Macy Gosselaar

My name is Macy Gosselaar and I graduated from Ottawa University with a B.S. in biology. I am originally from the Netherlands but have resided in Kansas for the majority of my life. I was fortunate enough to have family who lived in the Pacific Northwest and was able to visit Vancouver, British Columbia for most summers throughout college. Last summer, I volunteered at the Vancouver Aquarium and worked as an Amazon Animal Observer. I also had the opportunity to work in the Marine Mammal Rescue Center by helping restore injured harbor seals off the coast of B.C. I was also a part of an ocean ecosystem class at the University of British Columbia. One of my favorite parts of the summer was becoming dry suit and open water certified in scuba diving through the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. I had a great training experience swimming alongside a harbor seal and her pup, spiny dogfish, jellyfish, and the miraculous giant sea star. I am continuing my diving currently to work on buoyancy control that can be used for future scientific dives. My senior year of college I studied sound production and how it influences community structure and group population in the common clownfish. Clownfish exhibit a unique strict size dominance hierarchy and are an organism of sequential hermaphroditism. I tested physical and chemical predation cues using predatory-like figures and conspecific extracts. I became very passionate about this project as there are many purposes for why marine organisms use sound to communicate. I am planning on pursuing a graduate degree in marine sciences, and am interested in studying the interactions between environmental and physiological variation in marine species. I am most interested to see how organisms respond to multiple environmental stressors (Salinity, temperature, etc.) and what the consequences are of these mechanisms. I am very excited to have the opportunity to work with photo identification of rough-toothed dolphins for the Hawai’i project this summer.