Marine Mammal Institute

Global connections across the Pacific Ocean in science, economics and policies — and how these things affect Oregon's ocean — are the focus of the eighth annual Heceta Head Coastal Conference, Oct. 26–27 at the Florence Events Center. Scientists, policy-makers and community leaders — including Oregon first lady Cylvia Hayes and Oregon State University marine mammal specialist Bruce Mate — will address the theme “Oregon's Oceans: Bringing the High Seas Home” during the two-day conference, which is open to the public.

Scientists are warning that a new form of unregulated whaling has emerged along the coastlines of Japan and South Korea, where the commercial sale of whales killed as fisheries "bycatch" is threatening coastal stocks of minke whales and other protected species.

After five hours on a 140-ton C-17 military aircraft that had taken off from Christchurch, New Zealand, Mee-ya Monnin, peering through one of the plane’s small circular windows, saw white ice covering the ocean. The members of her research team and military men on the plane with Monnin chuckled as she squealed and jumped up and down in her seat.

Read more about Monnin’s first season in Antarctica and follow her this fall as she returns at blogs.oregonstate.edu/hailingfrozenthoughts/.

Every spring for almost thirty years, Bruce Mate makes his way down to Baja to reconnect with the same female gray whales. Over four decades, he’s witnessed their transition from smooth-skinned youth into mothers. More recently, he’s seen wrinkles start to appear around some of their eyes, each eye roughly the size of a baseball. He’s met and played with their offspring, even seeing some from the next generation become mothers themselves. These whales feel like family to him. 

A lone western gray whale, tagged off Russia’s Sakhalin Island by scientists in September and tracked for more than 70 days, has suddenly taken off from its feeding area and sped across the Sea of Okhotsk to the west side of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

Scott Baker, a marine biologist at Oregon State University and a co-author of the paper who has studied whales and dolphins for 30 years, saw his first live, open-ocean beaked whale just last month, in Samoa. The sighting lasted about 4 seconds before the animal dove — too brief to tell if it was a spade-toothed. “Their environment is very remote,” he says. “It’s deep water, and they’re submerged for maybe 96% of their lives.”

Many of us get a feeling of satisfaction when we learn that governments
or international bodies have issued regulations to protect imperiled
wildlife. Such as whales. Then we encounter a paper like the one in the
October Animal Conservation that snaps us out of our complacency. Its new data drive home once more that rules have value only if they’ll be enforced. [read the article]

An Oregon State researcher is raising some new scientific doubts about the National Marine Fisheries Service Sea Lion biological opinion.  Markus Horning has been tagging Sea Lions in Prince William Sound and finding that predators like Killer Whales and Sharks are killing a larger proportion of their pups than expected.

11/04/2009

An international group of 50 scientists, including Scott Baker, a leading OSU geneticist, have announced a project to sequence the genomes of 10,000 different vertebrate species.