Greetings MARMAM! Join us on *Thursday, December 15th 3 PM AKST / 4 PM PST / 7 PM EST (December 16th 12 AM GMT)* for the next SMM Editors’ Select Series: Hormones and whales: what tiny molecules can tell us about the giants of the sea with Dr. Valentina Melica of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
This event is free to attend and presented online via Zoom, but registration is required. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_bZI5tOxLSNy_s8xXOt1TUQ Space on Zoom is limited to the first 500 attendees. The talk will also be streamed live on the SMM Facebook page. *About this talk:* Hormones are tiny molecules that regulate many functions in our (and in a whale) body. Some of them have the important job to keep the energy level up in challenging situations. We researched how these hormones behave in response to ordinary changes in the life of blue and gray whales. We found that soon-to-be mothers blue whales and nursing gray whales experienced higher energy demands, thus their hormones were elevated. This information is essential for understanding how whales may cope with stressors caused by human activities. *About the presenter:* Dr. Valentina Melica is a research biologist specializing in endocrine analysis. She grew up in Italy, where she worked as an aquarist and snorkel guide in northeast Italy and earned a master's degree from the University of Trieste, with a research project on moon jellyfish. She completed her PhD at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where her research focused on reproductive and stress-related endocrinology in the eastern North Pacific populations of blue and gray whales. She now lives in North Vancouver, Canada, where she is research scientist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, in the Marine Mammal Conservation Physiology program. In that position, she is studying biomarkers in killer whales and humpback whales. Open access to this article is made temporarily available in the weeks around the presentation and can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mms.12954 . Current SMM members have access to all Marine Mammal Science papers. Missed a presentation or want to share this series with a friend? All previous Editors' Select presentations are recorded and archived on our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUc78IynQlubS2DVS1VZoplf_t42-yZOO All the best, *Ayça Eleman, Ph.D. Candidate* *Theresa-Anne Tatom-Naecker, Ph.D. Candidate* *Student Members-at-Large* Society for Marine Mammalogy
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