November 10, 2020 – Holy smokes! A project I worked on with a whole mess of researchers at MarineGEO has just been published in PNAS! We tested the role of climate and consumer communities on feeding rates across a broad span of latitudes. Check it out here!
September 4, 2020 – I’m back at Friday Harbor Labs one final time to run feeding experiments with sunflower stars and purple urchins. Still in quarantine at the moment but looking forward to getting everything set up for trials next week!
July 7, 2020 – I’ve finally made it back to Friday Harbor Labs! I’ll be in quarantine for a few days until I get a COVID test, then it’s hopefully going to be all lab and field work. We’ll be diving for seastars, conducting feeding trials, and monitoring kelp forests!
May 4, 2020 – Tomorrow (May 5th) I’ll be watching a webinar by John Muir Laws about making a maintaining a nature journal! You can find his calendar of events here.
April 3, 2020 – Well, it’s been a very productive (and crazy) several months. I’m now in quarantine working hard to use the OpenChrom software package to analyze fatty acid molecular data collected from Antarctic seaweeds.
January 27, 2020 – I have officially passed my PhD Proposal Defense and am one step closer to PhD Candidacy!
January 10, 2020 – Today is my first full day at the Charleston Marine Life Center (CMLC). For the next three months I’ll be working with the CMLC to design an interactive exhibit on research at OIMB.
November 25, 2019 – Today I went to Port Orford, OR with the Marine Conservation class from OIMB to check out the Port Orford Field Station. We learned a lot about the Oregon Marine Reserves and Port Orford Sustainable Seafood.
October 23, 2019 – I traveled to Newport, Oregon today to present my research proposal on subtidal algal communities to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
October 11, 2019 – Today I was able to return to my alma mater, the University of British Columbia, to deliver an invited talk about my experiences in Antarctica.
October 6, 2019 – This week I’ll be in beautiful British Columbia for the AAUS/CAUS Joint Symposium! Looking forward to meeting up with other scientific diving professionals from all around the world.
October 1, 2019 – I’m looking forward to my first dives this week with ODFW as a member of their Oregon Marine Reserves dive monitoring team!
September 20, 2019 – Today my lab mate Julie Schram and I got the chance to talk to students at North Bend High School about our experiences in Antarctica. It was great to see so many people take their lunch hour to join us!
September 4, 2019 – Tomorrow I’ll be boarding the RV Oceanus to participate in a weekend field campaign to explore the deep ocean off Oregon’s Coast. No internet onboard, but expect some great deep-sea critter photos when I return!
July 31, 2019 – This week I’m off to Friday Harbor Labs with collaborators Sara Hamilton and Reyn Yoshioka to install the second Kelp Ecosystem Ecology Network (KEEN) site in the San Juan Islands.
July 25, 2019 – Today I led an Introduction to R workshop for the Research Experience for Undergrad (REU) interns here at OIMB. It was a great learning experience for all! Check out the code-in-progress I used to teach the workshop on my github repository.
July 5, 2019 – This weekend I’ll be giving a pub science talk with my lab mate Julie Schram at 7 Devils Brewery in Coos Bay, OR about our trip to Antarctica. Stop by and check it out if you’re in the neighborhood (Sunday July 7, 7:30pm).
June 20, 2019 – Today I presented my proposed work on seaweed communities along the Oregon Coast at OSU’s Markham Symposium. You can find my poster here.
June 5, 2019 – This week I participated in a Bioblitz at OIMB organized by my lab mate Reyn Yoshioka. We collected organisms on dives for our taxonomic experts and retrieved ARMS, managing to find around 800 species!
June 1, 2019 – We’ve returned to Oregon after an exciting two months in Antarctica! See some of the work we did in this video put together by graduate researcher Sabrina Heiser.
April 8, 2019 – We are officially on our way to Antarctica! Follow my Twitter account or our project blog to get the latest on our study of #AntarcticSeaweedGradients.
March 14, 2019 – The blog for our upcoming trip to Antarctica just went live! You can follow along as we explore seaweed gradients up and down the Antarctic Peninsula this April on our page at National Geographic Open Explorer.
February 26, 2019 – The stars have aligned and I was able to make it to the Pacific Northwest Dive Safety Officer meeting today hosted by the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium. Great to see dive professionals from all over the PNW representing academic institutions, aquariums, and government organizations!
February 22, 2019 – I’m in Orlando, FL this weekend for the AAUS spring board of director’s meeting. Lots of Academy business to take care of!
February 13, 2019 – This week I spent two days at the Oregon Coast Aquarium training to become an Oregon Marine Reserve survey diver! With any luck I’ll be out in the field counting fish, invertebrates, and algae at one of the five coastal reserves very soon.
January 24, 2019 – My photo of a sunflower star in a British Columbia seagrass meadow is featured on the cover of Ecosphere this month!
November 16, 2018 – The work I did on invertebrate metacommunities in seagrass meadows as a Masters student has just been published in Ecosphere! Find the open access article here.
November 8, 2018 – I’m in Tacoma, Washington this weekend for the Western Society of Naturalists Conference. I’ll be representing AAUS at a table in the Rotunda, so come by and say ‘hi’!
