{"id":190,"date":"2015-07-18T04:47:46","date_gmt":"2015-07-18T04:47:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/?p=190"},"modified":"2015-07-18T05:44:47","modified_gmt":"2015-07-18T05:44:47","slug":"a-week-full-of-whales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/2015\/07\/18\/a-week-full-of-whales\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week-Full of Whales"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello and greetings from the sort of sunny Oregon Coast! Sarah reporting in to offer an update on Florence\u2019s Gray Whale study now that we\u2019re about ten days into sampling. If you\u2019re new to our blog you can read up on the preliminary field season right here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"This<\/a>
This little savior came through on the day all our technology failed and cheered us up with his rainbow spouts. \u00a0Thankfully, he’s a repeat visitor and though we may have missed him on the 14th, we were able to get a good focal follow on him today.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Before I get to the project though, let me introduce myself a bit further. As I said, my name\u2019s Sarah \u2013 one of the three interns on our whale surveying team. I got my Bachelor of Science in Oceanography at the University of Washington a few years back and have since worked as a lab tech at UW\u2019s Friday Harbor Labs and as an Americorps volunteer serving as a teacher\u2019s aide. Eventually I plan to become a science teacher, but thought a little more field work this summer would be a nice break after two years of service.<\/p>\n

\"Cricket<\/a>
Cricket and Justin pondering the challenges of whale watching.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thus, I moved to Newport last week just in time to catch the first day of our main surveying season. And what a season it\u2019s been. We\u2019ve tracked 48 whales since I\u2019ve arrived, averaging about six a day. Of course, those aren\u2019t all 48 different whales. If we lose sight of a whale for longer than 20 minutes, we assume it has left our study area and pronounce it lost, and unless we can identify the next sighting as the same whale based on markings (which we\u2019re getting pretty good at), we give it a new number to keep track. We also give whales we\u2019ve already seen new numbers when we see them on a different day.<\/p>\n

\"Table<\/a>
Table for two: these whales caused some confusion among the team as they began to forage together before we could tell the difference between the two.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You might be wondering how we can tell gray whales apart when they\u2019re mostly, well, gray and underwater. And the short answer is we have a pretty difficult time doing so at first sight. Gray whales aren\u2019t like orcas, whose saddle patch just behind the dorsal fin serves as a fingerprint, nor are they humpbacks, whose patterned flukes are cataloged for easy matching. Gray whales have more of a dorsal hump than a fin, followed by five or six ridges we call knuckles. They aren\u2019t famous for showing their flukes above water either, so unless you get several views of a particular whale\u2019s sides, dorsal, and, if you\u2019re lucky, fluke, it\u2019s hard to have a positive ID for the whale. The good news is, that part of our sampling equipment is a camera with a massive zoom lens, so we can take photos of most of the whales we track with the theodolite (see the previous post to learn about theodolites<\/a>). From those photos (at least 400 a day) we can look at scars from barnacles and killer whales, pigmentation spots that are part of the whales\u2019 coloring, and parasites like barnacles and amphipods to recognize whales we\u2019ve seen before. Eventually we\u2019ll send all the photos we take to the Cascadia Research Group<\/a> in Olympia, Washington, that keeps a database of all identified gray whales.<\/p>\n

\"Sitting<\/a>
Sitting on a clifftop photographing whales might sound more like a vacation than science, so here’s some (very peliminary) data of one whale. This is Mitosis on three different days. The first day is red, second is yellow, and the third is green.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Anyways, thanks for keeping with me to the bottom of the page. It\u2019s been a fun first week-or-so and I\u2019m excited to be heading to our second study site in Port Orford<\/a> tomorrow after surveying. We\u2019ll be there for 15 days, so next time you hear from us, we\u2019ll be a bit further down the coast.<\/p>\n

\"Yes,<\/a>
Yes, we named a whale after cell replication, because look at those overlapping spots!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Best Fishes!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sarah<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hello and greetings from the sort of sunny Oregon Coast! Sarah reporting in to offer an update on Florence\u2019s Gray Whale study now that we\u2019re about ten days into sampling. If you\u2019re new to our blog you can read up on the preliminary field season right here. Before I get to the project though, let … Continue reading A Week-Full of Whales<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6597,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[188686,636310],"tags":[712752,195384,634723,677522,635445,634945,513,1398,5],"class_list":["post-190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-projects","category-gray-whale-foraging-ecology-and-vessel-disturbance","tag-depoe-bay","tag-field-work","tag-florence-van-tulder","tag-foraging-ecology","tag-gemm-lab","tag-gray-whales","tag-marine-mammals","tag-oregon","tag-science"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6597"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":200,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions\/200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}