Latest Cetaceans Stories

YARMOUTH PORT, Mass., June 23, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Last night at the prestigious Cannes Golden Lion Awards for excellence in advertising, JWT Melbourne picked up the bronze medal for IFAW posters designed to highlight the sham of Japanese 'scientific' whaling. Despite a global ban on whaling, Japan has continued to hunt whales using a loophole which allows 'scientific' whaling. There is no valuable science which arises from 'scientific' whaling--just valuable whale meat which...

Traces of radioactive caesium have been found by Japanese whale hunters in two cetaceans recently harpooned off its shores in the Pacific Ocean, a fisheries agency official told AFP on Wednesday.Culled off the northern island of Hokkaido, the two minke whales showed readings of 31 becquerels and 24.3 becquerels of caesium per kilogram, the fisheries official claimed, adding that the cause may be related to the recent radiation leak from the Fukushima nuclear plant.Despite a worldwide ban on...

Whales are the earth's largest creatures, yet they are incredibly hard to study in the open ocean. For decades scientists have used boats, aircraft and even high cliffs to conduct visual surveys and gather data on whale and dolphin populations. Today, these live surveys form the basis of our knowledge of these marine mammals"”what species live where in the world, which ones tend to live together and how abundantly they are represented.Now, recent work by paleobiologist Nick Pyenson of the...

Dolphins and porpoises use echolocation for hunting and orientation. By sending out high-frequency sound, known as ultrasound, dolphins can use the echoes to determine what type of object the sound beam has hit. Researchers from Sweden and the US have now discovered that dolphins can generate two sound beam projections simultaneously."The beam projections have different frequencies and can be sent in different directions. The advantage is probably that the dolphin can locate the object more...

Whales have accents and regional dialectsWhen they dive together, sperm whales make patterns of clicks to each other known as "codas". Recent findings suggest that, not only do different codas mean different things, but that whales can also tell which member of their community is speaking based on the sound properties of the codas. Just as we can tell our friends apart by the sounds of their voices and the way they pronounce their words, different sperm whales make the same pattern...

Bottlenose dolphins* and beluga whales**, two marine species at or near the top of their respective food webs, accumulate more chemical pollutants in their bodies when they live and feed in waters near urbanized areas, according to scientists working at the Hollings Marine Laboratory (HML), a government-university collaboration in Charleston, S.C.In papers recently published online by the journal Environmental Science & Technology, one research team looked at the levels of persistent...

In a recent study to be published on April 27, 2011, in the peer-reviewed open-access journal PLoS ONE, Dr. Elliott Hazen and colleagues found that oceanographic and prey measurements can be used to identify beaked whale foraging habitat. The research team from Duke University, Woods Hole, and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center listened for foraging beaked whales and measured ocean features and distributions of prey off the east coast of Andross Island in the Bahamas.Their manuscript provides...

As they might with most endangered animals, scientists consider the whereabouts and activities of right whales extremely important.  "It is helpful to know where they go, why they go there and what they do when they're there," says Mark F. Baumgartner of the biology department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).Baumgartner and his colleagues studied the behavior of right whales and sei whales"”both endangered species of baleen whales"”in the waters of the Gulf of Maine...

Two Japanese whaling vessels from Kushiro launched their annual coastal whale hunt from the tsunami-devastated areas on the east coast of the northern island of Hokkaido, a fisheries agency official told AFP. Joining the fleet will be 5 crewman from the Ayukawa Whaling company, the only whaling company in the fishing town of Ayukawa.Already suffering from a recall of its Antarctic whaling fleet a month early from threats posed by the activist environmental outfit Sea Shepherd Society, the...

Project to Map Genetic Relatedness of Dolphin Populations in the South Pacific WASHINGTON, April 26, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Scott Baker, Ph.D., associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute and professor of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University, has been awarded a 2011 Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation. His project will map patterns of isolation and interaction among populations of dolphins in the South Pacific Ocean and identify habitats important to protect...