Gordon Sarratt
MARC ISR class of 2026
How do migratory species create a more ecologically interconnected world? what happens when a keystone species is only present for part of the year? do changes in one ecosystem affect changes in another via changing migration?
These are the kinds of questions I'm interested in helping learn about with my research. I'm interested in the intersection between landscape ecology and behavioral ecology, and how the seasonal migration of ecosystem engineers and keystone species affects our world's ecosystems.
Gray Whales are unique among baleen whales for lots of reasons: their short baleen, their resilience in the face of industrial whaling, and especially their feeding habits. One such feeding habit is called intertidal pit feeding and is exhibited only by a small population of whales who take a detour on their migration into the Puget sound to feed on Ghost shrimp. This behavior, invented by a pair of whales named "Earhart" and "Shackleton" in the 1990s, involves whales waiting for high tide and going into the roughly 2m deep water of the intertidal zone and filtering the shrimp out from the mud. this behavior is new among whales, and it's the focus of my research project. I'm measuring the frequency, size, and change over time in the pits that they leave behind.