A new paper by Leigh Torres and colleagues, published in PeerJ, describes how examining the fine-scale movements of blue whales provides insights into their feeding decisions.
OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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A new paper by Leigh Torres and colleagues, published in PeerJ, describes how examining the fine-scale movements of blue whales provides insights into their feeding decisions.
According to Jim Rice, stranding coordinator for the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, the boys are getting geared up to vie for a mate when they return to California during late May and June.
The north Oregon coast’s Sand Lake Recreation Area near Pacific City received a rather large and unsettling visitor on Friday. A camp host at the area discovered the corpse of a 39-foot gray whale. Jim Rice of OMMSN responded.
Last fall, Dr. Lisa Ballance took the helm as the new director of the Marine Mammal Institute (MMI) at Oregon State University. We visited with Ballance at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport to talk about her experience, research, and vision of MMI’s future.
Bruce Mate proposes that the recent increase in observable gray whale deaths may be due to the species' recovery and an adjustment to the population reaching its natural carrying capacity.
In a new research paper by lead author Robert Pitman, scientists propose that whales that forage in polar waters migrate to low latitudes to maintain healthy skin.
MMI Associate Director Scott Baker was a member of the scientific team documenting the return of great whales to the former whaling center of South Georgia Island.
The USFWS has awarded a grant to the nonprofit group Elakha Alliance to launch a feasibility study for possible reintroduction of sea otters to the Oregon coast. A newly published study by Dominique Kone in the Marine Mammal Institute found there is suitable habitat to support around 4,500 resident sea otters. Kone cautioned that wildlife managers would have to consider a range of overlapping human uses.
In January 2019, Dr. Lisa T. Ballance and Dr. Robert Pitman were part of an international team of scientists who launched an expedition from the southern tip of Chile, searching for what could be a new species of killer whale. Watch the video to see their first glimpse of the whales.
Nearly 10,000 Oregonians have purchased gray whale license plates since they went on sale a year ago, providing critical support for Oregon State University researchers studying gray whales that frequent Oregon’s waters.
Advances in DNA technology and understanding of molecular biology may help fill an important knowledge gap about the critically endangered and declining Cook Inlet beluga population. Dr. Ellie Bors and a team of researchers began working to find out how to use epigenetics to date Cook Inlet belugas in 2018, while she was a post-doctoral scholar at the OSU Marine Mammal Institute in Dr. Scott Baker's Cetacean Conservation and Genomics Laboratory.
During January 2020, the British Antarctic Survey’s wild water whales team has been conducting surveys for southern right whales all around the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia. MMI's Dr. Scott Baker is on the team of ten international experts from five countries (the UK, USA, Canada, Brazil, and New Zealand), which includes marine mammal observers, photo-ID specialists, geneticists, acousticians, a drone pilot, and an expert in satellite tagging. The wild water whales expedition is running for 33 days on New Zealand research vessel the R/V Braveheart.
Dr. Daniel Palacios was recently interviewed by Dr. Chris Parsons for the Marine Mammal Science Podcast. Listen to the episode here, "Tracking Whales via Satellite Tags."
After more than three years of rest in the Yaquina Bay in Newport, the skeleton of a 78-foot blue whale was brought back to dry land this week so it can be preserved and prepared for a public display.
Using drones deployed in the air and GoPros underwater, Oregon State University marine ecologist Leigh Torres recently completed her fourth field season documenting previously unseen behaviors of gray whales – and gathering their poop – off the Oregon coast.
Oregon Sea Grant’s annual State of the Coast conference, will be held Nov. 9 at the Salishan resort in Gleneden Beach. Among the panelists will be MMI's new director, Dr. Lisa T. Ballance, in a session about whale research off the West Coast, the Unusual Mortality Event of gray whales, and fishing perspectives on the impacts of increasing whale entanglements.
Guest columnist Dr. Caren Braby discusses regulatory efforts to reduce whale entanglements in crab fishing gear, which includes a partnership between ODFW, Oregon Sea Grant, and OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute to gather information about whales in Oregon waters.
Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute researchers using electronic tags were able to monitor blue and fin whales off the coast of Southern California over multiple weeks, providing new insight into the feeding behaviors of the two largest whale species. “The information collected with these tags gives us a good description of the scale of whales’ feeding behavior over periods of hours, days and weeks, which is something we’ve not been able to do before,” said Ladd Irvine, a senior faculty research assistant in OSU's Marine Mammal Institute and the study’s lead author.
To better understand blue whale behavior off the US West Coast, MMI researchers Daniel Palacios, Ladd Irvine, and Bruce Mate, together with a team from NOAA and the University of Maryland, examined the relationship between feeding behavior and ocean conditions using long-term satellite tracking data from 72 tagged whales. They implemented a statistical model that predicted where and when blue whales were most likely to be foraging for food. The new insight gained from the study could aid in the management of the endangered North Pacific blue whale population in light of climate change and whale mortality due to ship strikes.
MMI Associate Director Scott Baker is co-author on a study that describes new subspecies of short-finned pilot whale using genomic and mitogenomic data collected from individuals throughout the global range of the species. The results support the hypothesis that food-poor regions of the central Pacific Ocean have isolated these populations, leading to evolutionary divergence, despite the absence of physical barriers. The proposal to recognize the subspecies is important new information for managers and conservationists.