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a trip to....

antarctica


Excerpts of biographies taken from the crew roster...



Professor
Sean Todd is director of Allied Whale-a marine research facility at College of the Atlantic (COA) in Bar Harbor, Maine, performing dedictaed research on local cetacean and pinniped species, and part of the northeast region Marine Mammal Stranding Network. He is a professor at COA, teaching biology, sensory ecology, oceanography, quantitative science, statistics and marine mammal science classes. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of Maine in Orono. He earned his B.Sc. in Marine Biology and Oceanography at the University College of North Wales (Bangor, UK), and his M.Sc. (1991) and Ph.D. (1997) in Biopsychology, at Memorial University of Newfoundland (St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada).

He has participated in numerous research projects. Research includes photo-identification and biopsy of finback and humpback whales; working as director of remote field site (Mount Desert Rock) located 25 miles offshore where day-to-day whale research is conducted; and as a coordinator for marine mammal strandings.


Much of Sean's background is in the field of fishery-marine mammal interactions. He spent 10 years in Newfoundland as part of the Whale Disentanglement team, a group that releases large entangled whales from fishing gear. In Maine he is trained as part of a first reponse team that performs a similar function, coordinated by the Center for Coastal Studies. He has also worked on several projects that successfully designed alarms for fishing gear that reduce marine mammal entanglements. In 1992-1994 he also participated in Years of the North Atlantic Humpback Whale (
YoNAH), a three year census project of humpback whales, that included photo-identification and biopsy of individual whales.

Judy Allen is associate director of Allied Whale at COA. She is also director of Information Systems at the college, and has taught classes in GIS. She recived her BA in Anthropologyfrom William Smith College in 1972.

Judy's research has involved marine mammal population studies, particularly humpback whale photo-identification studies. She has also been the project director for the Gulf of Maine Sightings Network, the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog (NAHWC), the Antarctic Humpback Whale Catalog (AHWC), and the YoNAH catalog. She is also the co-author of numerous scientific papers involving cetaceans.


Sponsored by Abercrombie and Kent's Global Foundation, Sean and Judy hope to spot and identify whales and other marine mammals during the voyage. Their goal is two-fold; first, to collect data for the AHWC, a photographic archive sponsored by the International Whaling Commission and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and two, to begin to design some curriculum, goals and objectives for future participation of COA student interns, teaching staff and passengers onboard.


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