Month: September 2025

Seminar – New biologging approaches for studying marine species and ecosystems

Ronja Steinbach

Dr. Aaron Carlisle | University of Delaware

Presenting: "New biologging approaches for studying marine species and ecosystems"

Hosted by: Ichthyology Lab

MLML Seminar | October 7th, 2025 at 4pm (PDT)

Watch the Live Stream here or here

New biologging approaches for studying marine species and ecosystems

Biologging approaches, or the use of animal-borne electronic tags for logging and/or relaying of biological and environmental data, are advancing at a rapid pace, providing new ways for studying marine species and their environment. Our research group, the Trophic and Spatial Ecology Research Lab (TRASER) at the University of Delaware, is working to advance biologging technology to improve our ability to obtain in situ data on the behavior, physiology, and habitats of mobile marine species to improve our understanding of their ecology as well as foster improved management of marine ecosystems in a rapidly changing ocean. In this seminar, I will provide an overview of our research in developing the use of sharks as ocean observing platforms that will improve our ability to obtain near-real time oceanographic data from these highly mobile species, improving the type and scale of data available to various oceanographic models. I will also discuss our ongoing effort to integrate biologging tags with lab-derived estimates of physiological parameters with high resolution behavioral and environmental data to understand how the physiology of an organism interacts with the environment to influence its distribution and ecology across spatial and temporal scales.

Dr. Aaron Carlisle

Dr. Carlisle is an Associate Professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy at the University of Delaware. His lab's research focuses on how the abiotic and biotic environment and organismal biology interact to influence the behavior, distribution and ecology of species, and how these interactions impact their population dynamics, life history strategies, and ecosystem roles.We use a variety of approaches and technologies, such as stable isotope analysis and biologging, combined in new ways to provide unique insights into marine species. Dr. Carlisle is a graduate of Stanford University (Ph.D.), Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (M.S.), and Princeton University (A.B.).

Seminar – The (Real) Geologic History of the Stanislaus Table Mountains and Yosemite Valley

Ronja Steinbach

Dr. Manny Gabet | San Jose State University

Presenting: "The (Real) Geologic History of the Stanislaus Table Mountains and Yosemite Valley"

Hosted by: Geological Oceanography Lab

MLML Seminar | September 30th, 2025 at 4pm (PDT)

Watch the Live Stream here or here

The (Real) Geologic History of the Stanislaus Table Mountains and Yosemite Valley

In 1865, J.D. Whitney published a hypothesis, originally proposed by his colleague Ian Brewer, that the Stanislaus Table Mountains were a form of ‘inverted topography.’ According to this theory, a 10-million year old lava flow had travelled down a mountain canyon and solidified along the river bed. Over time, the adjacent valley walls had eroded down, transforming the lava-capped river bed into a series of ridges that are now recognized as the table mountains. Furthermore, Whitney reasoned that this much erosion could only have been accomplished as a result of tilting and uplift of the Sierra Nevada. Whitney’s explanation was the genesis for the dominant theory that the Sierra Nevada is a relatively young range, having popped up only in the past 5-10 million years. Similarly, the initial formation of Yosemite Valley has also been attributed to recent uplift. In my talk, I will present evidence demonstrating that the Stanislaus River watershed has not undergone any dramatic transformations and that, instead, it looks very much like it did 30-40 million years ago. In addition, I will present evidence showing that Yosemite Valley was initially cut by a river draining a large volcanic plain that once buried the crest of the northern Sierra. Both of these studies, as well as others, contribute to a growing body of evidence that the Sierra Nevada is an ancient range, rising up at least ~40 million years ago.

Dr. Manny Gabet

I’m a geomorphologist, which means I study how landscapes evolve over time. Some of my past research has focused on erosion in the Himalayas, the role of fires in triggering debris flows in Montana, and the mechanics of landslides. More recently, I’ve been investigating the geologic history of the Sierra Nevada over the past 40 million years and have been discovering that the dominant theory on the age of the mountain range is not supported by the evidence.

Seminar – Ocean fronts, eddies, and internal waves in numerical models and SWOT

Amadeo Scott

Dr. Dimitris Menemenlis | Moss Landing Marine Labs, SJSURF

Presenting: "Ocean fronts, eddies, and internal waves in numerical models and SWOT"

Hosted by: Physical Oceanography Lab

MLML Seminar | September 23rd, 2025 at 4pm (PDT)

Watch the Live Stream here or here

Ocean fronts, eddies, and internal waves in numerical models and SWOT

The ocean is the climate's largest reservoir of heat, freshwater, and carbon. Therefore, in order to understand and predict the impact of natural and anthropogenic perturbations on the climate system, we need to understand and predict the exchange of heat, freshwater, carbon, and other properties between the global ocean and the atmosphere. The driving hypothesis of my talk is that submesoscale ocean motions (<50 km), both balanced and unbalanced, play a key role in air-sea exchanges and vertical property transports in the ocean. To evaluate this hypothesis, we can use a set of tools that have become available during the past decade, namely (1) submesoscale and internal-wave admitting global-ocean simulations and (2) observations obtained by the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, which recently completed the second of its 3-year science orbit. I will describe some completed and ongoing studies that are using the aforementioned tools to study the impact of submesoscales on ocean circulation and climate.

Dr. Dimitris Menemenlis

Dr. Dimitris Menemenlis is the most recent hire of the MLML Ocean Modeling Lab. He first fell in love with programming while playing with an HP-25C as a teenager growing up in Montreal. Although an acoustical oceanographer by training, by sharing an office at MIT with Chris Hill and Stephanie Dutkiewicz during his PostDoc years, he became one of the early adopters of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology general circulation model (MITgcm), a key contributor to the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) project, and always a very big fan of the MIT Darwin Project. He is joining Drs. Carroll and Savelli at MLML in order to help take the open-source, data-constrained ECCO-Darwin global-ocean general circulation and biogeochemistry model to the next level!

Seminar – Beyond simple models of (marine) species on the move

Olivia Beaudoin

Dr. Alexa Fredston | Ocean Sciences, UCSC

Presenting: "Beyond simple models of (marine) species on the move"

Hosted by: Ichthyology Lab

MLML Seminar | September 16th, 2025 at 4pm (PDT)

Watch the Live Stream here or here

Beyond simple models of (marine) species on the move

Why are species found where they are and not elsewhere? What makes them move? Research in the Fredston Lab focuses on the fundamental drivers of species’ ranges, and the causes and consequences of climate-related range shifts. This talk will cover evidence for temperature driving the biogeography and abundance of demersal fishes across spatial and temporal scales; a range of projects aimed at disentangling multiple drivers of species’ ranges, with various methods and taxa; and methods and theory for understanding species on the move.

Dr. Alexa Fredston

Alexa Fredston is a quantitative marine ecologist who uses a range of statistical and theoretical methods and all the ocean data she can find to (hopefully) advance foundational ecology, biodiversity conservation, and human well-being. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ocean Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Fredston earned her PhD from the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2020, and graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a B.A. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 2012.