Alaska Sea Grant well-represented at symposium

Contributions by Alaska Sea Grant students and researchers at this year’s Alaska Marine Science Symposium were all over the food web. Their presentations focused on marine fauna ranging from humpback whales to seals, sea lions, otters, salmon and halibut—right down to the humble oyster. 

Alaska Sea Grant is a sponsor and co-organizer of the annual symposium, which brings together researchers, students, managers and community members to share new findings and exchange ideas about Alaska’s marine and coastal systems. This year’s event took place January 26-30 at the Hotel Captain Cook and the Egan Center in Anchorage. Each day of the five-day symposium centered on a different marine region of Alaska, from the Gulf of Alaska to the Bering Sea and the Arctic. As the sessions unfolded, they moved up the food web: starting with ocean physics and climate, shifting to plankton and forage fish, and ending with fisheries and human communities.

The event drew a large number of faces from Alaska Sea Grant, including Marine Advisory Program agents, staff, state fellows, and students. Ten different Alaska Sea Grant students or affiliates presented at the event, among them University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student Maeghan Connor, who took home the prize for Best Graduate Student Poster. Connor’s entry, “Small drones and spotted seals: Evaluating behavioral responses and future research opportunities,” detailed a 2024-25 research project to determine the conditions under which drones could be used to gather data on spotted seal populations without disturbing them. For more information about the research see our story on the subject. 

A key theme at the symposium was the growing need to better understand how harmful algal blooms (HABs) impact Alaska’s coastal and marine systems. These blooms occur when certain toxin-producing phytoplankton multiply rapidly, releasing compounds that can poison fish, seabirds and marine mammals. Alaska Sea Grant-supported UAF graduate student Sof Fox presented research quantifying how HAB exposure affects Pacific oysters, a commercially important species for many of Alaska’s coastal communities. 

Also focusing on mariculture were UAF graduate student Riley O’Neil, who presented research investigating whether Alaska oyster farms influence sea otter foraging behavior, and UAF research staff Jessica Whitney, who presented a poster on research by the Mariculture Research and Restoration Consortium.

Other Alaska Sea Grant-supported student presenters included Claudia Berry, who is developing a method to use fin tissue to estimate the age of Pacific halibut specimens; Dana Bloch, who is exploring how humpback whales contribute to nutrient cycling in Southeast Alaska; Elena Eberhardt, who is examining the responses of juvenile sockeye salmon and stickleback to environmental variation in high-latitude lakes; and Ben Peterson, who is studying the impacts of marine heatwaves on the foraging dynamics of Northern fur seals and Steller sea lions in the Bering Sea. Other presenters included Alaska Sea Grant State Fellow Ana Velasquez, who is looking at the short-term effects of implanting intro-abdominal tags in sea otters, and Alaska Sea Grant-supported UAF researcher Brandi Kamermans, who is investigating trends in environmental DNA research in Alaska. More information about research by Alaska Sea Grant students can be found on the Alaska Sea Grant website.