Scientific Publications

In BC waters humpback whales are known to bubble net feed, where groups of whales work together to trap fish inside spirals of bubbles. Over 20 years of observation, we documented the spread of this behaviour through the north coast population.

Quantifying underwater vessel noise in marine ecosystems is challenging, due to difficulties in accounting for small, not publicly tracked boats, creating a knowledge gap in marine management.

In coastal British Columbia, Canada, marine megafauna such as humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) and fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus velifera) have been subject to a history of exploitation and near extirpation. While their populations have been in recovery, significant threats are posed to these vulnerable species by proposed natural resource ventures in this region, in addition to the compounding effects of anthropogenic climate change.

As marine traffic increases globally, ship strikes have emerged as a primary threat to many baleen whale populations. Here we predict ship-strike rates for fin whales Balaenoptera physalus and humpback whales Megaptera novaeangliae in the central territorial waters of the Gitga’at First Nation (British Columbia, Canada), which face increases in existing marine traffic as well as new liquified natural gas (LNG) shipping in the next decade.

To understand the threat of ship strikes for marine predators such as whales, quantitative tools are needed that measure specific impacts without ignoring the many uncertain and stochastic elements of whale-vessel interactions. We developed a tool that focuses on one particularly complex aspect of the ship-strike problem: the encounter rate, the fraction of co-occurrences (i.e., times that whales and vessels occur within the same 1-km2) that result in an imminent collision.

Fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) are widely considered an offshore and oceanic species, but certain populations also use coastal areas and semi-enclosed seas. Based upon fifteen years of study, we report that Canadian Pacific fin whales (B. p. velifera) have returned to the Kitimat Fjord System (KFS) in the Great Bear Rainforest, and have established a seasonally resident population in its intracoastal waters.

Photo-identification (photo-ID) databases can comprise versatile troves of information for well-studied animal populations and, when organized well and curated carefully, can be readily applied to a wide range of research questions, such as population abundance estimates, meta-population connectivity and social network structure.

Animal culture and social bonds are relevant to wildlife conservation because they influence patterns of geography, behavior, and strategies of survival.Numerous examples of socially-driven habitat partitioning and ecological-niche specialization can be found among vertebrates, including toothed whales.

AUTHOR: JANIE WRAY, ERIC KEEN (2020) PUBLICATION: Marine Mammal Science ABSTRACT: The population dynamics of large mammals are characterized by highly variable and relatively poor juvenile survival. Changes in the rates of juvenile survival and reproduction are often [...]

Localization and tracking of vocalizing marine mammals are powerful tools for understanding and mitigating the impacts of anthropogenic stressors such as vessel noise on habitat use of cetaceans.

The shore-based survey is a common, non-invasive, and low-cost method in marine mammal science, but its scientific applications are currently limited. Such studies typically target populations whose distributions are not random with respect to nearshore sites and involve repeated scans of the same area from single, stationary platforms.

We used ecosystem sampling during systematic surveys and opportunistic focal follows, comparison tests, and random forest models to evaluate fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus) and humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) habitat associations within an inland feeding ground (Kitimat Fjord System, British Columbia, Canada).

Energetically costly lunge feeding at depth causes the respiratory patterns and feeding performance of rorqual whales (Family Balaenopteridae) to hinge in part upon prey patch depth.

A decade of visual surveys (2005-2014) revealed that humpbacks Megaptera novaeangliae occupy a temperate fjord system in British Columbia, Canada, in a wave pattern that propagates from outer channels in the summer to deep inland channels in late fall.

Rorqual whales (f. Balaenopteridae) supposedly respond to increases in prey supply according to both aggregative and feeding thresholds. With the former, they gather in areas above a minimum prey density set by their basal metabolic needs.

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) were hunted commercially in Canada’s Pacific region until 1966. Depleted to an estimated 1,400 individuals throughout the North Pacific, humpback whales are listed as Threatened under Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA) and Endangered under the US Endangered Species Act.