The Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies

Hello! My name is Mikayla, and I am a senior at Southern Utah University studying biology and chemistry. This summer, I had the amazing opportunity of working with my mentors Molly McCormley and Brian Fadely at NOAA’s Marine Mammal Laboratory. My project was using remote camera imagery to assess researcher disturbance on endangered Steller sea lions.

Steller sea lions are split up into two distinct populations, east and west. The eastern population ranges from Canada to California and are no longer endangered, while the western population ranges across Alaska up to Russia and are still listed under the endangered species act. In the summer, scientists at the Marine Mammal Laboratory travel out to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska to assess population status and health of the western Steller sea lions there. Assessing the population requires researchers to enter rookeries, which are rocky sites where the sea lions rest and breed. This inadvertently causes disturbance to the animals, who run away when the researchers come near. While the researchers try their best to disturb as little as possible, it’s hard to know what happens after the scientists leave. Do the sea lions come back to the island? How long does that take? Are we having long-term negative effects on their health and behavior by disturbing them? That is why we installed remote cameras on the islands. They take pictures every few minutes so that we can see what is going on when we are not there.

For my project, I used the cameras to see how long it takes for sea lion behavior to return to normal after our researchers leave the islands. To do this I got an average count of the number of sea lions on each island before the disturbance, and then looked at how long it took for the post-disturbance numbers to return to 90% of that average. This meant I spent a lot of time looking through photos and counting sea lions one by one using Photoshop’s eye dropper counting tool. I found that sea lion numbers and behavior usually return to normal after less than 24 hours, likely indicating that we are not having long-term effects on their health. This is important to know, because we want to make sure that we are not making the animals’ situation worse by our continued study.

With this project I was able to meet so many people who have had super interesting careers, and learn a lot about what scientific research actually looks like. I developed relationships with amazing biologists that I look up to, and will keep in contact with for the rest of my education and career. I also had a great time exploring Seattle in my free time and adventuring with my awesome cohort!

Project Introduction

Research Poster