Body Building: Bulking up with male Steller Sea lions

Pilot reached an important milestone this year, hitting 2,000 pounds on May 14, 2022 and reaching his top weight of 2,030 pounds on May 25, 2022. Only two ASLC resident Steller sea lions have reached the 2,000-pound milestone: Woody, the famous first male Steller to call ASLC home, and now Pilot. Pilot’s impressive weight change […]

Just Relax and Breathe Normally

Pregnancy in any species is often a critical, energetically demanding time. Females require adequate quantity and quality food intake to support their developing offspring. The Steller sea lion, the largest of the otariids, is no exception. In this species, females nurse their offspring for approximately 1 year, meaning at any given time outside of the […]

Demystifying Models

Building a Habitat Suitability Model Part 3. Back in August/September, I started a series of blogs about my work here at the ASLC on habitat modeling. Since it has been a while, when I sat down to write this next installment I figured I should start with a recap. You can read the original posts […]

Chiswell Project season wrap up – 2017

We had another successful year of remote video monitoring of the Chiswell Island Steller sea lion rookery!

Is she eating for two?

This nutshell is about based on a recently published paper about developing methods to detect pregnancy in Steller sea lions.

Introducing Steller sea lion pup: KULIAK

Kuliak, a male Steller sea lion pup was born on June 22, 2017! Learn about the ASLC breeding program and how this is helping us learn about the reproductive physiology of adult female Steller sea lions.

Animals on the Move

We have posted many blogs about our fieldwork, in-house, and collaborators’ research projects on 60N. But we haven’t talked much about the other big part of doing research: data and data analysis.

Chiswell Chronicles: June 26,2017

As the pups grow older, females are starting to come and go from the island as they start foraging. This week meet Robbie, just back from a trip to sea.

Chiswell Chronicles: June 19, 2017

This week we talk about what the males on the colony are getting up to, and highlight two females: Dee and Anita.

Chiswell Chronicles: June 12, 2017

Since 1998, scientists at the ASLC have been monitoring the behavior and population dynamics of Steller sea lions at a rookery in the Gulf of Alaska: Chiswell Island. Tune in each week to learn about how we use remote cameras to observe sea lion behavior and to monitor the number of pups born, and about specific wild sea lions the researchers know, and how to identify them!

How we get research ideas

You’ve probably heard stories about how scientists get ideas that might include ‘it came to me in a dream!’. This blog post shares a different kind of story–one about how scientists take an idea, design a scientific study, discover an answer, and excitingly, end up with more questions!

Cue the Jaws Theme Song Please

The Horning Lab spent the day on Resurrection Bay simulating predation events in an effort to test the accuracy of the Life History Tag. A simulated predation event is not as scary as it sounds! Read my blog about how this data will ultimately provide more information about the role of predation on Steller sea lions in our study area.

Growing Up Fast

If you have visited the Alaska SeaLife Center (ASLC) in the past few years, you may have seen young Steller sea lion pups swimming and playing from our underwater viewing area. We are working with these animals to construct a morphometric age determination model for sea lions 1 – 48 months old.

Crowdsourcing sea lion science

This week we want to highlight a really cool science program that you can take part in! Launched by NOAA, Steller Watch is an opportunity to contribute to efforts to better understand Steller sea lion declines in the Western Aleutians.

Messy Business: Steller sea lion scat collections

On a crisp winter day in February, we set out on a small boat for a couple of Steller sea lion haulouts just 18 miles south of the Alaska SeaLife Center. Our mission: to collect scat.