Profile Field Tabs

Biography

Mahmud Rahman is an international Master’s student from Bangladesh where the largest population of Ganges River dolphins live. He has a bachelor’s degree in Fisheries and became interested in dolphins while working with Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). His primary job at WCS involved building a citizen science fishermen network, to help collect data on by-catch of cetaceans (e.g., Ganges River dolphins, Irrawaddy dolphins and Humpback dolphins) and elasmobranchs. Part of this project involved developing software for data collection by forestry officials but also fishermen who could not read. And then also to be the bridge between fishermen, the forestry managers and the scientists at WCS. Being passionate about electronics, programming, and behavioral ecology, he realized that advanced technology could aide in research, and could be useful in mapping behavioral networks. This excites him the most and has pushed him to pursue a Masters in the LABIRINTO lab. His research will be investigating risk taking in dolphins focusing on a residential bottlenose population in the Florida Keys. For this project Mahmud will investigate whether individuals vary in risk taking and then the impact associations could have on the spread of risk taking across a population. This understanding will allow Mahmud to come up with a proxy for the future success of dolphins in the keys who will be impacted by rising sea levels occurring from climate change. His research project is supported by Mary Lou and Bruce Mate Marine Mammal Fellowship.

At OSU
Affiliated with: 
Laboratory for Animal Behavioral Interaction Research (LABIRINTO)
Marine Mammal Institute