On Wednesday March 31, 2010 we had our first opportunity to put our new Sea Lion Disentanglement Cage to good use.
You can follow these links for the story:
OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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On Wednesday March 31, 2010 we had our first opportunity to put our new Sea Lion Disentanglement Cage to good use.
You can follow these links for the story:
A crew from the Pinniped Ecology Applied Research Laboratory (PEARL) with OSU's Marine Mammal Institute is helping the North Coast Marine Mammal Center (http://www.northcoastmmc.org/index.php) track a young female Steller sea lion who was released from the rehabilitation facility in Crescent City, CA on Saturday, March 27. Markus Horning and interns Julia Hager, Stephen Meck and Jennifer Olson glued a satellite transmitter to the fur on the animals' head using 5-minute epoxy. The transmitter allows researchers to track the sea lion's location on a daily basis. The device is expected to fall off by the annual molt in August.
This is the first time a...
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.
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/.
Mate is now a professor in the department of fisheries and wildlife and is the director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Hatfield Marine Science Center.
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.
The MMI is hosting a 3-day digital photography workshop featuring world-renowned nature photographer, Flip Nicklin...
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.
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]