Daniel Webster from Cascadia flew back from Montana this week to work with us deploying more satellite tags on large odontocetes off Cape Hatteras. We were also fortunate to have Dr. Emer Rogan, from University College Cork in Ireland, working with us for two days as part of her sabbatical visit.

We’ve been enjoying a few days of early summer weather with workable conditions at our field site, which is about 40 nautical miles from shore. It’s a long two-hour commute to and from the shelf break, but the diversity and density of cetaceans out there make the trip worthwhile.

On Saturday we were able to deploy a location-only satellite tag on a large male pilot whale and obtain a biopsy sample (from the other side of the fin) to confirm the sex of the animal. We also had a great encounter with a group of unusually friendly Risso’s dolphins, with two animals repeatedly approaching the bow of the R/V Barber. We were hoping to deploy a tag on one of these animals, but they were too quick and we were working in a pretty good chop.

We had spectacular weather conditions on Sunday – glassy calm for much of the day – a perfect day to search for beaked whales. We found three groups of Cuvier’s beaked whales, but were unable to relocate any of them after they dove. Trying to tag beaked whales involves a lot of time waiting for them at the surface as they can dive for 75 minutes or more.

We did manage to deploy three more tags on pilot whales on Sunday – two dive recorders and one location-only tag. Unfortunately one dive recorder was shed immediately but we have high hopes for the other two tags and we are still receiving great data from the three whales we tagged in May.