Marine Mammal Institute

Dr. Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute, writes from Samoa, where he studies the formation of local communities among dolphins and their genetic isolation from one another. His work is being featured in the "Scientist at Work: Notes from the Field" blog of the New York Times.

NEWPORT (The Oregonian) – Motel manager Frank Brooks called the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network. Then someone saw the turtle lift its head, someone else thought they saw it move a flipper, and so the race was on to save the 135-pound green sea turtle.

A new study suggests that the impact of predation on juvenile Steller sea lions in the Gulf of Alaska has been significantly underestimated, creating a “productivity pit” from which their population will have difficulty recovering without a reduction of predators.

After being hunted to local extinction more than a century ago and unable to remember their ancestral calving grounds, the southern right whales of mainland New Zealand are coming home.  A new study published today has shown for the first time that whales from a small surviving population around remote, sub-Antarctic islands have found their way back ...

The Pew Environment Group announced today that four individuals, representing Chile, Mexico and the United States, received a 2011 Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation.  Scott Baker is associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute and professor of Fisheries and Wildlife at OSU.  His project is entitled: "A pattern of dolphins:  the seascape genetics of island populations in protected an unprotected habitats of Oceania"

Flex was first photo-identified off Sakhalin Island as a calf in 1997 and has subsequently been observed in multiple years off Sakhalin during the summer feeding season. To better understand his movements, photo-identification images of Flex were compared with a photo catalog of over 1000 eastern gray whales, which revealed a match.

Associate Director Scott Baker and Research Assistant Debbie Steel are in Apia, Samoa for a meeting of the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium, hosted by the South Pacific Regional Environment Progamme (SPREP).The Consortium includes 36 independent researchers active in 10 Pacific Island ...

On Thursday May 20, a team from the Marine Mammal Institute was able to successfully remove a plastic packing band that had been wrapped around the neck of an adult male California sea lion. This was our first attempt at removing debris from a sea lion on a beach.

We've also recently been successful with desentanglement efforts on a Steller sea lion at Sea Lion Caves and at our recently deployed disentanglement capture cage at the Bayfront in Newport.

Unfortunately, packing band entanglements are increasingly common with sea lions along the West Coast. These plastic strips are used in the packaging of many products, particularly frozen fish used for bait, and end up...

When Ocean Power Technologies floats its first 200-ton wave energy-generating buoy off the Oregon Coast this year, it wants to be sure the device doesn’t disturb the coast’s most frequent multi-ton visitors: gray whales.