Happy Holidays COASSTers!
Here in the office, it’s hard to believe another year has slipped by. And sooo many things happened this year.
After eight years, first as our Participant Coordinator, and then as our Science Coordinator, Jackie Lindsey fledged the COASST nest and is on to new adventures. Before leaving, she found and trained a wonderful replacement, Florence Sullivan, who joined us in January after curating Pacific Whale Foundation’s Humpback whale catalogs in Hawaii. We got another new addition to the office in September when Bibi Powers-McCormack joined COASST as a new PhD student. Eager to get going, Bibi has already been working on the COASST marine debris biofouling dataset.
COASST Executive Director, Julia Parrish has been busy working with faculty collaborator Jaime Snyder, a professor at the UW’s iSchool, on the design of a new beached marine mammal guide and protocol. Some of you got to participate in a marine mammal workshop, categorizing toothed whale head shots, and sorting carcass photos on a “grossness” scale. Want to know what’s the most gross? Tough luck! This is a holiday letter! Check out our Blog for that information.
In between running eight marine mammal workshops, Allie, Florence and Julia managed to tuck 34 beached bird trainings into this year’s schedule. Whew! That’s almost 200 trainees, including refreshers and COASSTLite! Level 2 folks. Welcome new COASSTers! We hope you enjoy surveying as much as COASST veteran Gary Lester, our stalwart SuperCOASSTer in the Humboldt region who topped 1,000 surveys this year! Go Gary!!
On the DIY front, Participant Coordinator Allie Brown solved the ever-increasing price of our eco-sustainable tags by talking her way into the maker space at the UW. After “heated adventures” with the laser cutter, Allie settled on bamboo (field-tested by COASSTer BB Bainbridge!), and even figured out how to save material by making the tags square.
Regarding birds, we added Pacific Golden Plover, White-crowned Sparrow, and Muscovy Duck to our species list (82 species found in 2025, and a stunning 221 to date!). A big thanks to COASSTer Marinell Croson for collecting a Cocos Booby for the COASST teaching collection. Meanwhile, our carcass count has quietly crept over one hundred thousand (101,294 to be exact)! There’s a “long tail of rarity” – many species with only one or two records – as well as some commons. Just under 30% of the total (29,265) are Common Murres, a testament to the ubiquity of this species along the West Coast and up into Alaska, and a sobering reminder of how a warming ocean is pushing this species to the edge.
This holiday season, we celebrate all of you – our science stands on the shoulders of COASSTers out there surveying, rain or shine. You’ve helped us amass the largest beached bird dataset in the world, allowing COASST and scientific collaborators to tell stories of environmental change through the lens of marine birds. Together, we’re one of the best examples of why, and how, public engagement makes science better.
Happy Holidays!
Julia, Florence, Allie, Charlie, Bibi, and the COASST Interns