July 24, 2000

Highlights

• Peter Rona was interviewed by NBC dockside in Seattle following up the "NY Times" article on slumping and tsunamis on the continental margin off New Jersey. The interview will be part of Discovery Science News scheduled for the Discovery channel at 9 PM this coming Friday 28 July.
• Rick Lathrop recently participated in a research expedition to the Canadian Arctic. An international team of scientists (led by Dr. Larry Niles, Chief of New Jersey's Nongame & Endangered Species Program) spent two weeks on remote Southampton Island in northern Hudson Bay studying the red knot, a shorebird. The red knot, which winters in Tierra del Fuego, migrates north to Delaware Bay where it fattens up on a bonanza of horseshoe crab eggs before flying up to the tundra of the Canadian Arctic to nest. Due to the great increase in horseshoe crab harvesting on the Mid-Atlantic coast, there is concern that a drop in horseshoe crab numbers and a decline in horseshoe crab eggs, will negatively effect the reproductive success of the red knot and other shorebirds. This summer's expedition successively located a number of red knots' nests to provide a baseline of information concerning the birds' nesting behavior and summer habitat use. Lathrop, Director of the Grant F. Walton Center for Remote Sensing & Spatial Analysis, developed a series of habitat prediction models based on satellite imagery and geospatial terrain data that successively located potential nesting habitat for the red knots, helping the
  scientific team optimize their field searching efforts. For more details go to http://www.state.nj.us/dep/fgw/

Seminars

• July 24, 2000, 3:00-4:00PM, Alampi Room/July 25, 2000, 2:00-3:00PM, RUMFS (Tuckerton): Seminar by Dr. Ming Li, Institute of Ocean Sciences, Sidney, British Columbia, Canada, "A coupled biological/physical model for the Georgia-Fuca estuary." (Candidate for Physical Oceanographer Position)
• July 26, 2000, 4:30: Judith Weis will be giving a seminar on Wednesday at 4:30PM at the Wetlands Inst. in Stone Harbor. She'll
  be talking about killifish behavior. Anyone in the neighborhood (e.g. Tuckerton) is welcome to drop in.
• July 27, 2000, 3:00-4:00PM, Alampi Room/July 28, 2000, 2:00-3:00PM, RUMFS (Tuckerton): Seminar by James M. Pringle, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of CA, San Diego, "Asymmetric Mixing - A Novel Mechanism for the Transport of Sediment and Sinking Plankton Across Isobaths." (Candidate for Physical Oceanographer Position)