{"id":4859,"date":"2022-10-17T15:49:23","date_gmt":"2022-10-17T22:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/?p=4859"},"modified":"2022-10-17T15:49:23","modified_gmt":"2022-10-17T22:49:23","slug":"return-of-the-whales-the-granite-2022-field-season-comes-to-a-close","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/2022\/10\/17\/return-of-the-whales-the-granite-2022-field-season-comes-to-a-close\/","title":{"rendered":"Return of the whales: The GRANITE 2022 field season comes to a close"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Clara Bird<\/a>, PhD Candidate, OSU Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences,\u00a0Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s hard to believe that it\u2019s already been four and half months since we started the field season (check out Lisa\u2019s blog<\/a> for a recap of where we began), but as of this weekend the GRANITE project\u2019s 8th<\/sup> field season has officially ended! As the gray whales wrap up their foraging season and start heading south for the winter, it\u2019s time for us to put our gear into storage, settle into a new academic year, and start processing the data we spent so much time collecting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The field season can be quite an intense time (40 days equaling over 255 hours on the water!), so we often don\u2019t take a moment to reflect until the end. But this season has been nothing short of remarkable. As you may remember from past\u00a0blogs<\/a>, the past couple years (2020-21) have been a bit concerning, with lower whale numbers than previously observed. Since many of us started working on the project during this time, most of us were expecting another similar season. But we were wrong in the best way. From the very first day, we saw more whales than in previous years and we identified whales from our catalog that we hadn\u2019t seen in several years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Image 1: Collage of photos from our field season. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

We identified friends \u2013 old and new!<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This season we had 224 sightings of 63 individual whales. Of those 63, 51 were whales from our catalog (meaning we have seen them in a previous season). Of these 51 known whales, we only saw 20 of them last year! This observation brings up interesting questions such as, where did most of these whales forage last year? Why did they return to this area this year? And, the classic end of season question, what\u2019s going to happen next year?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We also identified 12 whales that were not in our catalog, making them new to the GEMM lab. Two of our new whales are extra exciting because they are not just new to us but new to the population; we saw two calves this year! We were fortunate enough to observe two mom-calf pairs in July. One pair was of a \u201cnew\u201d mom in our catalog and her calf. We nicknamed this calf \u201cRoly-poly\u201d because when we found this mom-calf pair, we recorded some incredible drone footage of \u201croly-poly\u201d continuously performing body rolls while their mom was feeding nearby (video 1).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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