Cape Town

Tonight Tim and I fly to Cape Town, South Africa to attend the Society of Marine Mammalogy biennal conference. I’ll present my Gabon manatee research as a scientific poster at a Sirenian Workshop before the main conference, as well as in an oral presentation at the main conference. The thought of speaking to 500 people is more than a bit intimidating, especially when the data is preliminary. But I’ve been happily surprised at the amount of interest my Gabon research has generated by organizers of this conference- I was actually invited to give 3 talks and had to decline some of them because I just don’t have enough information yet to split it into separate 15 minute talks. There is so little research going on with W. African manatees and the scientific community seems starved for data, so it’s good to get the information out there and hopefully this conference will lead to support of more work down the road.

Here’s a miniture preview of the poster, sorry I can’t load a larger image! Hopefully after the conference I can create a link to a downloadable version.

I’ll post updates from Cape Town and look forward to seeing some of you there!