Marine Mammal Institute

Associate Director Scott Baker and Research Assistant Debbie Steel are in Apia, Samoa for a meeting of the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium, hosted by the South Pacific Regional Environment Progamme (SPREP).The Consortium includes 36 independent researchers active in 10 Pacific Island ...

On Thursday May 20, a team from the Marine Mammal Institute was able to successfully remove a plastic packing band that had been wrapped around the neck of an adult male California sea lion. This was our first attempt at removing debris from a sea lion on a beach.

We've also recently been successful with desentanglement efforts on a Steller sea lion at Sea Lion Caves and at our recently deployed disentanglement capture cage at the Bayfront in Newport.

Unfortunately, packing band entanglements are increasingly common with sea lions along the West Coast. These plastic strips are used in the packaging of many products, particularly frozen fish used for bait, and end up...

When Ocean Power Technologies floats its first 200-ton wave energy-generating buoy off the Oregon Coast this year, it wants to be sure the device doesn’t disturb the coast’s most frequent multi-ton visitors: gray whales.

An international team of Oregon State University scientists, documentary filmmakers and environmental advocates has uncovered an apparent illegal trade in whalemeat, linking whales killed in Japan’s controversial scientific whaling program to sushi restaurants in Seoul, South Korea, and Los Angeles, Calif. 

A crew from the Pinniped Ecology Applied Research Laboratory (PEARL) with OSU's Marine Mammal Institute is helping the North Coast Marine Mammal Center (http://www.northcoastmmc.org/index.php) track a young female Steller sea lion who was released from the rehabilitation facility in Crescent City, CA on Saturday, March 27. Markus Horning and interns Julia Hager, Stephen Meck and Jennifer Olson glued a satellite transmitter to the fur on the animals' head using 5-minute epoxy. The transmitter allows researchers to track the sea lion's location on a daily basis. The device is expected to fall off by the annual molt in August.

This is the first time a...

A sub-adult Steller sea lion was successfully disentangled from a trawl net at Sea Lion Caves on Thursday March18. Click HERE for details.

For several months this past fall and winter, thousands of California sea lions (Zalophus californianus) assembled on and just offshore of a remote beach just to the south of Heceta Head on the central Oregon coast. It is unknown specifically what attracted so many of these animals to this site, although it is clear that enormous amounts of prey fish (possibly herring, squid, hake, sardine or anchovies) must have been available to support such huge numbers of sea lions. This area is also home to several hundred Steller sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus), which use nearby Sea Lion Caves as a regular haul out.

On Thursday, April 9, 2009, a fresh dead adult female gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) was found on the beach at Washburn State Park, just north of Heceta Head.  She was extremely emaciated, and there was no evident trauma to the body. Her posture, lying belly-down flat on the sand, suggests that she died on the beach or in shallow water soon before she was reported to the stranding network. We suspect the immediate cause of death was starvation.

View map of the stranding location

A necropsy was conducted...