Kenady Wilson has published the first paper from her dissertation in the journal Royal Society Open Science. The paper describes the foraging behavior of monk seals in the main Hawaiian Islands, using simultaneous deployments of accelerometers, seal-mounted video cameras and GPS tags. Very cool work.
News
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The Palmer LTER crew recognized President Obama’s efforts to combat global warming by collecting climate data at an oceanographic station they named for the 44th president. The scientific crew, including our own Dave Johnston, who are on a five-week expedition aboard the U.S. icebreaker Laurence M. Gould, will stop at […]
On Friday, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) denied six applications to conduct seismic surveys with air guns in Atlantic waters. This puts a stop, at least for now, to efforts to conduct seismic testing in the Atlantic and helps to safeguard the endangered North Atlantic right whale, together […]
In April Andy will join a team of international experts who will attempt to capture some of the last remaining vaquitas and move them into a sanctuary in the Upper Gulf of California. This ex-situ conservation action is part of a last-ditch attempt to prevent the extinction of the species. […]
CIRVA, the international recovery team for the vaquita, has asked an international group of experts to consider ex situ (out-of-habitat) options for conservation of the species. These options include the capture and housing of vaquitas in the Gulf of California. You can read about this approach in a news piece in Science. Presidents Pena […]
After a couple weeks of wind and rain, the weather gods smiled on us last week, and afforded us a chance to start our third year of satellite tagging work off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, with Daniel Webster of Cascadia Research Collective. To date we have tagged forty short-finned […]
In May Andy attended the seventh meeting of CIRVA – the international recovery team for the vaquita. The team reviewed the results of the 2015 survey, which found only about 60 vaquitas left. Since then, at least three vaquitas have been killed by totoaba poachers. You can read the report […]
Doug Nowacek, Ari Friedlaender, Erin Puckett and Logan Pallin (a Duke undergraduate and now one of Ari’s master’s students at Oregon State) are on their way to the Antarctic to study the ecology of humpback whales as part of the annual Palmer Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, funded by the […]
The vaquita is the most endangered whale, dolphin, or porpoise in the world. The remnant population of less than 100 animals lives in a tiny area in the northern Gulf of California. The Government of Mexico is working to conserve the species, but it is threatened by an illegal fishery […]
We wrapped up our early summer field season this week with three excellent days off Cape Hatteras. Overall, we deployed 15 satellite-linked transmitters: 10 on short-finned pilot whales, 3 on Cuvier’s beaked whales and one each on a pelagic bottlenose dolphin and a sperm whale (our first tag deployment on […]