A sub-adult Steller sea lion was successfully disentangled from a trawl net at Sea Lion Caves on Thursday March18. Click HERE for details.
OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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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.
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.
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.”
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)
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]
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.
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.
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.”
Rare blue whales have been spotted by NIWA scientists on a research expedition in the South Taranaki Bight. NIWA marine ecologist Dr Leigh Torres is leading a team of blue whale researchers in the Bight on a journey that aims to collect critical data to enhance understanding of the blue whale population in the region. In the past week, the team has observed nearly 50 blue whales.
The Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute is a collaborating sponsor of this research. Dr. Torres will be joining the MMI faculty in spring 2014.
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.
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.
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."