My primary interests are in behavioral ecology and in the ability of species to adapt to changing and dynamic environments. Studying marine ecosystems presents a unique challenge due to the complex and dynamic nature of the ocean ecosystem as well as the difficulty in accessing marine organisms and habitats. Seabirds, air-breathing and land-breeding organisms, have evolved to exploit the marine environment and are formidable predators at sea. They present a highly accessible taxa of marine animals that are ubiquitous in the global marine environment; as such, they can be used effectively as indicators of ocean health.

For my doctoral research at UCSC, I will be using movement data from Laysan and black-footed albatrosses and from masked and red-footed boobies in combination with stable isotope and fatty acid signatures from diet and remotely-sensed environmental data, to look the dynamic interactions between predator and prey and changing oceanographic conditions. I hope to investigate (1) foraging site fidelity and diet preferences within individuals in relation to experience and sex (2) inter-annual variability in diet and foraging behavior and (3) the reproductive consequences of different foraging strategies.

I am also interested in the mechanisms that seabirds use to navigate the "featureless" surface of the oceans to find patchily distributed food. Both albatrosses and boobies are known to use non-aerial marine predators (tuna, dolphins, killer whales) to force prey to the surface where they can then be exploited by depth-limited seabirds. It is possible that detailed movement patterns will reflect these inter-species interactions as well as interactions with human fisheries. I'd like to see how inter-species interactions vary in frequency between individuals within a species, and how these interactions vary in a population between years due to different ocean conditions and prey distributions.

Growing up in the Mojave Desert of southern California and sharing the expansive space with a host of uniquely adapted organisms encouraged an early interest in ecology. After spending a year abroad in Australia on a marine sciences field course and then receiving my B.S. from the University of California San Diego, I worked as a research assistant on a variety of research projects spanning many ecosystems (the Rocky Mountains of Montana and Idaho, the Florida Everglades, the Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge, the Bering Sea, the Aleutian Islands and the northwestern Hawaiian Islands) and many taxa (grey wolves, grizzly bears, raptors, and a large variety of seabirds, including auklets, kittiwakes, murres, boobies and albatrosses).