Monitoring of Southern Hemisphere Whales Fund
New scientific methods can provide amazing insights into the hidden lives of marine mammals.
Using just a small skin sample, tools like genomics are providing new ways of estimating relatedness and abundance and most recently, to provide a reliable, non-lethal estimate of the age of marine mammals.
The University of Auckland has been a leader in marine mammal research and houses the New Zealand Cetacean Tissue Archive, which includes a DNA catalogue of over 700 New Zealand right whales. New field work scheduled for 2020 onwards will leverage this collection to provide a platform for developing and optimising new techniques for non-lethal research into marine mammals, with a focus on right whales, shedding light into the recovery of their Southern Hemisphere populations from whaling in an era of climate change.
Dr Emma Carroll
Dr Emma Carroll is a molecular ecologist that uses genomics and statistical models to study natural populations at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland.
For more information, contact:
Kate Thompson, Development Manager, Science
EMAIL: kate.thompson@auckland.ac.nz