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.
This opinion piece focuses on funding for the Marine Mammal/Marine Genomics Building at the Hatfield Marine Science Center.
The MMI's Bruce Mate will be leading a scientific team on a search for the "52-Hz whale" next fall. The expedition is planned as part of a documentary about the elusive whale and will involve tagging whales in the eastern North Pacific. Because it is possible to hear this distinctive whale over large distances, Dr. Mate's team will rely on the leadership of NOAA's Bob Dziak and the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab's access to fixed hydrophones in the North Pacific to guide the search, find the whale, and tag some of its cohorts.
Four MMI scientists flew to Capetown, South Africa, in November 2007 to present their research findings at the 17th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals.
Position in the Cetacean Conservation Genetics Laboratory for a post-doc in 'genomic divrsity of endangered whales' - click here for description and details.
A multi-agency team of scientists has launched a project to reduce the number of whales killed from ship strikes and entanglement in fishing nets by identifying high-risk areas along the West Coast of the United States. The WhaleWatch project will use data from the tagging and satellite monitoring of more than 300 whales, conducted by researchers at Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute.
MMI PhD student Renee Albertson is in the Austral Islands collecting data on whales and dolphins as part of the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium. The results of this project will contribute to long-term, ongoing genetic and demographic studies of residency patterns and social organization among whales and dolphins throughout French Polynesia. Follow Renee’s adventure through her bilingual blog.
AUCKLAND, NZ – The first paternity study of southern right whales has found a surprisingly high level of local breeding success for males, scientists say, which is good news for the overall genetic diversity of the species, but could create risk for local populations through in-breeding. Results of the study, by researchers at the University of Auckland, Oregon State University and the New Zealand Department of Conservation, have just been published in the journal Molecular Ecology.
The Symposium and Workshop on ‘Living whales in the Southern Ocean: Advances in methods for non-lethal cetacean research’ is scheduled for 27-29 March 2012, in Puerto Varas, Chile. The symposium and workshop are an initiative of the Southern Ocean Research Partnership (SORP), a multi-national programme to advance the conservation agenda in the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and to improve our scientific understanding of the population dynamics and ecological roles of whales in the Southern Ocean. Please check the website for registration information.
Internationally recognized whale expert Bruce Mate will lead off training for "Whale Watching Spoken Here" volunteers Nov. 22-23 at the Mark O. Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport.
Mate, the director of the Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute, will introduce trainees to Pacific gray whale biology and natural history at the Nov. 22 (Saturday) session. He has helped lead the training since co-founding the whale watching program in the late 1970s. For more information and to sign up, read article below:
Scott Baker is investigating genetic diversity of dolphins around the South Pacific as part of his Pew Marine Fellowship project, “A Pattern of Dolphins.” Baker, a 2011 fellowship recipient and a professor and associate director at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, and his Ph.D. student, Renee Albertson, recently participated in a survey of the islands’ waters.
DUBLIN—Dr. Scott Baker, a pioneer in the use of DNA to better understand the population structure, abundance, and genetic diversity of dolphins and whales, spoke recently at University College Dublin about new research that could help shape conservation measures for North Pacific humpback whales.
Scott Baker was interviewed by the BBC regarding humpback whale migrations for their website "World on the Move". For a link to the website and audio recording, please click on link to story.
For the past several weeks, gray whales that spent the spring breeding or calving in the waters off Mexico have been arriving in the Pacific Northwest to feed for the summer and fall, including areas along the Oregon coast. But gray whales aren’t the only species of whale that can be seen off Oregon, according to experts at Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute.
"Hambleton took the meat, froze it, and the following morning sent it by courier to Scott Baker, the associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University and an expert in cetacean molecular genetics. Baker, who recently established a database of whale, dolphin, and porpoise DNA, identified the meat as sei, the fourth largest of the baleen whales." [The New Yorker, Nov. 4, 2013]
The saga of Flex the whale continues to deliver surprises a year after the 13-year-old male western (North Pacific) gray whale was tagged and took scientific observers on a four-month, satellite-tracked ride, far from the Asian coast where he was expected to migrate, across the Bering Sea, through the Gulf of Alaska and down the west coast of North America.
“Though humpback whales are found in all oceans of the world, the North Pacific humpback whales should probably be considered a sub-species at an ocean-basin level – based on genetic isolation of these populations on an evolutionary time scale,” said Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center and lead author on the paper.