October 11, 2018 – This week I’m in Lake Tahoe for the American Academy of Underwater Sciences Annual Symposium. About 140 participants from all around the world are gathering to share their scientific diving knowledge and expertise!
September 17, 2018 – Today is my first unofficial day in the CTEL Lab! I’m looking forward to exploring kelp forest ecology of the Oregon Coast for the next several years.
July 22, 2018 – Tomorrow I leave for the Canadian High Arctic Research Station (CHARS) to participate in the joint Polar Knowledge, OceanWise, and MarineGEO #MarineGEOArctic 2018 campaign! We will conduct biodiversity collections, Reef Life Survey SCUBA surveys, and deploy Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS) for later collection. Follow updates from my Twitter account.
June 1, 2018 – A lot has happened in the last month. I’ve moved back to the West Coast where I’ll start my Ph.D. in September and I’ve taken a position as an associate researcher with the Smithsonian. This month I’ll be assisting with the Marine Subtidal Ecology course at Friday Harbor Labs. Follow along with the subtidal science excitement by searching #MSE2018FHL
April 3, 2018 – I have just been awarded the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship! I’m looking forward to putting it to good use studying the subtidal ecology of the Oregon Coast.
March 18, 2018 – I have official accepted an offer to join the Coastal Trophic Ecology Lab at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology (University of Oregon) for a PhD program in the fall!
February 21, 2018 – I’ve recently been appointed to the Board of Directors for the American Academy of Underwater Sciences! This week I’ll be attending my first board meeting, held at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta.
February 7, 2018 – This week I’m off to the IOOS Biological Data Training workshop in Seattle. We’ll be learning the nuts and bolts of contributing data to the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), a powerful crowd-sourced biodiversity database. You can check out their really cool mapping tool here.
January 20, 2018 – Today I’ll be giving a talk at the Baltimore Dive Show about scientific diving and the MarineGEO program. Looking forward to seeing members of the Black Girls Dive Foundation in the audience!
December 11, 2017 – I’ve started cobbling together an electronic lab notebook (ELN) online using exclusively open-source software including Hugo, Git, and the blogdown package in R. You can find it at my notebook website here.
November 17, 2017 – This month I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)! Will I write 50,000 words in 30 days? Follow my NaNo updates on Twitter. You can also track my progress with the word count widget on my blog page.
October 31, 2017 – This week I’m off to DEMA (The Diving Equipment & Marketing Association trade show) in Orlando to catch up on the latest in dive training, equipment, and safety.
October 2, 2017 – Tomorrow (October 3rd), The Ocean Portal will stream live from the Smithsonian’s Carrie Bow Cay field station at 12PT, 3ET. We’ll be there to answer questions and show you what life for a marine biologist on a tiny tropical island is like. Join the conversation here!
September 26, 2017 – For the next two weeks I’ll be conducting research at the Smithsonian’s Carrie Bow Cay Field Station in Belize! I’ll be tweeting photos, and The Ocean Portal will live-stream a day-in-the-life at Carrie Bow on Facebook early next week. Follow them here to watch and ask questions!
September 10, 2017 – I’m off to the American Academy of Underwater Sciences Symposium at the Thunder Bay Marine Sanctuary in Alpena, Michigan this week. Photos of shipwrecks coming shortly.
September 8, 2017 – Some of my photos were featured in a Smithsonian Insider article about the importance of biodiversity and new research that reveals just how important it is for healthy ecosystems. Check them out here!
July 24, 2017 – Research I contributed to with collaborators at the Smithsonian has just been published here in Marine Ecology Progress Series. What can bioacoustics tell us about marine biodiversity?
July 21, 2017 – This week I’m off to Friday Harbor Labs to map seagrass with drones. Then I’ll be headed to the Hakai Institute for the first MarineGEO bioblitz of British Columbia’s Central Coast. Search #MarineGEOBC to follow along!
June 25, 2017 – Check out my new Media page highlighting print and multimedia projects I have contributed to.
June 21, 2017 – A great video put together by Smithsonian Global has just been released featuring the work of MarineGEO at the Carrie Bow Cay Station in Belize. Find it here!
May 19, 2017 – This week I’m off to Hawai’i for the MarineGEO Ola I ke kai (Life Emanates from the Sea) Biodiversity survey! Over 90 participants will join from around the world. You can follow along on my blog, or by searching #MarineGEOHI on social media.
May 3, 2017 – I’m running for a position on the Board of Directors for the American Academy of Underwater Sciences (AAUS). Find out more here.
April 1, 2017 – Just made it back from Tasmania. Check out my post about the trip here.
March 9, 2017 – MarineGEO is on its way to Tasmania for the next two weeks! Check back for updates on Twitter and my Blog.
December 29, 2016 – The MarineGEO Squidpop video is finally up on YouTube. You can find a post about it here.
December 20, 2016 – After several weeks on leave I’m back at MarineGEO Central to prep for our upcoming trips to Florida, Tasmania, San Francisco, Friday Harbor, Hawai’i and Hakai BC. Lots to do, stay tuned for updates!
Ross Whippo 