Noyo Center to host talk on marine mammals

FORT BRAGG » Sarah Grimes, the Noyo Center’s Marine Mammal Stranding Coordinator, has an unusual job, and she will be coming to share her stories about all of the marine mammal strandings she has investigated over the past year.

It’s a big part of Grimes’ job to range up and down the Mendocino Coast collecting data on deceased marine mammals that have been reported — from harbor seals to blue whales. Grimes takes photos and collects data on each stranded mammal and looks for possible human interactions. In just the past year, she has been called out to investigate and document stranded California sea lions, harbor seals, Guadalupe and northern fur seals, gray and humpback whales, and more.

The information she gathers is fed into a national database of information maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that helps scientists better understand the health of the various marine mammal populations both locally and up and down the entire Pacific Coast.

It can be grim work but, for Grimes, every marine mammal is a unique individual whose life and death forms an important part of that great biological mosaic that is the North Coast.

Through Noyo Center’s partnership with California Academy of Sciences and as a member of the West Coast regional Stranding Network, Grimes is this area’s designated response officer with legal authority for conducting marine mammal investigations.