Arran Natural History Society meeting in January

Arran Natural History Society send everyone festive greetings and best wishes for the coming new year.

We have an exciting speaker lined up for our first talk of 2023 on Tuesday, January 10 at 7.30pm. This will be an online event so we hope to welcome members and supporters from near and far.

Our guest is Mariel ten Doeschate from the Scottish Marine Animal Strandings Scheme (SMASS).

SMASS is the research and reporting scheme for stranded marine mammals around Scotland’s coast and rivers. As well as investigating the deaths of marine mammals, SMASS is involved in several areas of marine mammal science and uses a citizen science programme to help with the collection of marine strandings data.

In her talk, Mariel will take a closer look at what SMASS has learned from 30 years of marine mammal stranding surveillance and how they can continue to learn from them in the future. Mariel will discuss the complexities associated with trying to translate those findings from investigating stranded individuals, to monitoring the health and status of marine mammal populations out at sea, as well as the wider ecosystems they dominate.

Mariel joined SMASS in September 2014. After finishing her MSc in Applied Marine and Fisheries Ecology at the University of Aberdeen, she joined several marine ecology related research projects – including a sea turtle nesting programme in the Caribbean, a bottlenose dolphin monitoring project in Western Australia, and a spinner dolphin research project in Hawaii. She then worked with the marine mammal strandings networks in the Netherlands which started her interest in strandings and their use for population monitoring.

Her main responsibilities within SMASS are the management and development of the database, sample archives and volunteer network. She is also closely involved with the post-mortem examinations, and outreach and engagement activities.
Additional to her work with SMASS, Mariel is working on her own PhD project which focuses on improving methods to analyse marine wildlife surveillance data for population level inferences.

Look out for more details of how to join the meeting on the ANHS Facebook page, but put 7.30pm on Tuesday, January 10th, in your calendar today!