Professional Development Speaker Series - A CAREER JOURNEY WITH WILDLIFE AT SEA AND ASHORE

Marc Webber recently retired from a 30-year career with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in the National Wildlife Refuge and Marine Mammals Management Programs. His last assignment was as Deputy Manager of the 4 million acre Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge which is home to more than 60% of North America’s breeding seabirds, and provides habitat for numerous pinniped species including an endangered population of Steller sea lions, and threatened populations of polar bears, andnorthern sea otters.

He is an Adjunct Instructor and Affiliate Faculty in Biology at the Kachemak Bay Campus of the University of Alaskain Homer, and is a member of the Alaska Marine Mammal Stranding Network. He worked extensively with stranded marine mammals at The Marine Mammal Center from 1976-1992, in Alaska from 2010-2020, and has studied small cetaceans including harbor porpoises, bottlenose and dusky dolphins, and pinnipeds, including Hawaiian monk seals, Pacific walrus, California sea lions, and Northern fur seals. 

He has also lead natural history expeditions in Antarctica, the Arctic, South America, off the California coast, and in Baja and the Gulf of California. Marc has worked as an observer and Cetacean Identification Specialist for the National Marine Fisheries Service on survey cruises in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. In the Arctic he has been a Marine Mammal Observer on Coast Guard icebreakers from Greenland to Alaska, flown aerial surveys for walrus in the Bering and Chukchi seas, and traveled to Russia to collaborate on walrus research.

Marc is a co-author of “Marine Mammals of the World: A Comprehensive Guide to their Identification" (Academic Press, 2008 & 2015) along with chapters in other books and peer reviewed papers in journals. In 2010 Marc co-founded Golden Gate Cetacean Research, a non-profit organization,to focus scientific research on the porpoises, dolphins and whales in San Francisco Bay and along the Northern California coast. He is a Research Associate at the California Academy of Sciences, and The Marine Mammal Center. His current research focus is on the cetaceans of the San Francisco Bay Area: harbor porpoises, bottlenose dolphins, gray whales and humpback whales, and he continues his lifelong fascination with pinnipeds through several ongoing projects. Marc holds a Master of Arts in Biology from San Francisco State University.