Category Archives: Human Impacts
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 [...]
PLASTIC IS FOREVER
Happy (?!?) Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup Day! We hope you’re reading this post on your smart phone, on your way to a beach to clean up plastic. The ocean needs all the help it can get, from people everywhere and in all walks of life, to remove plastic from the ecosystem before it chokes something. [...]
(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 [...]
Thinking big. Establishing general principles from little truths: lessons from marine mammal research
When most people think of scientists doing research on animals, we think of geeks in lab coats, experimenting on lab rats. Guinea pigs. Fruit flies. Maybe a guppy. Actually, marine mammals make fascinating study animals, but their aquatic lifestyle and large body size pose challenges to studying them in the wild — you try to [...]
Human impacts on the ocean
If we had our choice, we’d just study marine wildlife on its own terms. Realistically, the animals we study live in an increasingly human-dominated landscape. Human activities influence how loud the ocean is, how much fish is available to support marine mammal populations, and how many whales are killed by ship strikes or how many [...]
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 [...]
I HAVE BEEN COLLECTING WHALE POOP ALL MORNING (AND OTHER THINGS YOU COULD HAVE LIVED WITHOUT KNOWING)
Together, we’ve spent 18 years in university. We put our advanced degrees to work collecting whale poop. OUR MOTHERS ARE VERY PROUD. But we have a perfectly good reason for scooping whale poop. Our colleagues at University of Washington have pioneered methods to extract hormones from whale feces. Like a human pregnancy test that uses [...]
photo by J. Towers
