Jude Lane
Friday, June 22nd, 2018
The first paper from research I have been involved with has been published! Gannets, like many marine predators, can travel hundreds or thousands of kilometres to find food, but how they learn to locate prey patches in the open ocean has […]
Thursday, August 17th, 2017
One of the most exciting aspects of the field season is getting to download the data from the GPS tags and seeing where the gannets have been. As in previous years, we left the tags on for 7 to 10 days allowing us to record multiple trips from each bird. A popular foraging location for […]
Tuesday, May 16th, 2017
Our return visits to the Bass certainly didn’t disappoint! If you read the previous blog, you’ll know we put out some GPS loggers on gannets in April this year in a first attempt at finding out how they behave early in the breeding season before they are constrained by incubating eggs or feeding chicks. The […]
Tuesday, April 25th, 2017
My first field work blog of the year is a little earlier than usual. This is because, excitingly, we are attempting to gather some slightly different data this year. As I explained in Gannet Grabbing, the GPS tagging of adult gannets has traditionally taken place during the period of the breeding season when the birds […]
Tuesday, June 28th, 2016
Every gannet on Bass Rock that has been tracked with a GPS logger over the last 15 years has been fitted with two identification rings. A small metal BTO ring with a long identification number and a larger plastic colour ring with a unique four digit code. The metal rings are extremely difficult to read […]
Friday, May 6th, 2016
Last month I took part in the 2nd World Seabird Twitter Conference #WSTC2 If you’ve never heard of a twitter conference they are a fantastic medium, not only for enabling scientists to communicate and exchange information but also for providing a unique opportunity for the general public to find out about and engage with the work of […]
Thursday, April 28th, 2016
The 2nd NERC Spheres DTP Conference schedule has now been announced and promises two days packed with talks and posters and talking posters covering research on the Earth’s atmosphere, biosphere and geosphere. First and second year PhD students working within five departments at the University of Leeds and one at the University of York, will […]
Tuesday, March 8th, 2016
The gannet research blog has been quiet over the last 6 months … the gannets left the colony at the end of the summer and I returned to Leeds to make a start analysing some of the data we collected. Until now there hasn’t really been too much to blog about, my days have […]
Monday, September 7th, 2015
So in my first blog I talked about how we use GPS devices to record fixes of a gannets’ location in order to create maps of where it’s been. Using the locations and the time at which they were taken we can calculate metrics such as the distance and duration of a foraging trip. A more detailed […]
Friday, August 21st, 2015
The gannets of Bass Rock have a long history of being studied; the late Bryan Nelson dedicated years of his life to watching, recording and understanding their behaviour. To someone like me, Bryan’s book ‘The Gannet’ is pretty much the bible when it comes to these incredible birds. However, once they left the colony […]