Evening’s Moderator: Jameson French with Ashley Stokes of the Seacoast Science Center’s Marine Mammal Rescue

It might be their large, strangely human eyes or their dog-like playfulness, but seals have long captured people’s interest and affection, making them the perfect candidate for an environmental cause, as well as the subject of decades of study. Alix Morris spends a year with these magnetic creatures and brings them to life on the page, season by season, as she learns about their intelligence, their relationships with each other, their ecosystems, and the changing climate.

Morris also gets to know all of the competing interests in the intense debate about the newly recovered seal populations in our coastal waters, from local fishermen whose catch is often diminished by savvy seals, to tribes who once relied on seal-hunting for food, clothing, and medicine, to seal rescue workers and biologists, to surfers and swimmers now encountering seal-hunting sharks in coastal waters. A Year with the Seals is a rare look at what happens when conservation efforts actually work, and how human tampering with ecosystems continues to have unexpected consequences. But it’s also a gripping adventure story of a journalist determined to understand seals and our relationship with them for herself.

Alix Morris is a science writer in midcoast Maine. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, Smithsonian, Sierra Magazine, MIT Technology Review, Down East Magazine, and elsewhere, and she has graduate degrees in science writing from MIT and global health from Johns Hopkins. Her first book, A Year with the Seals, is supported by a grant from the Sloan Foundation.

Joining Alix Morris will be Ashley Stokes of the Marine Mammal Rescue Team at Seacoast Science Center. MMR responds to all reports of live (healthy, injured, sick) and deceased seals, whales, porpoises, and dolphins in NH and northern MA (from Essex, MA, to the Maine border). All marine mammals are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, enacted by the federal government on October 21, 1972. Fulfilling this requirement, Seacoast Science Center Marine Mammal Rescue staffs a 24/7 hotline (603-997-9448) and responds to all reports of marine mammals that haul out or strand on the shore in New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts (from Essex, MA to the Maine border). MMR leads the response and rescue and conducts health assessments and triage while collaborating necropsy labs conduct postmortem exams and rehabilitation facilities care for and release animals.

Ashley Stokes is the Senior Director of Science and Administration at Seacoast Science Center. She founded and started the Program in 2014 and has responded to over 1,500 seals, dolphins, porpoises, and whales, and has been with the Science Center for over 20 years. She also has a degree in Marine Biology from the University of Rhode Island.