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Photo Marylou Blakeslee
A leopard seal takes a break on an ice floe. |
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Blakeslee talks arctic change
Banner Daily Update Sun. Nov. 11
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
Artist and naturalist Marylou Blakeslee will give an illustrated talk at 3 p.m. on Sunday at the Wellfleet Library, 55 West Main St. on “The Bering Sea and the Antarctic Peninsula: Change in Cold Water.” The program is free.
Blakeslee has spent 13 years working in Alaska and four years in Antarctica. During her years she has observed first hand what is happening due to climate change and how the arctic regions are being affected.
“There has been so much in the media about climate change,” she says. She adds that she has so often been asked by people who know her personal experience to talk to them about what she’s seen and that inspired her to offer to do a talk at the library.
"I’ve seen changes in animals and in their behavior,” she says. “For example, the California sea lion’s range has increased beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.” Whereas the animal’s range fairly recently stopped well short of the Canadian border it now had extended into the Pribilof Islands in Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska.
During her talk she will focus on marine mammals like the sea lions and whales and will not get into land animal behavior found in species like the mountain goat or elk. She will likely talk about polar bears, however.
She will talk about changes to the Antarctic ice shelf and hopes to introduce people to some animals from down there that they are not familiar with at all.
Certainly the issue of climate change is more than a theory to Blakeslee who tracks how animal behavior responds.
“The shifting is going on already,” she says.
This is a web only report.
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Nov 8th, 2007