Alexandra Mayette

A regression-based method to estimate vessel mass for use in whale-ship strike risk models Vessel-whale collisions are one of the major threats that large whales face worldwide. The probability of lethal injury is an important factor to consider when conducting vessel strike risk assessment...

We just published a paper, in which we developed a method to include more user-friendly vessel parameters in {whalestrike}. Instead of input vessel mass, users can now input vessel type and length, which will convert automatically to vessel mass for the simulation journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

See details on the {whalestrike} package here 👉https://dankelley.github.io/whalestrike/

{whalestrike} R package version 0.6 is available now! 🐳The package simulates a #shipstrike and calculates the probability of lethality. The updated package provides parameters to select #whale species and vessel types. A Shiny app is available to see the impacts of the parameters in real time.

Canada falls short of 2025 conservation target | The Narwhal Ottawa says it remains committed to hitting its next conservation milestone even as it races to expand critical minerals production

The federal government said it would protect 25% of land and water by 2025. By December 2024, it had conserved 13.8% of land and fresh water and 15.5% of ocean areas, falling well short as habitat loss continues and pressure mounts to expand critical mineral production. thenarwhal.ca/canada-misse...

Book cover for Reproducible Code guide. The cover has a red background with a large yellow-bodied black-headed stag beetle.

Excited to launch the new improved Reproducible Code guide from @britishecologicalsociety.org @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social FREE online here! www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/... Amazing work by some very talented ECRs. We hope it’s useful!

Day 1️⃣7️⃣ of our Festive Ocean Art Advent Calendar

Festivity at full depth - Santa and science unite!

Artwork by Julia Moruchkova

#FestiveOceanArt

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line - Nature Communications The authors show evidence from a German funding line that a lottery-first approach followed by peer review is accompanied by increased female representation both at the submission stage and among fund...

🔥 A lottery-first system 🎲 makes research grants allocation cheaper, faster, and boosts funding for women, while "traditional" (patriarcal?) peer review drags everyone down.

🤔 Maybe randomness is fairer than the experts.

🔄 Time to rethink the whole game! 💣

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧪

Scientists say North Atlantic right whale population slowly increasing Once hunted to the brink of extinction, the most venerable of the leviathans now numbers 384, up eight from past year

North Atlantic right whale numbers estimated at 384. An increase in eight whales from last year - report today by the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium. Slow population growth trend over the past four years gaining more than 7% of their 2020 population. 🦑🐋🧪🌍
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Introducing The Art of Visualization with ggplot2 – Nicola Rennie I’ve written a book! This blog post gives a brief introduction to The Art of Visualization with ggplot2, a book of data visualization case studies showing the end-to-end process of building charts, st...

I've written a short blog post introducing "The Art of Visualization with ggplot2"!

This book is all about the end-to-end process of creating charts with #ggplot2 📊 including data wrangling, sketching, and styling your plots!

nrennie.rbind.io/blog/art-of-...

#RStats #DataViz #TidyTuesday

the front cover for a calendar with a salamander standing on a mushroom. in big bubble letters it says 2026 love notes from nature calendar created by Meg Lemieur and Sarah McAnulty phd

🚨 Cool educational item alert 🚨

We teamed up with Philly Nature Illustrator, Meg Lemieur @megstampede.bsky.social to create a 12 month wall calendar all about animals!

The calendar includes lessons we can learn from animals & how we can help them.

Pre-order here!
www.etsy.com/listing/4366...

Huffle season is upon us! The checkered puffer posses are rolling through town on the regular! 🏁🐡🐡🐡🐡🏁 #checkeredpuffer #pufferfish #pufferfishofcoralcity #huffle #huffleofpuffers #school #huffleseason #coral #coralhead #coralcitycamera #miami #portmiami #biscaynebay #coralcity

smartWhales SBDS The Space-based Detection System (SBDS) developed under the smartWhales Initiative with financial support from the Canadian Space Agency.

Our industry partners Hatfield Consultants and Alta ML made this amazing ESRI storymap to highlight what we did and the issues in right whale conservation that make this work important storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/849a...

Figure of study area in the Gulf of St. Lawrence with an area imaged by a satelite highlighted and then zoomed in on to show a chip of the whole satellite image of the ocean

Examples of whales at the surface of the ocean in satellite images

Happy to announce our new article in @marinemammalogy.bsky.social on finding #rightwhales in satellite imagery using machine learning. Great collaboration with academia, industry, and conservation @cwf-fcf.bsky.social. #whalesfromspace #NARW

Link:
share.google/CNepFK2pf0iU...

Green Oceans and Three Tribes Petition NOAA to Revoke Offshore Wind Companies’ Authorizations That Harm 61% of the Critically Endangered North Atlantic Right Whales While Building their Projects Three Native American tribes, the Shinnecock Nation, the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/Aquinnah, the Narragansett Tribe, ACK for Whales, and Green Oceans have ...

Interesting development in the whales-and-wind saga. Someone's playing this one very smart.

Repeating - anyone who tries to shut down offshore wind for right whale conservation and does nothing about entanglements is either a fool or has a motive other than whale conservation.
🐳🌍🦑
1/2

We are looking for a Research Assistant to contribute to our ongoing analysis of dolphin acoustic data from West Wales - collaboration between @wtsww.bsky.social @bristolbiosci.bsky.social 🐬
Deadline is 29th June - please share widely!
www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Multiyear Baleen Endocrine Profiles Suggest a Longer Estimated Gestation in Southern Right Whales (Eubalaena australis) Multiyear profiles of progesterone and estrogen in the baleen of adult female southern right whales indicate progesterone elevations lasting on average between 20 and 25 months, indicative of pregnan....

