Tracey Rogers

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Tracey Rogers
Alma materUniversity of Sydney
EmployerUniversity of New South Wales
Known forLeopard Seals

Tracey Rogers is a marine ecologist at the University of New South Wales who studies how mammals survive changing environments.

Early life and education[edit]

As a child, Rogers was interested in deadly sea creatures.[1] Rogers became interested in leopard seals whilst working as a seal trainer at Taronga Zoo.[2] The call of Astrid, a giant female leopard seal, inspired Rogers to pursue a career in research.[3] Rogers completed her PhD, "Acoustic behaviour of the leopard seal, Hydrurga leptonyx : physical characteristics and functional significance", in 1997 at the University of Sydney.[4]

Research[edit]

Rogers has served as Director of the Australian Marine Mammal Research Centre.[5] She joined the University of New South Wales in 2008. Her lab at the University of New South Wales study mammals, in particular the leopard seal (an Antarctic apex predator), and their response to changing environments.[6] To do this, she studies changes in the seals' diet and habits over time.[7] She identified that if mother seals stay with their pups, father seals only use simple, crude calls, whereas if mothers are more adventurous, the language becomes more complex.[8] She also found that female leopard seals can also sing during breeding season, which is rare in the animal world.[9][5] She believes that leopard seals might use the high-frequency (165 kHz) to echolocate food during dark winters.[5] She identified that more juvenile seals stayed together, where as older, more dominant seals have more established territories.[10]

She studies seals at the Commonwealth Bay and Prydz Bay.[11] The seals are tricky to study as they live in dangerous pack ice off coastal Antarctica, making observations difficult.[10][12] To identify how the seals respond to a changing ecosystem, Rogers studies them using acoustic technology (hydrophones and retired military sonar buoys).[13][11] During expeditions, the team take biopsies and collect fur from seals in the wild, which can be used as biomarkers to "capture the changes in an individual's diet, environment, climate, health, and stress levels".[14] These can be compared to seals in museum collections, collected by Douglas Mawson and Ernest Shackleton, to work out how changes in the ecosystem impact the food chain.[11] By understanding how climate change impacts species in the Antarctic, they can predict how they will cope with changes in the future.[15] She is now considered the word-expert in leopard seals. She has also studied the composition of Whale mucus with the Sydney Institute of Marine Science.[16]

She was awarded the Australian Institute of Policy and Science Young Tall Poppy Science Researcher prize in 2005, and became the Tall Poppy ambassador in 2009.[7] The children at Castle Cove Primary School were so inspired by her seal research they wanted to contribute, and raised money for a satellite tracker off the Western Antarctic Peninsula.[17] Rogers named one of the seals they observed Milo, after a school mascot, and the class tracked it in the ocean for 12 months.[17]

Rogers contributes to The Conversation, National Geographic and Nature.[18][19] She appeared on The Life Scientific in September 2017.[3]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Catalyst: Meeting Tracey Rogers - ABC TV Science". www.abc.net.au. Retrieved 3 April 2018.
  2. ^ "Tracey Rogers - Introduction". lrrpublic.cli.det.nsw.edu.au. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  3. ^ a b "Tracey Rogers on leopard seals and Antarctica, The Life Scientific - BBC Radio 4". BBC. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  4. ^ Rogers, Tracey (1996). Acoustic behaviour of the leopard seal, Hydrurga leptonyx : physical characteristics and functional significance (Thesis thesis).
  5. ^ a b c "Connect the Spots: Revealing Leopard Seal Secrets". news.nationalgeographic.com. Archived from the original on 20 February 2004. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  6. ^ "Professor Tracey Rogers | School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences". www.bees.unsw.edu.au. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  7. ^ a b "Dr Tracey Rogers - AIPS". AIPS. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  8. ^ "Life's a barrel of arfs for a working mum - National - smh.com.au". www.smh.com.au. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  9. ^ SCIENCE, Nicky Phillips (14 May 2010). "His song seals his species' true numbers". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 3 April 2018.
  10. ^ a b "Leopard seals surveyed by sound". msnbc.com. 12 April 2010. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  11. ^ a b c Jha, Alok (19 December 2013). "Antarctica live: the mysterious song of the leopard seal | Alok Jha". the Guardian. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  12. ^ "Antarctic Seals Counted in New Sound Census". Live Science. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  13. ^ Tracey Rogers (8 April 2016), 3 Leopard seal singing close up Tracey Rogers, retrieved 2 April 2018
  14. ^ Rogers, Tracey L.; Fung, Jeffery; Slip, David; Steindler, Lisa; O'Connell, Tamsin C. (1 December 2016). "Calibrating the time span of longitudinal biomarkers in vertebrate tissues when fine-scale growth records are unavailable". Ecosphere. 7 (12). doi:10.1002/ecs2.1449. ISSN 2150-8925.
  15. ^ "News | The University of Sydney". sydney.edu.au. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  16. ^ Ham, Melinda (15 August 2010). "Samples not to be sniffed at" (PDF). Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  17. ^ a b "SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES – The BIG Science Communication Summit". sciencerewired.org. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  18. ^ Rogers, Tracey L. (5 November 2008). "Research rewards are worth the effort for multitasking mothers". Nature. 456 (7218): 29. Bibcode:2008Natur.456...29R. doi:10.1038/456029a. PMID 18987712.
  19. ^ "Tracey Rogers". The Conversation. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
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