Redfish Rocks Community Tour

7. Gray Whale Research

Port Orford, OR

Hi, I am Lisa Hildebrand, a graduate student at Oregon State University in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. I work with Dr. Leigh Torres in her Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab and together we study the foraging ecology of gray whales right here in Port Orford. Look out at the ocean - scan it for a few minutes. Have you spotted a white, billowy cloud of air? That’s a blow and it’s from a whale! Top tip to spotting one here in Port Orford – don’t look too far out to sea. The gray whales that come into these coastal waters to feed do so pretty close to shore on shallow, rocky reefs, typically where there is kelp. In fact, a lot of the time, I see the gray whales feeding right up against the back of the port jetty, so be sure to spend some time there to see if you can spot a whale working its way along the backside of the jetty feeding. The kelpy reefs are home to thick layers of zooplankton, mostly something called mysid shrimp, a small, krill-like critter that the gray whales predominantly feed on here on the Oregon coast. The research that we conduct here is very fine scale, which means that we are looking at the relationship between predator and prey - so gray whales and zooplankton - in a very detailed way in a relatively small area. Since gray whales have this unique coastal feeding behavior, it allows me and my team to track and photograph whales from shore. Every day, two team members go out to a cliff site behind the OSU Port Orford Field Station where we set up something called a Theodolite. A Theodolite is a surveyor's tool that uses known heights and angles to calculate a very precise GPS location. So every time we see a whale come to the surface and we see its blow, we fix its location using a laptop. By doing this, we create what is called a track line of the whale's locations, movements, and behaviors, allowing us to determine when it has stopped in an area to feed and search for food or whether it is simply traveling in a unidirectional way. At the same time, two other team members are launching from the port beach in a tandem research kayak to sample for the other important component of this study, the zooplankton prey. The kayak team goes to twelve sampling locations, six in Mill Rocks, which are the big cluster of rocks off of battle rock beach to the left of the port, and six in Tichenor Cove, which is the cove right behind the jetty. At each of these sampling stations, we collect a prey sample with a net and we drop a GoPro camera to film the water column to gauge how much prey is at each of our stations. The goal of my research is to figure out whether the gray whales have individual foraging preferences, for example whether a whale is simply looking for the highest densities of prey, or whether it is selective and will chose where it forages based on the type of prey that is there. Essentially, it’s a question of quality vs quantity. Humans always say quality over quantity and I am curious to find out whether that holds true for gray whales or not. This project started in 2015, and we have conducted a summer field season from mid-July to the end of August every year since. We hope to continue this work for many years to come since gray whales, like most marine mammals, are long-lived species, just like us humans. Because of this, we require many years of data to properly understand their behaviors and choices. I have my fingers crossed that while I was talking to you about my research a gray whale stopped by to say hello!