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.
Scientists don’t know as much as they’d like about our ocean-dwelling neighbors, thus a team of researchers from Oregon State University, led by master’s student Florence van Tulder, aims to learn more. She is leading a project this summer to spot gray whales that like to frequent the Oregon coast, track their movements and behavior, and compare them with photo archives in an attempt to identify individual 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.
Jana Jeglinski (University of Glasgow) and Markus Horning (Oregon State University) both studied the diving behaviour of Galapagos fur seals (Arctocephalus galapagoensis) during PhDs conducted twenty years apart. Recently, they met in Glasgow to compare their data sets and see what this might tell us about long-term changes in the equatorial ocean environment.
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...
While it’s too early to have detailed results and analyses from the samples taken or the drone surveys so far, Ari Friedlaender of the Marine Mammal Institute of Oregon State University was able to explain how the drones will help. Friedlaender and his colleague, David Johnston, from the Practice of Marine Conservation and Ecology at Duke University, are two of the American scientists involved in the project. They and their teams are responsible for programming, transmitting and analysing the data collected by the aerial drones.
"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.
To Scott Baker of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, and a National Geographic grantee, the whales’ large size and low but prominent dorsal fins identified them as most likely Sei whales.
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 ...
Three of MMI’s graduate students have successfully defended their theses and have been awarded their advanced degrees: In April 2014, Rebecca Hamner, PhD (conservation genetics and monitoring of New Zealand Maui's and Hector's dolphins), and in September 2014, both Alana Alexander, PhD (The influence of social structure and molecular evolution on genetic diversity in the sperm whale), and Sophie Pierszalowski, MSc (the influence of local fidelity and recruitment on population dynamics and specialized foraging of humpback whales in Glacier Bay and Icy Strait, Alaska). All three studied with Dr. Scott Baker in his Cetacean Conservation and Genomics Laboratory.
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."
WALDPORT — Shea Steingass, a Ph.D. student at Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute, was part of a research team involved in giving area harbor seals new head decorations last week. [Read the whole story in the Newport News-Times here.]
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.
A new paper by Ladd Irvine and other MMI researchers finds that the favored feeding areas of endangered blue whales along the US West Coast are crossed by heavily used shipping lanes. The paper, which was published today in PLoS ONE, notes that moving the shipping lanes off Los Angeles and San Francisco slightly could significantly decrease the probability of ships striking the whales. The analysis is the most comprehensive study of blue whales' movements ever conducted.
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.
Scott Baker, associate director of Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute, agreed. "The often disreputable behavior of the whaling industry in the past, and some whaling nations today, does not inspire much confidence in a good faith return to commercial whaling," he said.
"The opportunity was there to get up to speed with whales and how they function as part of the Antarctic ecosystem around the peninsula," explained Ari Friedlaender, an associate professor at Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute. Friedlaender is the newest co-PI on the Palmer LTER, leading the study of humpback whales in the Antarctic.
OSU PhD student Dori Dick’s presentation last week (July 16, 2014) to the Esri User Conference in San Diego was well received. Dori introduced geneGIS, a suite of computational tools for analyzing the spatial distribution and genetic relatedness of whales and dolphins. The development of the geneGIS toolbox for ArcGIS was funded by an Office of Naval Research grant to MMI associate director, Scott Baker, and Esri chief scientist, Dawn Wright. A description of the tools has now been published in the journal Transactions in GIS.
In a virtual field trip, “Southern Exposure,” viewers can join Dr. Markus Horning and his colleagues as they investigate how changing sea ice conditions may impact ice-dependent polar seals, like Antarctica's Weddell seals. The website was produced by the education department of the Alaska Sea Life Center and includes multiple videos, classroom activities, lesson plans, and associated material for school teachers.
