Intro to Marine Mammals & Seabirds 2019

This week on campus we had the Introduction to Marine Mammals & Seabirds field course, with teen participants from Canada and the US. Below are a few photos to give you a glimpse of what kept us busy all week.

Identifying plankton.

A copepod (zooplankton) at 40x magnification.

Touring the Huntsman Fundy Discovery Aquarium.

Exploring the touch tank.

Scallop

Female rock crab

Participants created posters to teach their peers about the common marine mammals and gulls in the Bay of Fundy, such as the harbour porpoise...

and the minke whale.

Identifying right whales based on their callosity pattern.

Learning to use the humpback catalogue to identify individual whales based on their fluke pattern.

Heading out with Quoddy Link Marine to look for marine mammals & seabirds in the Bay of Fundy.

Seals hauled out at Black Ledge.

Harbour porpoises feeding.

Shearwaters taking flight.

Minke whale blowholes.

Minke whale dorsal.

Shearwater

Fin whale blow

Minke whale

Harbour porpoise underwater. They are so fast!

The Captain turned off the boat and we could hear the minkes, fin and porpoises exhaling! The Bay was so calm!

Watching and listening to whales.

Looking at the diversity of seabirds and their adaptations to the marine environment.

Eating like a seabird.

Dissecting albatross boluses from Hawaii (Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge).

A bolus is like an owl pellet. It is the indigestible material that is thrown up by the juvenile albatross chick at about five months, just before it leaves the nest.

Natural materials contained in the bolus would be squid beaks, fish bones & eye lenses, pumice stones and wood pieces. The boluses the participants dissected also contained plastic of many shapes, sizes and colours.

Aging porpoise using their teeth.

View through the microscope at a stained section of a porpoise tooth.

Investigating the life history of Right Whale 2029, Viola.

Using student whale sightings to create a whale/wildlife sanctuary.