Category Archives: Habitat
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 [...]
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 [...]
(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 [...]
Things that go bump in the night
When ships strike whales, the whale generally loses. People must wonder why scientists treat this issue like it’s some great mystery that’s difficult to quantify and even more difficult to solve. After all, hitting a large whale must be like hitting a moose with your car. Right? So fixing the problem must be as easy as [...]
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 [...]
It’s the whale equivalent of Park Place and Boardwalk…
A lot of our time is spent looking for whales and dolphins. When we find them, we assume that the animals are in a particular place for a good reason. The area that the animals occupy is their habitat, and much of our scientific research aims to identify why animals are found in some areas [...]
Ships are loud
Check out what a humpback whale hears as a ship steams around Vancouver Island: In partnership with acousticians and engineers at Cornell University’s Bioacoustics Research Program, we’ve deployed a number of hydrophones to measure underwater shipping noise in BC. Cornell’s Dimitri Ponirakis produced this amazing animation based on our data to illustrate what a humpback [...]
photo by J. Towers
