By Dawn Barlow, MSc Student, Oregon State University<\/p>\n
Perhaps you\u2019ve read some posts about New Zealand blue whales on this blog from the past field season in the South Taranaki Bight (STB). I know I eagerly awaited updates from the field while the team was in\u00a0New Zealand and I was in Southern California, finishing undergrad and writing funding proposals and grad school applications. Now that undergrad is done and dusted, I\u2019ve arrived in Newport and begun to settle in to my next chapter as the newest member of the GEMM Lab<\/a>, joining the blue whale research team as a MSc student in OSU\u2019s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. Since no blue whale news has made it onto this blog in some time, I\u2019m excited to share what has happened since the team returned from the field!<\/p>\n As you may have heard from Leigh<\/a>, Callum<\/a>, and Kristin<\/a>, 2016 was a fruitful field season. In nearly 1,500 miles of vessel surveys, the team documented blue whale foraging behavior, a pair of racing whales<\/a>, four mother-calf pairs, what may be the first aerial footage of nursing behavior in baleen whales (video below), and a whale with apparent deformities. Five hydrophones units were deployed<\/a>, fecal and biopsy samples were collected<\/a>, oceanographic conditions were measured, and photos were taken.<\/p>\n