Rock Talk Seminar Series

Our Rock Talk Seminar Series is a long-standing and well-loved tradition at SML. Historically, faculty members and guest speakers would gather with students on Appledore Island's rocky shoreline (giving the Rock Talk series its name) to present on a wide range of topics related to natural history, ecology, biology, and more. To stay connected with our community following the pandemic, we transitioned our Rock Talks to a hybrid format and have featured guest speakers from across the world.

Please note: All Rock Talks begin at 8pm on Tuesdays.

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Introducing our 2026 Rock Talk Speakers

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Conservation Media: Case Studies in Strategic Filmmaking for Birds

a large flock of white and grey birds in flight

The field of science communications—whether as a topic in the media or as teams within organizations—tends to follow the frontline of research, while an academic (often ecological) mindset leads what we broadly think of as “conservation.” But what value can visual storytelling have on the frontline? We’ll review and screen a collection of brief case studies, exploring how compelling visual storytelling—when strategically positioned for the right audience—can move the needle for conservation outcomes in uniquely powerful ways.

Andy Johnson is a conservation multimedia producer, with a background in ornithology and public policy. After studying Hudsonian Whimbrel migration, he joined the Center for Conservation Media at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where he worked for over a decade building partnerships, producing short films, and coordinating campaigns to advance conservation strategies on the ground, across flyways. He currently works as the Senior Video Producer at the National Audubon Society, continuing similar strategic visual storytelling efforts across Audubon’s broad network in the Americas.

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The Unseen Niche: Birds & Airspaces Across North America

Earth’s lower atmosphere is a vital ecological habitat, home to trillions of organisms that live, forage, and migrate through this space. Despite its importance, it is rarely treated as a primary habitat for ecological study or conservation prioritization, making it one of the least explored environments on the planet. Yet this aerial habitat functions as a global conduit for the movement of biomass, weather, and inorganic materials. Addressing fundamental ecological questions about its spatial and temporal dynamics is key to understanding its role in shaping ecosystems.

man leaning on desk with taxidermy birds on it

Kyle Horton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University, where he leads the Purdue Aeroecology Lab. His group studies the movements of airborne organisms and their use of the lower atmosphere as habitat. Dr. Horton earned his M.S. in Wildlife Ecology from the University of Delaware and his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Oklahoma, and he was a Rose Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. His research combines weather surveillance radar and advanced computing to understand bird flights behaviors, forecast bird migration, and guide applied conservation efforts. Dr. Horton has worked to advances in aeroecology, highlighting new insights into bird migration, the development of ecological forecasting tools, and emerging conservation challenges such as light pollution.

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Using an Incremental Approach for "Wicked Problems" in Marine Resource Management

After 20 years as a research scientist, I made a career change to a scientific administrator in NOAA Fisheries. Part of the NOAA Fisheries mission is to provide scientific advice using ecosystem based approaches to management. Where I used to see NOAA Fisheries science as relatively straightforward and transactional, I now recognize that fisheries and marine conservation are part of a complex socio-ecological system that spans natural and social sciences. With this recognition has come an appreciation for the concept of wicked problems and for the incremental approach to policymaking. Here I describe my perspectives before and after this recognition and present 10 lessons for myself as a guide to providing science in support of marine resource management.

Jon Hare is the Science and Research Director of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. He oversees science related to NOAA Fisheries mission in the Northeast region including marine fisheries, protected species, aquaculture, habitat, and ecosystem science. Jon earned a BA in Biology from Wesleyan University and a PhD in Oceanography from SUNY Stony Brook. He received a National Research Council Research Associate in 1994 to work at the NOAA Beaufort Laboratory and was hired by NOAA in 1997. Jon moved to the NOAA Narragansett Laboratory in 2005, was appointed Oceanography Branch Chief in 2008 and Lab Director in 2012. He started as NEFSC Director in 2016 and is now located at the NOAA Woods Hole Laboratory. His research has focused on fisheries oceanography: understanding the interactions between the ocean environment and fisheries populations with an aim of contributing to assessments and management. Jon also examines the effect of climate change on fish and invertebrate population dynamics. This work involves coupling the output of global climate models with population models to simulate the effects of climate change on population dynamics. He also works to move the new scientific information into the assessment and management process and the development of new technologies for observing ocean ecosystems.

Microscopic but Mighty: The Microbes that Drive Coastal Ecosystem Function

This presentation will explore the ecology of microbes—the often invisible but essential organisms that drive key processes in coastal ecosystems, including nutrient cycling and organic matter decomposition, with important implications for ecosystem resilience and restoration. Using examples from salt marshes, this talk will highlight the diversity of microbial metabolisms, how microbial communities respond to environmental change, and how modern molecular tools are advancing our understanding of microbial ecology in coastal environments.

Dr. Ashley Bulseco is an Assistant Professor in Coastal Microbial & Ecosystem Ecology at the University of New Hampshire. Her research focuses on understanding how the millions of microscopic organisms (bacteria, archaea, fungi) that inhabit salt marsh sediments drive ecosystem function and how they respond to environmental change. Ultimately, the goal of Ashley’s lab is to leverage microbial information as a tool to learn about ecosystem health, especially in relation to services we value them for such as nutrient filtration and carbon storage.

