Dear all, We still have a few spots available for our ‘Monitoring the health of pinnipeds – what do carcasses tell us about the health of populations?’ Workshop at the SMM Conference in Perth on Sat November 9th 08:30 – 12:30. This half-day workshop will focus on novel and best practices in pinniped health surveillance, focusing on by-caught, stranded, and hunted individuals. The format will include a series of expert speakers from around the globe (Europe, USA, and Australia), and will be followed by open discussion. We hope that this workshop will provide an opportunity to strengthen collaboration between research veterinarians and pinniped researchers. Click here to register: https://www.smmconference.org/workshops/#1718153122693-e00e6a7b-3c6f Abstract: Monitoring the health of individuals is one of the priorities for population status and risk assessments of marine mammals. As top predators, marine mammals are indicators of overall ecosystem health. Moreover, in a changing climate there is an increased need for efficient tools to collect data on marine mammal health parameters. In this proposed workshop, we focus on novel and best practices in pinniped health surveillance, based mainly on by-caught, stranded and/or hunted individuals. The objective of the workshop is to share ongoing and planned activities in pinniped health monitoring, and to provide an opportunity to strengthen collaboration between research veterinarians and pinniped researchers. We intend to invite key experts to share their knowledge on health monitoring of pinnipeds worldwide, with a specific focus on improving accuracy of post-mortem investigations. Through this, we hope to introduce different monitoring approaches, and necropsy and sampling protocols (e.g., Marine Mammal Commission, HELCOM) from varied species and locations. In addition, the workshop will facilitate discussion on the challenges that the participants may face in health monitoring, as well as provide opportunities to share good practices and novel tools used in this field. The workshop activities would include presentations from invited speakers and free discussions. We hope that this workshop will result in improved capacity and updated health monitoring guidelines for pinnipeds. It also fits to the conference theme “Culture and conservation: fishing for change” by improving the assessment of pinniped mortality attributable to bycatch. Looking forward to seeing you soon in Perth! Thank you, Mairi Mairi Young Doctoral Researcher University of Eastern Finland