Gray Whales and Climate Change with Dr. Steven Swartz

Gray Whales and Climate Change with Dr. Steven Swartz

In this talk Dr. Steven Swartz will discuss the current impacts of climate change on the Arctic's seasonal marine food production and how that is affecting marine species like gray whales, how the gray whales are responding to these changes in availability of their annual food sources, and whether climate change alone is responsible for the most recent gray whale Unusual Mortality Event (UME) of 2019-2022.

His summary will reflect on this species’ evolutionary past and previous environmental conditions and challenges that the gray whale has faced as it became the "modern" gray whale we know today.

Steven Swartz is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz and has researched and published widely on gray whales and their breeding lagoons in Baja California. He served as a consultant to the Mexican government’s Ministry for the Environment, Natural Resources, and Fisheries (SEMARNAP), and worked for the Ocean Conservancy (previously the Center for Environmental Education), the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, and the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service.