Board of Directors’ Meeting. The next Board of Directors’ meeting (the inaugural meeting of the 2019-2021 Board of Directors) is scheduled for this Saturday, November 2, 2019, at the Holiday Inn Sacramento, Downtown-Arena, River City View Room (300 J Street, 16th Floor, Sacramento, CA 95814), commencing at 9 a.m.
All members are welcome to attend; parking will be validated. The Final Agenda and Proposed Motions can be found on the CAPS website in the Members Only section.
CDPH Open Opportunities Program Launching Soon. CAPS received notice from the California Department of Public Health that they will be launching the Open Opportunities Program – “an online program offering CDPH employees professional development opportunities that facilitate collaboration, knowledge sharing, and innovation across the Department.” The voluntary program will limit participants to one approved project at a time and projects are limited to two (2) to four (4) hours per week. The program is anticipated to be implemented on or after November 22, 2019.
Know Your Rights. Overtime Meal Allowance. It still exists! A side letter within the CAPS MOU provides for a meal allowance up to $7.50 for employees who are “required to work two (2) consecutive hours prior or two (2) consecutive hours after the regular work shift.” If you encounter problems with your Overtime Meal Allowance, contact CAPS (caps@capsscientists.org).
CAPSule on the Web. The latest issue of CAPSule is now available. Watch for the October issue in your mailbox soon! If you’d prefer to go green, and opt-out of the paper copy of CAPSule, click here.
News Briefs
What We Can Learn about the Coast from Sick Sea Otters – CAPS member Melissa Miller’s job is to listen to what sea otters have to say about the things that are killing them. Conducting hundreds of post-mortem examinations on sea otters is one way she does this as a California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) pathologist and wildlife veterinarian. Now Miller has coauthored a paper recently published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B that uses genetic data to link the particular strain of Toxoplasma gondii killing sea otters and other endangered wildlife to strains found in cat feces. The pathogen also causes the infection in humans, and is a leading cause of foodborne illness deaths in the United States.
Massive California Kelp Decline Linked to Ocean Heat, Voracious Sea Urchins — Envision California’s lush forests from San Francisco to the Oregon border. Now imagine that 90 percent of those forests disappear within two years. CAPS member Laura Rogers-Bennett, a Senior Environmental Scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), says that’s exactly what happened to underwater kelp forests off Northern California’s coastline from 2014-16. Her analysis, published this week in Scientific Reports, documents the rapid decline of California’s bull kelp.