Chasing Giants: A whale tracker reflects on four decades of searching for answers
1859 Oregon's Magazine:

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. 

Digital Photography Workshop with Flip Nicklin

The MMI is hosting a 3-day digital photography workshop featuring world-renowned nature photographer, Flip Nicklin...

OSU’s Bruce Mate joins Russian scientists to track endangered whale

A team of scientists from Russia and the United States has successfully tagged and is tracking by satellite a whale from one of the world’s most endangered populations – a western gray whale off the coast of Russia’s Sakhalin Island.

OSU Spotlight: Education on Ice

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/.

Dried Meat 'Resurrects' Lost Species of Whale

A new paper in Marine Mammal Science, co-authored by MMI’s Scott Baker and Debbie Steel, describes how genetic identification of dried whale meat from a remote Pacific island helped to rediscover a new species of the rare Mesoplodon beaked whale. With the addition of Mesoplodon hotaula, there are now 22 species of the beaked whales, yet this family remains one of the most poorly described of all vertebrates.

(See also: http://dna-barcoding.blogspot.com/2014/02/an-old-new-whale-species.html)

Protected whales found in Japan’s supermarkets

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]

“FLEX” UPDATE: WHALE FROM ENDANGERED POPULATION SURPRISES SCIENTISTS

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.

Predators may block recovery of Alaska sea lions, scientists say

Researchers at Oregon State University and the Alaska Sealife Center started tracking 36 juvenile Steller sea lions in 2005. By November, 12 had died, a death rate that's not exceptional, OSU marine mammal expert Markus Horning said Thursday.

A First Look at a Never-Before Seen Whale

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.”

“Genome 10K” proposal aims to sequence 10,000 vertebrates

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. 

Endangered whale's swim captivates researchers

Maybe it's food, the prospect of sex or some deeply rooted memory, but, whater the motivation, an endangered whale is astounding researchers with a marathon swim which, so far, has taken him from Russia's Sakhalin Island to the waters off Alaska.

Alaska Public Radio Network interview with Markus Horning

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.

Want to help others spot whales? This training is just for you.

One of the highlights of the two training sessions they attended in Newport was the presentations by Dr. Bruce Mate, director of the Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute, Flugum said.“That’s one of the big perks of being a volunteer is being in on one of his sessions,” she said. “Bruce Mate is a world-renowned gray whale researcher, and he’s an individual that gets so excited about what he’s talking about, and at times, he’s in tears.”

Taking the Measure of Seals and Those Who Study Them

In a new article in Terra magazine, Mee-ya Monnin talks about the trials and joys of working in the coldest place on earth. Mee-ya is working on her undergraduate honors thesis in Dr. Markus Horning's Pinniped Ecology Applied Research Lab.

Genetic study pursues elusive goal: How many humpbacks existed before whaling?

Scott Baker, Associate Director of Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute and a co-author said: "These genetic estimates greatly improve our understanding of the genetic diversity of humpback whales, something we need to understand the impact of past hunting and to manage whales in the uncertain future."

Scientists use DNA to identify species killed during early whaling days

“From a preliminary look at the DNA sequences, it appears that there was a high level of genetic diversity in these whales, which is what we’d expect from pre-exploitation samples,” said Angela Sremba, a doctoral student in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University and lead author on the study.

Officials buoyed by mooring placement

One small plop for the ocean. One giant leap for wave energy research.

Antarctic minke whale abundance disputed

A new genetic analysis of Antarctic minke whales concludes that
population of these smaller baleen whales have not increased as a
result of the intensive hunting of other larger whales – countering
arguments by advocates of commercial whaling who want to “cull” minke
whales.  

Researchers fail to detect signal from rare whale

"I think our adventure with Flex is over for now," said Bruce Mate, director of Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute, which worked on the tracking project with the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "We've got a great track record and lots of great stuff to look at."

Markus Horning at Science on Tap

NEWPORT – Oregon State University marine mammal researcher Markus Horning  steps to the bar for this month’s Science on Tap lecture, with The secret lives or seals: Using high-tech marvels to pry into ocean depths.

In recent research, the high-tech tools have helped show that more juvenile Steller sea lions are falling to predators than had been thought, casting doubt on prospects for the animals’ ability to recover from recent population decline in Alaskan waters.

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