Satellite Telemetry Tagging of Large Whales

technology · earth · Deployed on multiple blue whale populations

Implantable Argos-linked transmitters that report a whale's position when it surfaces, and the instrument that turned blue whale migration from inference into a track. A programme led from the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University attached transmitters to 171 blue whales off California and in the Gulf of California between 1993 and 2008; a related analysis used 159 Argos tags deployed mainly off California in late summer between 1993 and 2007, of which 92 tracks exceeded seven days. Its coverage is deeply uneven by population. Eleven pygmy blue whales tagged off Western Australia produced tracks of 8 to 308 days; only two Antarctic blue whale tracks have been published at all. Where the tag data is thin, the map is thin.