Stefanie K. Gazda
· Associate Instructional Professor, Biology Online Major CoordinatorVerifiedUniversity of Florida · Biology
Active 2005–2024
About
Dr. Stefanie K. Gazda is an Associate Instructional Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Florida, where she also serves as the Online Education Coordinator. Her academic background includes a Ph.D. in Marine Science and Technology from the Intercampus Marine Sciences Graduate Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston, earned in 2015. Her dissertation focused on examining sociological differences and the influence of prey distribution and environmental variability in the distribution of the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). She holds a Master of Science in Marine Biology from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, completed in 2002, with a thesis on role specialization among foraging bottlenose dolphins off Cedar Key, Florida. Her undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Science in Marine and Freshwater Biology from the University of New Hampshire, earned in 2000, and she participated in a National Exchange Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1998–1999. Her research interests include advancing student-centered pedagogy, promoting inclusion and diversity within classes, and studying the role of spatial structure and environmental variables in shaping habitat usage by large predators and prey. She investigates how different spatial and temporal scales affect predator-prey dynamics and applies the One Health Initiative to estuarine systems to monitor regime change and ecosystem health through sentinel species.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Psychology
- Artificial Intelligence
- Ecology
- Biology
- Neuroscience
- Speech recognition
- Telecommunications
- Physics
- Communication
- Acoustics
- Multimedia
- Medicine
- Medical education
- Mathematics education
Selected publications
International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education · 2024-01-15
articleOpen accessSenior authorInternational Journal of Science and Mathematics Education · 2023 · 1 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Mathematics education
- Computer Science
Aquatic Mammals · 2022-11-06
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingBottlenose dolphin communication during a role-specialized group foraging task
Behavioural Processes · 2022 · 11 citations
- Communication
- Psychology
- Ecology
A division of labor with role specialization is defined as individuals specializing in a subtask during repetitions of a group task. While this behavior is ubiquitous among humans, there are only four candidates found among non-eusocial mammals: lions, mice, chimpanzees, and bottlenose dolphins. Bottlenose dolphins in the Cedar Keys, Florida, engage in role specialized "driver-barrier feeding", where a "driver" dolphin herds mullet towards "barrier" dolphins. Thus trapped, the mullet leap out of the water where the dolphins catch them in air. To investigate whether dolphins use acoustic cues or signals to coordinate this behavior, vocalizations were recorded before and during driver-barrier feeding. Results of fine-scale audio and video analysis during 81 events by 7 different driver individuals suggest that barrier animals coordinate movements during these events by cueing on the driver's echolocation. Analysis of dolphin whistle occurrence before driving events versus another foraging technique, which does not involve role specialization, revealed significantly higher whistle production immediately prior to driver-barrier events. Possible whistle functions include signaling motivation, recruiting individuals to participate, and/or behavioral coordination. While the use of cues and signals is common in humans completing role-specialized tasks, this is the first study to investigate the use of vocalizations in the coordination of a role-specialized behavior in a non-human mammal.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2021 · 3 citations
- Computer Science
- Computer Science
- Artificial Intelligence
Much can be learned by investigating the click trains of odontocetes, including estimating the number of vocalizing animals and comparing the acoustic behavior of different individuals. Analyzing such information gathered from groups of echolocating animals in a natural environment is complicated by two main factors: overlapping echolocation produced by multiple animals at the same time, and varying levels of background noise. Starkhammar et al. [(2011a). Biol. Lett. 7(6), 836-839] described an algorithm that measures and compares the frequency spectra of individual clicks to identify groups of clicks produced by different individuals. This study presents an update to this click group separation algorithm that improves performance by comparing multiple click characteristics. There is a focus on reducing error when high background noise levels cause false click detection and recordings are of a limited frequency bandwidth, making the method applicable to a wide range of existing datasets. This method was successfully tested on recordings of free-swimming foraging dolphins with both low and high natural background noise levels. The algorithm can be adjusted via user-set parameters for application to recordings with varying sampling parameters and to species of varying click characteristics, allowing for estimates of the number of echolocating animals in free-swimming groups.
Advances in higher education and professional development book series · 2019-04-01
book-chapterSenior authorBoth individual online courses and fully online programs in the United States have gained widespread acceptance. They are also more diverse than ever due to students' demographic changes. There are multiple challenges to student learning and to instructor teaching, and in this chapter, the authors present literature on online learning challenges and possible best practices for faculty training, instructional design, course content, intercultural miscommunication, accessibility for students with disabilities, and social isolation. Use of inclusive teaching methods are recommended. These are methods that promote effective cross-cultural pedagogies including methods that create learning tasks that foster reciprocal learning about cultures, expose learners to multiple perspectives, and facilitate development of skills in global thinking and intercultural competence. Use of universal instructional techniques to address multiple learning styles and integrating multicultural perspectives in course content have resulted in student success, satisfaction, as well as reduced stress and social isolation in online classes.
