Posts by melissa.walker
Meet a WDC Supporter Who is Helping Us Make Change
Grant Hensel is the Founder and CEO of Nonprofit Megaphone & The RoundUp App. A graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois, Grant is passionate about helping nonprofits use technology to accelerate their work. We caught up with him Earth Day weekend to find out a little bit more about how the RoundUp app will…
Read MoreWDC participates in ropeless fishing workshop
Last week, WDC was invited to participate in Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s workshop on reducing entanglements to critically endangered North Atlantic right whales. At this workshop, engineers introduced developing technologies for remote gear retrieval, which means a method for fishing that doesn’t use rope connecting the lobster trap at the ocean floor to the buoy…
Read MoreTrump Administration targets marine mammals…again
*Update: In spite of this Administration’s attempt to eliminate the US Marine Mammal Commission, the House and Senate have approved funding to continue the important work of this US Agency. For the second time since taking office, the Trump Administration is attempting to eliminate the US Marine Mammal Commission. The Marine Mammal Commission a legally…
Read MoreCanadian government announces measures to protect North Atlantic right whales
Steps in the right direction or too little too late? Today, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans outlined four immediate measures being put into place before the 2018 Canadian snow crab fishing season to protect North Atlantic right whales from fishing gear entanglements in the Gulf of St. Lawrence: Reduction in the amount of…
Read MoreUS population of Bryde’s whale declared as critically endangered
Gulf of Mexico (GoM) Bryde’s whales are genetically isolated from other baleen whale populations and are only found in the deep water canyons of the northeastern Gulf of Mexico. As few as a dozen individuals may remain. The decline in population has been associated with human impacts including entanglements in fishing gear, ship strikes, ocean…
Read MoreDeath of a species
The discovery of yet another dead endangered North Atlantic right whale off Virginia brings the loss to a total of 18 dead since April, a devastating blow to the species during a year when only five calves were born. While 12 of the deaths occurred in Canadian waters between June and September, this latest mortality…
Read MoreBlogging from Biennial: Monica's Final Thoughts
We’ve been back from Biennial for about a week now, but I feel like I’m still processing everything I learned. Most of my 40 pages of notes are yet to be transcribed, and at this point I am hoping I can still understand all of my shorthand scribbles. According to my records I listened to…
Read MoreBlogging from Biennial: Colleen's Final Thoughts
Well, we have returned (physically, but not yet mentally) from Canada and the chaos that is the Society for Marine Mammalogy Biennial Conference. After five packed days of conferencing and two days of workshops, some recovery time was definitely necessary. Now we are starting to process all the information we learned and sort through the…
Read MoreBlogging from Biennial: Day 5
Friday was the last day of the official Biennial Conference and the weekend was filled with workshops about specific topics. Colleen and Monica will fill us in on those later this week, once they return to the US, but here are their thoughts about the final day of the conference! If you missed Day 4…
Read MoreBlogging from Biennial: Day 4
After 4 full days of presentations and non-stop learning, Colleen and Monica are feeling the wear and tear of the conference. They only have one more day of the conference, followed by 2 days of workshops, so they are in the final stretch! They were able to celebrate as Monica gave an oral presentation today…
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