Shore-Based Humpback Whale Reserach

HMMC conducts shore-based research of humpback whales from the Old Ruins site on the Kohala Coast. The goal of these scan sessions is to document the presence and relative position of all marine mammals, vessels and aircraft, contributing to a long-term database on the relative distribution, behavior and seasonal presence of humpback whales off the Kohala Coast. Each year since 2004, with the help of our volunteers, we have conducted 20 scans during February and March. We are still in the process of analyzing the resulting data, which we hope to incorporate into a manuscript on trends in the relative distribution and abundance of humpback whales in Kawaihae Bay since 1988.  To learn more about our shore-based efforts, read the newsletters we’ve posted as well as our report (36 pages, 776 KB) to the Department of Land and Natural Resources, State of Hawai‘i and the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary on trends in shore-based whale observations 1988-2003. In December 2005 at the Sixteenth Biennial Conference of the Society for Marine Mammalogy in San Diego, we presented a poster titled: Using compass and reticle binoculars to measure animal position: An evaluation and comparison to theodolite data, which is based on data from our shore station work. Most recently, we published a paper on this topic in Marine Mammal Science.

Frankel, A. S., S. Yin, and M.  A. Hoffhines.  2009.  Alternative methods for determining the altitude of theodolite observation stations. Marine Mammal Science 25(1) 214-220.