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Killer Whale Count
Researcher's in Charge
Alexa Hasselman, Michelle LaRue, Kim Goetz
Classifications
251
Thoughts on Project
I really liked the goal of this project because I feel that I hadn't really paid much attention to other species and their situation in this world before. It also gave me a lot of insight on how research is conducted. A lot of the time, it is a tedious process where you constantly will have to research just one variable and hope that your hypothesis is correct. If not, you will have to test something else since you are able to come to some sort of conclusion. I also feel like people don't consciously pay attention to the different populations in the world. Especially because there is a food chain that shouldn't be interfered with most of the time, the question of when it's okay and when it's not is something that interests me. I really enjoyed this and I would love to be more involved in projects with wildlife. I would recommend this project to anyone since it isn't too hard but it would just depend on the person!
In this project, the target goal was to help researchers identify and count killer whales to determine whether or not their predation is causing the Steller sea lion population to decline! Killer whales are predators of Steller sea lion colonies which is an endangered species in the western island. Determining the cause of their endangerment is vital to make sure that they dont go extinct. Killer whales may or may not be the reason however even being able to rule it out as a possibility is a step in the right direction. However, researchers predict that it is the killer whales that are causing this massive change. This project will give researchers insight into whether or not there is a correlation between the prevalence of killer whales and sea lions and whether they are truly connected to each other. This will help in saving the steller sea lion species as well as possibly eliminate that killer whales are the cause of the endangerment and help focus research on another variable that may influence the steller sea lion species. As a researcher, you will be tasked with analyzing the photo data and identifying the killer whale and sea lion count. You will have to see if either killer whales or sea lions are present and the count of each of the species. In this picture, neither sea lions nor killer whales are present which is what you would enter into the database. If there are, you enter their counts and circle around them.
