Dear Colleagues,

The 17th Biennial Ocean Sciences Meeting will take place 23-28 February 2014 in Honolulu, Hawaii.  The meeting is an important venue for scientific exchange across broad marine science disciplines, with sessions on all aspects of oceanography.  We would like to call your attention to a session we will be chairing that will focus on top predators, including marine mammals.  Please consider submitting an abstract and attending the meeting.  Abstracts are due by 4 October 2013 (3 weeks from Friday).

ADVANCES IN APPROACHES TO MONITORING THE OCCURRENCE, DISTRIBUTION, AND BEHAVIOR OF TOP PREDATORS (session 091)

Unlike most marine organisms, top predators can be monitored in the field as individuals, providing unique insight into behavioral strategies that influence the status and dynamics of populations. Tremendous technological and methodological progress has been made in marine animal detection, tagging, and tracking in the past decade, and this session seeks to gather researchers to share new insights into top predator behavior, ecology, and physiology gleaned from these state-of- the-art approaches. We encourage researchers working with autonomous platforms, passive acoustic detection, animal tagging, satellite tracking, remote monitoring technologies, and other advanced methods to participate and present their latest results.

Mark Baumgartner, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution 
mbaumgartner@whoi.edu

Daniel Palacios, Environmental Research Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA/National Marine Fisheries Service 
daniel.palacios@noaa.gov