Title: |
Contractor |
Division: |
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Telephone: |
(206)-526-4370 |
Email: |
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Address: |
National Marine Mammal Laboratory |
Current Activities
Kym Yano joined the Polar Ecosystems Program as a contractor in 2007. Her duties include participation in the Alaska harbor seal project, which uses oblique photographs taken from small aircraft to aid in the annual population abundance estimates of the Alaska harbor seal population. She also has assisted in other research projects including the Bering Sea ice seal abundance survey in spring 2008 conducted from the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea.
Background
Kym graduated from the University of Hawaii in 2004 with a B.S. in biology and a B.A. in psychology. She began pursuing marine biology with the Blue-Water Marine Laboratory of the Waikiki Aquarium and the University of Hawaii as a high school student. During college, she spent a summer with the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory fluke matching the local humpback whales and assisted SPLASH efforts offshore of Maui and Oahu with KBMML and Oceanwide Science Institute. Kym helped on a project analyzing the mineral content of both wild and captive bottlenose dolphin milk at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park. In summer 2005, she joined NMML as a volunteer intern updating a 1985 bibliography of northern fur seal publications, now available on the AFSC website as a searchable database. She also digitized and archivied northern fur seal rookery photographs taken from 1895 to 2006 on the Pribilof Islands of Alaska; photos from this project are available for download on the AFSC website.
