Katie Florko

Yeah, it's totally a similar concept.

And I think that the ecological term portfolio effect is taken from finance.

And so the idea is that a varied meal would provide more of a buffer.

You know, instead of just relying on an area where maybe one species is and that should be a good area to go.

It really seems like they're going for areas that have this diversity that maybe is more of a buffer for, you know, if and when things, you know, are more abundant or less abundant, kind of that ebb and flow.

Yes, totally.

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.

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?