The Whalenerd‘s Podcast

Happy New Year!

Several birthing events for large whales in the North Pacific have been documented this winter. So we did a recap of the latest events in Mexico and California. We also covered a paper that gathered up reports over the past few decades of humpback whale births around the world.

This is our last episode of 2022. We talked through an early season update for Maui with some data from NOAA, observations on the water, and some news updates on Moon the humpback whale.

This week we get caught up on a few updates for everyone, including sharing some gratitude for you all. We are so grateful to everyone that listens to and supports the podcast!

Also we chat about some interesting patterns of humpback whales moving around the Eastern North Pacific using some data from Happywhale and our observations on the water.

This week we had guest Andy Rogan on from Ocean Alliance. Andy is the Science Manager for the Ocean Alliance SnotBot program. We chatted about new technologies in whale research, drones and of course whale snot!

Whale sightings have still been going strong as whales are working their way South for winter season in the Northern Hemisphere. Katlyn took a trip to New York last week to be a part of the Safina Center annual gala event. We are so grateful to them for supporting the podcast this year. While she was there she went whale watching out of Brooklyn, so we took a little time to learn more about the whales that use the New York Bight.

We chatted all things hydrophone this week with John Ryan from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). As you know, we are huge fans of the soundscape live stream and it was super fun to chat with one of the scientists who is central to the program. They recently published a paper using the hydrophone data to learn about how blue whales might be using acoustics to find large aggregations of krill in Monterey Bay.

We have had quite a few friendly humpback whale encounters over the past month. So we wanted to chat more about what makes an encounter "friendly" with a whale and what the experience is like. There hasn't been much science done to explain these encounters currently, but we did discuss what little information there is available.

Katlyn takes us through the basics of how sound moves in water. You can learn the definitions of how sound is characterized and how it's measured. Feel free to reference this episode later if you need a refresh on how this all works when we talk about whale acoustics in other episodes.

Slater is back from his trip to Tonga and we couldn't wait to talk about it! Hear about his experience swimming with humpbacks in a Southern Hemisphere breeding ground. 

This week Katlyn did a little follow up on the fin whale story from Antarctica that we have been talking about throughout the summer. For more background you can start with Episodes 117 and 119 as a primer. 

New studies with satellite and scar pattern data are shedding light on where fin whales are going in the winter months. Are these waters safe to transit? That really is the question.