Marine Mammal Institute

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Mauricio Cantor, behavioral ecologist at Oregon State University, about his study on how humans and dolphins work together to fish in a southern Brazilian city.

Bottlenose dolphins help Brazilian fishermen pull in their catch, and researchers have worked out what the marine mammals get from the cooperative hunting.

A sperm whale carcass washed up on a northern Oregon beach this week. Jim Rice, stranding program manager, said, "We document an average of six large whale strandings annually in Oregon. In the vast majority of cases, the animal is dead before it comes ashore."

Charles Nye, a graduate fellow with OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, said he was able to examine some organic material from the crabbing gear line. Nye has determined that the dead orca was not [endangered Southern Resident killer whale] K44. 

The federal government has commissioned Oregon State University to look into the possible impacts of offshore wind farms on marine wildlife. “The (continental) shelf and the slope have high abundance and high density of marine mammals and seabirds,” reported OSU Marine Mammal Institute director Lisa Ballance after the first two of seven planned research cruises were in the books. Ballance said her team needs to do a lot more analysis before she would consider making any statements about whether anchoring massive floating wind turbines amid this maritime abundance would create problems.

“It’s clear that something different is happening here,” said study co-author Joshua Stewart, an assistant professor with the OSU Marine Mammal Institute. “This is a rare story of ocean optimism.”

“It seems like these big die-offs are driven more by conditions in the Arctic, which these days is probably a result of climate change,” Assistant Professor Josh Stewart said. Doctoral student Lisa Hildebrand shared that the body conditions of the Pacific Coast Feeding Group gray whales have been improving over the years, while the body conditions of whales going all the way to the Arctic have been getting worse. 

More than 150 sea lions have been found sick or dead along Oregon’s coast due to a bacterial outbreak of Leptospirosis this summer. Jim Rice is the stranding program manager for Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute. He joins Think Out Loud to share what the outbreak has looked like so far and how it compares to previous years.

Sometimes, a marine mammal stranding presents a unique opportunity to educate. Such is the case of a blue whale that washed ashore near Gold Beach seven years ago, now the focus of a campaign to raise money to reconstruct and display it at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. To learn more about donating, go to beav.es/bones.