In the News

Our team has just finished an incredible field season in the Antarctic. We collected several hundred biopsies of whale tissue, paired many of these with measurable images of body condition using drones, placed tags on several animals, and conducted exposure experiments for a new study on the impacts of tourism on whale behavior. A film team from NowThis Earth joined one of our teams on an Intrepid Travel ship to tell our story.

Scientists have found that studying high-resolution images of whales from space is a feasible way to estimate their populations. A team, led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS; press release here), compared satellite images to data collected from traditional ship-based surveys.  This study is a big step towards developing a cost-effective method to study whales in remote and inaccessible places. Check out the full scientific article published in Scientific Reports here.

Blue whales have a flair for paradox. They live in water but breathe air. They’re enormous — the biggest creatures that have ever lived, as far as anyone knows — but subsist almost entirely on tiny krill. And as new research reveals, even the animal’s dunk tank-size heart jumps between extremes. Find the full story here.

For the first time, scientists have recorded the heart rate of a blue whale, uncovering new information about the biology of the world's largest mammal The full article can be found on CNN online here.

In a collaboration with WWF, Dr. Ari friedlaender led a team in Antarctica and attached a camera to an Antarctic minke whale. In doing so they captured incredible evidence of how these whales feed. The camera – one of three “whale cams” funded by WWF-Australia – is part of efforts by scientists to better protect whale feeding areas in Antarctica.

Take a look at just a few of WWF's favorite photographs from 2018, including an Antarctic collaboration between WWF and the Friedlaender BTBEL lab back in Santa Cruz. The full article can be found on WWF online here.

"As the Antarctic Peninsula heats up, the rules of life there are being ripped apart. Alarmed scientists aren’t sure what all the change means for the future." Check out this wonderful online article featuring work by Dr. Friedlaender and his lab at UCSC.

Check out the article in  Bates magazine featuring Dr. Friedlaenders work on hales in the Antarctic. "... the more Friedlaender finds out about the whales, the more he understands how even the smallest change in climate has a huge impact
on their lives." Emily McConville writes.

"As international whaling ramped up around the turn of the 20th century so did efforts by governments, activists, and the public to stop the practice. By 2016, more than half of the species' 14 population segments were no longer considered endangered." Check out the article which features BTBEL lab PhD student Logan Pallin's work on pregnancy in Southern Ocean Humpbacks.

Nineteenth century commercial whaling killed the vast majority of whales, but some species are coming back, especially humpbacks. Melting Antarctic ice has led to an abundance of krill, and with all that food humpback whales are thriving with high rates of pregnancy. University of California – Santa Cruz Researcher Ari Friedlaender tells Host Steve Curwood the comeback should be celebrated as a conservation victory, but there are questions about how long the krill boom might last.

SANTA CRUZ >> High school students will get a chance this summer to shadow and assist top marine scientists, as part of a new field study program centered at the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary Exploration Center.

Students will board research boats, to identify and assist in tagging whales and place listening sensors in open water.

In a rare piece of good news for whales, humpbacks who live and breed in the southern oceans near Antarctica appear to be making a comeback, with females in recent years having a high pregnancy rate and giving birth to more calves.

From 2010 to 2016, researchers collected skin and blubber samples from 577 humpbacks using a crossbow with modified darts. By sequencing DNA, the team determined that that population included a total of 239 males and 268 females. Higher levels of the hormone progesterone in the blubber showed that an average of 63.5 percent of those females were pregnant when sampled. But the story is in how those numbers changed, not the average.

A few miles off the coast of the rapidly warming Antarctic Peninsula, scientists are getting their first-ever detailed look at one of the most mysterious mammals on the planet, minke whales.

Smaller cousins of the mammoth blue whale, the elusive minkes have remained mostly out of reach in the deep fjords of the icy Antarctic. It wasn’t until earlier this month that a team of scientists using an array of drones, suction-cap tags, and whale-mounted video cameras uncovered some basic facts about the species, such as their average size and how they moved. They discovered that minkes, long thought to be loners, are outgoing and social. They found out that minkes had spots.

Scientists in Antarctica have attached a camera to a minke whale in what they say is a world first.

“You’ve just put an instrument on the biggest animal that’s ever lived, and you got the most incredible view while doing it,” said Ari Friedlaender, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University who says he has become so proficient at tagging whales that he doesn’t even notice the boat rocking. “Afterwards there’s kind of an adrenaline rush.”

Dr. Ari Friedlaender has been in Antarctica attaching suction cup tags and cameras to humpback and minke whales to study their feeding behavior.  “We have some wonderful data on different feeding strategies..."

The consequences of climate change in the poles can be a hard sell for disinterested Earth residents. Sympathy for polar bears afloat shrinking ice platforms to the north and dwindling penguin populations to the south only goes so far, and dense academic papers on the other end of the spectrum remain impenetrable for those without marine-biology degrees.

WWF has created a unique multi-media and interactive app that engages people about the current state of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.  It is replete with sections dedicated to sharing stories and reports on Antarctic science and conservation in action. One section, "whale research above and below the ice," tells about Ari Friedlaender’s work in Antarctica to uncover some of the mysteries surrounding minke whales and how these poorly known whales survive in a changing environment.

In waters off the West Antarctic Peninsula, Ari Friedlaender found that humpback whales fed exclusively at night when the krill migrated vertically into shallower water and became an easier catch. During the day, when krill were deeper and harder to access, the humpbacks spent more time resting at the surface.