Marine Mammal Institute

We are pleased to congratulate Ellie Bors on receiving a Fulbright Arctic Initiative Scholar award. Dr. Bors is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Cetacean Conservation and Genomics Laboratory at the OSU Marine Mammal Institute, where she is developing molecular methods to age Cook Inlet beluga whales. Her Fulbright Arctic Initiative project will explore both the biological and policy implications of shifting distributions of Arctic fish stocks. In 2017, Ellie was a Sea Grant Knauss Marine Policy Fellow in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of International Affairs in Washington, DC. She completed her PhD in the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography.

For the past two-plus years, the carcass of a 78-foot blue whale that washed ashore near Gold Beach, Oregon, in November 2015 has been submerged in Yaquina Bay allowing nature to run its course by having scavengers clean the bones. The cleansing process is nearly complete, according to researchers with the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, who hope to bring the skeleton to the surface and treat it with chemicals to get oil out of the bones. Eventually, they hope to display it for the public as an educational exhibit at the new Marine Studies Building that OSU will open in late 2019 on the Hatfield Marine Science Center campus in Newport.

A new blog by veterinarian Dr. Lauren Jacobsen describes the adventure of searching for the source of elusive beaked whale vocalizations. Extracting eDNA from seawater offers an opportunity to collect biologic information from the animal generating these calls. The samples are being analyzed by Dr. Scott Baker and his team at the Cetacean Conservation and Genomics Lab at Oregon State University.

The Cetacean Conservation and Genomics Laboratory, led by Dr. Scott Baker, is seeking a postdoctoral scholar to specialize in epigenetic aging of beluga whales by next-generation sequencing. Apply by December 1, 2017, for full consideration.

The Department of Conservation will carefully review a study which has described a constant underwater racket created by seismic airguns. In a new blog post, US scientists Dr Leigh Torres, of Oregon State University, and Dr Holger Klinck, of Cornell University, have aired their concerns over the oil and gas industry's use of the instruments, which they say are having a harmful impact on marine life.

“Our increased understanding of how whale populations are structured can help governments and inter-governmental organizations like the International Whaling Commission improve management decisions in the future,” said Dr. C. Scott Baker of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute and a member of the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium that contributed to the study.

The Marine Mammal Institute will be well represented at this year's Sharing the Coast Conference in Waldport, OR. Leigh Torres will be providing the keynote address at 6:30 pm, Friday, March 3, 2017. Dr. Torres will discuss the latest in research into the lives of gray whales and other marine megafauna inhabiting our coastal waters and ways in which citizens can help scientists monitor whale populations. Her presentation is free and open to the public.

On Saturday, March 4, Jim Rice, coordinator of the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network, will give an overview of the state’s marine mammal populations and explain how citizens can engage in tracking these populations through reporting stranded animals, alive or dead. The...