Knowing how many animals are in a population is at the cornerstone of many conservation and management decisions. For whales, dolphins & porpoises, ship time to estimate abundance can be prohibitively expensive — often running into the tens of thousands of dollars each day. We’ve just launched our Animal Counting Toolkit to share some of the […]
Guest post from our newest team member, Natalie Mastick “I look at pictures of dolphins all day,” is my most common answer when asked what I do for work. It’s an over-simplified statement, albeit accurate, and it usually leads to many follow-up questions. The most frequent being “Why?” That’s a fair question. I then proceed […]
A lot of the research our charity, Oceans Initiative, conducts is to see how human activities — all of them — affect marine wildlife, both in the Pacific Northwest and around the world. The iconic orca we study illustrate this problem well. According to the latest census by Center for Whale Research, the population is hovering at 84 individuals. […]
Did you know two species of river dolphin live in the Amazon? The pink one is called boto, or Inia; the grey one is called tucuxi, or Sotalia. Both are gorgeous, ancient species that have become adapted to live their entire lives in freshwater. They are also incredibly tough to spot in muddy waters, and have a […]
Few marine conservation issues are more contentious than Japan’s “scientific whaling” program, which allows for the killing of up to 935 whales each year. This number is large, relative to hunts of other whales in other parts of the world, but small relative to the hundreds of thousands of Antarctic minke whales in the […]
Grey whales are pretty neat. We were lucky enough to encounter two of them on Boxing Day. Their visit to inshore waters of British Columbia in December was a bit of a surprise. Grey whales are legendary for their migration, which is among the longest of any mammal. We’d expect to see grey whales […]
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 […]
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, […]
Mark Hume, at the Globe & Mail, just published a neat new story about our recently published paper on sharks in BC (with Tom Okey, Scott Wallace and Vince Gallucci). The paper was published months ago, but became newsworthy again recently in light of the Cohen Commission’s discussions about the potential role of marine predators […]
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 […]
