Finally we made it to Maine after a leisurely fifteen hour drive, but it went by pretty fast. We settled into our cottage on Tuesday and explored BA HA BA (Bar Harbor in a heavy Boston accent, yeah) , which is basically a glorified and lobster themed Chagrin Falls with an incredible view. We're excited for all the festivities the town has to offer during this coming Memorial day weekend.
Anyways, we began our first real day on the job today and essentially learned the ropes of the lab portion of our project. We learned how to operate the photo-identification software (iMatch) which we will be working on for the next couple weeks when there's nothing more exciting to do. Rosie, the marine mammal stranding coordinator, said at the beginning of the day, "If the phone ever rings, you might be on a stranding call", so basically every time the phone rings I have a heart attack. They did get a call today of a harbor seal pup stranding, but it was from a southern region of Maine, so there's a different organization responsible for that area (so pretty much it was a wrong number). But I listened in on the phone-call anyways, and it was interesting to hear the different questions Rosie asked the caller, ex: does the pup look emaciated? (can you see a defined neck and hip area? ..which means it's too skinny) is it in a densely populated area?/ is it disrupting or near traffic?, etc.. whatever the caller said, Rosie felt that by the information, the pup was alright and there was no need to move it from its position. She explained that seals often leave their pups for long periods of time to find food, and people often mistake it for abandonment. And there aren't enough resources for people to misinterpret a healthy seal for a sick and abandoned one, so Allied Whale is really working to increase awareness in that aspect.
Lastly, I feel the need to talk a little bit about the College of the Atlantic, the college that Allied Whale is affiliated with. Basically the college has 350 students, less than Hawken, and it's dedicated to letting students have complete freedom of their education. So there's one available major, human ecology, and you can take whatever classes you want that you think will help you to become whatever you want to be. The lunch food is mostly vegan/gluten free, there's flannel everywhere, nobody seems to be wearing shoes, and there's a giant rope swing in the middle of campus that seems to be the biggest attraction. We've talked with a few students so far and they're all extremely nice though. This is going to be a fun two weeks :)
-Lindsay
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| Bar Harbor |
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We made it to Maine! So today was our first day interning at Allied Whale. We met Tom and Rosie, members of the emergency marine mammal stranding teams; tomorrow we will meet Tanya our mentor. They showed us how to catalog whales and how to differentiate between the flukes (tails) of humpback whales. Humpbacks seem to be the most common whale that come into the New England area and it’s been discovered that the same ones travel back and forth to the same locations, which is pretty interesting. We know this due to photo identification. Allied Whale collects and encourages fishermen and whalers and anyone really who has pictures to send them into them. They are then able to catalog the pictures by looking at different characteristics of the flukes. Scars are also a good indicator to distinguish whether or not the whales have been already identified, if it has been then we know more about their migration patterns and how far and possibly often they return. We don’t know much about the routes humpbacks take while migrating, however we know that their calves follow them so then it’s repeated for generations to come. However as photo tagging catches on, ideally we’ll have a better idea of that. Unfortunately early tagging wasn’t as humane as photo tagging. Researchers would shoot metal rods into the whales and would later collect them once the whale has died. Obviously photo tagging is a better option especially with the help of other people all across the world.
-Bre
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| All the different variations of whale fluke patterns |
You made it!!!
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