Slingshots, Pogo-sticks, and Shock Absorbers: How Biological Springs Drive Animal Movement

Animals move in so many different ways, each of which presents its own mechanical challenges. The muscles that drive movement are remarkably powerful, efficient, and precise, but they have their limitations. We have found that these limitations are often overcome by an effective “cooperation” between muscles and tissues that operate like springs, such as tendons. Studies in an assortment of animal models, from frogs to turkeys, provide examples of nature’s spring-powered mechanisms.

Tom Roberts is a biomechanist who studies the link between muscle performance and locomotor performance. A professor in the Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology Department at Brown University, Roberts uses a comparative approach to understand how the evolution of vertebrate movement has been shaped by the conservative mechanical behavior of skeletal muscles. Roberts received his PhD in the Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Department at Harvard University and did postdoctoral work at Northeastern University.

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Seabird Sentinels: Making Use of Marine "Canaries in the Coal Mine"

Seabirds are often described as sentinels of marine ecosystem health. As a highly visible top predator, they can reflect in ocean productivity and lower trophic levels as well as large-scale environmental impacts, such as pollution, fish stock collapse, and warming oceans. They are relatively easy to monitor, as they gather in large numbers at predictable locations both at sea and on land, the latter when they congregate at colonies during breeding. Techniques have been developed to estimate their populations and track their diet, productivity, physiology, and behavior, and long-term seabird monitoring potentially reflects ongoing changes in the marine environment. In this talk, I will present stories from monitoring rhinoceros auklets in the U.S. Pacific Northwest that compare and contrast colonies in terms of prey communities, exposure to anthropogenic contaminants, and resilience in the face of an unprecedented marine heat wave.

Dr. Thomas Good is a Research Fishery Biologist for NOAA Fisheries at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, WA. He has more than 35 years’ experience studying marine birds. He received his M.S. in Zoology from the University of New Hampshire, where he studied foraging and diet of Herring and Great Black-backed Gulls in New England rocky intertidal habitats, and his Ph.D. in Systematics and Ecology from the University of Kansas, where he studied hybridization between Western and Glaucous-winged Gulls on the Washington coast. His connections to the Shoals Marine Lab date back to the last century; in the early 1990s, Tom was a visiting researcher studying neighbor aggression and chick productivity in Appledore Island gulls, and in the late 1990s, he co-taught Field Ornithology with Sara Morris, where he infused the course with more marine bird topics. Born and raised in Maine, his love of intertidal critters and gulls began during summers spent “Downeast.”

Tom’s present work focuses largely on the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem, where he studies the intersection of seabirds and West Coast fisheries, including how avian predators impact threatened and endangered Pacific salmon and how to quantify and minimize seabird bycatch in U.S. West Coast groundfish fisheries. He also monitors and promotes seabirds as indicators of the marine environment in his capacity as seabird lead for NOAA’s California Current Integrated Ecosystem Assessment and their annual California Current Ecosystem Status Report.

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TBA

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Impacts of Nutrient Availability and Herbivore Presence on Macroalgal Defensive Traits

Brown macroalgae often form complex aggregations on rocky substrates along temperate rocky shores and, more recently, on coral reefs undergoing shifts from coral to macroalgal dominance. The persistence of these algae and the aggregations they form is influenced by many human-caused impacts, including nutrient pollution and overfishing. Brown macroalgae are also known to possess physical and chemical defenses against herbivores, and these defenses are often variable in response to environmental factors. This talk explores how nutrient availability and herbivore density interact to influence anti-herbivory defenses in two brown macroalgae—Turbinaria ornata in the South Pacific and Silvetia compressa in California.

Sarah Joy Bittick is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles, where she leads the Coastal Ecology and Conservation Lab. Her research focuses on human impacts in nearshore marine ecosystems, including seagrass meadows and rocky intertidal habitats. At LMU, Sarah Joy teaches general biology laboratory courses, marine biology, coastal ecology, and marine conservation.

Prior to joining LMU, Sarah Joy completed her PhD at UCLA in 2017, where her dissertation examined the interactive impacts of nutrient enrichment and overfishing in coral reef and seagrass ecosystems. From 2017–2019, she held a Liber Ero Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia in Mary O’Connor’s lab. Her research at UBC focused on informing local seagrass management through studies of nutrient input and invertebrate community structure. At LMU, Sarah Joy continues to investigate these topics alongside a large and enthusiastic group of undergraduate researchers.

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Salmon Farming/Ranching in the North Atlantic: a Discussion

A brief overview of fish farming on a global scale followed by why Atlantic salmon are farmed, what types of Atlantic salmon aquaculture are employed throughout the countries of the North Atlantic, the major problems of open-pen salmon farms and how they are being addressed, alternatives to open-pen farming, and the complexity of determining seafood sustainability.

Shortly after receiving his PhD from the University of Southern California, Jim Coyer came to the Shoals Marine Lab in summer 1982 as faculty for the 2-wk Underwater Research course. He taught the course every summer until 2018 while also teaching at a private 2-yr college in Los Angeles (5 yrs) then switching to a research-based path leading to positions at SUNY-Stony Brook (3 yrs), the Hopkins Marine Station (8 yrs), and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands (14 yrs). He returned to the US in 2012 and assumed a Programs Coordinator position for SML from 2012 to 2018. After working for a year at a local deli during COVID, he has been a contract Naturalist and diver for National Geographic/Lindblad Expeditions for the past seven years on voyages to Svalbard, Orkney, Shetlands, Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, Southeast Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, the Channel Islands (CA), Magdalena Bay (Baja California), and Antarctica. But he is unlikely to ever leave SML.