End of year...

Our HUMPACS project has made for an exciting and busy year. To wrap it up, Beth had the opportunity to present the results of our HUMPACS East mission at the World Marine Mammal Conference in Barcelona, Spain Dec 6-12, 2019. She presented in the session on “Assessing Marine Mammals in the High Seas” as well as in the workshop “Using smart acoustic technology to detect, classify, localize and track marine species”.

Beth presenting at the WMMC

Beth Goodwin, Rose Fisher, Jillian Duggan, Ashley Noseworthy (left to right)

We have another HUMPACS mission planned for 2020! Check back in with us in January, in the mean time wishing you all a Joyful Holiday and a Happy New Year!!

HUMPACS East Results Are In!

We know you’ve all been waiting to hear about the success of HUMPACS East, and believe us, we’ve been just as anxious to let you all know.

Our results have just been published in the The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Amer (Vol.145, No.6).

The purpose of this study was to investigate if whales were present in the offshore waters between the Hawaii and Mexico breeding grounds where, to our knowledge, they have never been documented before. It’s a big ocean out there, so we were searching for a needle in a haystack…and we were successful!

We identified humpback calls out to 1,200nm from Hawaii, approximately midway to Mexico.

Our findings raise more questions regarding humpback whale breeding grounds, migration routes, and habitat. We have presented our results to the Marine Mammal Commission and hope to present at the World Marine Mammal Science Conference in Barcelona, December, 2019. We feel certain our results will elicit more research, affect how marine mammals are monitored and help with management.

Read the Publication (link to PDF)

Supplemental Material (link to download)

Copyright 2019 Acoustical Society of America. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the Acoustical Society of America. The article appeared in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Amer (Vol.145, No.6) and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5111970.

Below is a short annotated power point presentation of our mission and results.

Aloha!