Title: |
Contractor |
Division: |
|
Telephone: |
(206)-526-6866 |
Email: |
|
Address: |
National Marine Mammal Laboratory |
Current Activities
Holly Fearnback is a contractor with NMML's Catacean Assessment and Ecology Program working on the population biology of killer whales off western Alaska. Her primary task involves analyzing photo-identification data from surveys of fish-eating killer whales around the western Gulf of Alaska, Aleutian Islands and Bering Sea, and she has been the primary photo and data manager on the NMML annual killer whale survey since 2005. Holly is enrolled as a Ph.D. student in an overseas split degree program with the University of Aberdeen (U.K.), and is using the NMML killer whale data to assess the influence of environmental variability and fisheries interactions on killer whale social structure and demography.
Background
Holly began working with marine mammals in 1995 when she was studying for a B.S. degree at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She was involved with bottlenose dolphin research and marine mammal and sea turtle stranding response in both North Carolina and Virginia and obtained a M.S. degree from Old Dominion University on the social structure of bottlenose dolphins off Virginia. Holly led population studies of small cetaceans around Hawaii from 1999 to 2001 and then worked on right whale aerial surveys off the U.S. east coast from 2001 to 2004. Most recently, she participated in research projects with the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, involving the land-based gray whale census off central California and cetacean ship surveys in the Eastern Tropical Pacific, in waters around Alaska, Hawaii, and off the U.S. West Coast (2002-05).
