but I wanted an animal that could have an impact. People care a lot about marine mammals such as seals, whales, polar bears, otters. But some of these species have noisier data or it’s just harder to collect the data. Seals are a great first step because they’re easy to count as they come ashore.”

The project is essentially counting how many seals there are in the world over time, and seeing how they are recovering – or not – since protective legislation was introduced. “In Washington we have a lot of success with seal populations, but you shouldn’t gloss over local-level detail from other regions of the world. Some populations need more help, and it would be good to have more information on trends to use in management,” Terrance said.

Like many other marine mammals, there was a massive culling of seals until the early 1900s, with industrial-level uses of their hides, whiskers and fat. The same reason Terrance says they’re a good species to start his research with – because they come ashore – was one of the reasons why it was so easy to overhunt them.

Niamh Owen-McLaughlin
Gray seals are found in coastal waters throughout the North Atlantic Ocean.

It’s not just seals that are considered a conservation success story. Pinnipeds as a whole are considered a success story due to the global, unilateral ban on trade. But threats still exist. “There isn’t one threat that rules all when it comes to pinnipeds. Nets, human interaction, disease, food scarcity, environmental change – these are all factors still very much a threat to pinniped populations,” Terrance shared.

“The big picture for my seal project is to hopefully develop methods that we can use to say this is what the trends are with seals, this is how we count them, and then upscale and apply this to other species such as sea turtles, sea birds, sharks, fish, whales and move up through the marine animals chain,” he said. Working on gathering data from available online sources and inputting it into a central database, Terrance is currently in the data collection phase of this work.