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Daniel P Costa
Summary
Daniel Costa is a Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Director of the Institute of Marine Sciences. He completed a B.A. at UCLA, a Ph.D. at U.C. Santa Cruz and a post doc at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His research focuses on the ecology and physiology of marine mammals and seabirds, taking him to every continent and almost every habitat from the Galapagos to Antarctica. He has worked with a range of animals including turtles, penguins’ albatross, seals, sea lions, sirenians, whales and dolphins and has published over 500 scientific papers. His current work is aimed at recording the movement and distribution patterns of marine mammals and seabirds in an effort to understand their habitat needs. This work is helping to identify biodiversity hotspots and the factors that create them. He has been developing tools to identify and create viable Marine Protected Areas for the conservation of highly migratory species. In addition his research is studying the response of marine mammals to underwater sounds and developing ways to assess whether the potential disturbance may result in a population consequence. With Barbara Block he co-founded the Tagging of Pacific Predators program, a multidisciplinary effort to study the movement patterns of 23 species of marine vertebrate predators in the North Pacific Ocean. He is an internationally recognized authority on tracking of marine mammals and birds