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.

Introducing our 2026 Rock Talk Speakers

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TBA

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.