Category Archives: Dolphins
Five Ways to Show Your Love for the Ocean.
Whale you be my Valentine? I dolphinately will! Illustration by Leafeon via Quid Pro Quo on Tumblr Love prompts us to do brave, romantic and sometimes foolish things. To paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, today we’re asking ourselves: How do I love thee, Ocean? Let me count the ways. We came up with 5. On Valentine’s Day this [...]
The Little Boat That Could…
It’s amazing what you can accomplish from a little boat! Here’s a photo of Rob preparing a pop-up hydrophone (a microphone that listens underwater) for deployment. Our colleagues at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology invented these amazing hydrophones that sit on the sea-bed and record all the sounds in the ocean including whales, dolphins [...]
Big Skye Country
In the summer, you can you usually find Rob, Wishart (the dog) and me doing field work in our little boat with whales and dolphins in British Columbia, Canada. This year’s different. We’re in a new country. Scotland. I’m finishing my PhD on dolphin ecology and Rob is in the middle of his Marie Curie [...]
I LOVE DOLPHINS IN THE SPRINGTIME
It’s that time of year again. Pacific white-sided are making appearances in the waters throughout the Pacific Northwest. Last month, Knight Inlet, BC was bursting with Pacific white-sided dolphins and we were there to collect ID photographs, acoustic recordings (Click here to listen) and prey samples. Soon after our Knight Inlet trip ended, our colleague, [...]
(WHALE, DOLPHIN AND HUMAN) MOTHERS ROCK
I’m not a mom (yet), but being in the field with whales and dolphins for my PhD research is making me think a lot lately about motherhood. The killer whales (orcas) that we study stay with their mothers their entire lives: they live in a matrifocal society. That’s rare. Sure, when the daughters grow up and [...]
The best of times, the worst of times: Dolphin-palooza 2011; Earth Day; and the First Anniversary of the BP Spill
This is a big week for the planet. Earth Day and the one-year anniversary of the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It will take years to assess the damage from the Gulf spill economically, societally and ecologically. A recent paper in Conservation Letters led by Oceans Initiative’s Dr Rob Williams with [...]
REMEMBER, THE CAMERA ADDS 10 TONNES…
At New Year’s, we all make resolutions about diet. But we’ve got nothing on Pacific humpback whales, which are currently on their mating and calving grounds in Hawaii and Mexico. During this time, they go weeks or months without eating at all. BC waters provide important habitat for these highly migratory animals. When they’re here [...]
LEAPS: Lagenorhynchus Ecology, Abundance and Population Status
This study, led by Erin Ashe as part of her PhD project at the University of St Andrews, assesses the health of the population of Pacific white-sided dolphins found in the Broughton Archipelago, BC and nearby waters. This is a demographic study, which means that it uses statistical methods to study a population. The statistics [...]
Dolphin Twitter
We don’t know what they’re saying, yet, but it must be important. Click here to hear clicks, calls and dolphin chatter!
photo by J. Towers