Fascinating paper, led by Loraine Shuttleworth.
Gestation in female Southern #rightwhales is far longer than thought. Follows previous work showing similar for North Atlantic right whales and bowheads.

We don't understand these #whales as well as we think. We have their basic biology wrong.
🐳🌍🦑

Spatial conservation priorities for marine megafaunal predators: Multi‐taxon versus taxon‐specific approaches Conservation for marine megafaunal predators needs to improve as they are key for ecosystem functioning. We show that different marine predator taxonomic groups have heterogeneous distributions resul...

How should we best design marine protected areas for megafauna with large range sizes? New work from Betty Boyse et al suggests we should include taxon-specific coverage since multispecies MPAs can't address all taxon-specific ecological needs 🧪🌍🦑🦭🐳🐟
doi.org/10.1111/csp2...
@mariabeger.bsky.social

🗺️ I've spent a lot of time the past week looking at data in the Strait of Hormuz so here is a quick animation showcasing the sheer volume of activity in the Persian Gulf last Friday. The data highlights "Tanker" only vessels (AIS code 80-89) so everything from Crude Oil Tankers to LNG Tankers.

Updated abundance estimate of the eastern Beaufort Sea #beluga population! I participated in the aerial survey in 2019 as part of my masters project. The last estimate was from 1992.
open-science.canada.ca/items/6fadae...

Figure of the eastern Canadian Arctic with colored boxes outlining the regions surveyed for the study and the panels outlined with the corresponding colour highlighting a more detailed map of the specific region with the survey lines flown for that survey (Blue/B: High Arctic, Yellow/C: Intermediate Arctic, Red/D: Low Arctic)

Birds eye view photograph of ringed seals hauled out on top of sea ice taken by cameras in the survey plane documenting the area along the transect lines of the survey

Excited to share this ms in @ecol-evol.bsky.social looking at ringed seal populations using aerial surveys conducted from low-Arctic Hudson Bay (59N) to the Last Ice Area in the high-Arctic Lincoln Sea (83N)

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Figure from the paper. Caption text for the figure reads: Fig. 6. Estimated entanglement risk reduction (±SE) of the annual closure scenarios (2018–2021) among months (May– August) and among the annual detections of North Atlantic right whales (2018–2021). ANOVA indicated a significant effect among whale detections, closure protocols and months (F27,1920 = 13.69, p < 0.001). Post hoc differences (Student-Newman- Keuls test) within each month of the annual detections are indicated by different letters above each bar. Average annual monthly risk reduction (percent) is indicated below each ba

New paper on #rightwhale conversation by Cole & Brillant

www.int-res.com/articles/esr...
"...annual entanglement risk to right whales from the GSL snow crab fishery is estimated to have been reduced by approximately 62 ± 3% (mean ± SE) relative to pre-closure"
🐳🌍🦑

My Canadian university, Queen's, is offering TWENTY 4-year funded PhDs (40k CAD/yr) for a student of ANY citizenship who has been accepted at a top 100 US university but have had offer rescinded OR are reconsidering offer due to US policy.
Details found here👇

www.queensu.ca/grad-postdoc...

Who Did It? GIF Alt: Who Did It? GIF

Who's responsible for the climate crisis?

Two new studies try to answer this question: but whichever way we slice it, the answer doesn't change much.

The wealthiest are disproportionately responsible for the greatest emissions, and that's why climate change is so unfair.

An explanatory thread 🧵

How North of North’s creative team made this winter’s hottest new TV comedy in Nunavut The show’s co-creators and producers set out to capture the unique humour found in Inuit communities while laying the groundwork to transform Iqaluit into film and television hub

The hottest new TV comedy - that just hit Netflix - comes straight out of Nunavut

CanFish Gear Lending Program The first lending program for adaptive fishing gear in Canada.

Big Win for BC Whales! The Canadian Wildlife Federation has been awarded funding grant to work with prawn & crab fishers in reducing whale entanglements in fishing gear!

🔗 CanFishGear.ca
📰 Official announcement: lnkd.in/gkGDMxpC

@cwf-fcf.bsky.social is hiring full time positions, working in Ottawa or remote in Canada! 🍁 #job #conservation

🦞 Fishing Gear Technician
🌳 Chief Conservation Officer
🐦 iNaturalist Coordinator
🍎 Non Formal Education Manager
🙋‍♀️ Director of People and Culture

workforcenow.adp.com/mascsr/defau...

ICYMI, @cwf-fcf.bsky.social is hiring a Chief Conservation Officer. Closes April 20.

#ConservationJobs

in case you're wondering, "what's the harm in claiming an extinct species has been brought back from the dead" when it most certainly has not, our interior secretary is already using it to justify taking animals off the endangered species list

North Atlantic #rightwhale calving season summary, courtesy of Florida Fish & Wildlife and the #NARW Consortium

🔟 total calves spotted this winter
🐋🐋🐋🐋🐋🐋🐋🐋🐋🐋
This is *below* the 10-year average of 12 calves/year

#conservation #radicalhope #whale

Image of 10 book covers, available for just $25 of science fiction, fantasy and horror from around the world. It's a steal!

Hate Amazon? Support independent voices! Delighted to launch the 2025 World SF Bundle from @storybundle.bsky.social today! 10 books, $25, with charity partner @locusmag.bsky.social!

storybundle.com/scifi

Re-posts appreciated!