Marine Mammal Institute

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...

A sea otter (Enhydra lutris) has been sighted and photographed recently in Depoe Bay. This is the first confirmed sighting (with photographs) of a sea otter on the Central coast in many years. Although we frequently receive reports of sightings of otters on the coast, most of these are in fact river otters  (Lontra canadensis), a much more common species that lives primarily in fresh water habitats but frequently ventures into the marine environment as well.

It appears that this animal is a wanderer from either California or Washington waters. Whether or not it remains in...

Terri Irwin signs an agreement with the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University to fund humpback whale research projects. Read more

See OSU News and Communication Media Release here

See Corvallis Gazette-Times article here

A new paper in Marine Mammal Science, co-authored by MMI’s Scott Baker and Debbie Steel, describes how genetic identification of dried whale meat from a remote Pacific island helped to rediscover a new species of the rare Mesoplodon beaked whale. With the addition of Mesoplodon hotaula, there are now 22 species of the beaked whales, yet this family remains one of the most poorly described of all vertebrates.

(See also: http://dna-barcoding.blogspot.com/2014/02/an-old-new-whale-species.html)

A lone western gray whale, tagged off Russia’s Sakhalin Island by scientists in September and tracked for more than 70 days, has suddenly taken off from its feeding area and sped across the Sea of Okhotsk to the west side of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

One of the highlights of the two training sessions they attended in Newport was the presentations by Dr. Bruce Mate, director of the Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute, Flugum said.“That’s one of the big perks of being a volunteer is being in on one of his sessions,” she said. “Bruce Mate is a world-renowned gray whale researcher, and he’s an individual that gets so excited about what he’s talking about, and at times, he’s in tears.”

11/04/2009

An international group of 50 scientists, including Scott Baker, a leading OSU geneticist, have announced a project to sequence the genomes of 10,000 different vertebrate species. 

An Oregon State researcher is raising some new scientific doubts about the National Marine Fisheries Service Sea Lion biological opinion.  Markus Horning has been tagging Sea Lions in Prince William Sound and finding that predators like Killer Whales and Sharks are killing a larger proportion of their pups than expected.