Rate My Professor Ariel-Micaiah Heswall

Ariel-Micaiah Heswall is a Research Fellow in sensory and urban ecology at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland. Her work centres on seabird sensory ecology, examining how seabirds perceive and respond to environmental threats including artificial light at night and marine plastics. She completed a BSc (Honours) at the University of Auckland in 2019 and was awarded her PhD from the same institution in 2024 for the thesis titled Exploring how seabirds visually perceive threats in the environment using sensory ecology.

Heswall has authored or co-authored multiple peer-reviewed publications on related topics. These include the 2022 paper Artificial light at night correlates with seabird groundings: mapping city lights near a seabird breeding hotspot in PeerJ, the 2021 paper Seabird bycatch risk correlates with body size, and relatively larger skulls, bills, wings and sensory structures in Marine Biology, and the 2023 paper Why did they die? Analysing the cause of death of grounded seabirds lodged at an avian rescue centre in Auckland, New Zealand in Notornis. Additional works address plastic ingestion by seabirds and behavioural interactions of penguins with plastics, published in Marine Pollution Bulletin and Applied Animal Behaviour Science. Her research contributes to understanding sensory modalities in seabirds and informs conservation efforts in urban and marine environments.