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.
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!