Paddy won the Titanium Zone in June 2011. Here’s how he spent his prize money… As planned, I used the IAS prize money to help pay my way to Austin, Texas USA for the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America in August 2011. It was a great opportunity for me as a PhD student to attend a conference on the other side of the Atlantic and one that covered such a huge range of topics.
This is a picture of juvenile male Galapagos sea lion resting inside a slide in the town of San Cristobal. Galapagos sea lions are uniquely tame, so they come into close contact with domestic animals and humans when present in towns.
I presented my work on the Galapagos sea lion in a session on disease and epidemiology. I received useful feedback after my talk and met other researchers, some of whom I’m still in contact with and hope to collaborate with in the future.
This slide shows the two study colonies on a map of the Galapagos.
First, it suggests that sea lions are losing body condition due to human activity, and therefore may be more prone to starvation or less able to reproduce. Second, the heightened immune activity may indicate a threat of infectious disease to sea lions, which may mean that human activity (most likely to on-going introduction of dogs to the Galapagos) is increasing the chance of a new and potentially dangerous disease emerging in sea lion. See below for some key slides from the presentation.