Marine Mammal Science · 2016-03-24 · 16 citations
article1st authorCorresponding2015-01-01
article1st authorCorrespondingThe purpose of this dissertation was to examine the influence of environmental variability on the distribution of prey, and the influence of prey spatial structure and habitat variability may have on the distributions of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). Additionally I examined how sociological differences (behavior type and the changes in a foraging behavior specific to Cedar Key Florida) influences the relative roles of bottlenose dolphins within the population. The Gowans et al. scheme assumes that small groups form small communities and that foraging groups are small and rare as there are few foraging benefits to promote grouping. Using network analysis, I found that foraging occurs in small groups or alone, but there were preferential associations between individuals in Overall, Socialize, and Travel networks. I examined driver-barrier foraging behavior over several field seasons to assess the prediction that there are few foraging benefits to promote grouping. The driver dolphin does have greater catch success than the barrier dolphins regardless of group size. There is also evidence that barrier dolphins may have a role in increasing foraging efficiency by decreasing the number of incomplete bouts. Both the driver and barrier dolphins do better in larger groups when incomplete bouts are factored in. Therefore there are some foraging benefits that can promote grouping. In bottlenose dolphin foraging research, it is often assumed that habitat use is related to prey availability, though this is rarely directly tested. From my collaborative work using a database collected by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission’s Fisheries-Independent Monitoring (FIM) program, I evaluated the abundance of potential prey and their relationship to habitat and other biological and physical variables. I used MULTISPATI, which uses principal components analysis to partition and display patterns of spatial variation. The results show that there are correlations between fish-site scores and environmental variables. Spatial analysis of fish produced clear results, however neither PCA nor MULTISPATI could explain dolphin distribution. This is likely because the spatial scales are not the same grain for the comparisons; dolphins are highly mobile large marine predators (the scale is fine grained), and their prey are significantly smaller and habitat-specific (the scale is coarser).
Royal Society Open Science · 2015-03-01 · 22 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingNetwork analysis has proved to be a valuable tool for studying the behavioural patterns of complex social animals. Often such studies either do not distinguish between different behavioural states of the organisms or simply focus attention on a single behavioural state to the exclusion of all others. In either of these approaches it is impossible to ascertain how the behavioural patterns of individuals depend on the type of activity they are engaged in. Here we report on a network-based analysis of the behavioural associations in a population of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in Cedar Key, Florida. We consider three distinct behavioural states-socializing, travelling and foraging-and analyse the association networks corresponding to each activity. Moreover, in constructing the different activity networks we do not simply record a spatial association between two individuals as being either present or absent, but rather quantify the degree of any association, thus allowing us to construct weighted networks describing each activity. The results of these weighted activity networks indicate that networks can reveal detailed patterns of bottlenose dolphins at the population level; dolphins socialize in large groups with preferential associations; travel in small groups with preferential associates; and spread out to forage in very small, weakly connected groups. There is some overlap in the socialize and travel networks but little overlap between the forage and other networks. This indicates that the social bonds maintained in other activities are less important as they forage on dispersed, solitary prey. The overall network, not sorted by activity, does not accurately represent any of these patterns.
Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · 2005-01-19 · 271 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingIndividual role specialization during group hunting is extremely rare in mammals. Observations on two groups of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in Cedar Key, Florida revealed distinctive behavioural roles during group feeding. In each group, one individual was consistently the 'driver', herding the fishes in a circle toward the remaining 'barrier' dolphins. Aerial fish-capture rates differed between groups, as well as between the driver and barrier dolphins, in one group but not in the other. These differences between the two groups may reflect differences in group stability or in prey school size.
Frequent coauthors
- 5 shared
Richard C. Connor
Florida International University
- 4 shared
Rebecca A. Hamilton
University of Manchester
- 2 shared
Brenda Such
University of Florida
- 2 shared
Josefin Starkhammar
Lund University
- 1 shared
Timothy Killingback
University of Massachusetts Boston
- 1 shared
Frank Cox
Washington State Department of Health
- 1 shared
Teresa Mutahi
University of Florida
- 1 shared
Solange Brault
University of Massachusetts Boston
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