Research
The right whale population at Peninsula Valdes has grown from an estimated 580 whales in 1971 to around 3,000 whales today, but their future is not secure. Human activities are degrading the whales' habitat. Existing problems include entanglement in ropes from a seed mussel industry (the whale pictured here has a rope threaded through her baleen), increased boat traffic, and refuse disposal that has enlarged the gull populations and thereby resulted in young gulls learning how to feed on the skin and blubber of the whales (explained further under Conservation Activities). Potential problems include the development of the whales' preferred bays, the extension of oil fields that currently exist 200 km to the south of the Peninsula, and the creation of a hydropower plant between the two bays of the Peninsula. A growing interest among the Argentines for the right whales that calve off their shores gives us hope for the population's future. The Whale Conservation Institute's branch in Argentina, the Instituto de Concervacion de Ballenas (www.icb.org.ar) is working to educate Argentines about the whales and the problems they face and to gather popular support so that the people can become an effective resource for protecting the whales and their calving bays.

Every year since 1971, OA has made annual aerial surveys of the right whale population at Peninsula Valdes by flying along the 495km perimeter of the Peninsula, photographing the identifying pattern on the head of each whale encountered and noting the whale's location, behavior and companions. Right whales are unique among the large whales because they are distributed close to shore on the nursery ground. The 250' cliffs of the Peninsula provide a specacular and rare opportunity to observe the undisturbed natural behavior of individually identified right whales. Detailed descriptions of information about right whales that have come from studying the population at Valdes can be found in the papers listed under Publications.

Current Research Activities

• Annual aerial surveys of the whales. The surveys allow us to monitor the status and distribution of the population and alert us to changes that indicate problems the whales are encountering.
• Increasing the number of known-age whales in the population to get a better estimate of juvenile survivorship and a knowledge of the natural lifetimes of these individuals. Photo-identification of calves is difficult because the individually identifying marks on their heads are not distinctive (particularly in photos from a plane) until the calves are 3-6 months old. But by that age, many of the calves have migrated to the feeding grounds. We are taking close-up photographs of mother/calf pairs from the cliffs and boats.
• Studying juvenile right whales to understand the activity patterns that are important to becoming successful adult whales.
• Determining the acoustic characteristics of the whales' preferred areas so these characteristics can be incorporated into habitat protection plans.
• Investigating the role that sound plays in keeping whales together in groups.
• Collecting tissue samples for genetic, toxin and isotope analyses from whales that have died and stranded at the Peninsula.
• Completing the set-up of a computer assisted whale identification system. With 1300 whales, The Peninsula Valdes catalogue has become too large to search manually and we need help in analyzing the photographs from the aerial surveys. A newly developed system makes a two-dimensional extract (like the one pictured here) of the head pattern of each new whale. It then searches the catalogue of extracts for a match and presents the researcher with a list of whales ordered from best to worst match. Photographs of the whales appear when individuals in the list are selected. (Hiby, Lovell, Rowntree, Rohrich)
• Investigating the relationship between a mother's body condition and the activity patterns of her calf. Right whales at Peninsula Valdes are being harassed by kelp gulls that have learned to feed on skin and blubber that they pry from the whales' backs. This research is designed to see whether gull harassment (see Conservation Activities) is having an effect on calf activity and survivorship.