Category Archives: Habitat
National Monuments and Marine Protected Areas
Today, President Barack Obama designated five new national monuments, including Cattle Point on San Juan Island in Washington state. This is exciting news, not only because Cattle Point is beautiful and has historic relevance, but because important feeding habitat of one of the most critically endangered marine mammal populations in the US is just off Cattle [...]
PUTTING OCEAN NOISE ON THE MAP
We recently partnered with two acousticians, Christine Erbe of Curtin University and Alex MacGillivray of JASCO, to predict how BC’s waters sound to a whale. Using shipping traffic data compiled by Patrick O’Hara (which we used previously in a ship strike analysis for fin, humpback and killer whales), and making some assumptions about how noisy [...]
WHERE THE WHALES (AND WHALE RESEARCHERS) ARE
Rob and his colleagues published a neat new paper today in the open access journal, PLOS ONE. The paper, led by Dr Kristin Kaschner at the University of Freiburg, examined >1100 estimates of the abundance of whales, dolphins and porpoises reported in more than 400 surveys conducted worldwide between 1975 and 2005. It is [...]
Happy World Oceans Day! The Secret to a Sound Ocean
The Secret to a Sound Ocean Oceans Initiative is a team of scientists on a mission to protect whales, dolphins and their habitat. To celebrate World Oceans Day, we’re releasing the main findings from our Ocean Noise project. Our clever friends at Column Five Media have helped us turn our cutting-edge acoustics research with Cornell [...]
TELLING STORIES IN THE DARK
One of the overarching themes of our work is quintessentially Canadian. We study survival. {Margaret Atwood proposed that survival is one of the most central and enduring narratives in Canadian literature.} OK, we study the probability that whales and dolphins, not humans, will survive from one year to the next, given the amount of fish [...]
OCEAN NOISE: KEY FACTOR IN THE STATE OF THE SALISH SEA
Larry Pynn is publishing a special, six-part series on the State of the Salish Sea. We are happy for our work to be included. His piece on 18 April addresses an issue that resonates with us: using hydrophones [underwater microphones] to measure ocean noise levels, while simultaneously collecting information on whale presence. We are a [...]
Pink Moon
“A Pink Moon is the full moon of April, named for the herb, “moss pink”, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because [...]
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 [...]
IF YOU WERE A WHALE, WHERE WOULD YOU LIVE?
Former First Lady, Rosalynn Carter, said it best: “There is nothing more important than a good, safe, secure home.” She was talking about people, but it’s not a bad description of how we protect wildlife. Much of our work as marine conservation biologists involves identifying habitat that’s important to whales and dolphins, and ensuring that [...]
photo by J. Towers
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