Summary:
Listen to Tracey as she talks about her research and consider:
Captions:
Dr Tracey Rogers: And what we're using is the leopard seal and elephant seals
as a model of what is actually happening right at the top of the food chain.
Now some of the stuff, one of the components we're looking at is how
one of the things they're seeing there is a loss of sea ice and
these seals use the sea ice to live, to have your pups.
That's what you do you need basically your nesting area as the ice flows.
So we put on little satellite trackers.
We were talking about GPSs before - basically a little satellite tracker on a seal
and then we can track their movements back here in Sydney for predominantly that year.
So individuals we've been tracking, also we travel through the Antarctic on ice breakers and deploy sonar buoys
little underwater recording devices.
Then we can hear seals underneath the water.
It allows us to count how many animals are in an area.
So over a very large area,
this is a survey of about eight thousand kilometres we can survey seals right throughout that area.
And what we've been doing is using their own communication system to spy on them.
We know a lot about their communication.
The males sing underneath the water to attract females
so it allows us to actually use their own calls to count the animals.
There's about four little red dots - can you see those?
In a visual survey, if you're looking at them from a visual survey that's how many seals you could count
across eight thousand square kilometres of surveying.
But the green dots are how many animals you're encountering if you're doing an acoustic survey.
And all of this work was physics modelling.
Our work is biological but a lot of the foundations of it are actually physics and maths
and that's what I loved at school was physics and maths.
Being able to apply that to biological questions.
And then when we know where the animals are we can use things like remote sensing,
information from satellites, to here's where our acoustic surveys were, then to put in where currents are.
This is just a very important current and the bathymetry of the area
and the different ice data to be able to model together important
habitats for the seals to be used for pupping and then with other models
looking at what happens with climate change then we can make
predictions for what will happen into the future.
Summary:
As you watch the video, answer the following questions:
Captions:
Dr Tracey Rogers: The next part is looking at changes in their foraging behaviour.
With krill are very important for the animals and penguins are every important for the animals,
so those disappearing is going to be quite bad for the seals.
Just to give you an idea of how big these guys are - that's a small female leopard seal and they're,
they get up to about six hundred kilos, so that's about six of me - ten of me.
Sorry. I put on some weight lately, Argentinean food, but not that much weight.
And you can, another really cool thing about these seals is that the females are actually larger than the males.
And they can kill other seals of up to about two hundred kilos so they're serious predators.
Now how we've been looking at changes in their diet is looking at changes
in stable isotope signatures along the length of their whiskers.
Now just with your hair,we can actually, if we cut it into fine little bits all the way along,
we could actually look at the change in
your diet or your drug taking, past history and so you can actually look
and find by the stable isotope signature what the dietary component has been.
And because things like whiskers and hair grow progressively it's like a book,
it keeps that evidence and it doesn't change, it's
metabolically inert so it stays there for us to be able to collect that data later.
And so here you can see, this is just the changes in stable isotope signatures
along the length of the whisker and what we do is a lot of
modelling work to be able to tease apart that chemistry, back to again,
be able then to rather that just have this simple average
Now, I know I was saying it was metabolically inert,
back to be able to look at how their diet has changed over time.
Now this picture here, these guys were with Morson's group and these seals, they used to kill seals to feed to the dogs.
This is back in about 1911.
And we have their samples.
We have the whiskers from their seals.
We have collections back to about 1850.
So, it allows us to look at how, and it's the seals diet reflects what's in the system.
So, it allows us to go back
the interested in maths and physics, to tease that apart to
to be able to look at the proportion of different dietary components in those signatures.
that means we can go back to museum samples and collect whiskers from seals way
and look at what the changes in the system have been over about the last hundred and fifty years.
Summary:
Listen to Tracey as she talks about the impact of climate change and consider:
Captions:
Dr Tracey Rogers: Now, today, this is what we're faced with.
About seven hundred and eighty-four species are facing extinction;
sixty-five in captivity and sixteen thousand threatened.
But tomorrow, between eighteen to thirty-five percent of species will be committed to extinction by,
if we go on as we are by 2050.
And the polar bear is one of them, definitely.
They're kind of like the poster child of climate change.
Now, why do I care?
This is Lilly, my little girl, when she's my age, that's the reality for her.
So that's why I care.
Now, what inspired me to go and do this sort of stuff that I do?
Well I grew up on the beach and I was a seriously geeky kid.
I used to collect blue ringed octopuses, stone fish
I wanted to be a marine chemist and I put these, I had all these anything that
was dangerous and poisonous but it had to be venomous, it had to be something venomous.
I really loved it.
I really wanted to look at invertebrates that were really dangerous.
But it didn't work out that way.
I wasn't sure; you know which PHD, what'll I do?
I vacillated backwards and forwards for a long time and ended up getting a job at the zoo as a seal trainer.
And I was working on these seals the leopard seals
and I just found them absolutely extraordinarily amazing animals and no one knew anything about them.
So that's how my career really started, a complete and utter accident.
There's no way, I was never interested in dolphins or whales
or any of that marine mammal stuff, I actually had no interest.
I was always interested in very small invertebrates they held a much greater interest for me.
Summary:
As you listen to Tracey talk about her career consider the following:
Captions:
Dr Tracey Rogers: I headed off to the Antarctic, and if you, I don't know how well you can see that photo,
but there are how many - can you see very many women faces in there?
Now, that wasn't very long ago, that was a few years ago.
Thats actually a lot of women now for how it used to be.
The first ice breaker I got onto, there were five women walked up the gangplank
and there were about two hundred men and I went to an
all girl's school, I really hadn't had much to do with a very male dominated environments
and back in the old days in the Antarctic,
working in the Antarctic as well, women weren't high up on the hierarchy stake, but neither were scientists.
As a scientist you were called a 'boffin' and boffin wasn't meant in a very favourable word.
So to be a woman and a 'boffin' you were referred to as 'the dumb boffin chick'
or if there were a few of you together 'those dumb boffin chicks.'
And I'm really excited to see over my career, which hasn't been that long,
to see that change and that that's not the situation anymore.
And that they're are a lot of women in the work that I do now,
and I'm pleased to say that is because many of my PDH students have been
women so I've kind of cheated and bought a lot of women with me.
Which is quite common for women scientists, we like to do that.
Now the other really tricky thing with being a women scientist is juggling your family and having a career too.
And I think that's one of the really exciting things for me, having been a scientist, is that you can do that.
That the research work that you do, you aren't tied to being a lawyer,
making a partnership in a company you can actually take breaks.
Maternity leave breaks and you can shift and change your research focus
to actually fit your life and for me it’s worked out really, really well.
So that being able to juggle both my family and field so
this is me a couple of weeks ago and yet I've got little kids and it's been extraordinarily great.
Thank you.
Music: Music