Author: Kali Prescott

Happy World Oceans Day!

Kali Prescott

By Kali Prescott, Vertebrate Ecology Lab

A day near and dear to everyone here at MLML. Here is a brief history on World Ocean Day and a link to the website!

World Ocean Day was first proposed by Canada in 1992 at the Earth Summit; however, it wasn't until 2002 that a multi-national effort began to organize World Ocean Day as a global day of action. In it's first year (2003), World Ocean Day saw 25 events organized in 15 countries. 16 years later in 2019 over 140 countries organized over 2000 events in support of ocean conservation and awareness. Although the covid-19 pandemic nixed in person events, over 454 million people engaged with World Ocean Day during June of 2020. See https://worldoceanday.org/ for more info.

For us here a MLML, World Ocean Day means more visibility and more opportunities to share our research with our communities. We'd love to see what our MLML community is up to so share your research on social media!

P.S. Don't forget to tell your friends that the MLML Open House Crowdfunding Campaign is LIVE! Make sure they know to get their hands on this years Open House T-shirt design below!

 

COVID-19 Vaccine Resources & Links

Kali Prescott

By Kali Prescott & Lauren Cooley

Hello from The Drop-in Blog team!  It's been almost a year since the first COVID-19 shutdowns and with the roll out of the COVID-19 vaccine we may finally be rounding a corner. To help with the Vaccinate all 58 initiative by Governor Newsom, we have decided to provide links and information on vaccine distribution in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties in an accessible blog post.

Although it may be a few more months before many of us will be offered the vaccine, we wanted to ensure anyone in the MLML community that is higher risk has access to resources to answer any questions they might have regarding the vaccine and how and where to get one. We will continue to update this page as more information becomes available and as both counties move through the vaccine distribution tiers.

Monterey County COVID-19 Vaccine Resources

 

Active vaccination tiers as of 2/17/21

Santa Cruz County COVID-19 Vaccine Resources

Santa Cruz Vaccination Tiers as of 2/22/21

How 4Ocean Made Recycling Economically Sustainable

Kali Prescott

By Kali Prescott, MLML Vertebrate Ecology Lab

An estimated 5.25 trillion tons of plastic is currently adrift in the ocean having extensive deleterious effects on wildlife (Erikson et al., 2014). Reduce, reuse, recycle has been the battle cry of environmentalists and ocean clean up organizations since the public first realized the severity of marine plastic pollution. For decades plastic producing companies have touted recycling as the solution to plastic pollution in the ocean while simultaneously shirking responsibility—claiming that recycling “is not economically viable”. Continuing to produce virgin plastic unfortunately remains cheaper than producing products from recycled materials even with technological developments.

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