Katie Florko

Yeah, we've we've used a lot of technology and tools and ecological models.

So I'll start from the top.

So for the polar bears, we're using collars, GPS collars that are recording their locations.

For the seals, we have tags on the seals that are recording both their locations, their movements, and their diving behavior.

And then for the fish, this is actually another part of my PhD.

This is a big modeling exercise where we estimated how many fish were in the distribution of the fish across Hudson Bay.

And then we projected that into the future as well, which was really cool.

So looking at how those different kind of the prey field, if you will, or the number of fish are changing through time.

And that was really helpful because there is not existing data for fish in the Arctic.

It's a really big challenge.

It's logistically extremely difficult to count the number of fish in an area, especially in the absence of big commercial fisheries.

And so that modeling exercise was a really critical piece to it as well.

That's a really good question.

And that's something, you know, these tags are really good in that we're able to see what the seals are doing in high risk areas and are they avoiding them and they are and they're changing their dives and all these things.

But we can't get that really, really fine scale decision making just yet.

So one of the ideas I had with the tags was

is maybe you know they're coming up from a dive slower because I thought maybe they'd be coming up from a dive slower so that they have time to maybe listen to hear if there's a bear but the bears are sit and wait predators for the most part so they're sitting at a seal hole waiting for the seal to come up so

We did end up finding that.

And then I was also curious, you know, maybe they're going to come up slower or have a longer dive or a shorter dive.

Maybe there are all these different thoughts I had.