Marisa has received an Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award for her study, "Behavioral ecology of top predators in the Galapagos Marine Reserve." Maya has received a Voss Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Environmental Science and Communication, as well as an Explorers Club student grant for her study, "Niche complementarity and ecological function of damselfish in the Galapagos Marine Protected Area."

Both Maya and Marisa are also the recipients of Marine Conservation Scholarships from the Women Divers Hall of Fame. Congratulations!

Fiona Beltram, a recent graduate of the Witman Lab, recently published her honors thesis. Her work describes how the unusually warm temperatures of the 2014–2017 El Niño facilitated the novel appearance of cyanobacterial mats in the Galapagos rocky subtidal zone, which can have negative effects on the marine benthic community. Read the whole thing here!

It's been a whirlwind of presentations, awards, travel, and thesis defenses in the past few months, and we have a lot to celebrate. 

Benthic Ecology Meeting 2019
Seniors Hallie Fischman and Calvin Munson gave talks at the BEM, with Hallie winning an honorable mention for best student poster talk. Junior Maya Greenhill, Dr. Robbie Lamb, Dr. Jon Witman, and collaborator Alejandro Pérez-Matus all gave wonderful talks. We made new friends and connections studying everything from marshes to polar ecology. Even though St. John's was freezing, we still had a great time! 

Thesis Talks
Seniors Hallie Fischman and Calvin Munson, and junior Maya Greenhill gave thesis talks at the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department Seminar –"Optimizing coastal dune restoration with the stress gradient hypothesis," "Coupled effects of herbivory and upwelling on Galapagos benthic communities," and "Niche complementarity and ecological function of damselfish in the Galapagos marine reserve." 

Big congrats to the whole lab – now onto gearing up for field season!

Check out the feature article on the front page of the New York Times! Written by Nicholas Casey and with stunning images and video from land, air and sea by Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Josh Haner, this is a multi-media multi-story project that highlights our work on corals and fish as part of the suite of organisms affected by El Niño. Also featured are our friends at the Charles Darwin Station and Galapagos National Park including Dr. Heinke Jager. It paints a compelling picture of sweeping environmental effects of climate change being felt in the Galapagos Islands.

Research efforts by the Witman Lab to characterize the response of Galapagos marine ecosystems to climate change and El Niño are currently funded by the Galapagos Conservancy. This is the only US non-profit dedicated to conserving the wildlife of the Galapagos Islands. Read a recent blog post about our work with GC over the past year!

Jon Witman was featured on the cover of 41 North, Rhode Island's coastal and ocean magazine this month. You can read the entire issue here, or download the story on the Witman Lab here.

Robbie recently co-authored a paper on the biogeographic, energetic, and anthropogenic determinants of fish communities on tropical oceanic islands, believed to be some of the most pristine marine ecosystems left in the world. Below is the press release from Ecography.

A documentary called "Adapt or Die", about climate change impacts in the Galapagos Marine Reserve will be shown this Sunday, May 20, at 8pm - on CBS.

The documentary resulted from a CBS TV crew coming on our January research cruise, which they filmed along with several other researchers working in the region. 

It's CBS' streaming service (think netflix) so Sunday at 8 will be the full show, and after that the doc itself will be available online and in streaming (on any smart TV.)

Disclaimer: we haven't seen it yet either!!