Rosenberg Institute Seminar Series - Pádraig Duignan

Pádraig Duignan, Director of Pathology-Chief Scientist, The Marine Mammal Center (TMMC), Sausalito, CA

Climate Change and Disease Ecology: How are California’s Marine Mammals Faring 25 Years into the 21^st Century

Abstract: TMMC was established 50 years ago as a rehabilitation hospital for locally stranded marine mammals but over the past 30 years, our research has focused on the changing patterns of disease and the emergence of novel pathogens and threats. This temporal window coincides with the period of greatest global warming experienced by our planet since the start of the Anthropocene. Over this interval we have documented significant changes in the ecology of established endemic diseases such as leptospirosis in California sea lions linked to unprecedented thermal anomalies in the North Pacific; witnessed the emergence of Harmful Algal Blooms and the more subtle and insidious rise in fungal and protozoal diseases along our coast. The environmental perturbations affecting the temporal and spatial occurrence of these events and their severity are also altering the distribution of prey species, invertebrates and fish, not only impacting health through nutritional state but also be changing migration routes and patterns of aggregation that directly affect routes and rates of disease transmission. 

Bio: Pádraig graduated with an honors B.Sc. in zoology, M.Sc. in biochemistry and a DVM from University College Dublin. He compelted a pathology residency and a Ph.D. in marine mammal pathology from the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. After a further one-year pathology residencey at UC Davis, he accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at Massey University, New Zealand, focused on cetacean pathology and a year later, this became a faculty position during which he established the NZ Wildlife Health Center and was the first director until 2006. During this period his research was mainly focused on the endangered NZ sea lion in the Auckland Islands, and endangered Hector’s and Maui dolphins around the North and South Islands. After  NZ, he held faculty positions at the University of Melbourne, Australia, continuing health research on Australian fur seals and bottlenose dolphins as well as terrestrial wildlife, and at the University of Calgary, Alberta, as a teaching academic and pathologist for the Canadian Wildife Health Cooperative. In Canada, he continued involvement with research on NZ and Australian marine mammals and initiated a new project on narwhals in the Canadian high Arctic. He has held his current position at TMMC for almost 10 years. Some of his publications may be found here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=whjdsDwAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate or through the TMMC home page: https://www.marinemammalcenter.org/citation-list