Once a year for two months, the cacophony of barking coming from the Newport Sea Lion Docks falls silent. “They will probably be absent from the Yaquina Bay and most of the Oregon coast from early June to late July,” said Jim Rice, Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Stranding Program manager.
MMI grad student and postdoctoral researchers were recently aboard the R/V Bell M. Shimada as part of ongoing marine mammal surveys. Listen to a 4-min story here to share in their excitement over finding the tiny crustaceans that whales call food.
“All these sightings over the past month have been pretty exciting,” Leigh Torres said. “And what’s especially cool here is that you can view them from the shore pretty easily.”
Marine ecologist Bob Pitman witnessed some extraordinary things during his career. In this episode of the All Things Wild podcast, Bob shares an incredible account of humpback whales protecting seals from killer whales.
What do you do if you happen across a carcass or an animal that seems to be in distress? Call the Stranding Network at 541-270-6830.
A video has been released showcasing the work of MMI affiliate Angie Sremba and Bob Dziak, who use eDNA and acoustics to study blue whales off the Oregon coast.
Lisa T. Ballance will be the keynote speaker at HMSC Marine Science Day on April 9.
“The gray whales eat mainly mysids while here off Oregon, so we are guessing that food supply might be reduced,” [Leigh] Torres said.
“These are big animals,” says Lisa Ballance, director of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute. “They’re not planktonic organisms, and we just know next to nothing about them.”
A team of international collaborators examined a dead female whale in New Zealand whale found that it was morphologically and genetically different from all other whale species, and so Ramari’s beaked whale was described. Scott Baker initiated the DNA and tissue archive used for this study when he was a professor at the University of Auckland.
[T]here are indications that some fisheries observers might be underreporting the number of deaths, says Oregon State University marine mammal ecologist Lisa Ballance, who led a recent review of the dolphin by-catch.
[Leigh] Torres is hoping to see more and healthier whales this year. Some of the underfed whales they spotted in years past have not recovered to where researchers think they should be.
Scott Baker is a coauthor on a new study concludes that the humpback whale population in Southeast Alaska waters was disrupted by the massive and intense 2014-2016 Northeast Pacific marine heatwave.
United Nations member states agreed in 2017 to negotiate an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity of the high seas. The whale migration tracks identified in a new collaborative report from WWF will be essential when it comes to identifying areas of importance to marine mammals.
Daniel Palacios was interviewed by Jefferson Public Radio about his role in the new World Wildlife Fund report, Protecting Blue Corridors, which describes global whale "superhighways."
Robert Pitman has coauthored a paper documenting the first known lethal predation events on blue whales.
MMI Director, Lisa T. Ballance, has received the distinction of AAAS Fellow for her outstanding contributions to science.
The Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Laboratory at OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute has developed a website that allows visitors to meet some of the whales the researchers have identified over the years. IndividuWhale aims to teach about the animals, the stressors humans put on whale populations, and how those stressors can be reduced.
An unlikely visitor to the Oregon Coast -- a live sea otter -- was transported by Jim Rice to the Oregon Coast Aquarium for care after it was bitten by a shark.
KC Bierlich, currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Marine Mammal Institute, was a PhD student at Duke University when he contributed to the project. “They are eating so much more than we thought. It’s crazy,” Bierlich said.
