Marine Mammal Institute

As recipients of the first Antarctic Wildlife Research Fund (AWR) research grants, Dr. Ari S. Friedlaender (Oregon State University) and Dr. David W. Johnston (Duke University) will conduct a long-term ecological study on the foraging behavior of humpback whales around the Antarctic Peninsula, focusing on how critical foraging areas relate to historic catches of krill in the region.

Oregon’s resident gray whales are attracting a new wave of scientific interest as the OSU Marine Mammal Institute grows, with last year’s arrival of marine megafauna researcher Leigh Torres and with the endeavors of van Tulder, who is spending every day this summer with her eyes on the whales.

MMI's Ari Friedlaender has co-authored a new paper describing how humpback whale populations have rebounded to up to 90% of pre-whaling numbers in Australian waters and should no longer be officially considered a threatened species.

A team of scientists from the United States and Russia has documented the longest migration of a mammal ever recorded – a round-trip trek of nearly 14,000 miles by a whale identified as a critically endangered species that raises questions about its status. The researchers used satellite-monitored tags to track three western North Pacific gray whales from their primary feeding ground off Russia’s Sakhalin Island across the Pacific Ocean and down the West Coast of the United States to Baja, Mexico. One of the tagged whales, dubbed Varvara, visited the three major breeding areas for eastern gray whales, which are found off North America and are not endangered. Results of their study are being published this week by the Royal Society in...

"If you look at the geomorphology of that area, it's highly productive and there are a lot of animals," says Ari Friedlaender of Oregon State University in Newport. So the whales might have been lured by the promise of food. Once in, they may have struggled to find the way out of the treacherous waters.

A decade ago, we set out to unravel deep ocean crime scenes we weren’t even sure existed. The crime? Endangered Steller sea lions were rapidly disappearing in parts of Alaska. Their numbers dropped by 80% in three decades, yet only rarely did anyone see or sample dead sea lions. Live sea lions studied in the summer when they haul out to breed seemed healthy and had healthy pups.

We wanted to know when, where, and why sea lions die. To unravel the mystery, we needed information from those animals that we don’t see, those that might not breed, those that might never come back ashore. So we ...

Scientists on a rugged mid-winter trip to the remote sub-Antarctic islands have confirmed a large contingent of endangered southern right whales are spending the colder months near Campbell Island. Previous work on this species had focused on the animals at Auckland Island, with some minimal work done at the more remote Campbell Island almost 20 years ago. Lead investigator Dr Leigh Torres, said the news was "exciting, exhilarating and a relief to hear."

A new paper about Antarctic minke whales by MMI's Ari Friedlaender was published this week in the Journal of Experimental Biology. An article about the research in Science News highlights that this is the first time anyone has been able to tag the elusive whales, and that tagging is a nonlethal research method which is allowing scientists to uncover the minkes’ unique feeding behavior under the sea ice.

Bruce Mate tagged his first whale 35 years ago using a primitive dart emitting a VHF signal that could be heard a whopping 5 miles away—if the weather wasn’t stormy that day. Fellow scientists thought he was a bit touched in the head for thinking a tag attached to a migrating whale would survive the saltwater pounding.