Rain was pouring hard the day Renee Albertson first connected, face-to-face, with a marine mammal. She was a 7-year-old visiting British Columbia’s Sealand aquarium (Canada’s now-defunct answer to California’s SeaWorld) with her mom and dad. The daily show had been cancelled because of the downpour. The usual crowds were absent. As the soggy trio from [...]
Tag » Marine Mammal Institute
July 11, 2012
Legacy of a Whale
Renee Albertson’s childhood encounter led her, decades later, to French Polynesia
May 29, 2012
Tracking the Titans
A whale named Varvara is following in the fluke-path of a whale named Flex, who surprised scientists last year by taking an unexpected migratory route from Russia to Oregon. Scientists led by Bruce Mate at the Marine Mammal Institute are following Varvara’s incredible journey via satellite signals from an electronic “tag” she received in September. [...]
May 11, 2011
Sea Lions Star in the Center Ring
[Editor's note: Amy Schneider, a junior in zoology from Roseburg, Ore., is an intern with Terra magazine. She wants to write and do science and combines them whenever she can. Her interest in animals started at age three when she told her parents she would die if she didn't get a pet guinea pig.] [...]
February 1, 2011
Hope Rides on Tagged Gray Whale
An electronic tag attached to a single western gray whale may lead to conservation of one of the world’s most endangered whale populations. Bruce Mate, director of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute, affixed the tag to the animal, a male known as “Flex,” last summer off Sakhalin Island, Russia, in the western Pacific. Mate [...]
April 23, 2010
Gene Stalker
DNA fingerprints reveal clues to ancestry and illicit hunting of cetaceans
Scott Baker, an Oregon State University conservation geneticist and cetacean specialist whose work was featured in the Academy Award-winning documentary, “The Cove,” has been named one of four 2011 Pew Fellows in Marine Conservation.
April 23, 2010
Secret Slaughter
In the seaside village of Taiji, Japan, there’s a jarring juxtaposition: Jolly-looking tour buses shaped like happy dolphins putter up and down the streets by day, while by night fishermen secretly slaughter hundreds of panic-stricken dolphins in a nearby inlet and sell them as meat. This sinister irony permeates the Academy Award-winning movie, The Cove, [...]
June 22, 2006
Tracking the Great Whales
Bruce Mate's pioneering tagging technologies are helping protect marine mammals from human impacts.
Some whale species and other marine mammals are still not in the clear. Research by Bruce Mate and colleagues in the Marine Mammal Program is revealing new details about ocean ecosystems and helping to address new threats.
