20 December 2006 Memorandum to the Record Report of Sabbatical
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SANTA CRUZ: CENTER FOR STOCK ASSESSMENT RESEARCH, DEPARTMENT OF APPLIED MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS, JACK BASKIN SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING 20 December 2006 Memorandum to the Record Report of Sabbatical Activities of Marc Mangel, Fall 2006 I was Frohlich Fellow at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Hobart, Tasmania for the period 28 September to 3 November. When arranging this visit, we agreed that CSIRO would fund travel and rental assistance only and that I would cover the cost of rental car and subsistence from my research grants that support work relevant to Antarctic krill and disease. Activities at CSIRO My main research activities at CSIRO were a collaboration with Natalie Dowling and Chris Wilcox on models of fleet dynamics in the eastern tuna/billfish fishery and with Chris Wilcox on optimal control of invasive species. Both of these projects involve novel and important applications of the method of stochastic dynamic programming; I can state without hesitation that had I not come for this month, the work could not have been done. Dowling, Wilcox and I have formulated and developed the first version of code to allow one to predict how long-line vessels will respond to spatial management of effort (through decrements in hook allocations that vary according to fishing location). We are thus able to predict the spatial distribution of fishing effort, the landed catch as a function of week, and the price of the target species. I believe that this work has great potential for expansion, and would be easily modified to model quota rather than effort based fisheries. We are currently working on a paper for the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. Wilcox and I have formulated and developed the first version of code for a decision framework that allows one to conclude that the population of an invasive species is sufficiently low that it will decline rather than grow. The major problem here is that one never knows the actual size of the population and must make decisions based on imperfect observations. Our framework allows one to either conclude the extirpation activity has been successful, continue to monitor, or to take action by reducing the number of invasive species. We are currently working on a paper for Science. During the first week of my visit, my post-doc Kate Creswell joined me from Santa Cruz and she gave a seminar on our work concerning the foraging behavior of penguins in relation to krill variability. During the last week of my visit, I gave a talk on work with PhD student Nick Wolf concerning the decline of Steller sea lions in the Gulf of Alaska. I also made time to meet with various students and colleagues at CSIRO. I had a number of meetings with James Dell, PhD student of Chris Wilcox, to discuss aspects of his work on modeling the behavior of fishermen (particularly how one can construct prior distributions for fishing locations, given environmental information). I also had meetings with Marinelle Basson and Mark Bravington (both long-time colleagues), Jemery Day (whom I met when I lectured at a summer school in Vancouver in 1993), Rich Little, Tim, Reid, Jonathan Rhodes, Tony Smith, Geoff Tuck, and Jay Willis (to whom I had previously given advice on a paper concerning krill life histories). Activites at CSIRO/UTAS One of my great pleasures in being at CSIRO was to be able to meet and interact with Graeme Dunston (CSIRO), June Olley and David Ratkwosky (both UTAS). They have done seminal work on how bacterial growth responds to variation in temperature, and what the mechanism for the response is. Through my in-person (vs email) conversations with them, I was able to gain key insights for my own work on an evolutionary theory of fever and this would not have happened had I not been at CSIRO. This work is supported by my own NSF grant, and when I ultimately write it up I shall thank both NSF and CSIRO for the Frohlich fellowship. Activities at AAD/UTAS/CCAMLR I also have a major research grant, funded by the Lenfest Ocean Program in the US, for work on the response of krill and krill predators to climate change and the implications for fishery management. Consequently, I took the opportunity of being in Hobart again to strengthen my links with AAD. Early in my visit, I had an afternoon session with group leaders in Kingston (Steve Nicol, Nick Gales, Colin Southwell and Andrew Constable). I subsequently met with Gales and his group of scientists working on predators, with Nicol and So Kawaguchi to discuss krill, and with Andrew Constable to discuss ecosystem based approaches to management. I met many young scientists at AAD and had especially good talks with Toby Jarvis and Natalie Walker on interpretation and application of