Nicole Teutschel at UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab, CA -- The E-Seal Team has a new member, Melinda Fowler. Although new to the TOPP team, she's had extensive experience with marine mammals. Melinda did her masters at Sonoma State University with Dan Crocker, who introduced the Missouri farm girl to the world of elephant seals. He showed her how their extreme behaviors and synchronized haul out schedule makes elephant seals a model system to study many physiological processes. She focused on studying their physiology, specifically, how they metabolize glucose.

Photo by Tanguy de Tillesse.

Growing up on a farm in rural Missouri, Melinda wondered about the outside world, but maintained her interest in animals. Marine animals were as different as you could get from Melinda’s roots with cows, goats and horses; it was new and exciting to her. Years later, Melinda is still captivated by marine mammal research. Now she's not only driven by her curiosity of animals extremely different from those she worked with in Missouri, but also being able to do her own independent research.

Melinda preparing to collect blood samples from a female northern elephant seal during her masters work (above). Photo by Tanguy de Tillesse.

Melinda dye marking a sleeping female elephant seal. Photo by Tanguy de Tillesse.

Melinda is now a first year doctorate student in Dan Costa's lab at UC Santa Cruz. Melinda comes to UC Santa Cruz having deployed tags on elephant seals in Mexico, assisted in behavioral studies of Galapagos sea lions, monitored Hawaiian monk seals on Laysan Island, observed maternal investment and behavior of Stellar sea lions in Alaska, and, this year, Melinda was instrumental in the TOPP California sea lion tagging and recovery effort on San Nicholas Island in the Channel Islands off Southern California.
Melinda tagging an elephant seal in Mexico. Photo by Juan Pablo Gallo Reynoso.

Melinda holding a Galapagos sea lion.

Melinda capturing a California sea lion on San Nicholas Island (above). A female California sea lion carrying TOPP tags (below). Photos by Scott Hansen

After gaining diverse experiences on many different marine mammal species, Melinda is fascinated by northern elephant seals’ phenomenal ability to fast and lactate at the same time. How the female seals are able to mobilize the immense amount of calories that she and her pup need is an amazing feat. Melinda added that this is only one of the astonishing aspects that this extreme species is able to accomplish, and this has sparked her interest in satellite telemetry and TOPP’s tagging programs.

As a doctorate student, Melinda plans to look into those interests. Melinda will study lactation physiology in pinniped species and how their foraging ecology and varying environmental conditions can affect them and their pups.