Scott Baker, Associate Director of the MMI, was one of the invited members of an expert panel to designate Important Marine Mammal Areas (IMMAs) in the South Pacific.
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The Marine Mammal Institute will be well represented at this year's Sharing the Coast Conference in Waldport, OR. Leigh Torres will be providing the keynote address at 6:30 pm, Friday, March 3, 2017. Dr. Torres will discuss the latest in research into the lives of gray whales and other marine megafauna inhabiting our coastal waters and ways in which citizens can help scientists monitor whale populations. Her presentation is free and open to the public.
On Saturday, March 4, Jim Rice, coordinator of the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network, will give an overview of the state’s marine mammal populations and explain how citizens can engage in tracking these populations through reporting stranded animals, alive or dead. The...
A new license plate featuring a gray whale and her calf likely will be available to Oregon drivers by summer 2017. This project is sponsored by the Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute and enthusiasm for it is running high, said Bruce Mate, director of the institute. “Everybody I’ve shown the plate design to has loved it,” said Mate, whose institute will receive $35 from the Oregon Department of Transportation every time a vehicle owner spends $40 to buy the plate. The money will go toward whale research, graduate student education and public outreach. The institute needs to turn in an “expression of interest” from at least 3,000 vehicle owners stating they plan to buy the plate.
A sophisticated new type of tag on whales that can record data every second for hours, days, and weeks at a time provides a view of whale behavior, biology and travels never before possible, scientists from the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University reported today in a new study. This “Advanced Dive Behavior,” or ADB tag, has allowed researchers to expand their knowledge of whale ecology to areas deep beneath the sea, over thousands of miles of travel, and outline their interaction with the prey they depend upon for food. It has even turned whales into scientific colleagues to help understand ocean conditions and climate change.
Leigh Torres, an assistant professor at the OSU Marine Mammal Institute, will discuss some of her recent work with gray whales along the Oregon Coast during the 10 a.m. Saturday [12/3/16] meeting of the Oregon Chapter of the American Cetacean Society in Newport, Oregon. The meeting will be at the Newport Public Library. Admission is free.
A new paper describes how blue whale tracking data and oceanographic information can be used for near-real-time predictive locations of blue whales off the West Coast to help reduce risk of ship strikes. The WhaleWatch maps use years of data collected by Bruce Mate and the Whale Telemetry Group at the OSU Marine Mammal Institute.
The Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University is currently hiring for a full-time Business Manager/Fiscal Coordinator at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon. This position reports to and assists the Director, Associate Director, and Principal Investigators with the daily coordination and management of the Institute’s business and finance operations. To apply, please visit https://jobs.oregonstate.edu/ and search for position #P00896UF, or click on the link above. Closes December 14, 2016.
A lot of people think what Leigh Torres has done this summer and fall would qualify her for a spot on one of those “World’s Worst Jobs” lists. After all, the Oregon State University marine ecologist follows gray whales from a small inflatable boat in the rugged Pacific Ocean and waits for them to, well, poop. Then she and her colleagues have about 20-30 seconds to swoop in behind the animal with a fine mesh net and scoop up some of the prized material before it drifts to the ocean floor.
Although sperm whales have not been driven to the brink of extinction as have some other whales, a new study has found a remarkable lack of diversity in the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA within the species. In fact, the mitochondrial DNA from more than a thousand sperm whales examined during the past 15 years came from a single “Eve” sperm whale tens of thousands of years ago, the researchers say. Results of the study are being published this week in the journal Molecular Ecology. While the exact origins of this sperm whale “Eve” remain uncertain, the study shows the importance of her female descendants in shaping global population structure, according to...
The January-February 2016 Field Report on blue whale ecology in the South Taranaki Bight region of New Zealand is now available.
National Geographic Explorer and marine ecologist Leigh Torres made the likely discovery of nursing while on a research cruise in the South Taranaki Bight off the western coast of New Zealand. On February 5, the Oregon State University professor got video that she thinks shows a mother blue whale and her calf nursing beneath the waves.
Research on the world's largest animal has begun off the coast of Taranaki. Blue whales are being studied by a team from Oregon State University (OSU) in collaboration with the Department of Conservation to try to find out if the species use the South Taranaki Bight as a feeding ground. The survey comes after OSU marine mammal expert Leigh Torres led a team of researchers who observed dozens of blue whales feeding about 100km off the coast south of New Plymouth in 2014. "We want to know when and where the blue whales occur in the South Taranaki Bight, as well as how many blue whales use this area as a foraging ground," Torres said.
An international research team, working in collaboration with the Department of Conservation (DOC), has begun work on an extended survey to learn more about blue whales feeding in the South Taranaki Bight off the Taranaki coast. The research covers an area of the Tasman Sea between Cape Egmont and Farewell Spit and is led by Oregon State University marine mammal expert Dr. Leigh Torres. The research, led by Oregon State University, will be conducted over a three year period with support from the Aotearoa Foundation, a private foundation, in collaboration with DOC.
Researchers from Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute returned to the waters of Frederick Sound and Stephens Passage in Southeast Alaska this month. It’s the second year of a two-year tagging program aimed at finding out more about the timing and nature of the annual migration of humpback whales from Southeast Alaska to the warm waters off Hawaii and Mexico.
Standing on the blustery beach, Bruce Mate wears a camo slicker, green bibs, a tidy white beard and a somber expression. While Mate’s getup suggests a typical day in the field for a marine mammalogist, the box of latex gloves and bottle of chainsaw lubricating oil under his arm hint at this morning’s unusual task. Behind Mate and a dozen students from Oregon State and Humboldt State universities, a dead blue whale stretches across southwestern Oregon’s Ophir Beach.
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.
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.