acoustic data. In conjunction with my work on krill, I met with Manuel Nunez (UTAS) to discuss ways to predict UV intensity at the surface of the ocean, given a particular location. The Scientific Committee (SC) of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) met the last two weeks of October. Although I am not serving on the US delegation this year, I took the opportunity of the meeting of SC-CCAMLR to interact with colleagues from around the world. In addition, at the request of the Pew Foundation, Steve Nicol (Australia), Keith Reid (UK) and I started planning a small workshop on indentifying and resolving uncertainties in krill fisheries models, to be held in Santa Cruz in May 2007. Mote Symposium The Sixth Mote Symposium on Fisheries Ecology was held in Sarasota, Fl during the week of 12 November 2006. I served on the organizing committee of this symposium and presented an invited talk on combining proximate and ultimate approaches to life history variation in salmonids. University of Bergen I visited the modeling group in the Department of Biology at the University Bergen, 3-13 December 2006. During this period, I interacted with all of the students, faculty and post-docs (about 15 people) in the group. In addition, two of my doctoral students defended their degrees on 7 and 8 December. Three of the four opponents were able to give invited talks, so it was a wonderful week of science. Summary This sabbatical allowed me to expand my research in new directions, learn some new things (especially about fever and UV damage) and move my existing projects forward. I expect to write 4 papers on the basis of work done during this sabbatical: one on behavioral models for the Eastern Australian Current tuna fleet, one on optimal control of an invasive species with an Allee effect, one on the evolutionary theory of fever, and one on fetal syndrome and hormesis as two sides of the same life history coin. In addition, my krill work was substantially moved forward, and I will get to advance that in Winter, 2007. Marc Mangel Professor SANTA CRUZ: DEPARTMENT OF APPLIED MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS, JACK BASKIN SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING 25 June 2007 To: The Record From: Marc Mangel Report of Sabbatical Activities of Marc Mangel, Spring 2007 During this term, I spent approximately two months at the University of Oxford (two weeks as Astor Lecturer and six weeks to collaborate with colleagues on disease and krill ), ran an international workshop at the request of the Lenfest Ocean Program, spent a week in La Paz, BCS on research related to my UCMEXUS grant, and gave the Olin College of Engineering and Mathematics Keynote Address at the World Conference on Resource Management. Visit to Oxford (15 March -10 May) The Astor Lecture and Other Seminars I gave the Astor Lecture “Ecology, Conservation and Public Policy: A Vision for the 21st Century” at the Department of Zoology on 30 April 2007. About 100 people attended, including many from Zoology and Oxford University Centre for the Environment and Sir David Cox from Statistics/Nuffield College. In addition, I gave the following seminars: • “The Decline of Steller Sea Lions in the Western Gulf of Alaska” at Imperial College/Marine Resources Assessment Group (21 March 07) and at the Oxford University Centre for the Environment (9 May 07) •”Evolutionary Analysis of Longevity and Diversity, motivated by the Pacific Rockfish” at the University of Leicester (17 April 07) and Imperial College at Silwood Park (23 April) •”The Ten Plagues and Statistical Science as a Way of Knowing” at the George Slager Centre, University of Oxford (25 April 07) I was also a Guest Speaker and Tutor at “Populations Under Pressure: A Graduate Research Symposium” at Imperial College at Silwood Park (29 March 07) 1 Research Interactions While in Oxford, I embarked on a new line of research with my collaborator Dr. Michael Bonsall (Department of Zoology) – the evolutionary ecology of stem cells and their niches. Fuchs et al (Cell 116:769-778, 2004), in a wonderful article on stem cells and their niches, note that the potential of stem cells in regenerative medicine relies on the assumption that we can remove them from their natural habitat, propagate them in culture, transplant them into a foreign environment and assume that the transplanted cells will do as we wish. However, Anderson (Neuron 30:19-35, 2001) pointed out that there may be enormous differences between what stem cells do in the original niche and what they can do when put into culture or when transplanted to a new location. In 2003, Raff (Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology 19:1) noted that “perhaps the greatest challenge in stem cell biology is to uncover the..mechanisms that determine whether a daughter of a stem cell division self-renews or commits to a particular pathway of differentiation.