Climate change and disease ecology: How are California's marine mammals faring 25 years into the 21st century?

The Marine Mammal Center was established 50 years ago as a rehabilitation hospital for locally stranded marine mammals but over the past 30 years, our research has focused on the changing patterns of disease and the emergence of novel pathogens and threats. This temporal window coincides with the period of greatest global warming experienced by our planet since the start of the Anthropocene. Over this interval we have documented significant changes in the ecology of established endemic diseases such as leptospirosis in California sea lions linked to unprecedented thermal anomalies in the North Pacific; witnessed the emergence of Harmful Algal Blooms and the more subtle and insidious rise in fungal and protozoal diseases along our coast. The environmental perturbations affecting the temporal and spatial occurrence of these events and their severity are also altering the distribution of prey species, invertebrates and fish, not only impacting health through nutritional state but also be changing migration routes and patterns of aggregation that directly affect routes and rates of disease transmission. 

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Speaker: Padraig Duignan, Marine Mammal Center