The field season is now in full swing and office space is in high demand at the research station with eight team members, two visiting scientists, and four interns in house. In addition to daily tasks such as downloading images, matching photographs, and maintaining the research vessels, several different projects are underway. Richard, Christian, and Julien have just submitted two...
A few hundred million years ago, the terrestrial ancestor of cetaceans made its way into the aquatic environment. Over the course of evolution, several sensory adaptations developed to make it better adapted to life in the water. The way in which whales perceive their environment, which, it has to be said, is very different to our own, is presented here....
Recap of 2013 Blue Whale Tagging Expedition By the end of September into early October, the turbulent weather finally relented and left behind an unruffled stillness, and after weeks of rain, wind, fog, which kept us pinned on land, the sea stayed flat. We had spotted endlessly, hopefully, from the cliffs of Forillon Park's northern coast and only caught...
Scientists from the Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) at the University of St. Andrews are spending their third summer in Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan studying the underwater behaviour and ecology of whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This long-term collaboration between MICS and the Miller Lab at the University of St. Andrews aims to understand how the body condition of humpback whales...
July the 3rd, 2013 We recently got informed by the Réseau québécois d'urgences pour les mammifères marins, which we are involve in it, that a Sowerby's beaked whale was found stranded on a beach of Ile aux Pommes, in the estuary of the St. Lawrence, on the South shore of Tadoussac. This finding is surprising. Beyond the difficulties in...
