Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal and Marine Genomics Building got a boost from the Oregon Legislature, which dedicated $9 million in state money to the $25 million project. Gov. Ted Kulongoski signed House Bill 3643 into law last week.
A sub-adult Steller sea lion was successfully disentangled from a trawl net at Sea Lion Caves on Thursday March18. Click HERE for details.
A custom-built capture cage has been deployed at Newport's Port Dock 1 to address this problem of sea lion entanglement. The cage is basically a modified floating dock enclosed on four sides by a galvanized steel structure, with sliding doors on two sides. It is designed primarily to serve as an additional haul out area for sea lions to use freely, with its doors locked in the open position so animals can comfortably come and go as they choose.
For several months this past fall and winter, thousands of California sea lions (Zalophus californianus) assembled on and just offshore of a remote beach just to the south of Heceta Head on the central Oregon coast. It is unknown specifically what attracted so many of these animals to this site, although it is clear that enormous amounts of prey fish (possibly herring, squid, hake, sardine or anchovies) must have been available to support such huge numbers of sea lions. This area is also home to several hundred Steller sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus), which use nearby Sea Lion Caves as a regular haul out.
A pioneering project that implants life-long monitors inside of Steller sea lions to learn more about why the number of these endangered marine mammals has been declining – and remains low in Alaska – is beginning to provide data, and the results are surprising to scientists.
On Thursday, April 9, 2009, a fresh dead adult female gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) was found on the beach at Washburn State Park, just north of Heceta Head. She was extremely emaciated, and there was no evident trauma to the body. Her posture, lying belly-down flat on the sand, suggests that she died on the beach or in shallow water soon before she was reported to the stranding network. We suspect the immediate cause of death was starvation.
View map of the stranding location
A necropsy was conducted...
A National Geographic Channel film, “Kingdom of the Blue Whale, premiered on Sunday, March 8 with more airings listed on their website. This program offers some of the most revealingviews of the largest animal on the planet through the work of OregonState University’s Bruce Mate and colleague John Calambokidis ofCascadia Research Cooperative...
See the MMI photo gallery for this trip
A sea otter (Enhydra lutris) has been sighted and photographed recently in Depoe Bay. This is the first confirmed sighting (with photographs) of a sea otter on the Central coast in many years. Although we frequently receive reports of sightings of otters on the coast, most of these are in fact river otters (Lontra canadensis), a much more common species that lives primarily in fresh water habitats but frequently ventures into the marine environment as well.
It appears that this animal is a wanderer from either California or Washington waters. Whether or not it remains in...
Scott Baker is featured in an award-winning documentary. 'The Cove', a documentary about the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan. This moving piece just won the audience award for best US documentary at the Sundance film festival. This bodes well for a larger distribution in the future, hopefully leading to a greater appreciation of the problems of mercury contamination and the Taiji drive kill. Read the review here.
Toothed whales are known to form long-standing social groups – especially among females – and scientists have hypothesized that these bonds are created to fend off sub-dominant males interested in mating, and to watch after each other’s offspring while individual females dive for food.
Bruce Mate, director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, who, with Russian colleagues, tagged Flex last fall in his summer feeding grounds in the Sea of Okhotsk, suspects the tag has fallen off.
NEWPORT, Ore. – After visiting three different lagoons in the Pacific Ocean side of Baja Mexico, a rare western gray whale named “Varvara” is migrating up the West Coast – presumably en route to her home range near Russia’s Sakhalin Island....By Friday, the 9-year-old female was near the Washington/Canadian border, traveling northward at a rate of up to 100 miles a day.
Professor Scott Baker, Associate Director of the Marine Mammal Institute, was in South Africa this month (May 2013) as a contributing lecturer at a workshop on Advances in Conservation Genetics. The workshop was sponsored by the American Genetic Association and hosted by University of Pretoria and the Southern African Wildlife College.
The whale was already dead when spotted from the air earlier this week, said Bruce Mate, executive director of Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine ...
This opinion piece focuses on funding for the Marine Mammal/Marine Genomics Building at the Hatfield Marine Science Center.
The population of the world’s smallest and rarest dolphins has dropped by half in the past seven years to an estimated 55 individuals, according to research released March 13 by the New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC), the University of Auckland and Oregon State University.
A team of marine mammal researchers from Newport, Oregon is headed to the Gulf of Mexico next week to tag Sperm Whales near the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. They'll find out how the whales are doing 3 years later. Bruce Mate is Director of the Marine Mammal Institute at the Hatfield Marine Science Center. He says his team has been going to the Gulf region since before the oil spill.
The success story of the Pacific gray whales' full recovery from near-extinction is wrong, according to a new genetic analysis that pegs the current population at only one-third to one-fifth of historical levels.
